My weekend finally ended last evening. I took a couple of days off to support a couple of commitments and to maybe, sort of, get a little bit of rest here in the early spring. That last bit didn’t quite work, but I got stuff done.

The big event was the trip to Sweet Briar College for accepted students’ weekend on Sunday/Monday. This was really all about the firstborn’s experience, though I’d never been to the campus before, so it was a good experience for me. The kid loves it, and I can see why; it’s a gorgeous campus, not dissimilar to where I spent my undergrad years – lots of old brick, green grass, and fat squirrels running around. Being a very small college in the best of years, and especially after recovering from the recent hiccup, the only weird thing about it was walking around Monday (after spending Sunday in seminars, academic fairs, and campus tours) while classes were in session (the incoming accepted students got to audit a couple of classes), was that it felt kind of empty. I would have expected, on a warm spring day, to see kids in groups in the public areas, or sitting against a tree reading, or you know, milling around. Of course, the whole student body was in class somewhere; and those class sizes were pretty much all smaller than a dozen students, which, if you’re looking for an academic environment that would work for my kid, is pretty much perfect. Still, I kind of missed the blanket of student life just out and about; all the signs of it happening were there, I think I just missed it due to timing and the logical application of a small student population. In any case, the faculty, staff and students I talked to were uniformly pretty great, and I was very impressed with the place as a parent of one of next year’s First Years.

I kind of crashed Monday afternoon; it’s been a busy and stressful couple of weeks, and it pretty much wrecked me. Tuesday I had a medical appointment, which even though I’m in generally okay shape, is always a little stressful. I got some new stuff to try to sort out some of the rough edges; we’ll see how that goes. After that, I took care of grocery shopping I went on a nice bike ride along the river with the youngest (did I mention that? spring break), took a little time to read, and then got dragged out to the local, somewhat anachronistic skating rink for two-dollar-tuesdays, again with the youngest, as the middle one was hours deep into an Overwatch orgy and the eldest was out at the beach for the day with “the squad”.

I hadn’t been on roller skates in a few years, but I got my rink legs back pretty quickly. As I’ve probably said before in the more than a decade of musings archived in this space, roller rinks always perk up my nostalgia circuits, since I *lived* in roller rinks from elementary through mid-high school, because that was a thing we used to do. Things honestly haven’t changed much since then; I’m always amazed that stepping into a roller rink is like stepping back to 1988 or so. Same decorations, same carpet, same old brown and orange rental skates, same tables and crappy pizza in the snack bar. Half the music was from the period as well – “It Takes Two” from Rob Base and DJ EZ-Rock? Salt-n-Peppa? Yep. Only thing missing was a couples’ skate set to Atlantic Starr’s “Always” or “Almost Paradise” by Ann Wilson and Mike Reno.

I had thought that my rental size 11s seemed a little “off”, though I wrote it off to them being rentals until about 90 minutes into the session, I tossed a wheel going around a turn (while executing a pretty nice crossover maneuver) and I dropped myself gracefully to the rink surface in the opposite direction of the wheel. Oh yeah. I bet there are still the remnants of badly packed bearings somewhere. That was about it for me (it was a two-hour skate). Still, I had a decent time on a day when I was dealing with a bit of anxiety.

Rest of the week (other than the Spring Break stuff) is pretty standard for me; I’m going to try to get some more biking in (I need to get my mileage back up), do some band practice later this week, and just try to get through all of this…life.

…it may even Ragna-Rock! (I’m sorry).

Here’s the teaser trailer for Thor: Ragnarok:

It’s not like the other Thor movies, and that’s okay. This one, in large part, I think due to director Taikia Waititi (seriously, go see What We Do In The Shadows to get a sense of his sensibility – it’s on amazon prime; I’ll wait), is going to embrace the comic-bookiness and camp of 70s and 80s Marvel, and it’s going to be amazing. Hemsworth has always had an easy charisma and had a surprising gift for comedy; it looks like we’re finally going to finally see a Thor movie take advantage of it (the last two were good, but not the phenomena the other “founding” series and GotG were), and I think we’re really in for a treat.

Plus, you know, they manage to work in the classic “Planet Hulk” storyline without making The Illuminati (or at least those of them currently in the MCU) look like dicks to do it.

Marvel films, while always including humor, have been a bit heavy lately (particularly Civil War); 2017, with this, GotG vol 2 and, I hope, Spider-Man: Homecoming, is going to be the year of the romp, and that’s totally okay.

Happy Friday to you all, more or less. I will admit to a little deja vu, as yesterday felt an awful lot like Friday to me, which is never a great thing to have happen to someone on a Thursday, as you can imagine.

The week’s been the usual weirdness and uncertainty, though I’ve made some progress in a couple of areas at work that make things a bit easier; I got a few answers on a couple of things, which at least means I can make plans and adjust for the resources I’m not getting. This is the way of the world here in this particular public sector agency; we’re all frustrated. I heard a senior executive diss the president in a phone conference yesterday, which was novel; the current freeze on new regulations is putting serious limit on what kind of progress policy-making organizations can do in terms of implementing policy, it would seem.

Otherwise this week, I’ve been putting work into the first, limited-edition, live-around-the-mic-like-1920s-jazz-musicians, artisanally-burned CD release from my non-Humdingers project, Dimensional Riffs, which we’re calling “Live in the Boudoir”, since we recorded it in one of the vocalists’ bedrooms. We did the bulk of recording a couple of weeks ago, but did some pick-up stuff this week, and I spent several hours (mostly last night) hunched over a laptop bending the results to my will with various sound editing and processing applications (primarily tracktion and audacity), and knocking out a handful physical copies so we’ll have some stock to sell to our small cadre of “fans”, assuming we actually have any, at the gigs we have coming up.

It’s not much, just six seven (shhhhh….) tracks to give folks a taste of what we have to offer and maybe open up a few more gigs. There are a few bum notes and things that I couldn’t correct with studio wizardry (honestly, I’m still learning), but overall, it’s not an embarassing thing to be involved with (and a couple of tracks are things I’m legitimately proud of), and ideally, it’ll drum up enough interest to make investing in a “real” multi-track release worth the effort in the coming months.

It’s certainly something I feel comfortable asking five bucks for.

This weekend opens up spring break for the kids, and I’m taking a couple of days as well, mostly to fill in a couple of doctor’s appointments, and to be able to hit the student/parent orientation thing at SBC so I can finally see where my college money’s gonna go next year.

Otherwise, I’m going to relax a little after the busy week, and hope that last night’s 59 cruise missles’ worth of orange machismo doesn’t open up something larger on the 100th anniversary or our getting involved in another global spanning conflict that had a lot to do with chemical weapons.

But let’s not end on a thought like that – to celebrate our random eleven and a movie watched a bit of this week when my kid had it on, here’s Doctor Stranger Things, who it turns out, is actually a friend of a friend in the mid-atlantic sci-fi community:

And now some music. A slightly AAA mix this time around, because it turns out that that’s where I had my Pandora playlist targeted for at least the beginning of things. As I type this, I’m seven minutes into track eight’s 23, so I’ll get this posted sometime in the next century, without commentary on what could be a pretty embarassing back third:

1. “Lonely Boy” – The Black Keys
2. “Mess Around” – Cage the Elephant
3. “Where The Streets Have No Name” – U2
4. “Human” – Rag’n’Bone Man
5. “Riptide” – Vance Joy
6. “Soul to Squeeze” – RHCP
7. “Skirnir” – Falkenbach
8. “Thick as a Brick” – Jethro Tull
9. “Blister in the Sun” – Violent Femmes
10. “Space Oddity (live ’72)” – David Bowie
11. “Madness” – Muse

other than this is probably the best thing ever:

As I occasionally do, I practice sustainability by recycling the electronic drivel I find in my spam folder by grabbing snippets of spam comments about replica handbags and search engine optimization and re-arranging them into verse. Why do I do this? Because it amuses me for a few minutes, and probably because it confounds search algorithms, which I find entertaining, because sometimes I just want to watch the world burn.

I’ll admit up front these aren’t my best work, but there are perhaps a few gems in here if you look hard enough.

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Thank you folks, for humoring me.

As indicated earlier, I spent the weekend “on the road” as a working musician, playing a couple of shows with The Blibbering Humdingers down south, one our first online streaming “show” (really, we pointed a camera at our practice session, on the couch at Humdinger Central, but people watched and interacted and it was fun – if so many of our musical friends can make Concert Window a viable business model for online shows, we can dip our toes in), and second was a benefit show put on by the Triangle Area Pagan Alliance at Arcana my new favorite drinking establishment in Durham NC. It’s a great room, with all kinds of character. Just check out this shot from the stage area during sound-check before all the fools and fairies started flowing down the stairs of this awesome basement bar:

Our set went pretty well, all told – the sound did some funny things, as sound tends to do, and being a “bar show”, we were kind of there filling out the background tapestry of the entire event – we closed out the live performance part of the evening along with Burns and a talented bellydancer whose name I never caught, before the dance party started, but we played well, the folks paying attention really dug us, nobody complained, and we debuted a couple of our new tunes (one of which I only really learned a few hours prior) to great acclaim (at least in our own minds). The folks at TAPA posted a bunch of shots of the evening on their social media feeds, one of which I’m borrowing to post below:

Pretty clear this was our opening number, as indicated by the house elf head.

Sunday, before I hit the road back up north (where I had a rather unpleasant encounter with MTO food from Sheetz…just say no, people), we spent some time working through new tunes, including laying down a few tracks for the “Trolley Witch Blues”, which sounds a lot better with my friends playing on it and singing that it ever did in my head when I wrote it. I mostly just dig the fact that they thought my little idea from the most interesting scene in Cursed Child was good enough for the band to do. Makes me feel like I might be kind of good at this thing.

So, that was the weekend. Hope you had a good time with whatever you did!

Again, been a long week with lots of uncertainty and work weirdness, though some of this explained by the apparent presence of my position predecessor/nemesis back in the mix, who is always good for trying to work around procedures and throwing people under the bus to get ahead.

Damn.

Anyway, that’s in the past, or will be by this afternoon, as I get to make music with my friends this weekend. Tomorrow morning I head down to Humdinger Central to work on some new material and record some stuff for the next Blibbering Humdingers record. Also, Saturday night we’re playing The Fools and Fairies Springtime Soiree in Durham NC, which should be a good time.

Also, rumor has it we’re going to try livestreaming some of our efforts on Saturday afternoon around 3pm – keep your eyes on The Blibbering Humdingers facebook page for info, as the streaming vehicle is in question, be it youtube, FB, twitch, whatever…I don’t really know livestreaming, as I’m an old. In any case, it should be interesting…either a thrilling success or a colossal trainwreck; tune in to find out.

Anyway, that’s the story from here. Regular friday tunes below.

1. “Golden Years” – David Bowie
2. “Water” – Ra Ra Riot
3. “The Mammy Anthem” – Frank Zappa
4. “West End Girls” – Pet Shop Boys
5. “Urban Photograph” – Urban Cone
6. “When The Show is Over” – The Donnas
7. “Drive” – The Cars
8. “Once In A Lifetime” – Talking Heads
9. “Friendship Station” – Le Tigre
10. “Seventeen” – Winger
11. “No Rain” – Blind Melon

Pope Francis is watching you drink beer before noon on Sunday morning.

It kinda looks like he approves.

As much as I hate talking about work in this space (this is, in my mind, isn’t really the place except in generalities, though I end up doing it quite a bit), a lot of stuff from the office side of my life is really weighing me down lately.

Regular readers will remember that I’ve been bitching on and off in the space the last couple of months about the shakeups and uncertainty regarding resources and stuff in my public sector agency. It seems every week I’m being called to provide some new form of documentation or justification or data to support the work I do (which nobody disputes is important work that needs done), and last week, I spent most of a day sitting in front of a review board going line by line through work statements to break down how work is distributed across the contracts I have to deal with. The review board really rather liked my performance statements, which made me feel good about the one I wrote, and worried me because if the one i inherited and didn’t write is still impressive, it means the rest of the organization is in deep trouble because I know as as person who has a decade or so of contracting experience that that work statement is total shit.

In the last week or two, heads have been rolling here in this organization in response to waste and badly written contracts, and I expect it’s not quite over. My job is safe, thankfully (though I’m not happy with it, and thanks to the current hiring freeze, I don’t have much option to move anyway, as with the 20 years I have invested, it doesn’t really make sense for me to go private unless it’s absolutely necessary), but I expect that others in the organization don’t necessarily have the same assurances.

However, as they’re reviewing and killing certain programs and basically locking the purchasing people away for mandatory training/counseling, there’s still work to be done based on what I’ve been assigned to accomplish that goes beyond the budgeted resources on my current vehicles, and as my boss and I learned last week, there’s really no process in place to get requests approved and orders issued under the current in-flux regime; just a bunch of shouty executives and senior officers looking to castigate people for what, in many cases, were legitimately bad choices and work products.

This, as you might expect, is a problem.

The stuff above, however, is entirely academic. What’s really got me anxious is that the changes coming means that very real people I’m fond of in both “productive worker” and “very nice person” senses, could quite possibly lose their jobs; even if I get eventual answers to concerns about the process. Even though this isn’t really my fault in any way, and it won’t personally be me letting people go, it still really bothers me that I’m involved in this.

At this point, I just want a clear-ish answer about what the circumstances are going to be for my particular programs, so I can start planning priorities toward a semi-realistic target, and we can give the really good people we’re going to lose as much time to make their adjustments as they can. It’s the least The Powers That Be™ owe me, and it’s the best I can do given the circumstance for the folks who work with me.

It’s still a crappy situation, and I don’t like it one bit, and I needed to say it (figuratively) out loud.

So, Friday night we did go to The Fountain and hung out with John Scalzi for a couple of hours. Nice crowd in the tiny, awesome store, including our friends Chris and Melissa in from Norfolk. Scalzi read a bunch of cool stuff (including a chapter from the forthcoming sequel to the very good Lock In), and was generally agreeable, amiable and pleasant. We got our copy of Collapsing Empire signed, and generally had a good time.

Saturday was kind of crazy, as expected. The family’s older women were off to the VA Dance Festival for dress rehearsal before I woke up. I spent the morning getting the youngest cleaned and dressed before the rest got back for a little break before heading off to the first of two shows, when they also took lead on getting the complicated dance hair sorted for the little one (I’m good for brushing, ponytail, braids, etc, though the dance hair, bun-wig arrangments elude me) before I had to have her over at Church Hill.

Church Hill was crazy on Saturday – the weather was gorgeous, so everybody took advantage of the nice day to wander around drinking beer (and smoking, um…things…I swear, I left the place with a contact high) on public streets. The girls did a great job, of course. After the show, we just left, as it was damned near impossible to navigate the place.

The Dance Festival performances apparently went okay (the first show better than the second), though we all survived our day of splitting the party. The fact that I had the house stocked with ice cream helped.

Sunday was day two of Church Hill, with a noon showtime for the whole crew, so we packed up a little earlier, expecting crazy traffic and crowds. It actually wasn’t all that bad. The show went very well, as expected (these are some talented kids), and then a bunch of us hung around to take in the festival with slightly smaller crowds, have some lunch, and making use of the free food and beer coupons.

Yes, the benefit of being an Irish Dance Dad: Free beer:

This photo went up on the dance school’s facebook page- great promotion. Ballet dads don’t get this kind of benefit!

This week looks pretty typical – work, dance, rehearse…yes, rehearse, because I have a gig this weekend down in NC, where we’re hoping to do some recording for the new Humdingers record as well, and at some point this week, if I can get the band together in the vicinity of a microphone for 20 minutes (harder than you’d think), I can finish recording the Jenny Hendricks Experience CD.