It has been a week. I worked, I got through the day, I mostly slept okay, and had a really nice bike ride in Thursday afternoon’s gorgeous 80°+ temperatures, which helped distract me from what day Thursday was. Three decades later, I still miss my dad most on his birthday.

Not much so say otherwise, so I’ll do the obligatory promotional stuff:

If you happen to be Durham NC this weekend, I’ll be playing a couple of shows with the Humdingers at FantaSci 2023; It’s a small con, but it’s hometown for the band, so I’ll be crashing on their couch and poking around a bit. Scott’s not feeling well, so we’re not vending as planned, but we can definitely be found at the times and places listed below:

• Friday, 7pm – Magnolia (Main Programming)
• Saturday, 4pm – Magnolia (Main Programming)

And sure, here are some tunes, because that’s what we do here on Friday mornings:

1. “Falling Down The Stairs Of Your Smile” – The New Pornographers
2. “I Got This” – Sarah Shook & the Disarmers
3. “Southern Mark Smith (The Return) – The Jazz Butcher
4. “We Need A Bigger Dumpster” – Cheekface
5. “Darlin” – She & Him
6. “These Are The Days” – Inhaler
7. “Honey” – The Lone Bellow
8. “Edge of the Edge” – Panda Bear, Sonic Boom
9. “W.I.F.I.” – Wildermiss
10. “End of the Line” – Dr. John, Aaron Neville
11. “ILYSM” – Wild Pink
12. “new body rhumba” – LCD Soundsystem
13. “Take It Like A Man” – Amanda Shires

As hinted at last week, I spent a great deal of this week fighting off a sinus bug that’s making its way around the household. I plodded through the work week, got some minimal time outside (my Pikmin Bloom group pooling for 100k steps is going to be tight), and did my best to sleep my way through it, feeling especially exhausted after the seven hour in-process review with the CIO on Wednesday (making for a ten hour day).

I felt a bit better on Thursday, and got some nice hiking time on the northwest side of Pocahontas after work, then took my lovely spouse out for a drink at the Kilt, which helped shake some of the restlessness, even if the place was a little crowded and the music on stage was rhythm-challenged.

Assuming I can shake the hangers-on today, I’m going to go try to ride the bike for a bit ahead of the weekend’s rain, and put some time in on a musical project a friend of mine and I are working…more to come there once we get something worth sharing together.

Oh, and I’ll probably have a beer somewhere, perhaps green, because it’s the proper day for it. Slainte!

Speaking of music – all over the place this week; kind of a 90s alternative vibe, even though a bunch of this is somewhat newer. Still hasn’t cleared Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark” out of it’s week-long residency in my subconscious:

1. “Stray Cat Strut” – Stray Cats
2. “Growing Up” – The Linda Lindas
3. “Red Dragon Tattoo” – Fountains of Wayne
4. “Birds Fly (Whisper to a Scream)” – The Icicle Works
5. “Wilt” – Sloppy Jane
6. “Dethroning the Party Queen” – Rosalie Cunningham
7. “Honey” – AFTERxCLASS
8. “Bonnie” – Vylet Pony
9. “Dam, Damn” – Päter
10. “Stranded In Time” – The Unted States of America
11. “Doped Up Dollies On A One Way Ticket To Blood” – Big D and the Kids Table
12. “Love Impaired” – Dinosaur 94
13. “Spring and a Storm” – Tally Hall
14. “Aphrodite, Your Electric Sexiness” – Human Zoo
15. “Karen, You’re An Angel” – Sleeping in the Aviary
16. “The Cremation of Sam McGee” – Seth Boyer

I’m honestly not sure why, though I spent a good bit of this week feeling like I was on the edge of sick. Exhausted, hot/cold flashes, headaches, and all that good stuff. I continued to plow through my week nonetheless, because there’s stuff that had to be done, including some extra running about, as until yesterday afternoon, we were a car down, the little yellow one being in the shop for transmission work, which was it’s own kind of stress, though the metaphor possibilities about getting my own ass in gear are difficult to resist, so maybe I do know why I wasn’t feeling well after all.

The spouse and the eldest, upon returning from that wedding the other weekend, had noticed some noises/weird behavior in shifting. The car’s at the point where age and somewhat sloppy shifting by the youth might have us in clutch replacement territory, so we had it looked at, and it wasn’t the clutch, so it went into “drop the tranny and find out what’s up” territory, which is usually not a good region to find oneself in.

Thankfully, the replacement of a few bearings and internal bits got things back to where they should be, and we didn’t need a new one, so I actually got to keep most of my tax refund, and my savings and home improvement plans for later this year remain at least mostly on track, though I spent most of the last week seriously stressing about it.

But that’s adulting. I get it.

I honestly don’t know what this weekend holds, apart from meeting some friends for dinner to celebrate a birthday this evening, and likely working through some Humdingers tunes, because we’ve still got that gig in two weeks, even if S&K have been dealing with some extra crap of their own.

As for tunes, I can definitely tell that my youngest has been playing DJ on some car rides using my spotify profile lately, because apart from #1 and #4 being definite “me” territory, the rest (particularly #8 and all the other stuff that sounds like it) is all her:

1. “Montana” – Frank Zappa
2. “Lagoon” – Horsey
3. “Astronaut” – Future Crib
4. “I Don’t Remember” – Peter Gabriel
5. “Hey Peabrain! U Levitate?” – Junie & TheHutFriends
6. “Neon God” – KAYE
7. “Everything Is Bullshit” – Particle Kid
8. “The First Step” – Will Wood & The Tapeworms
9. “Malmo” – Mook
10. “Edna” – Henry Hall
11. “Kick Rocks” – And The Kids
12. “666” – jeremy messersmith
13. “Somethin in the Moon” – Geno Samuel
14. “Risk” – Mega Mango
15. “White Whale” – Shadow Academy

Been a hell of a week all around. Don’t feel like talking about it. Here’s what Spotify spit out this morning while I’ve been doing my best to smile through the despair

That’s a link, btw, to a track from my quick-and-dirty bandcamp release of fawm two-track demos – the whole six-track record may be found here, and if you buy today, BandCamp Friday, I’ll get a few more cents on the dollar, and related to that “hell of a week” mentioned above, I could use those few cents. Thanks.

I did, however, win #fawm, though not without a little crisis in itself.

for those tunes what aren’t mine, here’s the weekly spotify playlist. Generally cool, and covers both feline and canine dental interactions:

1. “Call Your Bluff” – Catbite
2. “Dom Fera” – The Reckoning
3. “Dance With Me” – Topline Addicts
4. “Vampire Chick”- Shawlin Supreme and the Kick Back Boys
5. “Juno” – Spud Cannon
6. “Good Boy” – Dogbite
7. “No Children – Ska” – Sad Snack
8. “Spellbound” – Siouxsie and the Banshees
9. “The Goo Goo Muck” – Ronnie Cook & The Gaylads
10. “Imitation of the Sky” – Bryan Scary & The Shredding Tears
11. “Benefits of Lying (With Your Friend)” The Apples in Stereo
12. “Wet” – Dazey and the Scouts
13. “Chanson d’une rupéteuse” – Lisa LeBlanc
14. “Exeunt” – The Oh Hellos
15. “They Don’t See Us” – The Tiarras
16. “Closeface” – Sorry About Everything
17. “Submarine #3” – Starlight Mints
18. “Know Me” – Sean Altman

Few particularly noteworthy accomplishments to report this week. Last weekend? Sure. All those previously mentioned events went off without a hitch, and on Sunday I did a two-fer on state parks, hitting York River and Machicomico, hiking a little over eleven miles between them, and ticking off the next milestone on the Trail Quest business.

This week, though? Meh. Yes, I was and continue to be the “acting” supervisor for the division this week as my boss is out, though thankfully the folks I’m nominally in charge of are all very competent and busy doing their own things, and most of the staff meeting rigmarole has been cleared ahead of time.

This is good, because I got whacked hard by six-months-later Covid Fog, which is apparently a thing; I’m not sure I’m a true “long-hauler,” but I seriously struggled with focus on anything complicated for Tuesday and Wednesday, just like when I was coming out of the infection. Thankfully, I was much better Thursday, and got a lot of the work planning and organization done that I needed, and apparently some of my unconscious brain cycles were working on the problems I needed to solve even when I was unable to actively consider them effectively.

Also Thursday, it hit around 85° here in the RVA, and I wasn’t going to pass that up, knocking out a really nice 21 mile ride on the VCT. If nothing else, I’m getting my summer bike stamina back much more quickly this year than last year, which is nice.

Hoping for a quiet weekend; fewer people in the house, as the lovely spouse and the eldest are heading a few states south for a wedding, and the other two (apart from running the youngest to an appointment or two) are largely self-sufficient. I’m going to hopefully chill, maybe do the taxes, and ideally hit another park to work toward the next milestone.

Tunes this week? Discover Weekly is giving me a decent mix of modern indie and classic punk and pop, plus this Orville Peck character I’ve heard about but never really looked into – after listening to #3, I think I might have to – it’s got a neat outlaw-country-by-way-of-drone/shoegaze vibe I’m digging. Also? Double Oysters at #2 and #10:

1. “Not Gonna Take Me” – Bailen
2. “Vitamin D” – Pearl & The Oysters
3. “Bronco” – Orville Peck
4. “Jet (2010 remaster)” – Wings
5. “It’s You” – The Millenium
6. “Same Days” – J. Roddy Walston & The Business
7. “Diamonds” – Mac Saturn
8. “My Brain is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes to Bitburg): The Ramones
9. “True Trans Soul Rebel” – Against Me!
10. “Burnin’ For You” – Blue Oyster Cult
11. “Queen Bitch (live at BBC)” – David Bowie & The Spiders from Mars
12. “Never Get Ahead” – Bobby Conn
13. “Stranger on the Town” – The Damned
14. “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)” – Billy Joel
15. “Crossbow” – Tamar Aphek

Another week down and all that…one that’s been pretty dull overall. Got out and spent some time outside, though not yesterday when it was gorgeous and I was stuck in a pre-brief for a CIO in-process review until almost 6pm, but whatever. Still hit my fitness goals every other day, got my stuff done, and wrote a few more tunes for fawm, and did a marathon recording session one afternoon, recording five(!) demos in around ninety minutes, including what I think might be the winner for this year, “Elegy for the Fourth Planet”, which is me working through my issues on the whole convention situation I described a few posts back.

The weekend heading into Presidents’ Day is looking to be pretty busy. Today, as some might know, is my son’s twenty-first birthday. Plans include having a celebratory drink or two at The Kilt with a few friends, then catching Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania at the local theater – it’ll be my first time in a non drive-in movie theater in over three years, so that’ll be interesting.

Saturday we’re meeting some other friends over at the Virginia Aquarium, which I haven’t been to in a long time, so that’ll be cool. Sunday and Monday? Who knows, though I’d love to get myself out to check another State Park off the list.

That’s life here, apart from finally getting a new couch in the in-the-process-of-being-revamped living room, though to be honest, the whole place is still a bit in flux for my serious comfort. I’m dealing.

Not really a lot else going on personally, though it’s worth the reminder for those of us in VA-04 that there’s a special election on Tuesday to fill the late Rep. McEachin’s seat, which I’ll likely mention again on Tuesday, because that’s my thing. And finally, because I think he’s a stand-up guy, I want to wish Senator Fetterman the best, as he’s checked himself in to Walter Reed to deal with his clinical depression, which is good for him, and also for the rest of us; his being public about it is a net good, as it normalizes mental illness, and that’s something this world really needs – too many people are afraid to talk about those things, and because of that, people don’t get the help they need, and bad things can happen.

Believe me, I know.

Let’s wrap this up with some tunes. Lots of the typical indie stuff out of spotify, with a bit of classic pop/rock and early alternative, including #3, a pretty decent track off of a truly excellent record:

1. “I’ll Be Damned” – Dutch Interior
2. “Out of Work” – Gary U.S. Bonds
3. “6’1″” – Liz Phair
4. “Radioactive” – The Firm
5. “Fairweather Friend” – GA-20
6. “Holy Water Hangover” – Butch Walker
7. “You’re My Favorite Waste of Time” – Marshall Crenshaw
8. “I’m a Man” – Jobriath
9. “Tim I Wish You Were Born A Girl” – of Montreal
10. “Seventeen” – Haley Blais
11. “Liar” – Envy of None
12. “Take Me To the Pilot” – Elton John
13. “Different Drum” – The Lemonheads
14. “Slow Dog” – Belly
15. “Americans” – Janelle Monáe

Another week in the can, and for once, it mostly resembled a regular 40 hour week, apart from the fact that I took Tuesday off to do some doc appointments and trek out to Bear Creek Lake State Park. With the business cases mostly in the can, we’re prepping for the big in-process review with the CIO later this month,  which mostly has me in an advisory role assisting all the program managers in effectively documenting their programs. That’s what I get for being the expert, I guess.

Otherwise, I wrote a couple of middling songs over at fawm, getting me five songs of fourteen down, though I stil have to demo a couple of them.  I’m continuing to maintain my creativity, though nothing is screaming “new hit” just yet.

The real news of the week, though, is the fact that the climate here in the RVA has been flirting with spring again, and I spent a couple of 70° afternoons on the bike getting my first miles on the VCT of 2023 under me, which was nice. I’m not in serious fighting shape yet, but I’m getting my legs back more quickly than I’d normally expect; if my sinuses and the skies hold out, I’ll maybe get some more in today before the weekend’s predicted rain.  We’ll see.

Oh, that trip to Bear Creek Lake was a nice diversion with a very pretty lake and some wonderful, well marked and maintained trails, and ticked off another notch on my Trail Quest adventure…

Have I mentioned that?  I know it’s over there to the left…One of my gifts to myself this year was an annual pass all of the Commonwealth’s state parks; mostly to avoid paying the parking fee when I go riding at Pocahontas down the road, but as it gets me into all of them, I’m going to try to get to all of them this year, and earn some park swag for hitting some milestones on the way.  I’ve got three down thus far, but there are a bunch more within an hour’s drive or so that I’ll hit before making some overnight camp weekends come summer for the more far-flung ones come summer. Stay tuned.

Anyway, this weekend looks like rain, so I might not get out much, but getting out in the sun a couple of nice days this week has already done wonders for my disposition, which is extremely helpful given the issues some of the other members of this household are dealing with.  Also, there’s some household involvement in a community theater production that’ll keep some of us busy, even if the role is small.

As for tunes this week, a bit all over the place, but there at #4 is a recording of that performance from the 2004 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony where Prince tears the roof off the place, which I’ll never not love:

1. “Old Enough” – The Raconteurs
2. A Jazzy Song with a Kanji title, but with “Lucky” in the chorus from the Lupin III sountrack
3. “Train from Kansas City” – Neko Case
4. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps (live)” – Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, Dhani Harrison, Prince
5. “Be Better At Listening” – Pompamoose
6. “Day Tripper” – Yellow Magic Orchestra
7. “Slippery People (live)” – Mavis Staples, Win Butler, Regine Chassagne
8. “Breathless on DVD” – Antarctico Vespucci
9. “The Rattle” – Leponds
10. “Drivin’ on 9” – The Breeders
11. “House on Fire” – Slam Bamboo
12. “Silver Line” – Sheer Mag
13. “Rockstar” – Momma
14. “White Reaper” – Pages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is my life sometimes…