And by ordinary I mean, it’s some late hour in the middle of the night and I’m not sleeping.
Week 111…ish…
It’s the end of April. Weather keeps swinging between hoodie weather and sub-freezing in 24 to 48 hour periods as Minnesota is wont to do. I recently had to be out of the house three days in a row and every single day it was pouring rain and snowing at the same time. It took a layer of grime off my car but it was a very confusing experience in general and people NEVER TURN ON THEIR FUCKING HEADLIGHTS IN INCLEMENT WEATHER.
*ahem*
Anyway…
… Road construction outside our door is in full swing and a real big mess. Leaving home does not (as of yet) cause too many delays, but getting home is like gridlock trying to get across the 35W Minnesota River Bridge at 7AM on a random Tuesday. Or 494 through Bloomington at any hour of any day. It’s SLOW is what I’m saying. And I am once again so bloody grateful I do not have to leave the house much more than once every two weeks. (Except lately, WTF?)
… I had one lone vial of blood drawn this week and my arm is more bruised and tired from it than it was a few months ago when I had five at once. I barely even felt the needle stick, but my arm is acting all dramatic over it. This seems to be a recurring theme with blood draws. It’s a crapshoot of whether or not I’m going to feel it for days or forget it happened within a few hours. I also just got the bill from that January appointment and I have many expletive-laden comments about the grifters that are insurance providers. Can’t wait to see how much this ten-minute appointment and single vial of blood are going to cost.
… Anytime music makers I love put out new material, I always have this paranoia that I’m not going to like it and be disappointed. It usually ends up being unfounded, but there have been some that didn’t hit the mark for me. (And probably included the words concept album.) Both Train and Gavin DeGraw have new albums coming out in May. I expect GDG’s new offering is going to make me cry because it’s reportedly a tribute to his late parents. At first listen the new song has a sound that feels like it’s circling back to his Chariot and Free albums. The new Train feels a little more like some of their mid-catalog stuff, but I’m more apprehensive because their last album fell kind of flat for me compared to previous releases. It might be because Pat Monahan is the only original member still in the band at this point, and I think the biggest turn in sound happened when Jimmy Stafford left. But if I’m being perfectly honest, Pat Monahan could sing the phone book and I would listen the shit out of it. If he teamed up with Marc Roberge and Matt Nathanson, I’d never listen to anything else and ugly cry over every last line. Maybe throw in Brandon Flowers for good measure.
Listen.
I have feelings about those guys and that means that Zoloft didn’t kill off all my dramatic emotions.
… Basil has been exponentially more What-If-Y as of late and it’s doing little more than mucking up my brain and preventing me from getting any real writing done. He’s even dredging up shit I wrote before I even met Bob. (A finished! Short! Story! It’s not good!) And while there might be some merit to the old idea, I really don’t need to go that far back into the black hole that is my writing drive to find some usable material. Of course I’m plotting over it. Fucking Basil.
… Youtube is also getting a little squirrelly with its suggestions lately and my brain is oobleck so every time it’s like, Hey you should watch this one, I’m just Okay sure. A current performance by Tears For Fears of Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Remnants of my mid-twenties balls-deep fixation with the Music Choice rock channel resurfaced with the wildly unexpected Mark Tremonti sings Sinatra. Nate Ruess’s ridiculous lungs but seriously Janelle Monáe. A Train song prompting a pile of songs I hadn’t heard before that Brendon Urie has done with people I have never heard of. That little punk kid could probably join in on the phone book album too. And I say kid like he isn’t thirty-five years old. I also have no real reason to believe he’s really a little punk, but apparently I’m still salty that I like Panic! At the Disco.
Because reasons.
… I’m not entirely sure if this keyboard I’ve been using is dropping keystrokes—the letter T especially—or if I’m just bad at typing because my brain moves faster than my fingers and I’m not hitting the keys properly. I really hope it’s the latter and not the former because I have been having A TIME with keyboards and I really don’t want to have to beat my head against the wall trying to find yet another keyboard to fit my EXTREMELY PARTICULAR set of standards.
… In all of my Monkees listening and soundtrack building, I made the realization that The Young Veins song Capetown is just their version of The Monkees song What Am I Doing Hangin’ ‘Round and that amused me far more than it probably should have.
… I’ve been trying to figure out some new recipes for dinner to break up the monotony of the same stuff I’ve been making since time immemorial. I know my current limitations with brain power and energy so it’s not an easy feat to find things that I’m going to invest my efforts into. (Ingredient list seventy-five items long. Overly complicated instructions. Claims of 30-minute start-to-finish that takes two hours.) I made Skillet Shepherd’s Pie with some slight modifications (dried garlic and onion, instant mashed potatoes). I dumped it in a Pyrex cake pan to bake because I don’t own an oven-safe skillet and don’t plan to buy one because I can’t lift a cast iron pan of that size when it’s empty, much less molten-hot and full of food. But it was good, and it will probably enter the regular rotation. I also revisited the idea of Baked Southwestern Egg Rolls and made Buffalo chicken rolls. I experimented with that version several years ago and wasn’t thrilled with the results, but Bob brought up the idea recently and we decided to give it another go with some changes (no bleu cheese *gag* and cooking the chicken by sous vide.) It turned out much better and held up better as leftovers. (For me. Because reheated chicken is worse than bleu cheese. Bob’s not picky.) I had leftover egg roll wrappers so I made breakfast egg rolls with scrambled eggs, tater tots, diced sausage, and taco sauce which were even better than the buffalo chicken ones. Everything was pre-cooked, but the eggs puffed up a whole lot more than I expected after being baked.
Influencer caliber photography it is not. Ask me if I care.
Oh. Right. The Last.fm stats. Not a damn clue what those are looking like these days…
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Top 10 Most Played Artists for March 2022…
1.) The Monkees … 678 plays
2.) Brandon Flowers … 347 plays
3.) Stage … 165 plays
4.) Fall Out Boy … 146 plays
5.) The Killers … 130 plays
6.) The Young Veins … 128 plays
7.) Splender … 104 plays
8.) Billy Joel … 84 plays
9.) The Fray … 80 plays
10.) I DONT KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME … 78 plays
Honorable mention: Panic! At the Disco, Nine Days, Masayoshi Soken, Steve Burns, Matt Nathanson, Ryan Star, Sara Bareilles, Tonic, Patrick Stump, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Stroke 9, Elton John
Total of 2,479 plays of 810 tracks from 92 albums by 22 artists.
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Drink Up Train |