I'm going to ignore the state of the world here at the end of 2021 (or maybe it's just 2020, Part 2), and instead focus on my own personal wrap up of the year, akin to what Spotify does with their 2021 Wrapped. It's a fun, more positive way to reflect on the past 12 months, rather than rehashing the news of the past year. So if you're of mind, please feel free to read on and see what I consumed most this year.
Spotify 2021 Wrapped
As I mentioned Spotify, I might as well start with my 2021 Wrapped. According to their nifty little Wrapped presentation, I listened to 47,482 minutes of music. Which, while a lot (more than 92% of the rest of Spotify listeners in the United States) is about half of what I did last year. I attribute this to my turntable. I consciously listened to my LP collection more, if only because it forced me to stand up every 20-30 minutes to flip the record over.
Spotify says I listened to 102 different genres, with my top 5 being:
New Age
Soundtrack
Classic Rock
Electronica
Ambient
I'm sensing a theme. Given I listen to music while trying to fall asleep, this is not a surprise. Nor is the fact that while I might have listened to 1944 different artists, the one I listened to the most this year was Enigma. They (he?) are one of my all time favorites. Along with Engima, the others in my top 5 are:
Enigma
Vangelis
deadmau5
Air
Daft Punk
Goodreads
I also did a lot of reading. I like that Goodreads does a reading challenge each year that I can partipate in. When I first started a few years back I set a goal of 12 books to read for the year. This year I challenged myself to 26 books, and I'm currently at 33. I'm about a third of the way through Peril by Bob Woodward, and I should finish that before the end of the year, bringing my total to 34 books. Perhaps for 2022, I'll strive for 36 books. I have friends that read 100+ books a year, which is amazing. Most of my reading time tends to be before going to bed, so sometimes it's only 15 minutes of reading before my eyes start to droop. Here's Goodreads stats on my year:
33 books read
13,514 total pages
Longest Book: Swan Song (956 pages)
Shortest Book: To Be Taught If Fortunate (176 pages)
Average Book Length: 409 pages
Most Popular: Where The Crawdads Sing (2,625,939 people also shelved)
Least Popular: The Salt Line (9,651 people also shelved)
Highest Rated: A Court of Mist and Fury with 4.71 Stars
And the books I read, in order:
Daisy Jones & the Six Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Bone Season Samantha Shannon
Recursion Blake Crouch
The Collapsing Empire John Scalzi
The Night Circus Erin Morgenstern
Nomadland Jessica Bruder
The Consuming Fire John Scalzi
To be Taught, if Fortunate Becky Chambers
The 5th Wave Rick Yancy
If it Bleeds Stephen King
The Last Emporer John Scalzi
Full Throttle Joe Hill
The Alice Network Kate Quinn
A Memory Called Empire Arkady Martine
The Color of Magic Terry Pratchett
The Ghost Brigades John Scalzi
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue V.E. Schwab
The Glass Hotel Emily St. John Mandel
The Lost Symbol Dan Brown
Utopia Avenue David Mitchell
A Gentleman in Moscow Amor Towles
Swan Song Robert McCammon
The Chosen and the Beautiful Nghi Vo
A Court of Thorn and Roses Sarah J. Maas
Later Stephen King
The Lightest Object in the Universe Kimi Eisele
Project Hail Mary Andy Weir
Redshirts John Scalzi
The Salt Line Holly Goddard Jones
Alas, Babylon Pat Frank
Where the Crawdads Sing Delia Owens
A Court of Mist and Fury Sarah J. Maas
The Midnight Library Matt Haig
I think my top three favorites would be:
Project Hail Mary
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
Swan Song
I'm hoping to branch out a bit more next year, in terms of genres. We'll see if that happens. I do love my sci-fi and fantasy!
Reddit
To be frank, I spend way more time on Reddit than is probably healthy. It's probably my main source of news, politics, entertainment, etc. I mod a couple of communities (r/harley, r/loghomes, and r/reason), and spend more time there than any other site. According to reddit, here's my stats for the year:
13 new communities joined: /r/appleswap, /r/talesfromtechsupport, /r/thenandnow, and 10 others reddit isn't showing me apparently
328.7K Bananas Scrolled
8.4k Karma Gained (given the amount of time I have spend on reddit, it's obvious I'm more of a lurker)
/r/todayilearned gave me the most karma
My top post of the year was in /r/natureisfuckinglit 2.4K Karma
Top voted comment had all of 141 upvotes (again, mostly a lurker)
22 awards given (I honestly never noticed)
Spent the most time in /r/harley (23 hours) closed followed by /r/AskReddit (22 hours)
And there you have it. Hopefully 2022 is more about creating than consuming. As that's a vow I usually make, we'll see how well it holds up.
In my last post I mentioned the need to send my 2015 MacBook Pro back to Apple to have the battery replaced. Normally this is something I think I could do myself, but I thought maybe I'd take it into Apple, see if they might cut me a break. I've had good luck with Apple repair before, both in speed and service.
Not so much, this time.
After a week of not hearing anything about my laptop, I logged into my account on apple.com and navigated my way to the service area. Turns out they hadn't started the repair yet because of an aftermarket drive I'd put in, and because it wasn't Apple, they needed my permission to replace the drive with an Apple approved drive.
For $1299.
So, let's break down how many ways this pissed me off:
Apple never notified me that they were waiting for my permission to carry on with the repair
Apple wouldn't move forward with the repair because of an aftermarket SSD, that'd been put in way after the warranty on the MacBook Pro had expired
Apple wanted to charge me $1299 for replacing the drive. That's as much as a new 13" MacBook Pro with the M1 chip
wtf
Needless to say, I refused the upgrade, and had them ship it back to me. Funny... when I took it in, the Apple Genius guy (who I had no problems with. Nice guy, helped me get my laptop on its way) said they would have to ship it ground instead of air because of the state of batteries. Made sense to me. Apple themselves shipped it back via FedEx air. Go figure.
Got my laptop back two days after declining services. The day I received it, I took it down to the local computer clinic (at this point I needed my laptop back and working, and I didn't want to have to hunt down the right battery, order it, wait for it to be delivered, watch a YouTube video or three on how to replace it, etc...), dropped it off and within an hour they called back saying it was ready. It's been fine ever since.
I've been an Apple fan boy (boi?) for at least the past 20 years, and this is literally the first time I've been annoyed enough to gripe about them in my personal space. I even tweeted about it. That's how huffy I was!
I was mentioning to the wife last week that our old pine dining room table could use a sanding, as it seemed the spot I had the MacBook Pro was a little uneven. I could rock it back and forth a tiny bit, which made typing on the thing annoying.
Turns out, it wasn't the table.
Saturday I was going to sit at the same dining table to do some freelance work, and when I sat the MacBook down, the rocking was much more noticeable. Odd, I thought. So I flipped it over, and noticed a small gap between the back cover and the body itself.
Fearing the worse, I broke out my tools and started removing the (very tiny!) screws. Once the first one was loose, it damn near popped out of there. I took off the rest, with a couple of them popping as the first did. Once all the screws were removed, I lifted the cover.
Yup. Swollen batteries. VERY swollen batteries. Yikes. I gently placed the cover back on, put only three or four of the screws back in, stuck the rest in a small baggie that I taped to the back, and setup an appointment at the Apple store.
My MacBook has since been shipped off to their repair center, and even though it's only been two days, I'm missing it. All my big programs are on there. True, my iPad Pro is a viable replacement (I pretty much update this website and the templates from it), but the music programs that I've been working with (namely Bitwig) are all on my MacBook. I have some music stuff on my iPad, but it's just not the same.
I've been wanting to write, to play music, to create, to do something that I can look at and go "Wow, I made that. Amazing".
I feel stopped up. I tried creating some music last night an managed to accomplish a bit of a tune that I didn't hate. I haven't listened to it again yet, so we'll see if I still don't hate it next time.
I've been wanting to write as well. But I sit down and just blank out.
It’s Memorial Day weekend here in the States, and though it may have been one of the coldest, dreariest Memorial Day weekends ever, it was significant in that it was the first time in forever since we’d hosted people for a BBQ and game night at our house, mask free.
It was a small-ish gathering, with ten vaccinated friends in total, and we had a marvelous time. It was amazing just being able to see everyone’s smiles, welcome people to our house with hugs instead of elbow-bumps, and just being able to feel relaxed about being around people in general. We had the grill going, and given the chill in the air, the chiminea as well. Eventually the chill and damp motivated us to move inside, but our spirits weren’t dampened in the least. We ate, played games, drank, ate some more, and laughed our asses off.
A year ago today, I started working remotely full time. That day, I walked into the office and started my morning routine; drop off the laptop at the desk, wander into the kitchen to put away my lunch and fill my water bottle, then back to the desk to setup the laptop, and start with the business of the day.
Little did I know, I’d be packing it all right back up within minutes.
The email stated that management had decided to err on the side of caution, and was sending everyone home to work remotely for two weeks.
The two weeks became a month.
The month stretch out to three.
By June, it was very much a “play it by ear” situation. I don’t think anyone realized how quickly Covid-19 would spread. When I read the news that there were 10,000 deaths attributed to the illness, it was sobering.
As I type this, we’re sitting at just over 530K deaths. At this point, I’m nearly numb. The 10K was followed by the 50K, and then 100. And it just kept getting worse.
Thankfully, there’s a vaccine. A few, actually. And they’re slamming people through the process. The government stated they were hoping to have everyone vaccinated by the end of July. Now it’s been moved up to the end of May. Something like 2 million people are being vaccinated a day.
I don’t want to consider what it might’ve been like if he had been re-elected.
I consider myself lucky, given that I’m able to work remotely full-time. Because of this, and the generosity of a very good friend, I was able to emerge from the gray walls and tiny window of my basement, and setup house on the shores of Lake Winnipesauke. The tiny basement window has been replaced by nearly floor to ceiling windows that look out at the currently frozen lake. I spend the days pretending to work while staring out at that frozen landscape, watching snowmobiles and ATVs trundle across the ice. While my friend’s office -- which I’m working out of -- is in his basement, the basement itself is warm and inviting, full of natural light. Pretty much the whole north wall of his house is windows, facing the lake.
It’s made for a very nice change.
There’s no hard timeline for when I’m going back to my own house. Probably when I get to missing the wife, or, fingers crossed, I get a notification that my vaccination appointment has been set. Of those two reasons, I imagine the latter will happen much later. I’m in the C class, which they haven’t even started scheduling for.
But there’s a vaccine. There’s light at the end of the tunnel. There’s (hopefully) a summer of gatherings with friends and good times ahead.
John Hopkins reports that the US has passed 400,000 deaths as of this third week of January. Currently, the US averages over 3200 deaths a days. That means, by the time this gets posted, the United States of America will have lost more people to Covid-19 than to World War II.
Fucking unreal. There’s so much that can be said about the how and the why. But I’m going to leave those three sentences above to stand on their own.
I have an odd fascination with how people get the job done. In that I mean, what their tools look like, what their process is, even their work spaces.
One of the feeds I look forward to reading the most is from Uses This. Their typical interviewee is usually in the tech sector, but there have been several artists, writers, and performers. I’m drawn to their tools of choice, be it Windows, or Mac. The peripherals they use, and the hardware and software they can’t live without. Some list cameras, and even games they play.
Uses This recently featured Kris Howard, and she offered up a lengthy interview. Which I loved of course. In the Who are you, and what do you do? section, I learned in one quick paragraph that she’s working for Amazon in Germany (which she and her partner relocated to in August 2020 from Sydney Australia), that she’s a huge Roald Dahl fan, and that she’s an award-winning knitter. She’s also been blogging for 20+ years at https://www.web-goddess.org. So, naturally, I went down that path and discovered she’s posed naked (along with 5000 other people) for Spencer Tunick. Some people really put it all out there.
But back to the tools. For me, it’s a captivating look into what is typically a non-conversation piece. At work, there’ll be tools that are suggested, and workflows to follow... but that’s about as far as the conversation goes. Someone will ask what my hobbies are, and I’ll say music. But I don’t typically say, “Oh, I love playing around in Logic Pro X or sometimes Bitwig, while other times I’ll grab my PRS SE 24 and plug it into my Fender Mustang amp and then play along to some Blues backing tracks on YouTube”. It’s not a typical every day conversational topic.
By the way, there are some really smart and hella-creative people out there. Call it a side benefit to being glued to the Uses This feed. I’ve learned about various conferences, and podcasts, and hobby projects (one person is a member of of the WesterosCraft project team that is slowly recreating the entire world of Game of Thrones in Minecraft) that I didn’t even have a clue existed.
Heck, one gal is even into group hugging. I mean, how cool is that?
I’m going to set myself a goal for this month: to actually finish something. Whether it’s a song, or a website or a story... I’m going to work on something until I consider it complete.
And then, perhaps, I’ll actually publish that piece.
If it’s a website, that wouldn’t be a big deal; I’ve done several. The one I’m currently contemplating is an overhaul of an existing freelance project. Up until I came onboard, they were using full pages for each section. Meaning that if I made a change on the menu, I had to make that change on each page, as each page had their own menu. So very much in dire need of an overhaul. The tricky part is that the owner has no interest in updating. I don’t think he knows what he’s missing, so my goal, if I go that route, will be to make a site the he likes enough to pay me for it.
I have an embarrassing amount of music clips in my project folders. I can’t even call them unfinished songs, as I think the longest of them comes in a 32 bars or something. Mostly they’re just loops.
Similarly for my writing folder. Mostly short stories, some longer pieces, some are just a sentence or two of an idea. Fleshing them into something I think worth publishing (or, at the very least, posting here) would be a worthwhile goal.
Another option that I considered after writing this (And am editing the next day after originally posting), is fixing up my bass and/or guitar. I have an old hollow body guitar, as well as a bass down in my workshop, both in pieces. The guitar (I’d have to look to see what brand) is a hand-me-down from my dad, a guitar he purchased after remarrying. His second wife played guitar, and he decided to take a stab at it. Thankfully that marriage didn’t last, nor did his desire to learn to play. I’ve had the guitar ever since. I’d taken it apart as a kid (dumbass kid) to paint it, but never got much beyond sanding the neck a bit. I even still have all the parts in a box somewhere.
The bass guitar, which I believe is an old Carvin bass, came into my possession via an old college roommate who skipped out owing rent. He left behind the bass, I guess as some sort of payment. The bass I actually did manage to dismantle and sand down to wood. I’m not sure I have the parts, but of the two, I’d rather have the bass functioning, more so than the guitar.
It might be a tough goal to meet. Much like everything else in my life right now, the desire to accomplish something is there, but the drive is practically nil. I find that during the day, I’m more energized to work on something. However, I’m kinda supposed to be doing actual work during the day. Not screwing around trying to create something I can take a bit of pride in. And by the time the evening rolls around and the evening “chores” have been done (go for a walk, figure out dinner, clean the kitchen, etc.), any energy I had for creative pursuits has faded.
Every week feels more and more like Groundhog Day.
It’s 7:53am on a Saturday morning. I’ve been up since 5:16. Woke up to the sound of the cat barfing. Which seems like an apt simile for 2020.
On March 12th, which was a Thursday, I arrived at work and started my morning routine; put my lunch in the fridge, poured some coffee out of my thermos, setup the laptop, and launched the necessary programs I typically use during the day. Opening my inbox, I saw an email from HR stating the growing concerns about COVID-19. They asked that everyone work from home until the following Friday. I remember thinking “sweet... work from home for a whole week!”
What a naive thought that was.
You know the rest of the story, unless you’ve been under a rock. Businesses, the economy, people’s livelihoods, all took a major hit. Every day I’m thankful that I have a job I can do remotely full-time. A lot of people weren’t as lucky.
Having done full-time remote work before, I had an idea of what to expect. This time, however, there was COVID-19 to also deal with. I work in my basement, and there’s one small window that lets in light. It’s the quintessential man cave. Previously, after working several days in a row and not leaving the house, the wife could tell I was getting a bit squirrelly and would take me to our local pub and meetup with friends and talk over a pint or three. This “mini-reset” always helped and the next couple of weeks would be fine.
I don’t have that outlet now thanks to the pandemic, and the worst of it, it seems like my pub has gone under and will not be opening again. That hurt more than I expected, honestly. The wife and I have been going there for at least 10 years. We’ve become friends with the crew. We’ve introduced our friends to the pub, and several of them became regulars. We were always invited to the “Regulars” Christmas party, where they shut down the bar to patrons and had insane drink specials ($2 for a pint that normally cost $5? I’ll take three please!). It was our “Cheers”.
That’s gone. Nearly everything else is closed, though some restaurants are opening patio seating now. But it’s not the same. I don’t have that outlet to turn to when my brain is slowly turning to tapioca after working too many hours, with the gray walls of my basement and whatever is on the turntable playing in the background (lately, it’s been the classical station on the radio).
So we walk the neighborhood. I go to the grocery store. Clean the house and do yard work. Stuff I used to do because it needed to be done is now stuff I do because I’m bored. Today is Saturday, and my big plan is to sweep and Swiffer our wood floors. Life in the fast lane baby.
The routine is slowly getting to me. Parts of it I very much look forward to; my morning coffee and yogurt with granola (banana on the side, please) at 10:00am. Poker Friday nights with the boys (more on that in a bit). Sitting on our recently completed deck, talking about the day’s highlights and lowlights with the wife over a beer and glass of wine. But the sameness can be maddening all the same. The problem with this forced routine is the lack of spontaneity. Aside from messaging my group of friends and asking who’s wanting to meet up at the pub after work, I’m also missing having lunch with co-workers. Realizing that what I packed just isn’t going to do it, and deciding I want to go out for lunch instead.
Getting on the motorcycle and heading west to wherever is still an option... but stopping in at a local watering hole, or visiting a touristy spot, or seeing some live music isn’t. Riding is still nice, but it’s not the same.
One bright spot is the poker games on Friday nights. I’ve been playing with this same group of guys for many years, some for more than 15. We’ve done White Elephant poker parties, have yearly trips planned that have seen us go from a cabin on Lake Anna, to camping along the Shenandoah River (both in Virginia), to a house along the shores of Lake Winnisekape in New Hampshire, and celebrated birthdays by renting casino equipment, hiring dealers, and dressing up in tuxedos. This is a great group of guys and one of the brighter sparks in the dull existence of my world as of late.
While not the same as getting around the poker table and handling cards and chips, we’ve managed to make it work, via Amazon Chime and pokernow.club. We’ve tried various poker apps with varying degrees of success, but for the past 6 weeks or so, we’ve been using Poker Now, and it’s been great. And the frequency with which we play has increased fourfold. Previously, we would try to get in a game once a month. Now it’s weekly, and occasionally twice a week.
Sometimes I think having the poker game at the end of the week is the only thing keeping me sane.
Getting out in the fresh air, and walking the neighborhood helps too. That can get a bit boring, but recently the wife purchased two different types of trash picker-uppers. One the “stab it” kind, and the other a “grab it” kind. We’ve gotten in the habit of grabbing a trash bag, our trash picker-uppers and collecting trash throughout the neighborhood. Makes the walk a bit more interesting and it make the ‘hood a bit nicer.
Now that the weather is starting to turn, I wonder how the lack of walking will affect the mood. Exercise is important; I know I don’t do near the amount I need to. When it gets cold, it gets harder to convince ourselves to bundle up and go walking.
I’m more than ready for this pandemic to be under control. Completely tired of the selfish and stupid people who want to have their parties and their weddings and not wear masks and live life normally. I get it. I want that too, but the only way we’re going to get there is if we get it under control. Congregating in large groups without masks is not the way to do it.
God dammit, I’m so sick and tired of the people who have their heads buried in the sand.