Sometimes, I think, the recovery is worse than the actual illness.

I am, by most measures, in way better shape today than I have been at point since my early twenties. Hell, my waist size is smaller than it was when I graduated college. The couple of chronic health issues I won in the genetic lottery are being successfully managed. I seem to have aged out of the weird skin/scalp thing I used to have. I am, by some measures*, dead sexy.

All that said (even if I’m gonna have to add the TMI tag to this one because of the previous paragraph), this bout of influenza that put me on the DL last week has knocked me on my ass.

I’m hoping I get six good hours today before the exhaustion/drudge sets in. I got four on Monday, maybe five on Tuesday. If that pattern doesn’t start degrading, by the end of the week, I won’t leave the office feeling ready to collapse, and find myself doing exactly that once I get home. Every day this week so far as involved some form of afternoon nap. I have, so far, managed to take my pants of first. Yeah.

I guess it’s because I’m on the cusp of, if not actually hitting and past, “middle age”. Since I hit 40, it takes me longer to bounce back from everything. That stupid shoulder sprain I got back in July falling off the bike to dodge a trail deer still twitches about once a week (though to be fair, it’s not the first time I’ve injured that shoulder). Getting old, my friends, sucks.

So, yeah. Feels like I should have a clever wrap-up for this one. It doesn’t feel in the cards. The weight feels like it’s settling a bit early today – best I can hope for is that my predicted six good hours today will be non-contiguous and a second wind will kick in eventually.

At least that damned check that the siding company lost the first time cleared overnight. Feel like I’m gonna have to coast on that small victory for a while.

Happy Wednesday.

__________________________

*-those measures being, the small community of groupies I apparently have in the NC research triangle, and the hope that my youthful local female bandmates’ near-constant chatter about my “bike shorts” isn’t actually facetious. I live in hope.

In case you were wondering where I was, I spent all of last week basically on my ass with the flu. Thought it was con crud? Ha. Hit me with a vengeance last Friday afternoon, knocked me down for a solid week.

And I *did* get my flu shot this year, like I always do. Apparently they missed the mark this year.

I don’t wish this on anyone. Stay healthy, folks.

It’s Friday. I believe I may be dealing with a touch of con crud, west coast style. Joy. I’m feeling a little less than amazing. Should be a low-impact work day, thank goodness.

Anyway, I just gotta get through the day, haul my ass out to Amherst this afternoon to haul the kid back (she needs a break), then maybe I get a break – I’ve got a copy of The Last Jedi sitting near the blu-ray player I wouldn’t mind watching.

The big event for my weekend is a ‘Riffs gig at Retro Daddio in Williamsburg Saturday night (click that link for deets). The set is finally together, and I spent a couple of hours last evening working on getting myself off-book for these tunes; when you’re playing with two different groups, it takes a little extra effort to force the brain and the fingers to switch gears. I’ll get there. Hoping it’s a good one, and drama (always a possibility with these kids, however much I love them) is kept to a minimum.

Anyway, that’s really life from here – I just, as I said, need to get through the day (and I’m hoping for the traditional holiday “59 minute rule”* to come into play); we’ll get there.

With that, here’s the welcome return of the random ten eleven**, absent for several weeks because I was too damned busy traveling or whatever. This one’s not bad; some indie, some Zappa, a touch of hair metal, and a healthy dose of Viking. The perfect soundtrack to pillaging thrift stores for skinny jeans, guyliner, and flannel:

1. “The Torture Never Stops Part Two (live)” – Frank Zappa
2. “Rolling in the Deep” – Adele
3. “Before Battle I Embrace” – Folkearth
4. “Dreams” – The Cranberries
5. “Apocalypse” – Cigarettes After Sex
6. “War of the Gods” – Amon Amarth
7. “Dr. Feelgood” – Motley Crue
8. “Come On Eileen”- Dexy’s Midnight Runners
9. “So Young” – Portugal the Man
10. “Enjoy the Silence” – Depeche Mode
11. “Under Pressure” – Queen with David Bowie
12. “Police Blitz” – The Donnas
13. “Cry Baby” – Kitten Forever

…and finally to those who celebrating various things, have a joyous Easter weekend, Passover, etc.

_______________________

* – go down that online google hole sometime; it’s a strange, bureaucratic whirlwind of legal jargon, memos, and human resources weirdness.

** – okay, thirteen this time. I missed a few weeks, so it’s okay (and totally not because I got distracted and miscounted).

After many, many weeks of disrupted schedule, both good and bad, I’m back to my regular routine (for some definitions of regular, anyway). I’m still a little worse for wear from the travel, but I’ll manage; I’ve dealt with worse.

All that said, Consonance out in San Jose was pretty great. Played some great shows, made a bunch of music with cool people, and generally made a pretty good showing. This was my first true filk convention (as opposed to cons with a strong filk/music track), so it was a little different than I was used to, but I can dig it. I’ll certainly do more of these things going foward; people dug what we (and I) were selling, and I heard some really, really great tunes. Twas nice to be welcomed into the community, both as a Humdinger and as a solo performer (I did a short solo set on stage, and played several tunes in circles over the course of the weekend).

One of the highlights was certainly Summer Russell the consonance “Toastmaster”, who put on amazing show (that took us all a bit by surprise, having never heard of her before) on Friday night, and played lots of other cool stuff throughout the weekend. It was a pleasure hearing her stuff and getting to know her a bit. I hope to see her again. Seriously, click that bandcamp link above and buy all her stuff – you won’t regret it.

Other cool stuff was seeing and hanging out with Heather Dale and Ben Deschamps again – it’s been years (going back to Balticon in ’12, before I really got into being a guest rather than an attendee), and the two of these folks are some of the most impressive musicians and performers I’ve ever seen, and are really great folks to boot. Again, seek them out if you don’t already know who they are.

I also met some other neat folks, like filk legend Blind Lemming Chiffon (who’s a hell of a player, and an all-around interesting human being), Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff, who in addition to being terribly talented (seriously, go listen to “Manhattan Sleeps” – chills), ran the sound (Jeff, primarily) for the con, making *us* sound awesome, and also lent me a bass guitar (with six strings!) for the weekend so I didn’t have to deal with transporting one.

I know there are a ton of other names to drop, but in the interest of time and space, I’m just going to say thanks to all the folks who made things interesting and pleasant for us as east-coast interlopers and Guests of Honor.

I may have also offered up my body in the name of fundraising for Interfilk, but if my promise of twerking raises the sale price of an item by almost $50, it’s worth it.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t note my long-overdue reunion with Jonah Knight and family, a dear music friend who moved out west a few years back, and came out to meet us for dinner and hang out for our show. It’s been too long.

Travel was uneventful on the trip out, though weather caused some serious delays on the way back (diverting out plane from Denver to Colorado Springs, and leaving us stuck on the tarmac for several hours – my ass still kinda hurts). Oh well, I think the airline is going to renumerate us in the form of vouchers for flights at some other point in the future – I have a couple of places I could stand to go.

Thanks, as always, to S&K for allowing me to tag along on these sorts of journeys – words can’t express how greatful I am.

Seriously, we as a nation need to fix this.

Today’s school shooting in MD? My friend’s kid attends this school. I got to watch, in more or less real time, this poor guy going through watching this happen to his family on social media.

Thank goodness she’s safe, but the fact that most of you knew exactly what I was talking about before you even read the content, and the fact that I had to clarify that it was today’s school shooting (as opposed to all the others), is so disturbing.

I don’t even know what to think at this point. I do have the definite feeling that most of our elected representatives aren’t going to do a damned thing about it, and those that would like to don’t have the numbers.

I don’t know…but this has to be fixed.

So, you might have noticed I haven’t posted in two weeks.

It’s not that I haven’t had things to do; in fact I’ve been ridiculously busy, winging (on occasion, literally) around the country to take in the ambiance of various public sector conference rooms and admire their institutional-chic environs as lit primarily by PowerPoint slides.

It was just as exciting as you might imagine.

My first stop was the cozy midwestern metropolis of Columbus Ohio. As you likely already know, I have spent many a day in the Arch City over the last decade and change for various work things; and have gotten relatively used to getting around there and enjoying the local color. I didn’t get much of a chance to do that this time, given the length of my days staring at said slides, enduring interminable briefings, and getting chided by data trading partners who can’t seem to get it through their heads that I can’t make the department financial system pay their bills correctly if they send transactions with accounting lines like “INSERT CREDIT CARD NUMBER HERE”. I am not making this up.

At least I got some fresh White Castle.

Last weekend wasn’t ridiculously terrible; there was some dancing, as there nearly always is, and I got to spend a little quality time with the college kid on Saturday before hauling her back to school on Sunday. However, given the fact that my routine had been disrupted pretty significantly by the previous week, my nerves were becoming a bit fried; a condition that would continue, intensify, and remain in place as I type this missive.

Last week should have been pretty low-key; I spent it in class, as my social media friends were surely aware, ticking another box for my required program management certification. The class was what it was, a typical offering from the training body, titled “Understanding Industry”, which was supposed to help public sector folks understand the point of view, motivations, and actions of the private industry partners we work with. Mostly, it made me rememeber how much I hated business courses in grad school, and got me seriously considering a career change, and having a few chats with the boss on breaks about the future (not that any of us know what’s going to happen in the next couple of months – so many changes…).

At least it was off-site (only about two miles from home – if it wasn’t so cold – we had a weather-related two hour delay one day – walking or biking would have been ideal), which would be nice if my boss (who, if I’m to be honest, is a pretty chill guy), as I mentioned, wasn’t also there, thus requiring me to be a bit more diligent than I’d particularly like about checking office email to see what my contractor teams were fighting about. Mostly, I can trust my folks to do the job without much supervision (once schedule and requirements get sorted), but as I may have written before, they’ve been sniping at each other a bit lately and stirring up unneccessary drama. Luckily, nothing exploded.

Nothing at the office, anyway. On the homefront (particularly the child academic front) shit fountains abounded. Let’s just say it’s never a good week for me when I get an email from a teacher addressed directly to me and not the larger parent community. If my routine was already screwed given my wide-ranging and geographically distributed work situation, this really started the kettle boiling.

The fact that I was off my usual schedule (usually, on normal workdays, I’m home by 3pm or so – I was averaging 5:30 or 6 the last couple of weeks, and home was, for part of that, merely a hotel room) along with all this other stuff (family stress, work weirdness, unpleasant reminders of business school, and a long-simmering career-related internal crisis), seriously ramped up the stress. My shoulders pretty much permanently swallowed my neck given the tension, my body’s gone into starvation stress mode again holding onto everything way too long, and I came pretty close to seriously wounding several folks who couldn’t be bothered to manage their carts in Wal-Mart, to the point that my mostly patient wife arranged things that I could pretty much have this past Saturday free to do nothing.

I didn’t exactly do nothing – I ran a few errands and popped by the Chesterfield Library Comic-con on Saturday (a small little event the library system puts on that gets ridiculously crowded for some reason, and a few of my friends in the geek/comic circles tend to exhibit at), but mostly, I gave myself some long-overdue couch time catching up on Agents of SHIELD and zoning out to the entire xXx franchise.

Yesterday, feeling a slightly better (but not really), I threw some instruments into the car and drove down to Cary NC to play a “local” show with the Humdingers that afternoon, which was a nice time (as always), a good show to a small but enthusiastic crowd, and served as a decent rehearsal for the big stuff coming up this weekend on the west coast.

Yeah, as mentioned previously at some point, probably more than once, The Humdingers are playing Consonance, the SF Bay Area Filk Convention, (as Guests of Honor) this year. We’re flying out Thursday, and I’m taking most of a week off to support the music habit. At least they’re flying us out there and putting us up on their dime, and have found me an instrument to borrow on the other side so I don’t have to risk my own as checked baggage.

That said, I did debut The Spare™ on stage this weekend for most of our second set, since I got my parts in the mail last week and spent an evening doing some basic upgrades. It’s still definitely a budget instrument (it weighs a *lot* less than the Jazz bass, which is solid ash; this is basswood at best, likely plywood as well), but it’s *loud*, and not just because of the knobs that “go to eleven”. Whatever no-name pickups they put in it are surprisingly hot for something I have less than a hundred bucks invested in. it’s definitely solid for the purpose for which it’s intended, and looks pretty sharp, to boot, even rotated 90° to make the post flow better:

Anyway, that’s life right now. Still very stressed, a lttle worse for the wear, though I have something to look forward to if I can get through Wednesday.

So it’s Monday. Yeah.

Weekend was busy. So busy. Friday night was set up the feis; integrate the college kids into the household for the next week. Saturday was get up just as early as I get up every other day to do the dance dad thing at the feis all day, handling all sorts of volunteer things and being generally busy. Barely saw the house. Sunday I got to sleep in a bit, but then it was groceries, and taking the family out to see Black Panther (again) so Mary could see it, then a very good, but pretty expensive dinner out.

I did immediately fall in love with the music of songwriter Caitlyn Smith about four bars into the first song of hers I heard on Live From Here Saturday evening on the drive home. I purchased her record Starfire, immediately upon arriving at home, in a weird transaction where I could get the MP3 downloads for a price of $9.99, or the physical CD (which came with a free download of the MP3s of all the songs) for $7.99. Guess which one I got?

Then it was coming to terms with the fact that Monday meant work again.

The week is going to be extra weird as well, I guess. I didn’t wake up to any particular crap like I saw last week from people who ought to know better, but the Monday staff meeting this afternoon might change that. I hope not. I also had to shut down some assumptions about my presence in Orlando Florida the first week in April (I’m not going…thank $diety), where I’d not been invited to some sort of symposium, but they had my name on the draft schedule to run some workshops that really weren’t my area anyway.

I will, however, be spending the back half of the week in Ohio, for reasons I can’t quite fathom – it’s an occasion to sit in a conference room and stare at powerpoints for two and a half days, which is, as you can imagine, a thing I live for.

As I have said, at least while I’m in Columbus I can obtain freshly grilled White Castle. Small favors, small pleasures.

Next week, I’m taking a class, which gets me mostly out of the office, but it also means spending a week studying basic accounting, which was such fun during grad school.

So that’s been my life, and what appears to be on the horizon. I’ll talk about the cool band gigs coming up in the back half of the month once we get there. That’s basically what’s keeping me going at this point.

Yeah.

Life this week has revolved entirely too much around using my dad voice. Funny thing was, I wasn’t really doing it at home. The supposedly professional adults I am charged with working with are well in the midst of all kinds of petty squabbling and I’ve had to do too many things that feel too much like kid wrangling…

…and then I wake up this morning to things that look quite a lot like mansplaining.

Gah.

I did get my hands on that backup $50 bass from monoprice, as well as my little tube amp I ordered. Both are pretty nice; especially the bass, given the price. It plays really nice for a cheap instrument, and once I do the couple of upgrades I’m planning, it’ll be very solid. Came set up really nice, even after riding in cardboard box in the back of a truck across the continent, not something you can always count on.

Anyway, that was nice.

The weekend is shaping up to be pretty busy; the feis (which I learned yesterday my car dashboard can pronounce correctly when reading me texts and emails while driving) is Saturday, all day; I’ve got a full day of dance dad volunteering tasks, as well as some Friday evening setup. I’ve already started assembling my emergency cable-n-connector kit for fixing the sound system.

And the kid is home for spring break tonight; of course, I have to spend a significant chunk of next week in Ohio. Joy.

While I wallow in my stress and groaning, please enjoy these tunes:

1. “Hold The Line” – Toto
2. “Pour Some Sugar On Me” – Def Leppard
3. “Goodpain” Yoke Lore
4. “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” – The Slits
5. Under Pressure” – Queen feat. David Bowie
6. “Rebel Heart” – The Shelters
7. “The Promise” – When In Rome
8. “Saggitarius” – Phoebe Green
9. “The Killing Moon” – Echo & The Bunnymen
10. “Fascination Street” – The Cure
11. “Holiday on the Moon” – Love & Rockets

Finally, because we all need this wonderful thing that dropped last night:

This weekend was a weird one.

I stayed up way too late on Friday night, drinking beer and shopping online. Having gotten a pretty good coupon from Monoprice after ordering a cheap tube amplifier (that I’d been watching for months) last week, I spent $50 on a backup electric bass guitar, their knockoff copy of the Fender Precision Bass. I still felt pretty good about the purchase in the morning, figuring (as the product description suggests) I could have a spare electric bass that fills another hole, and I won’t feel bad about hacking on.

I’m already windowbrowser shopping for new pick guards, and discovered cheap knobs that go to eleven, which of course I’ll have to get, even if the P-bass style traditionally uses Telecaster-style numberless knobs.

Of course, what this means is that I’m spending all my time compulsively checking UPS tracking to see when things are getting here. That’s not good.

Saturday, after poking around after Pokemon in the morning, we headed out to SBC to visit the kid, have some pretty decent Mexican food, and take in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which, as I mentioned, the kid did sets and stuff for. It was a really great show – I’d seen the movie a couple of times, but I enjoyed it live a bit more – the clever wordplay and dialogue came through more effectively when presented in a clever “theater in the round” style. I wasn’t my best self on Saturday – the drive did me in, and I was somewhat cranky. I made sure to apologize to the kid.

After getting home way too late on Saturday night, I slept in a bit on Sunday, did the grocery shopping, and spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on the marvel movie a week leading up to Infinity War, getting in Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and following up those with SPECTRE, which isn’t the best James Bond film (I kind of have problems with some of the casting and plotting), though it has the best Bond Girl since Diana Rigg, and, probably most importantly, lets JB get his happy ending, nicely wrapping up the Craig quatrology.

This week, so far, is me getting frustrated with my team at work, dreaming about performance work statements, and obessively checking UPS tracking, not believing that all my new gear is going to get here tomorrow, and I totally haven’t written any songs yet this week (even if I’m 15/14 in #FAWM).

Oh well. This is my life. At least I have Joe Hill’s Strange Weather to keep me company. It’s good.

So, this week has been a bit of a roller coaster in terms of personal health; Had a couple of good days with the sinuses and the throat, enough that I felt like I might be turning the corner. Then yesterday happened, and I started up that cycle of better/relapse that gets me two steps forward one step back for the next couple of weeks. I skipped dance class last night, in part so I could go to sleep early and not share my germs, and in part because the big feis is coming up in a couple of weeks, and a lot of focus in class right now is about getting the competing teams up to snuff, and when that’s happening, I’m kind of just in the way. No worries, I’m doing it for fun and to share an experience with the family is all.

I need to be somewhat fresh for the weekend at any rate -Saturday we’re heading out to SBC to get the kid off campus for a bit and see the school’s production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which she has a bunch of friends in and has been working backstage stuff as part of her technical theater class.

Oh yeah, in the morning, I’ll probably try to catch a bunch of dratinis for Pokemon Go community day, but whatever.

anyway…

I’ve not gone ridiculously political in this space all that often lately, though the general responses to the Parkland Shooting from the current Presidential administration have really, really rubbed me the wrong way. From the crib notes on how to appear to have empathy* (especially troubling, given the description of Obama’s comforting families after another shooting floating around social media that I can’t find this morning) to the big headline in the last twenty four hours about the proposed solution to arm teachers(!), my outrage meter has kind of been pegged. That second thing, which is probably the worst idea in this administration’s huge inventory of bad ideas, and I say this as a former (failed? yeah) teacher myself, really is tone-deaf. First, no situation has ever been calmed down by the introduction of a firearm, and secondly (as a friend of a friend wrote this week), teachers have enough on their plates these days, and lack the resources, time, and support to do them.

This stuff’s got to change; it’s gotten to the point that the responses are rote on both sides. Shortly after the shooting happened, I got a comment on this website from my dear convention friend Paula on this post, and it struck me that it was entirely appropriate for Parkland, although it was written about the incident a few months ago in Sutherland Springs.

Things may, however, be changing. Paula’s comment was about the kids from Parkland rising up, not being quiet, and might be the spark that changes things. Gotta say, I’m really impressed with the action these kids are taking; I really hope they do change things.

and with that, music. Not a bad mix this time. Little heavy on indie and classic rock, but I’ll take it.

1. “Once In A Lifetime” – Talking Heads
2. “Black Ice” – Kitten Forever
3. “Don’t Dream It’s Over” – Crowded House
4. “Talking Backwards” – Real Estate
5. “Interstate Love Song” – Stone Temple Pilots
6. “Flourescent Adolescent” – Arctic Monkeys
7. “Lord of the Blacksmiths” – Falconer
8. “Armageddon It” – Def Leppard
9. “Us and Them” – Pink Floyd
10. “So Much Trouble” – Jethro Tull
11. “Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin” – Young Presidents

* – This one irked me enough that I went ahead and wrote song fifteen of fourteen about it for #FAWM. Might as well make some lemonade.