Today I was out in shirtsleeves. I put a coat on this morning when leaving the house and immediately regretted it, ditching it into the way back of Rudy the Saturn.
This, after all, is December 6th, so I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the concept that Christmas eve is less than 3 weeks away.
I've done no shopping for gifts, have displayed no lighting or other festive stuff on the exterior of my home. Although it probably would behoove me to get out there and hang some stuff while it is 50 degrees in the evening. Beats the crap out of stringing lights in a bitter biting wind with frost gathering on my fingernails and dripping from my nose. I'd always wondered what it was like to spend Christmas in temperate climes, like the Carolinas or something. This time last year we had snow. And it didn't stop until March. We had snow for St. Patrick's Day. So this is odd.
I get the feeling though we're going to get our asses kicked when it comes to the snow, once it decides to come down. We shall see. Until then, it's no wonder I have this cold, and it is a beautiful thing to not need a jacket.
The only thing I wish right now would be that it would be light out when I got home from work. I'd love to be able to take the kids to the park after work in this weather... before the cabin fever sets in and we're climbing the walls when it is -10 out.
By the way, it is rarely -10 out here in this part of New England. If it gets to Zero, that's odd. But colder than 50 with wind I don't like being out to play... I'm not a big fan of snow sports, so I'm not looking forward to it being fucking cold and snowy.
I'm sick of the "Very Special Christmas" rock and roll format. Stevie Nicks groaning and moaning her way through "O Holy Night" makes me weep, but not for the reasons she wants me to cry. It ain't pretty -- it's pretty horrid.
I like Sting's "Gabriel's Message," and listen to that often, even in July. I listen to Anne Murray only because the girl next to me does... and she's not half bad but I feel that by liking her I declare my elderliness (aside from the very cool fact that Barenaked Ladies wrote a song about the farmer who stalked her, I'm not a big fan of hers).
So I've got no good Christmas music. I suppose that's okay... the radio is going to be shoving everything from the Waitresses to Don Henley down my throat any day now, so I should just relax and ready myself for it. Sigh.
Any good recommendations. No Kenny G. Please. Email me with your favorites.
My friend GPJ gave me a Bruce Cockburn (again with him! what is with me!!) CD a couple years back of Christmas music. On the whole it is pedestrian, for an artist and guitarist I hold in such high esteem... but it has one song on it that I will listen to all the time. Iesus Athionia, the Huron Carol. Amazing.
Oh, and get this shit... I just went to log into my Winamp Locker, where I store all my MP3s, and get this message welcoming me:
We'd like to apologize for the inconvenience, but Winamp Lockers have been shut down due to a plethora of reasons. What it comes down to is that the locker service is no more and the music you had stored in your locker, if any, is not inaccessible. We hope that we haven't caused you to lose valuable data and that you don't hate us for this, it was really just out of our hands. Thank you and we hope you enjoyed using the locker service while it was still around. - The Winamp.com Staff
Forgive me in advance, cover your ears and eyes. For lo, I am about to lose it old school. Mother fucker!!!!!!!!!! What the fuck is this shit. Oh my aching HEAD!!!!!! My goddamn MP3s, which took me 2 years to gather, rip, hunt down, find, FUCKING GONE!!!!! BLUGH!!! ARGH!!! MEH MEH MEH!!!! FAJSD:Fasiofna;sdofn; adlkfmal'djr[w4ur5[0234hji5nlnb ldmfla
asdklfn;aklsdfn !!!!! FUCK!!! (aneurysm).
Oh MAN I'm rather irked right now.
These jackasses at Winamp didn't send a message out alerting me that the lockers would be shutting down. I have 300 MP3 files that I was storing on their service. That's less than some people I know, but a lot of them were songs I've legally obtained from artist websites, a couple are rare live bootlegs that I doubt I'll ever find again.
What the bloody fucking hell?! Is this a Napster related fall out thing? Artists Against Storage!!!!! A lot of people did indeed rip off artists and do the MP3 instead of buying the CD thing. A lot of times I downloaded the MP3 to hear the song and then bought the album. Hell, since Napster's demise I've bought more CDs than I did the 2 years previous. A lot of stuff that I was buying was upgrading of old vinyl as the stuff was released onto CD.
But not to send out a warning. That's just fucking classless bullshit. So damn unfair.
Goddamn.
Okay, I'm better. Thanks for hanging in there with me while I shit the proverbial bed.
Well, everyone here is shuffling out the door to go get themselves prissied up, I mean prettied up, for the Holiday Party. Which is tonight. One of the girls here lives across the road and a ton of people are going up to her place for some wine, and some getting dressed and listening to music stuff... I'm opting out. I don't like the idea of dressing in a group, or messing with hair/makeup like school girls before a Sadie Hawkins dance. I'm going to ready myself at home. The party isn't until 6pm, so I will bolt home, play with the kids a bit, feed them, and then come back over here. The shindig is at the Andover Country Club, which is cool because the last couple of years they did it in Boston. I don't like going into Boston, due mostly to the traffic nightmare that the entire North Shore and City are, so I'm relieved to be doing this locally.
I should be home by 10.
The cool thing is that last year all my buddies from the Info Tech group blew the party off. This year, they're coming. So we'll be nerding the joint up real good. My buddy FL will be there... he's awesome. He and I are the original Portal Wonder Twins, and recently merged with 2 people in marketing to do WebDev stuff for the internal and external sites. He's the only thing that kept me here for a long time, when things were feeling pretty iffy. I'm glad I stayed because compared to last Christmas this is a great place to be. Simply HAVING a tech job that I've not been laid off from in 18 months is nice.
Well, off to the races. An update with perhaps some pictures if the participants are willing will be your reward for sticking with me so far. Maybe.
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