So I spent most of the weekend hanging about the house thanks to the seven or so inches of snow that blanketed the RVA over the weekend. It was kinda nice, mostly. I ventured out on Sunday afternoon for a necessary trek to obtain prescription depression medication, tampons, chocolate and Pamprin, to which the pleasant pharmacist gave me a knowing and sympathetic nod along with the following comment:

“Some weekend for a snowstom, huh?

We shared a good laugh. Anyway, the roads, once you got out of my neighborhood weren’t all that bad anyway, correcting for someone like me who grew up driving in this sort of thing..

Otherwise, I read some books, played some video games, made a kickass new recipe I discovered online for Peirogie Lasagna (which is an amazing carbohydrate bomb of goodness), and changed the strings on my bass.

The kids got the call that school was cancelled for Monday early on Sunday, and I checked the plans for the host installation for my place of employment in the afternoon to discover we were on a four hour delay.

A four hour delay.

I have decided, having now dealt with this situation that a four hour delay is really skirting the edge of propriety. if you’re going to cancel half the day, you probably ought to just have closed the place. Sure, I got to sleep in a bit. That was okay. However, like a responsible adult, I cleared my car and such out well before this morning, and it doesn’t take me all that long to get here (it’s a fifteen mile commute, mostly on the interstate). I had just enough time to eat a nice breakfast of leftover peach pie, and sit impatiently until it was time to go, with my wife looking at me funny in my discomfort, because there really wasn’t time to really start anything in the morning before I had to show up.

Granted, I’m one of those 6am people (gets me out of the way before teenagers start beefore school routines, and I get a couple of hours of quiet to queue up the day before the meetings start, and I get to see the sun in the afternoon, even in winter), so I aimed to arrive at 10am. I gave myself a few minutes extra, used most of it to stop and buy a sandwich to stick in the fridge for lunch, and still got here at 9:45.

The main roads on post were clear, as expected, though here’s the view out the front door of my building of the parking lot where I usually park:

Nobody bothered to plow it (which is funny, because it’s usually full of people for the health clinic across the street), other than a little space in front of the porch (which is where I put my car). And, it doesn’t look like the plows are running anymore.

Huh. Making good use of those extra four hours.

Yeah, I’d just cancel things, even being the superior-about-winter-weather northerner that I am. Everybody else is grumbling too.

All told, it’s been as tolerable a first week back in the real world as one could reasonably expect. There were, as there always are, challenges (figuring out where the hell we left off at the office), weirdness (kitchen fixtures showing up in decidedly not kitchen places, for example), non-sequitir (I have been served so many ads for local boudoir photography companies this week….) and impending disaster in the form of snow coming to the mid-Atlantic region.

Although we’re not expected to get pounded too much (the RVA is expected to get somewhere in the neighborhood of 4-6 inches), my experience living here for the last 19 years (and yes, I just counted in my head, it’s been that long) is that two inches is good enough to shut the place down for a couple of days. I had to run to the grocery store last night for, coincidentally, milk, bread, and toilet paper (not because of the oncoming storm, but because my kids eat and poop constantly so we were running out). My local Kroger was a freakin’ madhouse.

Actually, it could’ve been worse (like say if I went today, which I still might have to do…argh), and the shelves were rapidly emptying, though I still got my staple items.

Normally I wouldn’t necessarily mind a nice weekend storm, though I had plans to go to a friend’s “after holiday” party in NoVA tomorrow night, which this weather might scuttle. We’ll see. Either way, I’ve got music to rehearse for Marscon next weekend (yay!), a couple of bombers of good local beer to drink, books to read, and a new PS4 to spend time with (the No Man’s Sky universe isn’t going to explore itself!), so I’m good.

Below you’ll find the first random eleven of the new year. The first half is, interestingly, a neat alternating pattern of Viking Metal and late 80s New Jersey Glam Rock, before settling into the usual really weird eclectism:

1. “Schwertzeit” – Varg
2. “Youth Gone Wild” – Skid Row
3. “The Pursuit of the Vikings” – Amon Amarth
4. “Wanted Dead or Alive” – Bon Jovi
5. “Havamal” – Falkenbach
6. “I Ran (So Far Away)” – A Flock of Seagulls
7. “Take it Off” – The Donnas
8. “Father O’Blivion” – Dweezil Zappa
9. “Shia LaBeouf Live” – Rob Cantor
10. “Ha Ha Ha” – The Julie Ruin
11. “Bad Horsie” – Steve Vai

Wednesday was my first day back at the office after the traditional holiday break.

I arrived bright and early (well, I was bright, the sky wasn’t, as it was ten to six in the morning). I found that while I was gone, facilities had installed a sink in my building. A kitchen sink, pretty much sitting right out in the open in what we traditionally think of as a hallway.

There’s been talk of repurposing some of the extra space in this building (used mostly for storage) to house some additional folks, which would necessitate some upgrades to the facilities, though we figured they’d stick the sink in the little break room that’s got the microwave, coffee machine, and refrigerator in it.

Apparently not.

Having encountered this change half a dozen steps inside the front door, I made my way to my office to find that the network was down in the entire building. In today’s fancy VOIP world, that means nothing works, no phone, no internet, no intranet…nothing. So I spent an hour on hold with the help desk on my cell phone before talking to a pleasant person who told me that most of the organization was down, and kindly entered a service ticket that I couldn’t see because I couldn’t get into the online service ticket tracker.

Anyway, my computer did turn on, and I was able to look at all the messages left for me since I last logged on back on December 21 (I came in for half an hour that morning while running errands because I didn’t trust that the timekeeping system worked or that my boss approved my time sheet so I’d be paid*). I spent a while working through that, and sending a couple of off-network email messages (using my spare public email) to my team letting me know the situation.

I took this as a sign, and since I didn’t have any meetings scheduled on my calendar (at least as of the last update on 12/21), I’d spend my day knocking out some documentation off-line and setting up my project file folders for the new calendar year. It was a quiet, pleasant morning.

Then the plumber and the electrician came in. Seems the sink wasn’t finished yet; they had to hook up a water heater and tap the water line.

It wasn’t quiet anymore.

The internet eventually came back on after I’d also let the housekeeping folks in and gone off for lunch. I was able to clear the rest of my messages, send off the documents I had queued up, and then it was pretty much time for me to leave.

I hope the rest of my year is less eventful.

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* – I was right, by the way. The time system crapped out and I had to re-submit my time card. Sometimes paranoia is a virtue.

Tomorrow, I go back to work after being out for a little over two weeks.

Not gonna lie; it’s going to be tough.

The good thing is, I’m mostly in charge of my own program, so I get to set the schedule for the most part, so there’s nothing immediately pressing tomorrow save digging through the emails, which shouldn’t be all that bad, because let’s face it, everybody else at my level, given the responsibilities they have to deal with and the amount of leave we accrue, was off for the last two weeks of December too.

I’ve got three days to dig out and set things up for the two week test cyle I have lined up to start up on Monday next week. In fact, my team’s probably already got it covered, because they’re awesome like that (especially since I’m doing the MarsCon thing for the long MLK day weekend).

That said, though, I’m not really looking forward to going back. It’s not that I was particularly rested during my two weeks off; I had a bunch of low-level stressors (“did my boss approve my time card?”, “is the body shop ever going to get done with the van?” “Why the heck can’t I get a good night’s sleep?”) working the whole time. It’s just…work. The thing I do so I can afford to do the other things. Sometimes I enjoy it, but mostly it’s the hassle I go through to keep a roof over my family’s head.

Oh well; it’s happening, I just have to accept it. And read things like this thing my friend Ryan posted today and nod my head with knowing helplessness.

The past year was (not just because of all the very public deaths of famous people and the less-than-preferable political stuff) challenging. This isn’t to say that I didn’t accomplish stuff, because I did. That’s mostly what this post here is about; highlighting the good stuff. The challenges are there, over the posts logged over the past 365 days for you to look over – there were a lot of challenges; personal, emotional, mental, vocational, relational. I think I talked about most of them.

Here’s the stuff I thought was cool:

Thing the First: I’m actually really proud of all the cool musical stuff I got to do this year, with a whole bunch of different people; I played public, occasionally paying(!) gigs with two (maybe three, if you squint) different performance groups in public venues. Not all of them were amazing performances, but if I think about it, I could point to something really cool about each performance (although I never really counted how many shows I played – it was a lot, though). I played in cities all up and down the east coast, from the DC Suburbs to Downtown Atlanta, and all kinds of places in between, from fancy auditoriums to living rooms and campfire circles. Every time was a privilege, and I learned a heck of a lot about performing with other people, with myself, and for and with an audience.

I also wrote some songs this year; some of them might end up being something. This is kind of a new thing for me, I’m still getting all of my bad stuff out the system before the good stuff can flow semi-reliably, but I’m learning. I didn’t really record or release anything this year with anyone (we were too busy playing shows), though I think that’s on the docket for this year. Again, it’s been a pretty cool learning experience.

This part of life has brought me so much damned joy over the last however many years; I’ve made so many friends, both musicians and fans all over the country; I really feel privileged to have been welcomed into this community of artists I find myself in.

Thing the Second: As much as I bitched about work here this last year, I think after sitting in my particular vocational chair for two years now, I think I almost know how to do what I do. Sure, I don’t *do* things so much as *direct* things these days – my *do*s are largely relegated to meetings, emails, and monthly and quarterly briefings, though my team and I have managed to accomplish a couple of pretty neat things over the last year, and we’re showing progress with my particular area of the agency infrastructure that has largely been coasting and limping along for a while. I don’t love it, but I’m starting to show competency, and being competent is something I do love. It pays the bills, which allows me to do all the other cool stuff.

Thing the Third: I managed to reorganize life a little bit so that the cash flow makes more sense, and be a little better prepared for what life throws at us. I make to much money to feel so damned poor sometimes, but I took some steps to fix that a bit. This is kinda new, but we’ll see. It’ll certainly help out with some of the other stuff coming down the pike soon.

Thing the Fourth: I don’t feel like a complete failure as a husband and father right now, which is nice. My kids, to greater or lesser degrees, are succeeding, and my wife hasn’t left me yet, or given me any indication she’s going to, despite my many faults. Everybody’s doing well in school, passing classes, and (as I alluded to previously), getting themselves accepted to college. I wrote the check for the deposit and to reserve a place this week, so that’s happening. I’ll figure out how to make it happen. It’s a good kind of stress, though, as it indicates that I didn’t completely screw the first one up.

Finally the kitten has chosen me as her favorite. That’s gotta count for something, right?

Here it is. My last day of work for 2016. It’s been a heck of a year, all around, and my work life really isn’t an exception. I’ve taken on more responsibility, which involves lots of dog and pony show meetings and briefings to important people (even if those briefings aren’t so much about defending my failings as keeping them up to speed on cool stuff I’m doing to make them look good), but also finally sort of figured out, after two years, how to do the job in a way that works for me. I have, largely through my strong aversion to having to deal with complicated crap and excess work, implemented some pretty nice efficiencies in the process, and I get to close out the year with plans to deploy a new bit of code that will make my life a lot easier by replacing eight unique data structures with one that does the work of all of them once we come back in January.

In the future, when the process changes, I’ll have to do it once instead of eight times – that’s something like a 30 percent reduction in effort. I’ll take it.

Why am I talking about work? I spent a lot of time the last two thinking about it and talking about it, leading up to my performance appraisal the other day. It was nothing to worry about, I’m doing well (in fact, according to my boss, I’m “carrying the program” while they get the larger structures sorted out). That’s nice to hear, since I’ve been afflicted with all kinds of impostor syndrome these last two years now that I’m kind of in charge; I figure eventually everybody will figure out I have no idea what I’m doing, and am coasting along on the backs of the people who do all the real work. Maybe that’s the case, maybe it’s not – intellectually, I know it’s not, but I can’t help but feel that way; damned non-code mental wiring.

Anyway, after around 2pm today (I’m cutting out a bit early to deal with a car appointment), I get to box all that stuff away for a little over two weeks, and replace it with holiday anxiety, which shouldn’t be too bad, as I’ve actually got most of my shopping done. I haven’t decorated anything yet, but I expect, unless the kids go nuts with it, that we’ll probably keep that kind of low-key as well.

As has been my custom for the last couple of years, I’m going to spend the holidays primarily chilling at home, and treating myself to the gift of non-obligation. I’m going to let myself just be; enjoying the feeling of not feeling obligated to do anything for anybody or anything unless I choose to do it. I’m going to sleep in, enjoy my family, maybe play some music with friends, and catch up on leisure activities. I’m not going anywhere, unless I think of something cool I want to do, or the booze and snacks run out.

We’ve had a hell of a year, folks. We’ve lost lots of wonderful artists who made the world better, made some questionable choices as a nation, and dealt with some serious crap for the last twelve months. I’m going to do my part by kind of dropping out and rejuvinating in my own personal Lazarus Pit for two weeks or so to recover from what’s come before, and do my best to be ready to make 2017 a better experience all around.

To that end, I’ll probably update here a little less; I won’t be totally unplugged, as I need to coordinate social engagements (Rogue One comes out this weekend, and I have plans), and one of my stress relieving outlets is the Marvel Heroes MMO; but I probably won’t be putting much here, other than my usual year-end wrap-ups (I like my year-end “by the numbers” and writing highlights posts).

I have some serious loafing to do, and I already bought myself that PS4 (hey, I did it to make it easier for my wife to shop for me for Christmas; she doesn’t like to buy me musicial stuff without my input, just like I don’t like to buy dance stuff for her without hers), and it needs some attention.

To that end, this is probably my last random playlist of the year, unless I feel moved. This one’s not terrible; it’s a little derivative of recent history, though that first track was pretty awesome. Led Zepplin was made for trombones….

1. “Ocean” – Bonerama
2. “Heaven is a Place on Earth” – Belinda Carlisle
3. “Heroes” (live 1978) – David Bowie
4. “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart) – Journey
5. “Better off Dancing” – The Donnas
6. “I Melt With You (7” mix) – Modern English
7. “Flesh Without Blood” – Grimes
8. “Livin’ On A Prayer” – Bon Jovi
9. “Cliffs of Dover” – Eric Johnson
10. “Budapest” – Jethro Tull
11. “Efterbyrden” – Asmegin

…also – if I hadn’t been looking at the screen on my phone, I would’ve sworn #10 was actually Dire Straits.

…and a good time was had by all.

Yes, I know it’s the wrong end of the solar year for that title; bear with me…

I’m pretty sure I hadn’t mentioned it here previously, but after returning to work after a short Thanksgiving break, I discovered that one of the two furnaces in my building had failed; once the maintenance guys did some balancing, it wasn’t too bad here while the blower motor for one of them was down, but it was pretty cold for a day or two.

Anyway…that’s some background for my story here.

For the last two years or so, I’ve had a nice spathiphyllum plant sitting here in my office keeping me company and doing a bit of air purifying (as that’s what these guys are good for). Now, I usually don’t have much luck with plantsunless they’re submerged in a box of water with some fish, though I tend to do okay with these; “Dave” lived with me in my dorm room in college for years, and this one (who I’ve never named for some reason) has done pretty well under the flourescents and late-day sun from the windows.

Anyway, I left for the weekend on Friday with the plant looking healthy as usual. I returned on Monday morning to find this:

Yep, pretty much cooked, thanks to it getting down below freezing over the weekend, the maintenance guys fixing the blower motor, and very hot, very dry air blasting from the ceiling heat vent right onto my plant because they never re-balanced the system.

Anyway; I moved things around, did some extra watering and hoped for the best, though as I left the office yesterday, I wasn’t expecting much, as things hadn’t improved since the morning. I was kind of expecting to need to conduct a plant funeral and go shopping for something new over Christmas break.

In any case, I came in this morning and found the following:

Definite improvement. I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose a bunch of leaves and that flower near the top, but I think in the end, things will bounce back. There’s even some new growth in the middle.

It’s a Christmas miracle.

I will freely admit that I’m especially prone to clockwatching right now, and I don’t see it really improving any for the next couple of days. It’s been a rough week/month/year, and I’m within spitting distance of the end of my working time for 2016.

This is the time of year, when (due to the requirements of human resources) I take stock in the events of the last twelve months, lessons learned, victories won, and task accomplished, then write them all down on a form created by bureaucrats and professional form-builders, and then pass them over to my supervisor so we can sit down and have a good laugh about the process and have arbitrary numeric ratings applied to my activites over the last year.

This was the week where I took my scattered notes and program schedules and email archives and spent a few hours on the clock writing all kinds of impressive things about myself and my team, because the bureaucracy says that’s what I’m supposed to do. This year I wrote five pages of impressive prose bullshit; 3000 words or so that will probably mean nothing, but might mean a lot depending on how this new experimental pay system business they’re toying with around here shakes out.

In any case, spending lots of time talking about how great I am at my job and how much my team contributes to the mission or whatever is perhaps one of the least enjoyable things I could do, given how my major motivations around here involve being quietly competent and staying out of the spotlight whenever possible.

Anyway, that’s what’s been occupying my mind the last day or so. I’m also entering that time of year where I have to tell people not to open boxes from amazon with my name on them, and find places to hide things for a couple of weeks, at least until I put a tree up and buy some wrapping paper.

The other big thing on my mind is that this weekend, I’ve got a great annual tradition to attend to; some dear friends are throwing their annual holiday party tomorrow, and for the third year running, have seen fit to invite my humble musical co-conspirators The Blibbering Humdingers as the entertainment. I get to hang out with my friends and play music with and for some of my favorite people in the world for a good bit of tomorrow, including some new stuff we’ve never played together in the same room at the same time. I can’t wait.

I also got to play some tunes with some *other* friends last night, which is always fun, and we ended up writing the bones of a kind of naughty song about some of the frustrations we’ve been dealing with in our extended circle. It’s not done yet, but it’s got a pretty nice chord structure and was therapeutic for the laughs it gave us all.

I found myself humming it (with expanded orchestration!) in the shower this morning; that means it’s got at least a little bit of catchy staying power. We’ll see.

Anyway, as we all head into our weekend, here’s my morning Pandora playlist. This week started off kind of strong, peaked in the middle, then fell off completely toward the end with some shitty 90s AOR and new wave covers. As I write this, the last one hasn’t come up yet, so the final judgement’s still a wash:

1. “Queen Bitch” – David Bowie
2. “The Torture Never Stops” – Dweezil Zappa
3. “Magnet” – Bikini Kill
4. “You Make My Dreams” – Hall & Oates
5. “Internet Troll” – The Doubleclicks
6. “Hazy Shade of Winter” – The Bangles
7. “Good Mistake” – Mr. Little Jeans
8. “Farm on the Freeway” – Jethro Tull
9. “3am” – Matchbox Twenty
10. “Where Did Our Love Go” – Soft Cell
11. “Brat Girl” – Bratmobile

(two minutes later) – okay….I’ve never heard this one before, though it’s certainly energetic. Could be worse. Have a good weekend, everyone.

Also – new trailer for Spider-Man: Homecoming (actually two of them) popped up overnight – not bad, not bad at all. This kid’s got it, and Michael Keaton (a national effing treasure) makes the Vulture look bad-ass, which is a term no one has ever used to describe Adrian Toomes’ alter ego before.

When I left work on Monday, I wasn’t expecting to go out to a movie, though given that I’ve got a couple of sick (for varying definitions of sick) teenagers, and a bouncing nine-year old who was bothering them, after knocking out out a one-take bass line for a related demo track* for the Humdingers, the spouse and I took the youngest out for a couple of hours so they could rest.

We caught a matinee of Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them in a mostly empty theater (which, once you’ve experienced it, you’ll realize is the best way to see a movie). I wasn’t expecting much going in, honestly, but I found I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, though found a couple of things frustrating, given the meta knowledge I have of the franchise.

I expect I’ll get spoilery here, so if you’re going to bail, bail now….

we good?

Anyway – the story itself, with Newt Scamander wandering around NYC collecting his escaped beasts with the help of a couple of american wizards and a muggle no-maj aspiring pastry chef, was engaging and enjoyable (especially our baker Jacob taking in the spectacle of the wizard world and falling in love), but kind of suffered by being secondary to the larger story that’s getting laid out here and will quite likely be belabored across five movies, which is pretty clearly going to be the rise of evil wizard Grindelwald parallelling muggle WWII, as hinted at in the later Harry Potter novels.

I guess I can understand the need to ease people into things, especially folks who’ve only seen the Potter films, which leave most of this ancillary historical worldbuilding out. That said, while the movie delivers the promised titular Beasts, it lays the foundation (occasionally awkwardly) for a much darker story of political corruption and wizard fascism; the introduced and dropped plotlines (particularly Jon Voight’s newspaper publisher and rival sons) were kind of ham-handed, but you know they’ll come up later when this franchise takes its turn away from the rather innocuous “Fantastic Beasts” title into dark urban historical fantasy and fascist allegory.

So much for 2 Fantastic 2 Beasts and Fantastic Beasts 3: Tokyo Drift…

That said, I kind of dig that that’s the story they’re going to try to tell – it’s a logical progression for Rowling, who’s gotten to be a much better writer since the Potter books wrapped, taking on darker non-fantasy stories with the Cormoran Strike mysteries (which I love). That she’s writing these herself lets her stretch her muscles in that area while still giving the Potter fans more to chew on; I just hope she’s up to the task – screenwriting is a different animal than writing novels, and the wizarding world she’s laid out so far hasn’t stood up to much scrutiny once one scratches the surface.

We shall see. The one thing that bugged me, however, and this is the big spoiler….we got some Grindelwald in this one, and he’s played by a slick, dark, and competent Colin Farrell…who then turns into Johnny Depp, once again doing his acting like a cartoon through a bad wig thing. If we’re going the route I think they’re going, the suave “Mr. Graves” persona is the one who’s going to seduce a world into lining up behind his schemes, not fat albino Johnny Depp with a weird moustache (Young Dumbledore certainly wouldn’t be seduced by the latter, if that’s still canon). That’s a missed opportunity.

Still, we got Ron Perlman as a goblin running a prohibition-era speakeasy, which makes up for a lot.

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* – “The Erumpent Tango”, coming soon to a nerd music venue near you!