After yesterday’s aborted attempt, I made it into the office this morning (after a two hour delayed opening, which I obsessively checked on six or seven times as I got ready), cracking the seal on that metaphorical jar of pickles. Roads weren’t bad, though my parking lot, as I expected, wasn’t plowed, and there was a six or eight inch snow drift against the door to my test lab building. They’d cleared a small area alongside the road that runs between the lot and me, so I parked there with a note in the window to hit the buzzer and get me if they need the car moved. Due dilligence achieved.

Being Friday, very little happening other than a couple of calls with my teams to catch up on the latest happenings (which, included no serious crises, and one decent little win, though not, apparently, the one I’d like to have gotten), so it was clear the detritus, check to make sure the building survived (the only issue was somebody closing the rest room doors before they left, and given the lack of heating registers in there, it was effing cold this morning), get out for the weekend.

I will say that yesterday’s schedule disruption totally blew my plan for the day, and being a creature of habit, I kind of just wandered and puttered generally, I think, got on my wife’s nerves – she told me she truly hoped I made it into the office Friday because I was becoming difficult to be around, which I totally understand. My apologies, my dear.

I eventually settled down and watching a few more episodes of The Orville, which comes courtesy of the Hulu subscription I set up recently (mostly to watch Marvel’s Runaways, which is a Hulu original), and we are really enjoying around the household. It was kind of savaged by critics, but enough friends of mine have said good things that I gave it a shot, and was delighted to find a generally well put-together, heartfelt, affectionate, and slightly profane love letter to Star Trek: The Next Generation. If that’s your jam, and you haven’t checked it out, give it a shot.

Reaching back to my more cerebral or maybe navel-gazing post from the other day, I am still working on the intentionality I talked about. In that spirit, I’ve set myself up a reminder, making use of a $1.78 piece of amusement I grabbed the other day from the Target clearance shelf, which currently holds a place of high visibility in my workspace:

We’ll see if it helps.

Anyway, some tunes. Little riot grrl, little 80s, the best version of stairway I’ve ever heard, and 18.18% Tull for some reason:

1. “Don’t Wait Up For Me” – The Donnas
2. “Sweet Disposition” – Th Temper Trap
3. “Hymn 43”- Jethro Tull
4. “My Best Friend’s Hot” – The Dollyrots
5. “Fucken Awesome” – Spiderbait
6. “Safety Dance” – Men Without Hats
7. “Yr Mangled Heart” – The Gossip
8. “Bouree (Live 1992)” – Jethro Tull
9. “Black Infinity (Upside Down)” – SULK
10. “Rebel Yell” – Billy Idol
11. “Stairway to Heaven (live)” – Frank Zappa

The metropolitan area got about four inches of snow overnight (my friends to the east got hit a bit harder). It’s cold, and pretty.

As I said in my last post, today’s the day I was supposed to go back to the grind after the holiday break. When I woke at my usual 5:10am, my site was operating on a two hour delay. I went back to bed until 6:30am. Was still on a two hour delay. Got showered and dressed, and packed my stuff up. Still on a two hour delay. Shoveled the driveway (being nice and cold, it was light and powdery); still on two hour delay. Get on the roads, which are crappy. Continue to be crappy even on the interstate. Consider turning around, but I really kind of just want to rip the band-aid off and get things over with.

Just as I pass the half-way point (which also includes a dearth of exits for several miles), I learn that the office has closed. Damn.

Oh well. I tried. Tomorrow is another day.

My northeast upbringing and practice dealing with slides and skids (thanks for all that donut practice in the empty mall parking lot, Dad!) kept me in good stead. The exit I used to turn around was recently changed from a boring red-lights and intersections into a cool and pretty efficient roundabout. As I navigated the unplowed circle, a bit of a skid happened; I took the roundabout a bit sideways (at a safe speed of about 3mph) and perfectly recovered it in time to drive smoothly through the exit back onto my ramp heading home. Must’ve looked like a bad-ass rally film in slo-mo worthy of Top Gear. The cop sitting patiently in his car waiting for me the clear the circle before he entered gave me a thumbs-up as I made my way through.

I kind of wish I had noted the car number to check with the department to see if he had the dash cam on – I’d love to see myself looking badass for once.

That’s kind of what my spouse called it anyway.

I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’m going back to work tomorrow after two weeks or so away. If you look back at my posts here for (especially) the past year, you’ll notice a theme: I’m not very happy there. The organization I work for (who shall remain nameless in print) is kind of a mess; management has recently changed, after the previous regime identified some serious problems in a bunch of departments at the headquarters level, and the new folks are shaking things up; nobody knows what’s going on, and what things are going to look like a year from now.

I’m dealing with a lot of stress; a lot of uncertainty, a lack of support, and a lot of (frankly) bullshit in the way of doing the job the way it ought to be done is really frustrating; because if this stuff wasn’t in the way, I could get this thing moving on rails and save the public an awful lot of money, though my pleas for the space to do so fall on deaf ears, mostly because it’s an endless circle of bullshit all the way around, and nobody has any space.

As I’ve said previously, here and to my boss (who’s just as helpless as me, honestly), I’m giving it a year – the contract I’m overseeing pops at the end of the FY, and if things don’t settle down or get put in the proper order by then, I’ll be looking for greener pastures to maintain my sanity.

I’m not really the type to make “new year’s resolutions”, but I am heading into 2018 with some intention: I’m going to try my damnedest to not get hung up in the cycle of expectation, uncertainty, and perception of failure. I’m going to work on managing my expectations of what success in the workplace looks like; the situation just isn’t set up for anything but the worst bureaucracy can deliver. I hate the way this sounds, but I’m going to promise less and expect even less in return, because I’m just one small cog in a big unwieldy machine, and frankly, I’m not in a position to do a hell of a lot to change things unless help comes down from the top (and my organization is terrible at change management, and seems strangely proud of it).

So, I’m going to try to let some things go, and try to convince myself it’s not that I’ve given up, but that I’m setting conditions for a healthier life and a better situation down the road. Feels like the best thing to do; just not get my hopes up, and let this stuff roll off.

In not expecting a lot of validation or feelings of accomplishment in the professional space this year, I’m going to have to find it somewhere else. Luckily, I’ve got some good things happening outside of the professional world – last year, I really got my physical help in order, and had some wonderful creative successes. I’m hoping to keep that going – as we’re fond of saying in the musical realm, “this is cheaper than therapy”, and it really is. People really seem to like what I do in that space with my various co-conspirators, and we’re going to have some great opportunities to take our “hobby that kind of pays for itself (at least some of the time)” out in the world for more people to enjoy, and we know we’ll really enjoy it ourselves, bum notes and all….as a wise man once said, “there are no mistakes, just happy accidents.”

So there; that’s what’s been rattling around in my head the last few days. Just gotta stick to the plan.

Okay, folks…this is the album we’ve been working on for the last year or so, and we cannot wait to share it with everyone! There’s some really great work on here (if I do say so myself), including a songwriting credit to yours truly, some really great songwriting from Kirsten (seriously – “Elegy for a Nerf Herder”? Pegasus award material!), and a bunch of fun material that really got me stretching my abilities as a musician (I gotta keep up with those other other folks, after all…).

Anyway, it’s now out there in the world, and I share it with you. You can listen (and purchase!) at the link above, at least digitally. We’ll have the official CD release at Marscon in Williamsburg in a couple of weeks. Did I mention we’re Musical Guests of Honor this year?

I am, shall we say, excited this is out in the world. Hope you all like it.

I’ll be honest, this year wasn’t completely awesome – there was a low-level (occasionally spiking to high level) stress and anxiety thing going on all year because of a less than ideal work situation, that’s still less than ideal, but like I told my boss, I’m giving it another year to sort itself out before I start looking for a lifeline – there’s a lot of changes coming up with the organization, and it’s either going to get better, or it’s going to go even further to shit than it already is, and a year from now, we’ll know which way the sewer lines are flowing.

That said, there were some completely awesome things that happened outside of that wheelhouse, which is what I’m going to try to focus on. I put in a kid in college, where she’s kicking all kinds of ass. I played a bunch of really awesome shows with two different groups, put out two small records with those groups; Dimensional Riffs’ Live in the Boudoir and the pre-release EP edition of Fantastic Geeks and Where to Find Them with The Blibbering Humdingers, and we’ve just announced that we’re releasing the full-length CD at Marscon!. We are all really proud of this one.

The other big number is 75. That’s the number of pounds I lost this year, thanks to tons of exercise, better diet, and some pharmaceutical assistance. I’ve kept it off for a good solid six months now too. That’s something to be proud of.

Anyway, some other numbers:

• books read: 67
• miles biked: 1167
• shows I played: I don’t remember at all, but it was a bunch
• cons attended: something like a dozen, it was a lot
• kids graduated sucessfully from high school: 1
• pounds lost: 75
• inches lost from waist: 8
• new pants purchased that don’t fall down: 4
• solutions implemented to make my split-level fish tank plant racks work: 3
• Irish dance classes attended: 11
• ceilis learned: 5
• the number of those ceilis I can remember by name: maybe one?
• Dance dad sound emergencies solved: a few
• national parks visited: 5
• current Pokemon Go level: 34
• average liters of water consumed per day: 4
• number of D&D players killed: 1
• number of players who have run the cleric in the group: 3
• number of times I totally failed to recognize awesome celebrity Alex Kingston when she came to the merch table: 1

Not a terrible year overall. I’ll take it.

Greetings, folks, from the leisurely period between Christmas and New Years where you never quite know what day it is.

I had a little bit of a bout of illness here the last couple of days (my spouse too – I blame my kid back from college, which is fair, I was sick every year right after finals – she knocked a 3.5 out of her first semester, though – works for me), but I’m mostly back in the swing of things now.

The last couple of days, I’ve been playing with recipes in my Instant Pot pressure cooker (and then some) that my lovely spouse got me for Christmas – so far, I’ve knocked out some excellent refried beans (from dried beans to creamy taco-filling goodness in 30 minutes), a decent pot roast (from which I learned some things) and a middling cheesecake (again, a learning experience, though it didn’t stop the girls from eating it all within hours). I have plans to do an ersatz roasted whole chicken, and maybe a few other things before my break’s out. It’s been fun, learning how to incorporate a pressure cooker into my tool kit.

Since Christmas, it’s largely felt like winter, which is nice. the week or so prior (which I also had off – use-or-lose leave is a thing I deal with), it was brushing 70 – I rode almost 30 miles on the bike! I accomplished a lot around the house, though – I fixed the toilet (replacing all the innards), re-arranging my drawers, and picking up new kitchen table chairs at IKEA. Since Christmas, I’ve still been accomplishing some things, but I’ve been lying a bit lower, resting off the kid-provided illness, doing laundry, and finishing off James S.A. Corey’s “Babylon’s Ashes”, the sixth book in the excellent Expanse series of novels. I also held a small memorial service for the microwave, which died tragically last night – luckily, a decent replacement was on sale at Target this morning.

Also, today, we took the kids to see The Last Jedi, which I enjoyed just as much the second time. Some people are complaining about it, but again, it felt like equal parts deconstruction (which we’re due for after nine movies, a canon TV series, and bunches and bunches of EU tie-in media) and homage ot Empire. Again, though (and I think I said this in the last post), it felt like it could easily have been an ending to things, rather than part eight of nine. The spouse caught the force broom this time, however.

Oh well – I’ve got a week to go before I have to enter the world again. Gonna mostly just chill at home, I think. The youngest is agitating to play My Little Pony: Tales of Equestria, the MLP RPG, which I need to work through a bit, and I gotta think a bit about Marscon, where the Humdingers are musical Guests of Honor in a couple of weeks, so I should probably pick up the bass and dust off some of the Fantastic Geeks… tunes.

I’ll probably just end up drinking whiskey and playing Civilization, though, like I’m doing tonight.

So, I’m done with work for the year (unless I get a note from my team about a certain meeting with security actually happening at some point? I dunno, I’m done worrying about it). I spent this week in class, learning all about schedule management. I passed the class with 98 of 100 points (I missed one question on the exam, and it was a stupid, but understandable mistake). One step closer to level III program management certification. Woo.

Today was my first official day of leave heading into the end of the calendar year (I always take my year end break as a gift to myself). My lovely spouse and I continued our tradition of going to see the new Star Wars early in the morning of opening day. I actually really enjoyed The Last Jedi; it was kind of a deconstruction of Star Wars films; not without flaws, but it did some interesting things with the mythos, and Mark Hammil is a freakin’ superstar. If anything, it felt like a satisfying ending to the series, not part eight of nine or wherever we are now; I’m honestly not sure where it’s going from here, and it doesn’t necessarily feel like it has to go anywhere, really.

The one thing that came out of all of this was my wife’s new love for the CGI stars of the film, the Porgs (as seen above with Chewbacca), these weird sorta-bird things that hang out with Luke Skywalker on his hermit island. She’s spent the rest of the day since we finished watching the movie around lunchtime looking for the perfect plush replica, and I guess I’m going to have go find one. Oh well, this is my duty as husband and partner, I guess.

Anyway, I don’t have a random eleven this week; I never got around to streaming or randomizing anything – I’ve mostly been listening to NPR or St. Vincent’s MASSEDUCTION record on repeat for the last week – one of my favorites of the year, frankly. Go seek it out.

Musically otherwise, I think I’m officially an old now, as Bon Jovi, my favorite band from middle school/high school (though I got better, right before they got all Nashville and ceased to be a rock band anymore), is in the class of 2018 of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Also included are The Cars, The Moody Blues, Dire Straits, and Nina Simone, plus (and I wonder why she hasn’t been there from the beginning) early influence Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who if you haven’t heard of before, you need to go and dive in now (just click that link and go, my friend. Check out those guitar chops!)…not a bad group of folks.

Anyway, have a decent weekend, enjoy things, and start laying in for the holidays, folks. Happy whatever-it-is-you’re-celebrating!

Monday is, allegedly* my last “in-the-office” work day for 2017. Tuesday through Thursday, I’m off-site (at that nice training facility around the corner from my house) taking a not-so-exciting three day course on Earned Value Management, as I believe I may have mentioned. This is not something I’m excited about at all, but it’s required for the fancy certification I’m supposed to earn for this job, so whatever.

The weekend wasn’t awful, I guess. My wife and I legitimately tried to go to the cool vegan-pop-up/holiday bazaar at Hardywood Park Craft Brewery in the city on Friday night, but after knocking out a little shopping first, the snow and freezing rain were in full swing, and while the roads weren’t awful yet, the drivers were, and it was getting colder, so we settled for dinner out at the nearby mexican place (she got a margarita, I made it home without the requisite bottle of Gingerbread Stout, which is really good stuff), then home.

The storm kept up for most of Saturday, though the roads weren’t awful – we ended up with an inch or two depending on where you took your sample, but I still ended up venturing out once or twice for some things (cornbread to go with the chili I threw in the crock pot, etc) and to catch the new Gen III pokemon (because I still play Pokemon Go – sue me).

Sunday, I ran the usual D&D game with the post grad students legit PhDs (congrats Kat and Will), where we had a good time with a classic “on-rails” one shot dungeon crawl, where the druid managed to get her hands on a Cloak of Billowing (a “common magic item” that does nothing useful other than to billow dramatically on command); and chose to continue wearing it while wildshaped into a velociraptor (I allowed it, because “rule of cool” is my DM mantra). As a dinosaur, she couldn’t speak, but continued to puncutate interactions by billowing the cape whenever appropriate (or not), mostly to taunt the barbarian in the party, because why not. It was fun, and the boss demon, for whatever reason, was fond of metagaming (telepathically telling the party about his employee evaluations, and sacastically wondering why they just don’t come on in for the fight, rather than continuing to confer outside the big doors with the symbol of Vecna on them). I also gave out Inspiration for dick jokes. It was fun, and a good send-off for Will, who’s off to a post-doc fellowship in Texas for a while.

That’s about it, really. Otherwise, I’m continuing to work on shutting down the program for a couple of weeks while I’m in class/on leave, figuring out when we’re going to get out to see The Last Jedi this weekend, and working to deal with the unfortunate lower-GI symptoms of the iffy leftovers I had for dinner last night, and thanking the maker that I forgot the other batch I’d packed for lunch.

____________________________

*- I say allegedly, because although I’m in class the rest of this week, I’m likely not going to be able to put the last bit of business I talked about earlier without another meeting with people I’d rather not deal with.

Okay then. Not loving life right now. Stress (and depression) is a bitch.

As I run down the end of my work year, I’m able to nudge lingering issues forward, sorta, but they never seem to get solved. I’ve got this one issue I’ve been trying to run down since October, and whenever I make some progress, they change the rules, or somebody who had influence leaves the organization and somebody else needs to get “up to speed” and then *they* change the rules and I have to sell my (very simple) solution all over again. Made some progress this week, but it’s slow and I need some sort of good news/resolution.

I kind of hate my job right now, even though I’ve gotten a two week reprieve on furlough. We’ll see. Government is actually good at waiting until the exact last minute to accomplish the absolute minimum required to keep trudging along. At least I get my class

Right now my weekend is allegedly quiet – the girls have a couple of small dance things (nursing home performance, local Christmas parade), and I’m supposed to run my D&D game on Sunday, but really, who knows, since the weather folks are saying the magic word snow for tonight and tomorrow, so who knows; when that particular word gets uttered, all bets are off in Central VA.

Me, I just want to get resolution to something; anything. Quick, somebody set up a contrived problem I can come in, solve, and maybe feel better…

Nevermind.

Anyway, tunes. #4 is one of those anthems of my high school years that’s always kind of nice to hear. And yes, there’s a double dose of Pink Floyd on the list, which I’d normally get frustrated about, but honestly, it’s really two different bands, depending on whether Roger Waters was there (#6; although there’s still some Syd Barrett influence left in ’71, even though he left a few years earlier) or not (#1, which was really all Gilmour)…

…and that’s your prog rock history lesson for the day. Rock on, potentially wearing your Rick Wakeman cape.

1. “Marooned” – Pink Floyd
2. “Famous Friends” – Kittens Forever
3. “All Messed Up” – The Donnas
4. “Fallen Angel” – Poison
5. “Santeria” – Sublime
6. “One of These Days” – Pink Floyd
7. “Dr. Feelgood”- Mötley Crüe
8. “I Melt With You” – Modern English
9. “Promises” – Day Wave
10. “Head over Heels” – Tears for Fears
11. “You Make My Dreams”- Daryl Hall & John Oates

The news of the potential of Disney buying up a big chunk of Fox’s assets and intellectual property hit a fever pitch this week, with talk of a deal being announced as early as next week, leading to exciting possibilities like orphaned Marvel properties such as the X-Men and Fantastic Four “coming home” to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

I’m kind of conflicted, actually. While I would *love* to have Marvel’s First Family exist within the MCU (preferably as a weird-science Kirby-tastic 60s period piece – hear me, Feige?), and the option of getting Star Wars: A New Hope‘s home video rights back with the other films (which could finally lead to maybe getting us some decent original theatrical edition versions released someday), there’s a lot of potential not-so-good things that could come of it, both in terms of the characters we love, but also the entertainment industry as a whole.

First of all, if Disney buys up Fox’s entertainment side, they’ll own upwards of thirty percent of all movies released in the last year (that’s a stat I heard this week; I can’t find it right now); that’s not exactly good for competition. While it’s not a perfect synchronization (given various production companies not aligning completely with studios etc), that’s one giant megacorp controlling damned near everything, which in my mind, is going to, at the very least, stifle creativity. Disney, being as huge as it is, is pretty risk averse – I don’t see to many risks being taken – Marvel movies are great, and wonderfully enjoyable, but I wouldn’t exactly call them particularly daring.

Also, Hulu could be a problem; That particular streaming service is currently split amongst almost all the major studios – Disney and Fox each hold somewhere around a twenty-five percent stake. Disney buys Fox, all of a sudden, the mouse is a majority stakeholder. This might not be all bad -Disney’s been talking about setting up their own streaming service for a while; should this go through, they might just use the existing Hulu infrastructure instead. However, if Disney’s got a majority, all the other guys who get their stuff out over Hulu’s service will fall by the wayside.

One of these days, the studios are going to figure out that everybody having thier own services sucks – Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon have pretty much figured the infrastructure out; sure, holding back studio properties leads to cool stuff like Stranger Things, but I can’t think of anybody who wants to subscribe to fifteen different streaming channels to get all the cool stuff – that’s just cable TV all over again, and since these entertainment businesses are all also kind of in the broadband business, and Net Neutrality in serious danger of going away, we, the customer, are screwed.

Also, finally, I don’t really even want the X-Men hanging out with Cap, Thor and Iron Man on the movie screen. The fact that the MCU started out without the heavy sales hitters like Spider-Man and the Mutants actually encouraged more creativity and aiming for the “deep cuts”, many of which are my favorites. If those guys were there from the beginning, we’d never have gotten Ant-Man or Doctor Strange. Historically in the comics, the X-Men have mostly stayes to their own end of things (other than recent, overdone event series of the last decade or so) historically, and it works – additionally, the X-Men movies seem to work pretty well on their own anyway – they aren’t all amazing, or particularly married to continuity, though they work in their own sense of context, and have given us some pretty great individual properties like Deadpool and Logan, which wouldn’t have really worked otherwise. I say leave ’em out – they’re fine on their own, and the comics guys since the 60s understood that (in spite of Wolverine being on everything now). Sure, Marvel didn’t do amazing things with Inhumans as a replacement they’ve been playing at for the last few years, but Marvel doesn’t really *need* an X-Men replacement in their universe – the Avengers, Defenders, and cosmic folks hanging with the Guardians are fine.

I bet this deal happens. That said, I hope it doesn’t seriously upset the delicate balance of the entertainment industry, or the ten years’ worth of cool storytelling in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, even if they already have the whole Infinity Stone thing queued up to change up the universe anyway and just wedge stuff in – I just hope they don’t.