Vicarious Birthday Weekend

CWs: food, alcohol

My spouse’s birthday is in a few days, so we’re celebrating this weekend with friends. We are doing an escape room tomorrow (dinosaur-themed) which will be very fun. We’ve done escape rooms at this place twice before, so this will be a room we haven’t done. We’re probably going to have dinner out with friends, and alcohol will be consumed, that is a given. I have some errands to do tomorrow before that, though, and at least some Latin to get done before we meet up with our friends tomorrow evening. I am needing to get a new pair of dress shoes (my Skechers “dress shoes” are blowing out at the seams, likely since I didn’t get “wide” ones, ugh) so I need to look for that. And we’ll probably get breakfast out. I also need to return Saw X to the library before it auto-renews again, since I’m definitely done watching it. My own birthday is in a few weeks, I’ll be 40 and I’m looking forward to it.

I don’t entirely know what we’re doing for my birthday yet. Something fairly low-key. We are taking a belated birthday trip though and trying to plan for that and it’ll be really fun, good to get out of town for a little while.

This has been an incredibly long week. I was on phones all day Wednesday and Thursday and it just about melted my brain. I’ll have one phone day next week as well and then be backup on phones. So it’s been busy but it’ll be a little calmer coming up. Very grateful for the weekend ahead, even though it’s gonna be a busy one. I very much would like to see our friends tomorrow; my spouse hung out with them last weekend, but I was out sick on Friday and I didn’t feel comfortable going out, y’know, after calling out.

Last week sometime I finished Ultros, a lovely Metroidvania which has major Hollow Knight vibes. I may have mentioned it before, can’t remember. One of the better games I’ve played in a while, and also has a fantastic soundtrack. I had a queue of 15 albums that I added to my collection as well, finished tagging them last night and renaming and prepping them for my collection. If you know me a lil bit at least, you know I tend to curate my music collection pretty carefully. These days I use Ex Falso to tag albums and then rename them based on the tags. I spent a lot of time in the MP3 scene back in the late ’90s and early ’00s, so I tend to prep albums with those guidelines, but I don’t make .nfo files anymore, just .m3us, and instead of .sfv, I use .sha512sum to checksum all the music files. These days I have around 170Gb of music; I’ve been collecting since again, the late ’90s/early ’00s.

I don’t have the teenage “I’d die without music” attitude anymore, but I do really adore it and listen to it very frequently. If I have the mental bandwidth while working, I’ll definitely throw something on on my phone, but otherwise I’m usually listening while on the laptop and working on Latin. I don’t listen super often in the car, as I usually have podcasts to listen to, but I did listen to it on the way home from dropping my parents off at the airport recently and it was nice.

My spouse and I intersect a lot on music taste, but I always want to introduce them to more music and feel very passionately about it. I gave them a trove of albums to listen to awhile back and I don’t know if they’ve made their way through it or not, and I’d be happy to share more with them. Sometimes with music I feel like I’m alone and listening to things no one, or few others, listen to. I really need to update my Favorite Music post on here as it’s changed a little bit at least since I wrote that. I may restructure it in general, as I don’t necessarily want it to be comprehensive and compendial, reflecting every single artist I listen to, but a representative sampling. Right now it’s pretty comprehensive and I don’t know that that is a great thing. I think a cross-section would be better. but at the same time I really like sharing everything with everyone. if I had it my way I’d give each new friend a flashdrive full of amazing music and hope they adored it!

My spouse and I initially bonded over a few bands together. I introduced them to Beirut and I can’t remember who else and they were really happy about all that. I don’t think they like Alaska in Winter as much as I do, but that’s OK. I will geek out as much as I want about music. I have gotten them into some lovely stuff though like Amythyst Kiah and some others they really like, so that is awesome. I was telling them about the random “weather music” I got into lately. There is a composer named Trammell Starks who did background music for The Weather Channel, and it’s available on Internet Archive. When I went down that particular rabbit hole, I came across two other “weather music” albums that were really excellent as well. Check them out and enjoy! I swear, the internet has given so many of us a chance to get into oddball, wonderful, strange stuff and I am so happy for that. And also very happy for the chance for creators to share all this wondrous stuff with us!

anyways I need to feed the girls and then I’ll be back to the laptop probably, for a bit at least. May play some more Stardew Valley tonight but I’m not sure. thanks for reading, friends <3