For the first time in a long time, I didn’t bring any work home with me this weekend. I’m just beat and I needed a break, so I took one. This is what happened.

Saturday, I went to the music store and spent money I didn’t have on a book of bass chords and another book of bass scales and modes. Yes, I did this because I had to. Then I came home and made this thing that will give you any mode or scale in any key. I’ll post it on my main website sometime soon. I still have a few kinks I need to work out of it, but it’s pretty cool.

Of course, figuring that out meant that I needed to figure out how to score music on the computer. As it turns out, this is not an easy task, but I found a few fonts, a program, and a nifty extension for OpenOffice that makes it easy. I’ll write some more about those later. I’m never going to use them to write a symphony, but from time to time, I need to do fairly simple things like this:

and do it quickly and easily without a lot of fuss. (That actually looks good on the printed page, which is what my main medium will be, but the pdf rendering makes it look a little strange.)

I also finished reading Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which is a frightening experience, because that almost seems like the society we live in now.

After that, I started reading Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, which I’ve been meaning to get around to for some time. This has become especially urgent because I heard that they made a movie of it, and while I generally don’t care to see movies that are made out of good books (this is especially true of third-rate movies made from a second-rate books, such as The Bridges of Madison Country), this looks like one I would actually like to see. But I gotta read the book first.

I also forgot that Saturday was Free Comic Book Day, which is a bit of a bummer, because the music store is just around the corner from the comic book store. That makes two years in a row that I’ve missed it. It’s probably a good thing, because I would have wanted to spend a lot of money that I don’t have anyway.

I also made a gigantic batch of taco-flavored Chex mix, and ended up eating almost half of it. It’s that good! Recipe and pictures will follow in a few weeks.

Now I’m winding down and doing laundry because tomorrow is another Monday and it’s back to work and I’m feeling a bit wound up because I’m thinking of all the things I didn’t get done this weekend. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.

I did not get anything done on a podcast, other than putting some notes together, but hopefully, I will have one done by this Saturday. If all goes well, I can get another one done the week after and another one after that, and then I will be happy because that’s a creative outlet that I really need and have really neglected. It’s a surprising amount of work to produce a podcast: every minute of air time takes about ten to twenty minutes of behind-the-scenes work. So a half-hour podcast takes six to twelve hours to get in the can. That’s actually a lot of time that I just don’t have, but that will probably change once summer rolls around.

It can’t get here soon enough.

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