By the time anyone’s reading this, I’ll be on my way south to participate once again in ConGregate, a wonderful convention in Winston-Salem NC that does me the honor of having me as a guest once again in 2023. I’ll be playing a bunch of shows and sitting on a few panels, and generally hanging about with friends and enjoying the company of my lovely spouse who’ll be joining me.

If you happen to be in the area, here’s my schedule as it stands for the weekend:

• Saturday, 11:30am, Hearn C/D: Blibbering Humdingers performance
• Saturday, 1:30pm, Salem: Panel – “SF Themes in Rock Music”
• Saturday, 3:00pm, Hearn C/D: White Plectrum and Friends
• Saturday, 5:30pm, Hearn C/D: Chuck Parker performance
• Sunday, 1:00pm, Winston: How We Found Fandom

So, yeah, three shows on Saturday – solo, with the band, and with pretty much every other musical guest performing the tunes of our good friend Keith Brinegar, aka White Plectrum, who’s been in the con scene for decades, and has a ton of great songs, but is having some health issues, so we’re all stepping up. I’m really looking forward to it.

There’s also a couple of “open filk” sessions throughout the weekend, and in general, I’ll likely be supporting my musical friends performing throughout the weekend, so I’ll likely be there. There’s lots of good stuff to do, which you can browse to your heart’s content at congregate92023.sched.com if you’re so inclined.

I could talk about this week, but it’s mostly been work (lots of work), biking, and rehearsal for this weekends so I don’t suck. I’m gonna need this long weekend with my friends playing rock star.

So it’s been a quiet a couple of weeks in terms of posting missives here that no one reads anyway. It happens.

I’ve honestly been mostly working too much and neglecting much of the rest of life, at least until I got to the end of June and it’s big work product deadlines, then I took a long Independence Day weekend, spending some time with friends, catching a show, and trying to remember how life works when twelve- or thirteen- hour days aren’t the norm.

Less quiet this morning, as I woke to dripping ceiling in the hallway after someone overflowed the upstairs toilet. Joy.

Oh, and for the second time in a month, a teenage boy hit my newish car. The last one was relatively minor, as, I suppose is this one, but involves replacing the headlight assembly and front bumper cover he drug the passenger side of his late-model BMW across. Seriously, he peeled holes in the plastic of the bumper cover, which is at least unique, and does a pretty good job of showing who was moving and which direction he was going. The insurance people are still figuring it out, though in the end I think it’ll work out in my favor and I’ll get my deductible back.

I’m becoming way too much of a regular customer at the body shop, where we just picked up the little yellow Honda after the door thing.

Yay.

Seriously, I need to figure out what makes me so attractive to teenage boys.

Anyway, that’s all I got; I’m playing the boss this week and I’m tired of answering all kinds of emails that are getting in the way of me doing my own work.

But yeah, tunes: extra nineties triple-A radio, or at least sounding like it, plus Stevie Nicks covering Buffalo Springfield followed immediately by The Cranberries covering Fleetwood Mac in a nice circle there at #s 6 and 7, and a pretty damned perfect fusion of Cash and Zep at #10 I didn’t know I needed in my life:

1. “King of New Orleans” – Better Than Ezra
2. “Good Day For The Blues” – Storyville
3. “Little Black Backpack” – Stroke 9
4. “Moment in the Sun” – Clem Snide
5. “This Forgotten Town” – The Jayhawks
6. “For What It’s Worth” – Stevie Nicks
7. “Go Your Own Way” –
8. “Dreams” – Brandi Carlile
9. “Through & Through & Through” – Joel Plaskett
10. “Whole Lotta Folsom” – The Surreal McCoys
11. “Barbarella” – Scott Weiland
12. “Honeysuckle Blue” – Drivin N Cryin
13. “Swallowed By The Cracks” – David & David
14. “Love And Anger” – Kate Bush

Been a bit of an overwhelming week and change. LONG work days involving going into an actual office for several days in the interest of meeting deadlines and doing our part to quash the “drinking from the fire hose” mentality my workplace just can’t seem to let go of. Lots of personal stuff to do and one fewer cars to get it done (especially since the Eldest started the new job recently and works on the other side of town), and a weekend full of all kinds of other things keeping me busy.

Here, on Tuesday afternoon, I maybe have a chance to breathe a bit.

Not all of it was bad. We got a lot done at work those couple of office days, and I really rather like the co-workers I was engaged with (we’ll see how we do about changing the culture). I got quite a few miles in on the bike and foot, and even dragged my Lovely Spouse along with me to visit a couple of new state parks, saw some friends at the soccer match on Saturday night, and celebrated the aforementioned Eldest’s birthday.

Of course, I also had the estimate for fixing the little car ratcheted up a few hundred bucks over the initial, had like 45 hours logged on the books by Thursday afternoon at work, bumped up against (admittedly First-World) financial stresses of there not being enough money due to these unexpected expenses, and, of course…Father’s Day.

Yes, I seriously struggle with this holiday. Of course I miss my Dad, though I also, somewhat shamefully, doubt my own ability and worthiness in the role, even if I’ve occupied it for nearly a quarter-century now. I can’t help but compare myself to the standards society presents, and find myself wanting, and then I just stress out some more.

Damned Imposter Syndrome.

But…yeah. At least my unending feelings of inadequacy occasionally lead to decent creative output, but when it comes to the whole “parent” thing, the incompetence doesn’t always feel like an illusion.

Oh well; I shall continue, as they say, to deal with it.

It’s been awfully exciting lately. This week really wasn’t, and that’s okay.

I spent most of my time just getting work done, and working through the beginnings of the song I’m covering for Streamer Song Swap this year. This is the first time I’m doing it as, well, me, though I played bass on Metricula’s entry a few years back, and since Metricula’s running things this year, I decided to jump in. It’s a roughly annual fundraiser project where performers swap songs and do covers, with proceeds supporting The Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation, and music in schools is a good cause.

Anyway, I’m still working through my tune, but I’ve got to have my recording submitted by August 7, which gives me some time, but not that much time, and I’m feeling a little abmitious in terms of instrumentation and such.

Always another project…

Speaking of projects, I also signed up for the VCT Summer Challenge again, and I’m doing the birthday ride, which this year is 413.6 miles, or eight times the distance of the Virginia Capital Trail between now and the first week of September. No problem. In any case, you can track my progress over in the block on the left, because why not.

That’s honestly all I’ve got, except for some tunes, which has lots of girls names and solo projects from members of Americana-styled indie bands:

1. “Emilia” – Young Gun Silver Fox
2. “Nanci” – Toad The Wet Sprocket
3. “Get Out Of This House” – Shawn Colvin
4. “Winter Solstice” – The Tea Party
5. “Crystal River” – Mudcrutch
6. “Good Morning Coffee” – Seth Avett
7. “She’s A Girl And I’m A Man” – Lloyd Cole
8. “Jesus on the Telephone” – Machinery of the Human Heart
9. “Elevator Boots” – Counting Crows
10. “Whatever It Takes” – Sinéad Lohan
11. “Grace” – Marcus Mumford
12. “Faster” – Samantha Fish

Work was kinda busy this week, continuing to put out fires, which is kinda what I do now. No worries; they keep on paying me, I keep on logging in. That big problem requirement has been successfully pushed off my plate to be dealt with by folks who are authorized to spend the money, but that just makes room for a few more problem requirements to be dealt with by the guy who solves the problems…

But, as of around 2:30 today, I logged off until Tuesday, because Thursday night I played a pretty successful set at Dancing Kilt, my local watering hole, where I tend to be once or twice a week anyway, but every few months they’re nice enough to have me come in to share some tunes. It took me a few songs to find my groove, but overall, things went really well. I tried some new things, and those things mostly worked (I still need a little work on my emergency kazoo business), I had some good friends show up to support me, and I got paid and had my bar tab covered for the evening (a couple of pints of Turoń, the Polish style smoked wheat beer, my new favorite), which is always nice.

It feels good to get paid to make music at my local; I’ll take it.

Friday, after a few local responsibilities, the lovely spouse and I will be heading south to Charlotte for ConCarolinas, which I haven’t been to in a year or three, but we’re hitting this year to visit some friends and not be on the hook for anything, because I’m not a guest! The plan is to just hang out with folks, enjoy some music and entertainment, probably buy some books, and probably drink too much….

Which, y’know, is perfectly cromulent.

It’s also likely I’m going to be coming home with a banjo a friend of mine no longer needs, which is fine, because of course I need to learn to play another stringed instrument…

Anyway, that’s the plan for the next little while. In the meantime, here are some tunes randomly kicked out of a playlist I built to pump through the P.A. between sets. It’s mostly cool ’90s stuff I listened to at the time, plus a few Replacements tunes I wasn’t cool enough to listen to when they were actually active in the late ’80s:

1. “Falling for the First Time” – Barenaked Ladies
2. “This Tornado Loves You” – Neko Case
3. “Blood Makes Noise” – Suzanne Vega
4. “Pump It Up” – Elvis Costello & The Attractions
5. “Love Like We Do” – Edie Brickell & New Bohemians
6. “Closer To Fine” – Indigo Girls
7. “Supernova” – Liz Phair
8. “Birdhouse In Your Soul” – They Might Be Giants
9. “Angeline Is Coming Home” – The Badlees
10. “Alex Chilton” – The Replacements
11. “Dyslexic Heart” – Paul Westerberg
12. “Minneapolis” – that dog.
13. “A Common Disaster” – Cowboy Junkies
14. “8 Miles Down” – Big Back Forty

Not a lot of engagement with the world, online or otherwise that hasn’t had to do with work these last two weeks. That can happen when you get assigned a seriously time-sensitive and poorly-documented requirement that somebody just dropped and abandoned four or five months ago, and needs to be solved now or the organization gets hit with a few million in unnecessary fees for letting coverage lapse.

That’s about all I did or thought about for the last two weeks. I put it to bed, just like I was supposed to, but I wasn’t enjoying life very much.

I mean, I’d just nailed the 51.7 mile Cap2Cap a couple weekends ago, beating my best time by more than twenty minutes (a light road bike will help there), and then life becomes nothing but bureaucracy for a couple of weeks, apart from catching the soccer match with some friends last Saturday evening.

It really ate into my rehearsal time, because I have a gig next week, and since my local watering hole is paying me, I need to sound good. Luckily, the weather’s looking a bit crap this weekend, so I’ll have some time.

As for that show:

Thursday Music and Fun at The Kilt, featuring me playing three sets of thereabouts of my original music peppered in with a few interesting cover tunes. Why not come on out, have a beverage or three, make a friend and enjoy some tunes? Thursday, June 1, 6pm to 9pm, Dancing Kilt Brewery in Chester.

Speaking of tunes, here’s some that Spotify spit out. A little all over the place, but I’m okay with that:

1. “Darlin'” – Freedy Johnston, Aimee Mann
2. “Sister Starling” – Aoife O’Donovan
3. “Skating Away On The Thin Ice of the New Day” – Jethro Tull
4. “Lotta Love” – Juliana Hatfield
5. “Think About Your Troubles” – Harry Nilsson
6. “Got Weird” – dodie
7. “The Storm” – Dori Freeman
8. “Light of Day” – Joan Jett & the Blackhearts
9. “The Boy Wonders” – Aztec Camera
10. “Ladykillers” – Lush
11. “Ants In The Kitchen” – Masters of Reality
12. “Eye Of The Hurricane” – David Wilcox
13. “All The Lilacs In Ohio” – John Hiatt & Jerry Douglas

So yes, I was *on* all week, due to the off-site (at my former office a little north of here) program management workshop Tuesday through Thursday, which involved backing up my boss’s never-ending energy with technical expertise and rapid-fire abilities to yank obscure documentation out of the aether at her word.

Plus, I had to wear nice pants and stuff.

I’m not really complaining, you should know…we had folks in from all over the country, some of whom I’ve only met over MS Teams conference, even if we work closely together pretty much every day. It was nice to see them in person (and share a drink or three with them at the Kilt after work one day), and we got a ton of work done.

Also, it was kind of exhausting, because I’m used to working by myself at my little corner office surrounded by my sound equipment and my lovely spouse’s craft space. I got to work at home again today, Friday, except for about two hours when I had to go down to the newly-christened Fort Gregg-Adams to get my software phone configured on the laptop they’re going to replace next week (and I’ll have to re-set it up all over again).

Still, I got the stuff done I needed done and was a good steward of taxpayer dollars, as I’m supposed to be.

So that was my week, apart from forgetting every other day to post a photo to my “Life Is Good” challenge on the FriendFace, but I’m catching up as we go. Sorry Micheala!

But that was the week. We’re really looking at the weekend.

Tomorrow, Saturday, I’m doing the Cap2Cap half-century ride, which I do every year this weekend now, because biking is what I do. Shockoe Bottom in Richmond to the Jamestown Settlement. Stone Brewing to Billsburg. I’m gonna do it.

Not going to commit to the hundred-plus mile out-and-back this year, because I don’t think I’m up to it…yet. Might do it before the summer’s out, though. we’ll see. But I look forward to riding it with a few hundred of my fellow crazy cyclists, because it’s a nice check on the achievement list, and it proves, to me, anyway, that I’m in the best shape of my life at almost 49 years old.

That’s really the whole weekend right there; I’m not committing to anything else apart from finishing the Sirius XM five-hour long 35th anniversary track-by-track Bon Jovi New Jersey record retrospective*.

Otherwise, I’m going to probably do some laundry, drink a couple of beers, and maybe watch some of The Electric Mayhem…

But here’s the tunes, of course. My Senator’s favorite band (and one of mine) at #3, and a killer late 80s jam from a killer late 80s record that I forget is one of my favorites until it pops up on my playlist:

1. “We’re Not Gonna Take It” – Twisted Sister
2. “Mr. Sellack” – The Roaches
3. “Waitress In The Sky” – The Replacements
4. “Hourglass” – Squeeze
5. “Watermelon” – John + Jane Q. Public
6. “A Little Help From My Friends” – Willie Nelson
7. “Love Like We Do” – Edie Brickell & New Bohemians
8. “Pumpkin Cowboy” – Brian David Gilbert
9. “Counting Down The Hours” – Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
10. “Mother Earth” – Emitt Rhodes
11. “freequent letdown” – illuminati hotties

__________________________________________

* – Dammit, I wore that record out in high school, and it came out thirty-five years ago. Damn, I’m old.

Not loving this week. In particular, Thursday.

I’m not sure I mentioned it previously, but we’ve been down a car the last week and change after somebody forgot the emergency brake and the Honda rolled back into a gas pump pollard and hyper-extended the open door. As such, I’ve really not had the range of motion I’d prefer, as others have needed my car. Luckily, I was able to work from home (as usual) this week; unlike the previous week and next week, which involved work symposia where we all enjoy the novelty of talking to each other face-to-face, but have to actually put on pants and stuff.

In any case, I’ve not gotten quite the outside/park time I’ve really needed. But, I got through it, and have managed to mostly get the flames tamped down on this work requirement I picked up after somebody dropped it for a few months, and now the contract needs to be awarded by the end of June or the taxpayer gets stuck with a few million in re-licensing fees if the current arrangement expires.

It sucks, but that’s kind of my job to fix that sort of stuff.

That said, I haven’t yet managed to unload my old job managing a particularly ancient and convoluted interface/data conversion project, which I’ve managed to keep going, but can’t give my full attention. That said, stuff is getting done, but not necessarily as fast as we’d all like, and not just because of my split attention – the target system is at least a decade older than I am, isn’t exactly state-of-the-art, and requires a lot of care and feeding by all kinds of analysts and programmers of mostly dead languages.

But, Thursday morning, I woke up to an email from one of the functional leads sent in the middle of the night complaining that a particular system hasn’t been certified to use the slightly-modern data paths, and cc’ing all kinds of high-ranking folks and generally throwing me under the bus.

Problem is, if he’d talked to me or his guys, he’d know that the thing he thinks isn’t certified has been for months, and just passed few hundred business transactions at months’ end. But, of course, when the C-suite is copied on this sort of thing, I’ve had to spend a good bit of the day explaining that things are going along as fast as I can make them, and say, doesn’t that fancy new channel push the data like nobody’s business, and gee, has anyone thought about passing this responsibility on to someone else yet?

I cleared it up, but it sucked. Almost as much as the rather large price tag the body shop quoted me on the Honda’s door, and the drama provided by the kid who was driving it (I swear, I should just schedule the quarterly four-digit repair bill…). And to top things off, as I was driving my five-month-old car home from the park this evening, some kid in an SUV tagged my rear quarter panel. It’s not a lot of damage on the surface, and the fix won’t be too expensive for the kid’s insurance, but it was kind of the perfect bow tied on a really shitty day.

Bleh. I’ve had better Star Wars days…

Anyway; here are some tunes. All kinds of the usual indie, plus some cool stuff like the Kids in the Hall theme song there at #11:

1. “I Wanna Die With My Blue Jeans On” – Fairhazel
2. “Bus” – Begonia
3. “Find the Truth” – The Sheepdogs
4. “Blood and Roses” – The Smithereens
5. “Way Down Now” – World Party
6. “Going to Hell” – Adeem the Artist
7. “Egyptian Cadillac” – Alex Izenberg
8. “The Thunderthief” – John Paul Jones
9. “Rug Busters” – Personal Trainer
10. “Maestro (Tears Don’t Lie)” – Wilder Woods
11. “Having an Average Weekend” – Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet
12. “I Let My Guitar Do The Talking” – Buddy Guy
13. “Scared Together” – Silversun Pickups
14. “Doomscrollers” – Quasi

So, I’ve been up to some stuff.

Last weekend, with it’s pub crawl adventures (lots of fun showing a friend around town and sampling many libations and game stores) and Ravencon was pretty cool. I think I played some really good shows (I might actually be getting kind of good at this?) and the new material (some of which you can find here on bandcamp…) went over well with the folks who came to the shows, of which there were some additional, undocumented instances, as my friends The Nefarious Ferrets had to cancel due to illness at the last minute, and some of us had to fill in (I played their song “Night of the Hunt” in their honor). I even sat in for a tune with my old bandmates in Dimensional Riffs when their guitar player was running late.

The most interesting bit, though, happened at my Friday night show when my lovely spouse, child, and a couple of dear friends showed up wearing t-shirts with my face on them!, which was weird, but kind of cool and appreciated:

The past week has been novel as well, as spent Tues-Thurs at my organization’s “IT Symposium” at the facility up the road, which involved being in a room with a hundred or so people for extended periods of time talking about all sorts of issues we’re working and dealing with. I didn’t have anything to brief (apart from being slide-monger on my boss’s presentation). Mostly, it was sitting and taking it all in, putting names with faces, and struggling with Dunning-Kruger feelings as I tried to keep up with everybody’s projects that I often have a hand in, though sometimes feel completely out of my depth talking about.

Oh, and last night I made use of my latest WNRN ticket win and caught Suzanne Vega at the gorgeous old Beacon Theater down the road in Hopewell, where she played all the hits and then some, told lots of entertaining stories, and was generally awesome. I last saw her play almost twenty-six years ago at Lilith Fair on my honeymoon, though given the fact that the last time I was at this place last summer, my lovely spouse and I caught COVID, she didn’t come along, though my youngest child did, both of us masked, and she thoroughly enjoyed herself and told me she might have a new role model for adulthood. Here’s the obligatory poorly-composed photo:

Not sure what the weekend holds; there are a couple of open mics (one of which has good local music friend as the singer/songwriter “headliner”) I might go to, and there’s the usual stuff like grocery shopping and laundry to deal with…assuming I don’t feel completely people’d out by now, which is a definite risk.

Tunes for this week? Lots of bands I’ve not heard of (but generally enjoyed) and the Pixies:

1. “Feel Like Going Home” – Miko Marks and the Resurrectors
2. “(I’m) Screwed” – Titus Andronicus
3. “BWP” – The Paranoyds
4. “Once There Was No Sun” – Jake Blount
5. “Frog 2” – Mamalarky
6. “All Comes Crashing” – Metric
7. “There’s A Moon On” – Pixies
8. “After This” – July Talk
9. “On The Floor (live)” – Perfume Geniusm
10. “Sudden Light” – Jesca Hoop
11. “Arkansas” – Larry McCray
12. “Rambler – Calexico

As mentioned previously, I’ll be a guest at Ravencon, my hometown convention here in the RVA, this weekend. I’ll be playing a few solo shows and being an occasional panelist. I haven’t played this one in a few years; the last time was doing the RavenCon Summer Concert back in ’21, though I’ve been attending as a civilian and a semi-regular guest as part of other acts for more than a decade.

Anyway, I’ll be playing the old favorites and am planning on working in some new stuff I’ve never done live before, so it’ll either be really cool, or it’ll be a disaster, but at least it’ll be interesting. As of right now, here’s where I’ll definitely be (subject to change, as always):

• Fridy, 7pm – King George – Opening Ceremonies
• Friday, 11pm – King William – Performance
• Saturday, Noon – King William – Performance
• Saturday, 2pm – Dinwiddie – Panel: “The Office Space of the Future is a Holodeck”
• Sunday, 11am – King William – Performance

There are also late night filk circles on Friday and Saturday, so I expect I’ll at least show my face there (especially Friday, as it’s right after my show and in the same room…), and anything else reasonable the staff asks me to do, because that’s only right, and if the con staff is happy, everyone’s happy, this year, and in the future!