I actually accomplished a very big pile of things this weekend. Friday night’s visit to Lynchburg to watch Shakespeare under the stars – Love’s Labor’s Lost – with the eldest was a nice trip; the show was well done for a small production, and the location, Jefferson’s Poplar Forest, is a gorgeous historical site I definitely want to spend some time exploring for it’s own sake one day soon, and I got to spend time with the kid, and see a couple of her friends that I like (HI, SARAH JANE!)

Saturday I managed another ten miles on the trail in the morning, followed by some grocery shopping and a nice visit to the local farmer’s market for my weekly veggie hook-up from Jerry the farmer. I also knocked out a bunch of laundry, cleaned the toilet, fixed my bass jack (and felt like an electronics god afterward) and motivated the rest of the family to do some real cleaning up. It felt good. We closed out the day making an appearance at a dear friend’s birthday party (at the apartment that was still kind of dressed for the recent bachelorette party; the wedding is in August); socialization was had, Cards Against Humanity was played, and laughs were shared. I’m sure the party got a little more off-the-hook after the old folks like Colleen and I left, as is good and proper. We did bring Mary back a left over bachelorette party cupcake covered with penises; it was funny.

Sunday started again with a nice ride on the trail; another ten miles down, hitting eighty for the week; I’m getting closer to picking my Capital Trail weekend, as I think I’m almost there in terms of condition and endurance. I hit the trail earlier than usual (trying to avoid the humidity), and had a somewhat strange experience – the dog walkers out with their Starbucks kinda looked at me like I was “fitness guy”, which I totally don’t feel (especially since I got lapped by some other guy while doing one of my fifteen milers last week), though I was reminded by my wife and friends on social media that I might, just perhaps, be fitness guy, since I’m out there riding all the time on my well-maintained bike with disc brakes and all, wearing the shorts and the helmet, and knocking out four minute miles on dirt. I dunno.

Otherwise, I did some more laundry, made some Hawaiian-style chicken (“Hawaiian” because it had pineapple in the bbq sauce), made my electronic door locks on the car work again by changing the battery in my key fob (and learning a few valuable tidbits about coin cell batteries in the process), and thanks to Colleen’s doing some sorting of storage boxes from upstairs, hooking up an old VCR (and finding cables to do so to my modern, HDMI-based system) so we could watch the VHS tape we found of a dance recital featuring Mary, age five.

That’s actually a nice lead-in to what we’re looking toward this week; it’s dance recital time once again, which becomes big dad time; I’ve been doing some minor sound editing leading up to the performance the last couple of weeks, but I’ll likely be working sound and setting things up all week to some extent. The work week shouldn’t be too onerous; I actually got some good news late last week about some folks wanting to maybe fund some of the things I want to accomplish but have bureaucracy getting in the way, and need to work that bureaucracy even further (since my boss is away in training for the whole damned month) in order to make this good stuff happen, which will be tough, given that although what I want to do lines up perfectly with the bureaucracy’s stated goals, involves all sorts of complications designed to keep me from working in these sorts of efficiencies because of all kids of weird power plays built into the system. Damnit.

Oh well, I can hope the rain holds off (it’s not doing such a good job as I type this) so I can ride off the stress as the week progresses.

It’s another Friday. The week’s not been awful; just the usual meetings, plus my boss is off taking a class for the month of June (I’m on the docket to take it in August; neither of us were looking forward to it), so I’ve got a few less distractions than usual. That said, office gossip about the future of this organization is running rampant, but I’m doing the right things according to the right people, so I’m not too worried; just taking in the info and banking it for the future.

Outside of the office, I’ve been biking…a lot. Did twenty miles yesterday, because it was gorgeous, and I’m occasionally a glutton for punishment. I hurt afterwards (still do), but it’s a good hurt, and a good reminder than I’m not in my twenties anymore (even if I’m in better shape now), and I made the right call by listening to my aching behind and not doing twenty-five. I’ll be taking tonight off (see below), but I’ve got sixty miles down so far this week, and will probably knock out another twenty or so this weekend assuming the rain holds off.

Otherwise, I totally didn’t fix my bass input jack yet, mostly because I’ve been biking, and haven’t been in the right frame of mind to do it – the soldering iron intimidates me, even if I’m not terribly bad with it. When I get around to it (ideally this weekend sometime), I’ll do a beautiful job and feel like a superhero for the next couple of hours, but I need to work up to it.

I’ve also been watching some upleasant drama/fallout from the con I attended as a musical guest this past weekend, which thankfully didn’t touch or intrude on my experience at all, though some of the stuff I’m hearing (I’m not going to link to it; if you care, it’s out there) does concern me. I expect we’ll get some more news in the coming days. The politics of fandom is just as weird as the larger American community, perhaps weirder because so many of the fans are less-than-competent at social discourse under the best of circumstances.

As for the coming weekend, the eldest and I are taking a father-daughter road trip out west to Jefferson’s Poplar Forest to catch a performance of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost that a few of her friends from school are involved in this evening, and I’ve got a friend’s birthday celebration Saturday evening I’m hoping to make an appearance at. Otherwise, I gotta fix the bass and ride the bike, as previously described, and hopefully watch a bit more of that Bobby Kennedy doc on Netflix I’ve been trying to keep pace with.

Anyway…tunes. Nice, different than usual variety this week!

1. “The Beauty of Dead Cities” – Borknagar
2. “Bye Bye Beautiful” – Nightwish
3. “Shine” – Mondo Cosmo
4. “Here If You Want (Pale Blue)” – MOSSS
5. “Panama” – Van Halen
6. “This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)” – Talking Heads
7. “Just Like Heaven” – The Cure
8. “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) – Eurythmics
9. “Midvinterblot” – Unleashed
10. “Never Be The Same” – Surf Rock is Dead
11. “Dammerung” – Equilibrium
12. “Dear Life” -Beck

Oh, and having read the news this week about Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, and hearing a story on NPR this morning about dramatically increasing suicide rates in this country…as a person who has been touched by this very personally, if you’re having thoughts in that direction, know that there are people who love you, and please, please get some help – one option is the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

My Senator kind of won the internet for the day with this one:

Sure, the internet occasionally laughs at Sentor Kaine’s “aww shucks” demeanor and dad jokes, but I kind of love the guy (even if he’s not always as progressive as he could be); he’s got a consistent worldview, and does his best to live by it, and I think he’s mostly in the right. He’s also pretty sharp with his humor (his “believe me” bit at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 was on point and funny), and isn’t afraid to use it to make a point, even if he’s poking fun at himself.

Plus, you know, the guy’s a musician and a Replacements fan…that’s gonna count for something.

As is tradition, consider this the Concarolinas wrap-up post!

As I indicated previously, going into this one, it felt a little weird – there was some drama regarding guests and politics, which, thankfully, never ended up crossing my path during the weekend. Instead, I got to spend some time with dear friends, making music, jokes, sharing stories and updates over a pint or three, and saw some really pretty great music performed (in spite of some weird programming choices for music and performance), and played a couple of good shows myself, and overcame technical difficulties that might have broken lesser men.

The Humdingers had two shows over the course of the weekend; a “happy hour” set near the bar on Friday at 5pm, which went well, and we shared the stage with next-generation Huminger Liam on keyboards for most of the set (at least until the batteries ran out), and featured in the audience pretty much the entire extended family of singer/guitarist/co-bandleader Scott, all in fine Potter regalia(!), and Sunday at 2pm, which was past time a lot of folks have hit the road, but we still had a pretty nice turnout, featured Liam once again, and was saved by my friend DJ (from Dimensional Riffs, the Nefarious Ferrets and elsewhere) when the input jack on my bass crapped out halfway through the set, when he loaned me his Ibanez to finish things out. My lovely wife also livestreamed the whole thing on Facebook, which let a lot of our friends who weren’t there enjoy the show too!

Otherwise, I got to see, as I said, some pretty great music, from usual friends Mikey Mason (who did a couple of shows of music and comedy), Valentine Wolfe (who sounded amazing, and put the best show I’ve ever seen of theirs, and *all* their shows are damned near perfect), the aforementioned Nefarious Ferrets, and Atlanta’s own Nick Edelstein, who I met at Dragoncon a few years ago, and is amazingly talented, generous, and all-around excellent, as a performer and a friend. I also caught most of the a show by Frenchy and the Punk, who impressed the hell out of me, and got to hang out a bit with Neil from Antler Hill, who jammed with us a bit on Sunday in the hallway near our merch table.

…I also got to knock another item off the bucket list by appearing on Mikey’s Beer Powered Time Machine podcast, where we (along with Chris and Tina from the Nerdbliss Podcast) tasted and talked about a few beers, what exactly “filk” is, professional wrestling, and a bunch of other random things, late into the night on Saturday.

Other little highlights included hanging out with Julius the kitten (representing Saving Southern Kitties), conversing with a big plastic penguin, being told I was “buff”, and seeing my friend Scott look way prettier in drag than I might have expected.

On either side of that was driving *a lot*, and taking today (Monday) off to recover from the con (which is a great practice), but I still ended up cleaning the fish tank, doing a bunch of laundry, riding fifteen miles, taking care of the grocery shopping, and teeing up dinner in the crock pot, that I’ll finish off after I finish this.

So, yeah, it was fun. Exactly what I needed after the week I had last week…and as always, I kinda dread going back into the mundane world tomorrow….

Because I’m off for a long weekend to do the ConCarolinas thing, I’m doing my random playlist this morning, because I like doing it, and I felt like playing some tunes before another day of virtual meeting data analysis starts for me today.

For two days so far, I’ve been doing an all-day data analysis thing to figure out where one of my data trading partners is horking up their transactions; as I’ve said, this is the exact thing I offered all of them two years ago and none of them had time for me. Now, when somebody is breathing down their neck, I gotta jump and derail all my resources and timing (I have a buttload of other efforts running now) to appease. Oh well. It’ll be over today, I hope. We are, slowly, but surely, learning some things, but damn, if it isn’t tedious.

I also learned yesterday my building’s fire alarm isn’t hooked into the larger installation system anymore…the bell went off yesterday morning, and nobody showed up to check for over half an hour (after I called the building manager). Last time this happened a few years ago (faulty sensor), the fire department, who’s right down the block, was here in 90 seconds. This is encouraging.

While running this data analysis thing all week (nine hours a day or so…yay), I’ve also been dealing with the most stereotypical public sector auditors as well – I’ve got an interagency data exchange agreement in the process of being renewed (no changes other than formatting – simple, right?) that hit a schedule snag at the other agency, but me and the other guy got it covered with an extension to span the gap. The auditors on our end (we’re always auditing, it’s life here in the public sector) decided that the documentation on the extension wasn’t technically correct because it didn’t have a sentence with the words in the right order (literally), though I think I’ve managed to finally head that off.

Oh, and when I tried to get a good bike ride in the other day, the only day it wasn’t a complete rainy washout, I got half a mile down the trail and blew a tire tube. Seriously blew it, as you can see from this photo of when I took the tire off:

That’s about a six inch split right from the tube stem; the green goo that automatically patches small breaches (that’s that stuff everywhere) wasn’t gonna fix that. Luckily I only had to walk the bike half a mile back to the car. Anyway, I have it fixed now (no biggie), and once the weather settles, I’ll be able to ride again.

…as the title says, no wonder I drink.

So…ConCarolinas promo time. The Humdingers have two shows on the schedule:

Saturday, June 2 – 5:00pm – “Blibbering Humdingers Happy Hour Fun Time!” – Fountainview
Sunday, June 3 – 2:00pm – “The Blibbering Humdingers” – Lakeshore 3/4

We’ll also be showing up with pretty much anything with the word “filk” in the title, plus probably engaging in some busking/hallway shenanigans with our other musical compatriots. I’ll probably drop some new-ish solo stuff in the circles, see if it goes as well as it did at the last con.

Anyway – tunes for the week – lots of roit grrl/punk/indie sort of stuff here. I’m okay with a little agression right now, to be honest.

1. “That’s All” – Genesis
2. “Police Blitz” – The Donnas
3. “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” – AC/DC
4. “Suffragette City” – David Bowie
5. “Black Ice” – Kitten Forever
6. “I Turn My Camera On” – Spoon
7. “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” – Guns N’ Roses
8. “Under The Sun” – DIIV
9. “Mama’s Gonna Make Us A Cake” – The cCsual Dots
10. “Jezaig” – Eluveitie
11. “Psycho Killer” – Talking Heads

…this is a thing that doesn’t surprise me in the least.I literally LOL’d (and I don’t claim such things lightly).

Encountered in this thread on Jezebel about Matthew “Neville Longbottom” Lewis’s wedding this past weekend:

Not a bad weekend, all told. I spent a little more money than I would have liked, but this happens, and I can always make more. Busch Gardens and a trip to Blue Bee Cider can do that.

I also got some cycling in (on the Virginia Capital Trail, no less), and washed and waxed both cars on Saturday (mine really cleans up nice…). Guess which one hurt the muscles more? All that squatting to catch the ground effects package on the Scion – “ow”, say my thighs.

This week, I am stuck doing a three day special event with some data trading partners that I don’t really want to do right now (I wanted to do it two years ago, but somebody wasn’t interested then…), and with this weather (thanks Alberto), I probably won’t get the biking in I want. Gonna be a brilliant week. At least I’ll have time to get my music work in prepping for our sets at ConCarolinas this weekend. Kirsten even sent me a new tune to work on!

I’ll probably have a solid reminder post later in the week, but right now, I know we’re playing at 5pm on Saturday and 2pm on Sunday, but as cons often say, schdules are tentative until the event in question actually starts.

Happy Friday, folks. I’m mostly relieved. This week, overall, hasn’t been ridiculously excessive work-wise (it helps when most of my management, nicely distant most of the time anyway, are out bowing and scraping as part of senior leadership’s retainer for out of state site visits, and most of the public sector workforce is using today as an extra long weekend break), though I’ve got the usual “oh crap, we’re running out of hours on the contract” business (a bit earlier than usual this year, which should make it a bit more manageable), and the last-minute event-slash-production coming up next week that’s the main reason for the first thing, that none of us want to do anyway.

On top of that, the rain hitting the last week or so has totally hosed my sinuses up, to the point where it knocked me down completely Sunday and Monday. As the title suggests, 2018 might as well be my first year as a teacher, as every little virus knocks me on my ass. Or maybe I’m just getting old, I dunno.

Anyway, it’s a long weekend, which I can honestly use. We’re planning on doing Busch Gardens with friends on Sunday, but otherwise, I’ve got nothing on the agenda but a service appointment for the car and intentions to hit the farmers’ market on Saturday morning (plus, Riverdale Season 2, aka “Tween Peaks”, just hit Netflix). I’m hoping to catch a little bit of relaxation, because next week, as alluded to previously, is three days of showing a data trading partner how shitty their data is in practice, because they don’t actually read test reports, and wouldn’t do this 18 months ago when I asked nicely and didn’t have a million other things going on.

Next weekend is ConCarolinas with the Humdingers, which is usually fun, and lots of our musical tribe will be there to share songs and laughs with, even if the con itself feels weird this year thanks to changes in con staff and political drama (these links are pretty balanced accounts, all told – my personal understanding of the situation is that things had to do more with the actions of the guest’s hangers-on rather than the guest himself, though the whole business was handled badly), plus they almost always give us non-optimal show slots (currently Saturday 5pm and Sunday 2pm) . We’ll see; I still get to play music with my friends, even if hardly anybody else comes to that second show.

In any case, that’s life from here. It’s been a meh, congested sort of week. I’m hoping things clear out for the holiday.

Anyway, tunes. Now that I’ve finished off the all-time records thing (which was fun, and I learned of a couple of neat things from friends who I nominated – Bishop Allen is pretty great – thanks Dave!), I’m back to shuffling Pandora again. This one, as I listen, is equal parts classic British art rock and modern indie, which isn’t a bad mix to have on a quiet Friday morning.

1. “Interference Fits” – Perfect Pussy
2. “Easier Said” – Sunflower Bean
3. “Police Blitz” – The Donnas
4. “Sparrow on the Schoolyard Wall” – Jethro Tull
5. “Dear Mr. Fantasy” – Traffic
6. “Ditmas” – Mumford & Sons
7. “Heroes” – David Bowie
8. “Heavenly Bank Account (live)”- Frank Zappa
9. “Iron” – Ensiferum
10. “The Scratch” – Seven Year Bitch
11. “You Are (The Government)” – Bad Religion
12. “Our Swords” – Band of Horses

edit: and apparently I can’t count. Oh well.

The final one…

last saturday, blah blah

Day X of 10 of my all-time favorite albums. 10 days. What really made an impact and is still on your rotation list, even if only now and then. Post the cover, no need to explain, and nominate a person each day to do the same. Nominated by XXXXXX, I now nominate XXXXXXX

feeling the need to explain

Day ten – Indigo Girls – 1200 Curfews (1995)

I joke that the Indigo Girls are the soundtrack to my marriage. One of our first “dates” was catching the ‘Girls show at Franklin and Marshall College on the “Rites of Passage” tour. We caught them at Lilith Faire on our Honeymoon (yes, we went to Lilith Faire on our honeymoon – how 90s is that?), we saw them a couple of years back in town right abouts on our 15th anniversary; there was another show in there somewhere too (but she took our eldest to that one because I had a conflict on the rescheduled date…), and we’ll probably see them again when the come to town.

Yeah, I’m a fan. Voices, acoustic guitars (although they’ve tended to amp up here and there, and when they do, they sound like The Replacements, which is awesome). It just works. The songwriting is uniformly great, and they do a whole lot to support good causes, and mentor and lift up aspiring talent. Simply good people, with great songs and stories to share. This live record, catching lots of stuff (but mostly from the 94-95 tour) captures the life sound pretty much perfectly.

Busy and tiring weekend. Here’s a twofer

last saturday, blah blah

Day X of 10 of my all-time favorite albums. 10 days. What really made an impact and is still on your rotation list, even if only now and then. Post the cover, no need to explain, and nominate a person each day to do the same. Nominated by XXXXXX, I now nominate XXXXXXX

feeling the need to explain

Day Eight – Bon Jovi : New Jersey (1988)

The soundtrack of high school (I wore the printing off of my cassette copy of this one) barring some adventures into Queen and Van Halen. Was a HUGE fan of this band through high school and college; lost track when they started goin’ country and selling rosé, and largely forgot how to rock. No worries, they just evolved with their 80s girl fans as they graduated into moms and cougars and country music and such. Was a huge fan of Richie Sambora back then too – great guitar player/vocalist. Listening to these records now, it sounds like they’re playing through a pipe; so much echo on the mix, but I still remember every damned fill on “I’ll Be There For You”.

Day Nine – They Might Be Giants – Apollo 18 (199s)

Really, this one could’ve just as easily been Flood (I got them both on the same day, thanks to a friend down the hall in the dorm); I dig ’em both (and so much of TMBG’s other output), but there’s just so much more *weirdness* on this one. “Turn Around”, “The Statue Got Me High”, and “Fingertips” are just so out there – it wins, even if Flood is the classic. Great live show as well.