It’s been another long week, even if the end of this particular project is in sight at work. We’ll get there. But that’s not what I’m going to focus on this morning.

What I’m going to talk about is watching one of my favorite things in the world destroy itself in real time. I’m not going to get particularly specific, because it involves a dear friend of mine who doesn’t need the extra attention, and a bunch of assholes who I’m not going to honor by actually naming.

So, a particular sci-fi convention I’ve been attending and performing at for years and years and has given me some amazing times has booked, for it’s author guest-of-honor next year, a writer who’s known for macho-shooty sorts of novels where men are men (with meticulous knowledge of firearms) and women don’t matter much, and right-of-center political commentary is often front and center. He’s one of the leaders in a certain movement that’s upset that this kind of “old-fashioned” adventure stuff isn’t winning awards anymore, and caused a bunch of fuss a few years ago.

In social media discussions of this guests merits (or demerits), a friend of mine expressed concerns about this guy’s aggressive tone and confrontational tendencies, and whether they were appropriate for this particular venue. It’s not so much about him (though he’s certainly “difficult”), but about how his army of fans are also known for their tendencies toward harassment, confrontation, and violation of behavior and weapons policies at events such as these.

For the last week or so, the community’s been up in arms, in part because this fan army (and the author himself) has been harassing my friend specifically, and the general population at large with all kinds of regressive, political, and obnoxious behavior online, and the con’s newish management has been largely allowing it to go on; I swear, every time I take a look, management is just digging deeper.

It really sucks. The author and his crew are being total assholes, and the way management is handling things is encouraging them. I hate seeing my friend getting harassed about this and other (largely imagined) slights. It’s bad for the community, bad for the event, and generally just the worst sort of thing to watch, and it hurts to watch this thing that’s been around for decades just destroy itself.

If you put a few things together, you can easily figure out what I’m talking about, but again, I don’t want to fan the flames. A bunch of us have a whole lot of things to think about in terms of how we’ll participate in the community in the future, however.

Oh, and I’m doing fawm again; that link goes to my stuff. Two songs written so far, and one more basically in the can.

But anyway, tunes. A big interesting mix of stuff from bands my kids like to string quartets to a song from the 90s I always dug. Take a listen while I wish my lovely spouse a happy birthday:

Sorry, no Friday post this week, I’ve been way too busy copy-editing business documents written by people who really ought to be able to manage subject-verb agreement, but clearly can’t. Also, I wrote the first draft of every one of these with convenient places for folks to simply enter in their details for their specific requirements they’re supposed to be the experts on, but I’ve read way too much of my own novel-and-a-half’s worth of business prose on supposedly final documents…Ugh.

Seriously, I’ve been cranking; I had forty-two hours logged by Thursday afternoon (which was a 13 hour day in itself), and worked more than a full day Friday.

Today was Saturday. I spent my afternoon enjoying the beautiful weather outside riding 25-odd miles on my mountain bike on the trails at the local state park, then I stopped at the grocery store and had a beer with friends. It helped.

I’ll be back to normal eventually…or something.

Apparently, somewhere in the last forty-eight hours or so, there was a weekend, but I’ll be damned if I can see where the time went when looking back.

Sure, objectively, I did things. Shopping, laundry, installing trim to hold the laminate floor down, hiking a bunch of miles along the river, taking my wife out to dinner, and visiting the hardware store what feels like dozens of times for various bits and bobs in support of the living room refresh.

But, I honestly I don’t feel like there was any particular break in the never-ending cycle of work and responsibility.

Part of that might be that I came off of a con weekend, slept badly throughout the week, and my Sunday night gaming session got bumped thanks to the group being made up other middle-aged folks with too much else to do.

Oh, and I learned that it’s really hard to buy an aquarium lighting rig these days that doesn’t require you to download an app to your phone to operate it.

Yes, I had to buy new lights for my fish tank…that’s a story.

Let me set the scene:  With the living room remodel, my big fish tank got temporarily relocated to the kitchen while we pulled up the carpet and laid down the laminate floors.

That’s a process in itself, involving pulling more than two dozen gallons of water out of the tank (using siphons and five gallon buckets) so a human can lift it (remember, that unlike the human head, a gallon of water weighs a little over eight pounds), then moving the tank and all it’s accoutrements and stand to the new location, then putting more than two dozen new gallons of water back in, making sure the water’s treated to remove the impurities and getting the salinity right again), and reconnecting and plugging it all back in.

We have five cats. One’s a deaf cat that gets picked on by the others sometimes when he tries to do normal cat things like eat and use the litter box. Because of this, he sometimes pees in places he’s not exactly supposed to, like disused corners of the kitchen, of which there were a few more while there was a fish tank in there; one of which included a slightly expose power strip.

Those things, the cat, his abberant behavior, and the power strip, when combined, involve worrying electrical odors, a bit of smoke, and light rigs no longer working.

This is my life sometimes…

I am completely aware it’s cliché at this point, but four day weeks always feel longer than typical five day weeks. I even managed to log off on time most days this time around; didn’t matter. After a con weekend of late nights, a work week of both rushing to complete scads of documents to close a big deficiency and banging heads against hard things trying to salvage a test cycle in the face of data environment failures, a house still in the throes of an active remodel, and bad hiking posture so as not to slip and fall in the mud after the week’s irregular rain?

I’m absolutely drained.

Still, as I’m an adult and a goddamn professional, I got the things done, though not all the things were, in all honesty, my best work, but <<insert further cliché about ‘being sufficiently approximate for public service’ here >>.

…and now I’m going shut up, because I have four more MFRs to knock out and a test review meeting to get through before the day’s out, and if I’m not careful, I’m going to exceed my allotment of HTML symbol codes for the day.

But tunes…lots of indie and some fun twelve-bar blues, and I legitimately laughed out loud (but quietly, because most of the rest of the house is still asleep) at #8; seriously, seek it out, because it’s a fun one.

1. “Another One” – Scott McMicken and the EVER-EXPANDING
2. “Ængus, The Prize-Winning Hog” – The Toxhards
3. “Summertime Mama” – Becca Mancari
4. “Grump” – Yucky Duster
5. “Hammer To Fall” – Queen
6. “Hot Patootie – Bless My Soul” – Meat Loaf
7. “Future Version” – Nana Grizol
8. “MILF Song” – The Puddleducks
9. “Super 8” – Jason Isbell
10. “Do Unto Others” – Pee Wee Crayton
11. “The Analog Kid” – Rush
12. “Take Me To The River” – Talking Heads
13. “All In My Mind” – Love and Rockets
14. “Dont You Go Forgetting About Me Now” – Har Mar Superstar

As has been mentioned previously, I was not a guest at Marscon this year, though attended with my family as a civilian. This convention, what I consider my “home” convention for various reasons, had gone through some changes heading into this year, in terms of management and venue, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect; there were some causes for concern in the weeks leading up to this weekend.

I really needn’t have worried. While there were a few hiccups, things mostly ran well enough, and for me, the people matter more than the venue or management. Plus, the new venue was actually pretty nice, and the lessons learned from this year will certainly improve next year’s events, assuming the venue remains the same.

Being badge-buying attendee for the first time in forever did free up a lot of my time, which allowed me to enjoy the experience a bit more than usual. I got to sit down at the gaming table for more than half an hour at a time, rolling some dice and spending a couple of hours roleplaying as a “murder maven” old lady detective in my friend Jonah’s Brindlewood Bay session, which was a definite pleasure. Lacking a guest’s schedule was wonderful for just slowing down and taking things in and visiting with friends.

Of course, this didn’t entirely keep me off the stage; I played a few tunes on Friday night in the ad-hoc filk circle, making music with friends and responding to requests for some of my stuff that I hadn’t played in *years* (and getting to hear some of my former bandmates do some wonderful harmonies!), singing some karaoke on Saturday night, and being added as a performer for the traditional con-ending “Round Robin” musical performance, getting to play a few of my own tunes on stage, as well as backing up and jamming with my friends Mikey, Madison, and Leigh (who I met in person for the first time, which was an absolute pleasure!)

And, on Sunday night after much of the regular rabble went home, a bunch of us stuck around, had a nice dinner down the street, and just hung around sipping cocktails and craft beer and enjoyed the company.

It felt good.

…and we’re back.

I never managed to put up anything like my traditional year-end wrap up post, but honestly, I’m not that worried. It’s more work than it’s worth most of the time. I put almost 2200 miles on my bike tires and/or boot soles, which isn’t bad, and I think I’m a net five pounds lighter than I was this time last year.

Otherwise, I put in way too much time at work, played a couple of good gigs, and was on the whole a little more depressed than usual. Let’s just leave it at that.

The holiday break was fine. Low-key Christmas at home, new year’s trip to Muncie, Indiana to spend time with friends, drink too much beer, listen to some tunes, and visit The Bob Ross Experience, which was a nice way to spend an afternoon.

I started up work again on Thursday, which involved mostly digging out of email and planning upcoming test efforts. Beyond that, it’s continuing to try to satisfy auditors by tightening up business case documentation (or, ideally, getting the folks whose responsibility it actually is to tighten up the documentation).

The house is currently in a state of flux, as we start the new year off with some significant interior redecoration/renovation, including paint, new trim, and replacing the ancient carpet with laminate. Currently, a lot of the living room is in other parts of the house or in the trash cans outside, but the paint looks nice so far.

I also got my first bike ride of the year in yesterday, since it’s flirting with the low seventies in terms of temperature again. 11 miles up and down the single tracks at Pocahontas, where I met a few friends on my final descent:

Hoping the weekend’s quiet; I need it, as next week the office work really begins in earnest, as everybody else ought to be back, and that’ll lead into Marscon next weekend, which should be fine, if interesting, as the new management is bound to piss some people off, though I’ll see friends, and will have limited responsibilities, as they didn’t bother to book me either solo or as a Humdinger (that second bit has already pissed some folks off), and I’ll be attending as a civilian unless somebody invites me to sit in in a way that makes sense. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I’ll just keep watching to see how many more votes Kevin McCarthy can lose…

Today’s algorithm-driven Spotify playlist definitely shows the influence of having my youngest child DJ on a couple of drives recently; the beginning definitely has some showtunes energy, but by the end, mostly settles back into the americana and indie we’re all used to:

1. “Old-Fashioned Love Song” – Paul Williams
2. “Taste the Biscuit” – Vincent Gargiulo, Toasters ‘n’ Moose
3. “Princess Andy” – Petrojvic Blastinc Company
4. “Let Her Dance” – The Bobby Fuller Four
5. “Some of My Lives Are True (Sooner Or Later) – Huey Lewis & The News
6. “I Can Hear Music” – Freddie Mercury
7. “So Says I” – The Shins
8. “The Room Is Filled With People Who Love You” – Foresight
9. “Indianapolis” – The Bottle Rockets
10. “Didn’t Have Time To Think” – Math The Band
11. “Mainstream Kid” – Brandi Carlisle
12. “I Wanna Be Your Dog 2” – AJJ

Today, with any luck, is my last work day of the year 2022. I say “with any luck,” because the last couple of months have been awfully crazy and given where I am in the organization (basically management’s back-up brain and copy editor these days), I can’t rule out the odd phone call about where some document some auditor needs is hidden, where some parcel of money lives, or where some body is buried.

That said, I mostly expect to be left alone (unless the spending bill gets wrecked and I have to do temporary shutdown paperwork…again), and my general plan for the holiday break is to mostly stay offline, enjoy the quiet, rest, recharge, and refuel. We have very few official plans apart from a welcome couple’s retreat for NYE, and that’s exactly the way I like it. It’s possible I might open mic here or there at any of the various events around town, but maybe not? who knows. I expect I’ll be wandering my usual parks and trails, and probably sidle up to a familiar bar rail or three, but those of you who need to find me know how regardless. It’ll be a welcome unplug.

I usually try to do some year-end wrap-up sorts of posts in the interim, and I probably will, but who the heck knows…it’s not like I have a lot of readers in any case.

I should make mention, because it’s on-brand (as my VeryOnline™ friends would tell me), that I took 40 minutes or so after work yesterday to vote in VA-04’s “firehouse primary” for the Democratic candidate ahead of the special election in February to fill the late Rep. McEachin’s seat. It was quite crowded at my nearest polling place (the quickly-established, party-run event had relatively few locations), which in this form of government is never bad news. For the record, I voted for State Senator Jennifer McClellan, who’s got a great progressive record and is the odds-on favorite; she’ll be an excellent representative for the district.

So yes, exercising my responsibilities as an active citizen (as opposed to just asserting rights) is a thing I get good feelings about. You should as well.

Anyway – happy holidays, whichever you feel like celebrating.

After a day at the desk doing final edits on business case documentation, a walk out along the marsh is a nice way to shake the track changes markings off of your perception. It was a little cold out there yesterday afternoon, but the geese didn’t mind, and my camera caught the clouds doing some interesting things.

Another little win to carry me through this time I often struggle with.

Another week, another series of December surprises, office drama, one or two little wins, and for whatever reason, not a lot of sleep.

But, it’s almost over. I’ve got the balance of my forty on Friday, a weekend with very little planned, and a handful of days left to work for the year before I take the holiday break.

And, those days ought to be quiet, because as the public servant habit, eight-tenths of the entire workforce are already burning their use-or-lose, and with the one week extension that got passed Thursday means that leave won’t be disturbed until at least next Friday.

Shutdown Blues.

Still, the end is in sight, and I managed to burn off a little stress Thursday evening at the Art Factory open mic my friend runs, and while it wasn’t my greatest set ever, I did get to avenge the murder of Joni Mitchell’s “River” at the Kilt last week by backing up a ridiculously talented young vocalist singing it this week.

I’ll take the win.

Like I said, not a lot on the agenda this weekend. Holiday prep I’m really not invested in anyway has the energy level and the bank balance low; maybe a mind-clearing hike in the woods and a grocery store bar beer to offset the laundry requirements, but honestly not much else.

Tunes this week? Kinda everywhere, but I do dig that last one, mostly because it’s half Waxahatchee, and I’m always a sucker for Katie Crutchfield…:

1. “Never Been To Spain” – Three Dog Night
2. “The City” – Mark-Almond
3. “Expectations” – Lo Moon
4. “A Million Miles Away” – The Plimsouls
5. “The Light of Day” – Kacy & Clayton
6. “Don’t Mind (feat. Robert Plant)” – Patty Griffin
7. “You & Me & The Bottle Makes 3 Tonight (Baby)” – Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
8. “Jesus, etc” – Nora Jones
9. “Dreaming My Dreams With You” – Bria
10. “Run It” – My Morning Jacket
11. “Sugar” – Amethyst Kiah
12. “Dry in the Sun” – Daryl Hall & John Oates
13. “Problem With it” – Plains

The last couple of weeks have been rough on me, and given the time of year, the next few will maintain that pattern. That’s just the reality of the holiday season for me, and I cope the best I’m able.

Part of that coping is finding and embracing pleasures where I find them. Yesterday after work, I took advantage of a sunny afternoon to hike a few miles at the local park along the river; enough to keep my fitness up, but mostly to clear the head and take in some vitamin D from the all-too-rare sunshine. I varied my usual route a bit and ventured down one of the lesser used spur trails and managed to capture the above image with my camera.

I’m going to call it a win, and celebrate it by sharing.