With the holidays and work and weather and life and stuff, it’s been four months since I added a new state park to my Trail Quest list. I figured I ought to do something about that, so while the rest of the family (all of them fighting some sort of bug that’s let me alone thus far) slept, I got on the road before the sun and headed about 90 miles north to Leesylvania State Park in Woodbridge.

I arrived shortly before 8am, hitting the Potomac and Lee’s Woods trails, a few extra spurs, and some additional walking to take a photo or two, and find a long stick to retrieve my phone when I tripped and dropped it from a bridge onto a thankfully frozen pond after shooting the photo above. The whole place had about four inches of snow on it, which is a novelty, since we’ve been too far south to get much of anything here in the RVA metro. The hiking was pleasant, and I stopped counting bald eagles after I’d seen more than a dozen of them.

I’d actually tried to check this one off a couple of times over the summer when I visited the other NoVA parks, but during the summer, by virtue of it’s smaller size and proximity to a whole bunch of people in the DC suburbs, it fills up really quickly, to the point that they’re turning folks away by 10m most summer weekends. I can see why folks like it so much in the summer; the water’s quite nice, and it’s ideal for launching boats, though I thought it was perfectly suitable for a sub-zero hike on a January morning.

One more, and I’m halfway to hitting ’em all.

I was only in the office for three days this week, after wrapping a kick-ass first year of ConVivial, where I had a whole bunch of shows, panels, quality time with friends, pleasant conversations, and maybe one or two too many drinks, though all that other stuff got me more than my share of steps in, so I worked ’em off.

Those three days were kind of a pain in the ass, because as my boss is out on vacation, I was the boss while I was here, which means I had a few extra things to deal with, though they weren’t as bad as certain people in other areas setting up human roadblocks and displaying an alarming lack of knowledge of Federal law and regulation regarding who is required or allowed to do what when it comes to tax dollars. Still, some carefully selected language, a couple of phone calls, and a few hours of paperwork later, I solved it, and managed to use my coping skills to just brush the drama off my shoulder and just let it go, apart from a couple of pointed groans into a muted headset mic.

Nothing much coming up for the weekend; we’re having weather and stuff here (mostly cold rain this far south, though it’s a different story a half-hour north), so I don’t really expect any outdoor adventures, but who knows. Probably just grocery shopping, laundry, think about getting some FAWM ideas staged, and finally finishing off the new Murderbot book.

As for today’s random playlist – tons of traditional, bluegrass, and americana. Sure, why not…

1. “If I Had Wings” – Ryland Moranz
2. Good Time Gone” – Jade Jackson
3. “Yellow Ledbetter” – Iron Horse
4. “Ain’t Nobody” – Dori Freeman
5. “F*ck Up” – Sarah Shook & The Disarmers
6. “Mercy” – Suzanne Santo
7. “Jealous Moon” – Sarah Jarosz
8. “$13 Beers” – Chicago Farmer
9. “Unknown Legend” – Bella White
10. “Social Skills” – John FUllbright
11. “Born To Be With You” – Mike Barnett 3+
12. “So Far Away” – Town Mountain
13. “Trouble” – L.A. Edwards

As you’ve read previously, I’m off at the first edition of ConVivial in Williamsburg this weekend with folks like my band-mates the Blibbering Humdingers, my friends The Salacious Crumbles, and interesting new acts like HipHopMcDougal, along with the usual writers and artists and cosplayers and vendors and geeks of all aspects.

That said, I’m still dropping my playlist this week, because that’s what I do. It’s full of all kinds of Americana and such, and multiple instances of “church” in both title and artist, because that’s what Spotify spits out.

Enjoy; I’ll be hanging with my friends, making music, and likely drinking a little too much.

1. “Counterfeit – Tal Wilkenfeld
2. “Stripes” – Brandy Clark
3. “Happy Pills” – Palmyra
4. “Hard Sun” – Indio
5. “Feather, Fur & Fin” – Danny Michel
6. “For Your Soul” – Josh Ritter
7. “Darkest of Discos” – Slowcoaster
8. “Church of Better Daze” – Boy Golden
9. “Rocketeer” – Church of Roswell
10. “Raleigh and Sepncer” – Laural Hells Ramblers feat. Joshua Quimby
11. “Soft to the Touch” – Bonnie Bishop
12. “There is a Time” – Tori Miller

As I may have mentioned, I’ll be attending as a guest at the inaugural edition of ConVivial, the new convention on the block in Williamsburg VA. For the first time in forever, I won’t be at Marscon* for…reasons, though if that’s where you’re going, have a great time, and say “Hi!” to all my friends who’ll be there.

I’m going to be pretty busy this weekend, as expressed below, my schedule as it stood when I was writing this post mid-week:

• Friday, 5pm, Patriot Ballroom: “The Power of Fandom: Building Community”
• Friday, 6pm, The Bar: Solo Performance
• Friday, 9pm, Patriot Ballroom: Blibbering Humdingers Performance
• Friday, 10pm, Patriot Ballroom: “Adult Mad Libs”
• Saturday, 9am, Media Room 103: “The Craft of Filking: Techniques and Inspiration”
• Saturday, 11:30am, Patriot Ballroom: Blibbering Humdingers Performance
• Saturday, 1pm, Berkley: “The Musical Multiverse: Discovering Geek Music Genres”
• Saturday, 2pm, The Bar: Round Robin/Open Filking
• Sunday, 11am, Berkley: “Trivia:Test Your Knowlege of Sci-Fi & Fandom”

As is usual, I’ll be performing both solo and as part of The Blibbering Humdingers, as well as sitting a bunch of panels, and trying, if at all possible, to catch my friends’ performances and maybe play a game or something, and ideally, have a meal in there at appropriate intervals. It’s goiong to be busy, and probably have a few first-year hiccups, but I know for sure we’ll make it work and have a good time.

If you happen to be in or around Williamsburg, maybe stop by and check things out?

———————-

*-but weirdly enough, it looks like my ukulele might be…

It’s been a week, and it’s only Wednesday morning. I’m done.

The winter storm covering most of the country east of the Mississippi has mostly dumped a bunch of rain on the RVA parade; somewhere between two and three inches if I’m reading the charts right. It was enough, when combined with the winds the storm brought, to close down schools in the area early yesterday, and a delay this morning, even though the temperatures have been flirting with the low 60°s.

After a pretty awful work day (more on that in a bit), I spent some time rehearsing for this weekend’s gigs, making some good progress (as I haven’t played with the band in about seven months and I’m a little rusty on the bottom-end), I was just settling in to relax and close things down for the weekend when I was made aware that all that rain had started to wander into our nicely finished basement.

Many towels and a couple of runs to the hardware store for a wet/dry vac and appropriate filters, and dozens of suck/dump cycles later, we’d gotten ahead of it and stopped the water from pouring down the stairs from outside. It looks relatively okay this morning, thanks to all that work and the dehumidifier living in the Cupboard-Under-The-Stairs™, though there’s still a bunch of moisture under the laminate floor and, I suspect, a few gaps in the watertight seal between the basement and the non-basement under-house space on the west side of the building.

I suspect I’ll be making use of my home warranty in the coming weeks to get somebody to come in and investigate and ideally fill those chinks in the basement’s armor.

But that was the evening.

Early in the workday yesterday I got a couple of questions I’m relatively sure I’d answered multiple times already from the PM who took over the project I’d finally extricated myself from managing the middle of last year, after having it be my job, officially for six or seven years, then an “other duty as assigned” for the last three or so since the business unit reorganized and hadn’t bothered to back-fill me.

I answered them to the best of my ability; although I hadn’t been able to devote my full attention to that project recently, I kept it running relatively smoothly while it wasn’t officially my job, and as I’ve said in the past, it’s running better and with more attention now. That said, the interaction flicked a couple of warning lights in the back of my mind, and sure enough, as I was shutting down for the day, I got word that the contract supporting that effort is getting audited.

This means that for the next little while, I’m going to have a bunch of people asking me to explain things over and over, answer innumerable questions and dig up all kinds of documents when I’m trying to do my regular job to satisfy the auditors, who won’t feel like they’ve done their job unless they find something to write up and ding someone or other for.

The worst bit is that I know exactly why this is happening, and it’s due not to a deficiency in satisfying the requirements or fraud or waste or anything, but because someone elsewhere in the organization has a general beef with some of the folks involved and kicked this business off because they’re kind of an asshole, prone to late-night unprofessional passive-aggressive messages and over-the-top gestures rather than simply addressing concerns in a responsible manner.

Oh, and I just stopped one of the cats from chewing on a long piece of narrow gift ribbon he found someplace, which, if I hadn’t caught him, would’ve gotten swallowed and torn him up insides until they looked like what’s left over after running old documents through a paper shredder.

Keep on coming, new year, keep on coming…

After the holiday break and all it’s adventures, Tuesday I logged back in to the work network get a fresh start on the year. It’s mostly gone okay; a lot of folks are still out, but thankfully the ones I needed to talk to to get things moved along were around, for the most part, and I got a respectable amount of work done and got ahead of a few deadlines. Sure, I saw a few more looming on the horizon, but they’re reasonable (so far), and accomplishing those will make a whole bunch of the other stuff go faster, so…I’ll take it.

Still, it’s taken me a while to find my rhythm; I was off just long enough to lose a step or two. I get done with my eight or nine hours, and I find myself just kind of drained. The cloudy, damp, and cold weather isn’t helping; my sinuses are protesting mightily, and I’m way below my average for physical activity, even if, honestly, the break probably won’t hurt.

In the scheme of things, it’s normal, but it’s bothering me, because I have stuff on the horizon I need to be ready for, like the inaugural edition of ConVivial next weekend, where I’ll be playing shows as both singer/songwriter and Humdinger, as well as sitting a bunch of panels about songwriting, creating, and general nerdery, AND the festivities I’m pulling together for the lovely spouse’s birthday next month (which is going to be *lit* as the kids say…).

But, I’ve got nothing in particular this weekend, so I’m hoping I can get past the hang-ups and find the groove. We’ll see. Wish me luck.

In any case, let’s keep the random playlist into the weekend tradition going into 2024. This is, as usual, off of my Spotify Discover Weekly list, which has clearly been fed by my youngest playing some of her tunes in the car, and the deep-dive into Jason Isbell’s output I’m working through, and quite enjoying:

1. “Seven-Mile Island” – Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
2. “Run Devil Run” – Haunted Like Human
3. “Kiss” – Matthew Yee
4. “Cuz I Love You” – Joshua Ray Walker
5. “The Sound of Rock and Roll” – The Bourbon Brothers
6. “Unchained Melody” – The Unrighteous Brothers, Paul Cauthen, Orville Peck
7. “Folsom Prison Blues “Slow Folsom” (Acoustic Version) – Thomas Gabriel
8. “The Ballad of Ben Blank” – Sam Roberts Band
9. “Alien Party” – Sid Dorey
10. “Laid” – July Talk
11. “B or C For Effort” – Emily Kinney
12. “Puttin’ on the Ritz” – Taco
13. “The IPA Song” – The Brothers Comatose, Ronnie McCoury

The holidays around here were quiet, I guess, which is okay. Christmas was low-key; we didn’t even really decorate, in part, because those sorts of things are buried in the back of the storage unit we’re still working through, and if there was a tree in the way, putting up the bookshelves we bought ourselves would be more difficult. Gifts tended toward quality rather than quantity. The lovely spouse and I bought each other a long-overdue new bed, for example, and my youngest child, the budding marine biologist, got her very own freshwater aquarium to care for. And things arrived when they arrived – honestly most of the things were difficult to wrap anyway.

On Christmas Eve, we sat in our library, in the shadow of the new bookshelves, eating fancy cheese and sipping the honey-cherry bourbon we put up in September, listening to Patrick Stewart’s “The Night Before Christmas” recording, then went to bed rather early.

I honestly needed a quiet evening after the eventful afternoon, as earlier in the day I noticed a leak in my fish tank in the living room, which is, unsurprisingly, a bit stressful. I managed to temporarily patch things with silicone sealant and reducing the water level a bit, though it looks like the tank may have picked up a chip in the glass during the move. So, I spent much of the afternoon, after settling the patch, trying to locate a replacement, and likely found the last available thirty-seven gallon tank in the county, as part of a start-up kit (so I now have spares of all the extra do-dads like heater and filter), but at least it was on sale. My patches held until I did the replacement on Boxing Day, and honestly, things look pretty good afterwards:

The rest of the holiday break was novel for us, as we actually had guests for a few days. Our friends Jonah and Milo came down from New England to spend a few days with us checking out the sites in Richmond. We’ve known Jonah for more than a decade from the con scene, and Milo and Catherine have been great friends since they’ve been four our five, and since they’ve moved back to the east coast after spending a few years in California, we’ve tried to get the kids together on a semi-regular basis. We spent a couple of days visiting some museums and other places, playing some games, and generally hanging out and catching up.

After spending so many years in a tiny little house, we’re way out of practice hosting guests, though we’re working on re-learning how, and this attempt went pretty well, all told. Still, everyone had a good time, and it was nice seeing our friends again.

New Years Eve was pretty uneventful as well; we watched part of our friend Mikey’s online NYE show, and honestly went to bed around 10pm, because we were tired after our adventures in the days previous. On New Years Day proper, I did my traditional First Day Hike at Pocahontas State Park, and my lovely spouse came along with me. We did a nice three mile hike around the lake and then had a pleasant lunch date, before we came home and I started settling into the concept of returning to work on January 2nd.

So that’s that, and I’m settling back into the regular grind, hoping, as stated previously, that the year ahead is, well…boring.

As I do, here’s a summary of the just-ended year as defined by pure numbers. A few of the standard categories went down, but as you can see elsewhere in the list, I’ve been busy elsewhere. Lots of stuff going on, as you can see.

• miles hiked or biked: 1608
• rides longer than 50 miles: 6
• net pounds lost over the course of the year: 11
• books read: 49
• shows played: 20
• paying gigs played: 2
• conventions attended: 4
• songs written: 15
• songs released: 8
• songs recorded: 18
• albums appeared on: 2
• times one of my songs was covered: 1
• medical procedures endured: 4
• friends made: several
• beers consumed: many
• musical instruments purchased: 2
• office “all-hands” shout-outs: 2
• number of times I actually left home for work: 14
• longest pub crawl: 7 venues
• “last beers” consumed at closed venues: 2
• houses bought: 1
• houses sold: 1
• net residential square footage gained: 1400
• sheds discovered: 1
• times moved house: 1
• times I’ll move in the future: 0
• times my new car was hit by teenage boys: 2
• rugs purchased: 3
• boxes purchased: too many to count

2023 was definitely a year. Lots of big things happened, some big changes, some small changes, a ton of stress. I got healthier (at least below the neck) and am working on the other parts. I took on some new responsibilities, including mentoring co-workers, changing job titles, and playing actual paying, repeat music gigs.

That said, all I really want out of 2024 is for things to be boring.

By the time anyone reads this, I’ll be done working for the year.

It’s kind of fitting that the big thing on my agenda for the last day is the try-to-make-it-quarterly touchpoint meeting with my supervisor to talk through the whole work experience thing and make plans for moving forward into 2024. So, having wrapped up all the final tasks I wrote about briefly earlier this week, I’ve been thinking about that whole topic and how things have been and how they’re going.

Upon reflection, my work life in 2023 wasn’t all that bad, honestly. Sure, there are daily frustrations about meetings that could’ve been emails and bureaucratic busybodies, but I can usually deal with those kind of things by writing songs or blog posts about them and moving on. To tell the truth, though, I’m pretty sure I’m part of the best, most effective team of people I’ve ever worked with, and almost certainly the best boss I’ve ever had the luck of drawing. I’m given room to do the work effectively, my contributions are valued, and I’m provided opportunities to grow and learn myself, and help others do so. Because of all this, our group is in a position to make some real, positive changes in an organization that could definitely use some.

The campsite rule applies all over the place; leave things better than you found them. I think we’re going to do that here.

Out of a bunch of good things I can say about work, my biggest accomplishment in 2023 has been finally being able to hand off the project I’ve been the unofficial caretaker of since the big re-organization a couple of years back. Not that I didn’t enjoy running that particular effort for most of the last decade, and it was a definite boon in terms of learning how to manage programs, but as I’ve moved on to other things, it’s been this weird anchor of “other duties as assigned” that I hadn’t been able to give adequate time to, even if we did accomplish some pretty cool things laying the groundwork for (the latest attempt at) modernization of a computer system that regularly gets written up in “World’s Oldest Computer Program” articles. Keeping the data flowing there’s been a good experience, but it was time to let it go. The new guy handling things is honestly doing a better job than I ever did, and I’ve long been ready to fully move on to solving the next problem.

So as frustrating and change-filled as this year has been, my work life has been, weirdly, one of the anchors that’s kept me from floating too far afield and kept me grounded. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to make more positive changes and impose a little more order in some chaotic corners of the public sector in the coming year, even if my boss does keep making friendly hints about making me a boss myself one day. I don’t think I’m quite on board with that yet, but she’s nothing if not persisent and persuasive.

We shall see.

Today I started my final work week for the year 2023.

Three more days, and another work year is in the books. Honestly, I haven’t spent a lot of time reflecting, because I’ve been too damned busy tying things up before I take off for a week or so.

…And of course today (actually over the weekend), somebody dropped the now-standard end-of-year garbage event.

This year is comparatively mild; mostly just weird management posturing bullshit rather than an arbitrary schedule shift three or four months to the left without warning, though it was awfully frustrating on Friday when I was apparently prepping documents at the same time someone was flexing bureaucratic muscles changing the format at the same time I was building the actual article, leading to some silly real-time commentary/argument.

It’s silly. Especially since the “new, official format” leaves out terribly important, basic information, and includes multiple spelling and grammar mistakes.

This is my life.

Oh well, this weekend I got to hang with the local Pokemon Go crew for the first time in a while, got another excellent cabbage at the farmer’s market, beat the new Civ VI monthly scenario on the first try, and we finally hung up some art on the walls in the new house.

Still, I spent most of the day frustrated.

Then, of course, after hitting the park for my after-work hike, traffic and accidents prevented me from pulling into my own driveway. So be it; I drove forward, hit the grocery store and stopped for a beer at another local place I haven’t been to in a while, and in chatting with the bartender/manager, I might have a lead on another local bar gig…we’ll see.

So, yeah, not all bad, but I’m still twitchy. Things’ll be a bit better come Thursday afternoon.

I hope.