Happy Friday.

You know it’s going to be thaty kind of day when the first thing you do in the office is, after checking a notification that a document’s been added to your personnel file (we’re reorganizing here, and the paperwork has finally caught up with the office code change), you start going down the rabbit hole of of estimating retirement and life insurance benefits.

The good news is that even after figuring a VERY conservative return on my 401k and not counting on any futher promotions (which I don’t really want anyway), the annuities and social security benefits and whatnot guarantee that I’ll be pretty comfortable if I manage to make it past retirement age in public service.

Of course, I gotta wait until 2031 at the very least to manage it, and 2036 if I want to actually maximize the benefits. At least ifteen more years of this crap, huh? Sure, why not.

If I for some reason don’t make it that long, my life insurance payout seems to be pretty nice as well; kids’ll get through college, debts will be paid. they can go out and find a replacement daddy who doesn’t have my issues and insecurities.

But, I really don’t wanna go there. Most of the time I like being around. This is just the kind of data dive you find yourself doing on a slow Friday morning knowing you’ve got to spend 9am to 11am listening to people you don’t really like drone on about a requirements document that you were sure got put to bed three months ago but that people just can’t let go of for some reason.

Okay, that last bit makes me not wanna be around so much, but it’s only on the phone and I can make snarky comments on mute and jerkoff jestures at them through the wires and they’ll never know.

But I have to stick around for at least another month – I got a couple of cool band gigs coming up, and have a ticket to see Willie Nelson (!) play in town in September, and I don’t want to miss that.

Pretty typical weekend coming up, apart from the waiting for the body shop to call about giving me the car back. We’re getting together with some friends we haven’t seen in a while to play board games and make each other laugh. I think we might have our other game group (Seventh Sea) set up to meet on Saturday, but I honestly can’t remember.

Oh, and we have a surprise for the youngest on Sunday, as she’s turning nine, though I have, for some reason, been describing her as nine for the last year. I don’t know why I do that, it’s not going to make retirement get here any faster.

whatever. Here’s some tunes. #8 is a definite memory grabber, causing me to actually kind of smell the chorine and the melting Charleston Chew candy bars at the Sunbury community swimming pool circa 1986-87. This tune, along with “Body Talk” by Kix and a couple of tracks off of Prince’s 1999 got pretty near continuous repeats over the crappy all-weather public address/siren speakers. I think they were the only half-dozen tracks on the ancient jukebox. It’s a good memory, though. I’ll take it.

1. “Don’t Get Me Busted” – The Donnas
2. “Fortunate Son” – CCR
3. “Ophelia” – The Lumineers
4. “Here Comes The Sun” – The Beatles
5. “Chasing the Brand New” – The Badlees
6. “Back in Black” – AC/DC
7. “Here Comes A Regular” – The Replacements
8. “White Wedding” – Billy Idol
9. “The End of the Tour” – TMBG
10. “Photograph” – Def Leppard

Yesterday, I finally dropped my car off at the body shop to have the storm damage fixed. As part of the deal, my insurance company is covering a rental car while the professionals replace parts and match paint and all that stuff they’re good at on my 2016 Scion iM.

I left the shop yesterday with this:

A 2016 Toyota Corolla LE. As you might be aware, my Scion and this Corolla are essentially siblings. They’re derived from the same platform, share the same engine (though the Scion’s tuned to make a few more horses), and seem to share, based on my short experience thus far, a lot of the same parts bins for interior hardware and sheet metal. Mine’s got a hatch and a body kit, this one’s got plastic hubcaps and a trunk; otherwise, the family resemblance is uncanny.

That said, they feel like entirely different animals.

Part of that might be the fact that the Corolla has a less advanced suspension out back,is running a CVT rather than a six-speed manual, and has smaller, narrower wheels and tires rolling it along. It’s a little bumpy and sluggish, has less responsive steering, and is largely numb. My Scion, at least, has sporting aspirations; the Corolla is a cheap reliable appliance for people who don’t like driving very much.

But I kind of knew that already, though I’d never had the opportunity to do such a hands-on comparison before . What’s surprising me most is the fit and finish. The interior of the Corolla, again, clearly shares a bunch of components (dash top, door cards, pillar shrouds, buttons and stuff), though even for the mid-trim level Corolla (which actually has a sticker price a bit higher than my Scion), it feels kind of cheap. Surfaces that in my car are soft-touch or leather(like) wrapped in my car are plain, hard rubber and plastic (most notably the steering wheel). The seats are barely bolstered and uncomfortable (also weirdly gray while the carpet and much of the dash is black); the instrument cluster has a cheap LCD screen rather than the color, multifunction display mine’s got, and The sound system, while running the same software, runs on a smaller unit with a lower-res screen and with much lower sound fidelity. Stuff is “mostly” in the same place, though often just off enough to throw me off when I try to turn on the headlights or change the volume.

It’s my car, just slightly shittier, which is weird, since we’re talking about a car that’s nearly identical, but with an MSRP that’s $1100 bucks higher. It feels….cheap.

I don’t know, that might just be the ubiquitous rental car smell – you know, the scent of conflict between deodorizing spray and “I wasn’t smoking in here, honest!”?

Whatever it is, I just want my car back.

My weekend. I actually got lots of useful little projects done like pruning the wardrobe, replacing the broken handle hardware on my dresser, and doing a good deep cleaning of the fish tank.

The big donation bag of clothes got me thinking of downsizing in other ways, so I spent some time looking up potential values for a couple of musical instruments I’m looking at unloading (likely in a three-for-one exchange for this), so now my internet everywhere is loaded with ads and ebay auctions for guitars. It’s actually kind of oppressive.

That said, If anybody’s looking for a mid-90s Kramer Strat, a very nice E335 clone, or an 80s Ibanez bass, let me know, I’ll make you a deal.

I also watched 20 minutes of Atlantic Rim, the Asylum-produced mockbuster mimicing one of my actual favorite recent movies, only to find it so painful and disjointed that I couldn’t finish it. I normally go all-in on these bad movies, but for some reason (sub-porn star acting, awful editing, long digressions into non-plot relevant directions, David Chokachi…) this one was a bridge to far.

Maybe I was primed for it, having watched Suicide Squad on free tickets to a half-full theater on Friday. I will say this one was the best of the new DCU movies (characters were allowed to smile, for example), with lots of great individual pieces that, likely due to studio interference that will likely become Hollywood legend, totally didn’t gel into a cohesive whole. The cast was mostly great, the little hero cameos felt more natural than the entirety of MoS or BvS, though the rest? Meh. We still enjoyed ourselves, except for the idiots on their phones or thinking they were sneaking their vapes into the auditorium without being noticed.

Also less than optimal was the big storm that came through and cancelled the Spamalot! performance on Saturday night. We were hoping it’d clear, but it was not to be.

The coming week should be mostly quiet, nothing out of the ordinary other than my body shop appointment; I’m finally getting the hood fixed starting Wednesday, which means I’ll have some kind of rental for a couple of days (hope it’s better than my last one). Otherwise, I’m going to oversee some testing at work, keep an eye on where the local band project is level-setting, start working on getting up to speed for the Humdingers’ Dragon*Con sets, and hopefully watch some more Mr. Robot, which just showed up on Amazon, and was the best thing I watched all weekend.

Being Friday, I shall continue my tradition of posting a random list of tunes pulled off of an interest streaming service, and offering up a short summary of my week.

The tunes’ll come eventually, I promise. As for the week, it’s been less than optimal. First of all, the kitten (who’s really past two years old now, so I shouldn’t call her a kitten, but she’s still tiny, so I keep doing it) managed to worm her way into my bedroom a couple of nights this week and kept waking me up, so I’ve been sleeping badly.

Work’s been kinda the usual; lots of meetings cancelled, and I had my supervisor changed in the timekeeping application without anyone letting me or my new supervisor know; it came up in a non-related conversation, where we both decided that the agency seems to think we’re mushrooms (you know the allusion, don’t make me say it).

Since it’s been raining on and off and keeping me mostly inside (along with the fact that I am really tired thanks to the kitten), I finished off Stranger Things on Netflix, which I highly recommend if you like Spielberg, Stephen King, or have an affectionate regard for the 80s. The production design is excellent, as is the music (I’ll forgive that one anachronistic Bangles tune, because it’s the best Bangles tune). Seriously, watch it.

I also finished off Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which I was maybe a little less impressed with (and yes, I’m aware it’s a play and seeing it performed is always better than reading it and blah blah blah). I had tempered expectations going in (I felt no pressing need for JKR to go back to the well, especially as a play about middle-aged Harry and his kid who’s whinier than he was by way of Back to the Future Part II where she’s got nothing beyond a “story by” credit); and my expectations were met. There were some nice character bits from old favorites there, and new character Scorpius Malfoy is a joy, but plot-wise, it was everything one would expect from a lesser piece of fan fiction, lacking only the obligatory slash (and that lack is itself debatable…). It’s not that I didn’t enjoy bits of it (the Trolley Witch is exactly the right kind of batshit crazy*), but overall, it was kind of a letdown, mostly because there was very little “new” there, merely a remix of all the old elements, which mostly reaffirms my belief that the story found it’s end with book 7 (the universe, thin as it is upon cursory examination, still might have potential). I’m sure the hardcore Potter-heads will love it, and will probably revive a bit of the fandom (which might mean some more gigs for me, which I’m down with), though I’ll just be waiting patiently for the next Cormoran Strike novel.

Finally, I caught Terminator: Genisys on Amazon Prime one night this week; it wasn’t nearly as awful as everybody said it was (it was kind of awful, but it was the kind of awful I needed). It’s only reasonable after five movies of timeline-bending shenanigans that Los Angeles of October 1984 is now crawling with time-displaced killer cyborgs. I kind of loved it, which, according to this study, speaks well of me.

I’m hoping for an enjoyable weekend; we’ve got (free) tickets to a screening of Suicide Squad tonight, which should be amusing if nothing else if the reviews are to be believed, and we’re talking about catching the local Dogwood Dell production of Spamalot on Saturday before it closes its run.

That’s really about it here…hoping the rest of my non-entertainment obligations stay pretty quiet. Here are some tunes – a neat little mix, I’ll grant. I still kind of love that I added a “Viking Metal” channel to my Pandora feed for kicks one day. It’s the gift that keeps on giving:

1. “This Ain’t Over Yet” – Tom Smith
2. “Skyway” – The Replacements
3. “The Presidents” – Jonathan Coulton
4. “One More Dollar” – the Wailin’ Jennys
5. “Sweet Dreams are Made of This” – Eurythmics
6. “The Empty Page” – Sonic Youth
7. “Four Chords” – Axis of Awesome
8. “Cannonball” – The Breeders
9. “Guardians of Fate” – Ensiferium
10. “Don’t Stop Me Now” – Queen

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* – I’ve already cracked the nut on the first proper wrock tune of my own composition, a character study of the events of Act 1, Scene 11.

I had a long weekend. After the pretty great “Cheesy Sharknado Party, where a bunch of us just watched a bunch of silly movies and ate fondue party, I arranged to take Monday off (because we got home around midnight). It was the best call.

The rest of the weekend also involved a lot of cheese (Saturday’s birthday party was themed “Cheesy-Baconpalooza”); my lower GI has not been thrilled with my weekend adventures.

I guess I should talk about the gig on Friday night – it wasn’t a total trainwreck, but the group’s collective level of preparation definitely informed the quality of the performance. I wasn’t thrilled. I’m still not sure I’m thrilled, but I’m not necessarily bowing out. There seems to be somewhat of a variance of priorities going on, and that’s got to get itself sorted out. We shall see. Also, there was a taco bar involved, and it had cheese.

In talking with another unrelated musician friend earlier on Friday afternoon, I said something to the effect of “it’ll either be a good set or a great story with a little distance. Tragedy + Time = Comedy, after all”.

At this point, not enough time has passed – the jury is still out.

If you’d been paying attention to my goings on this week, you probably caught a mixture of hair-tearing stress and affectionate Tim Kaine dad jokes. Work’s been interesting, if non-conclusive lately; the agency re-org is slowly proceeding, and I think I may have an actual idea of where I’m eventually going to land; I’ve always known what I’d be doing, but it wasn’t immediately clear who I’d be doing it for.

This clarification is probably for the best, as my boss retired yesterday. Big fancy retirement ceremony and all. He was a good guy. Actually, I did double duty on retirement ceremonies yesterday, hitting a second show in the afternoon, this time honoring an agency deputy director who I followed around for years between agencies, who was always a good egg, and looked out for me a couple of times in my career when she didn’t have to, so I wanted to take a moment to say thanks and show my appreciation. Retirements are interesting things…in one case, they make me feel old, because these people heading off now were just hitting their journeyman/competent phase of their careers when I came on the scene, and now they’re gone, which means I’m supposed to be the competent one now. Also, it makes me look at my career path, and feel bewildered when I realize that although I’ve got almost 20 years of public service to my name, my own retirement is a very long way off.

There was also a class in my building this week, which involved me being on-call tech support and building manager in addition to my usual program management stuff. Yay.

The rest of life has been a stressful week full of preparing for tonight’s gig, where the band* is once again opening for a comedy/improv show we have some connections with. This gig’s been VERY stressful for a number of reasons (as expressed in the asterisked footnotes below), but mostly because of personnel issues and communication. Last night’s rehearsal was somewhat encouraging, though it didn’t make up for two weeks’ worth of constant frustration. Anyway, I’m playing two sets tonight, one with Dimensional Riffs to open the show, then a short acoustic thing where me and a couple of vocalists do a few other newish tunes** while the comedians do whatever they do between sets.

Also on deck is a friend’s birthday party on Saturday night, and another friend’s “Cheesy Sharknado Party” (bad movies and fondue, leading up to Sharknado 4) on Sunday. Also, I’m taking off Monday, because I owe it to myself, that’s why.

In the meantime, here’s some tunes unrelated to tonight’s gig – Pandora’s feeling a little 120 minutes/hipster this week, it seems:

1. “Mad World” – Tears for Fears
2. “Your Love” – The Outfield
3. “Sheila Takes a Bow” – The Smiths
4. “Don’t You (Forget About Me) – Simple Minds
5. “Melt With You” – Modern English
6. “Just Like Heaven” – The Cure
7. “Kids” – MGMT
8. “Shots” – Imagine Dragons
9. “Little Bird” – The White Stripes
10. “Here It Goes Again” – Ok Go

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* – Eh, I hesitate to call it a “band” at this point when I have to have alternate arrangements in place to play entire set for solo acoustic guitar and a couple of voices because the other “instrumentalists” can’t be bothered to answer correspondence, show up for rehearsal at all, or when they do show u, theyre unprepared to do anything but attempt to hump one of the vocalists under the guise of “performance enthusiasm” but don’t know the damned songs.

** – The “full band” set has but one new song in it, as nobody else could be bothered to show up or learn anything else. Do I seem bitter? Yes. The little “acoustic set” is our solution to filling the alotted music time when most of the other performers are, expressed with euphemistic politeness, “not team players”. After we get through this gig, there are going to be some serious discussions. It seems I have been spoiled by spending the last three years playing with responsible, professional, adult musicians.

I can’t believe we just put the biggest crack in that glass ceiling yet….If there are any little girls out there who stayed up late to watch, let me just say: I may become the first woman president, but one of you is next.

Damn straight. I don’t care how you feel about whichever candidate or where you fall on the blue/red, left/right spectrum; last night was historic. In the future, when people look back on this election, nobody’s going to care about ideology – that blockquote above is what textbooks are going to point to. this is a big deal.

I wish we’d done it way sooner than this, but I’m glad I was around to see it.

I indicated briefly on Friday that I had what I thought was a migraine brewing. As I kind of expected, it swung into full-on head pain/fog/hangover without the benefit of alcohol/oh-my-god-i-feel-like-crap-for-days by the end of the workday. It really got going on the drive home, where I had to pull over and vomit half-way through the trip, then limped home after getting my ass off the interstate.

I spent a lot of time hiding in the dark afterwards. I (probably against my better judgement) took a road trip with the family on Saturday, though spent the whole trip hiding in the middle row of the van with my eyes closed/head down/not looking at the road. Sunday, I didn’t move, or even get dressed. I barely left the couch until Sunday evening, again, sitting in the dark, with Netflix’s library of Person of Interest playing with the sound way down (it’s a dark palatte show, I could manage).

Oh, did I mention that my nerves were fried, and I may have melted down more than once? Yeah, that happened.

Today is Monday. I slept okay, so I went to work (because there’s a bunch of meetings I have to call into, and people are using my building who might like to gain access to it). We’ll see how it goes.

In the meantime, a bunch of stuff happened in the world while I was looking the other way.

Politics: Tim Kaine indeed got selected to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate. I was going to vote for Clinton anyway, but now I’m kind of enthusiastic about it. I’ve been watching Kaine his whole career (I’ve been around the RVA since his city council days), and I’ve seen lots of good things. He’s pleasant, smart, successful, way more liberal than most people give him credit for (a Jesuit education will do that to you – his entire worldview is pointing toward Social Justice and ending poverty), and gets good stuff done (which, as a Democrat in Virginia, which isn’t all that blue outside of the interstate corridors, means something). He’s good people, and should be good for the country.

More Politics: Debbie Wasserman Schultz steps down as DNC chair after a bunch of DNC emails get leaked indicating (as most observers were pretty sure of all along) that the DNC did not, as it should, remain neutral during the Democratic primary, and actively sabotaged the Sanders campain and championed Clinton’s cause. This is, yeah, a big deal, but we all kind of knew it anyway. I was a Sanders supporter the whole primary season, but as the Senator wasn’t a registered Democrat until very recently, and railed against the establishment the whole way; which isn’t gong to get the establishment’s support; he was always a long-shot, and I think his presence did a lot to pull Clinton to the left. Wasserman-Schultz was a pretty terrible chair anyway (plus, she continually votes to support payday lending which makes her an awful person), so I’m not mad to see her go. this’ll get some traction for maybe half a day until Sanders speaks tonight at the Convention in Philly, and unity will be mostly restored (those rabid Sanders meme-makers bitching up a storm probably weren’t going to vote anyway).

Popcomiganza: my friend Dan Nokes, by all appearances, had a great success with his first-annual POPCOMIGANZA convention up in Dunkirk MD; I wish I could have made it (see above), though I was happy to be a kickstarter supporter for this con, and I’m happy it went well. Congratulations!

San Diego Comicon News: the other big pop culture event of the weekend was over on the other coast. Lots of neat pop culture news came out of it. While I’ve been likewarm on DC’s Murderverse so far, the footage from Justice League and Wonder Woman looked…not bad. The JL bit even worked in a bit of humor. A general lack of charisma Vacuum Henry Cavill helped – there are some charming actors in this project; with no Supes around, they actually get to be kind of entertaining.

More SDCC: Some pretty cool stuff on the Marvel front as well – new footage for Doctor Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, and, it seems, Spider-Man: Homecoming, a bunch of casting confirmations, including Brie Larson as Captain Marvel (don’t really know much about her), BlacK Panther folks (Michael B. Jordan as Killmonger? okay), and Star-Lord’s father revealed as Kurt Russel as Ego The Living Planet, which is just the kind of weird I need in my life. Oh yeah – Ghost Rider (Robbie Reyes) on Agents of SHIELD – I’ll take it.

There’s probably other stuff in the world to react to as well, but I haven’t gotten there yet. Maybe I will when my head clears.

It’s been a week; it started with a pretty great anniversary date with good food and British “action transvestite” comedy, then swung back and forth between awesome and shitty: damaged cars and insurance claims (boo!), many cancelled meetings (yay!), great band rehearsals (rawk \m/ ) and less than great band rehearsals (meh.), my kid beating my SAT score by 30 points (sweet!), a weird-ass but entertaining dumpster fire of an RNC (ooh!), more unfortunate shootings ( argh.), a metric assload of Psyducks (uh, okay), cool Comicon news (Defenders!), and coming into this morning with a headache that’s probably going to swing into migraine territory by lunchtime (pfft.).

Anyway…not sure what I’m looking toward this weekend. Probably keep an eye on the news to see who HRC’s VP pick is going to be (It’s going to be Timmeh, who’s not a bad guy at all, boring in all the right “Dad Joke” sorts of ways, and has his heart and mind in the right place in terms of social justice issues, despite his “conservative” reputation, and has a reputation as a consensus builder) and see about getting my head clear.

Oh, it’s looking increasingly like I’m not going to make it to this one given all the other life in the way, but my friend Dan Nokes is launching his indie, East Coast response to SDCC this weekend in Dunkirk MD, the soon-to-be classic event POPCOMIGANZA, featuring lots of great dealers, artists, costumes, and all the cool stuff one finds at a Comics/Pop Culture convention. Dan’s a great artist himself, and has been a big part of making the Virginia Comicon such a great event (especially for small press/indie artists) over the years. If you’re within spitting distance, please thing about checking it out!

Otherwise, that’s the way life’s shaking out ’round these parts. Have a good weekend, folks – enjoy the tunes (a pretty nice mix this week if I do say so myself):

1. “Dark Center of the Universe” – Modest Mouse
2. “The One I Love” – R.E.M.
3. “In A Time of Tales” – Mithotyn
4. “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” – Vampire Weekend
5. “Riptide” Vance Joy
6. “Every Breath You Take” – The Police
7. “Wicked Game” – Parra for Cuva
8. “Under Pressure” – Queen w David Bowie
9. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” – Joy Division
10. “True Faith ’94” – New Order

Last night, after getting back from a pretty great anniversary date (great, inexpensive food at Capital Ale House and a very entertaining couple of sets from Eddie Izzard – the only thing missing was “cake or death”), we had a pretty active storm system run through the neighborhood; lots of thunder, wind, and lightning. This isn’t uncommon here in the mid-Atlantic this time of year; in fact, I generally find these things pretty relaxing as I’m lying down to sleep.

I woke up a little later than usual – I took off today; knowing I would be back late, and I had a chiropractor appointment scheduled this morning – and upon planning to head out for my commitments, I noticed what you see two paragraphs up. A big crease through the hood of my car, and a couple of very large limbs (the smallest was about five inches in diameter – the others larger – I’m not sure which one is the culprit) lying on the ground in front of the vehicle. The crease/dent is about 18 inches long, maybe four inches wide.

This sucks. This car is, as attentive readers will remember, only six months old, and just yesterday turned over 8500 miles. It was pristine (other than some road dust).

Anyway, thank goodness for low deductible comprehensive coverage, and a good auto insurance company (as it was my car, my property, and my tree, homeowners doesn’t cover it). After taking a bunch of photos, I placed a quick call to the insurance company, opened a claim, and got an estimate for repair scheduled.

I wrapped that a little while ago – I’m looking at a little over $900 in damage; basically, I get a new hood – no other damages anyone could find. It could be much worse, I suppose. I’ve got a repair appointment coming up in a couple of weeks (I’m in the “driveable” category, so I can stand to wait a bit); I’ll trade the car in for a rental for a couple of days in early August.

In the meantime, I get to drive around with a bad-ass battle scar. Ain’t nobody going to mess with me.