I'm working on a Halloween album, Spooker of the House. Can't tell you how much fun I'm having with it. Start from scratch every song. Design my own synths, shape my drum samples custom, lots of chromatic and minor scales for spookiness, sampled my squeaky garage door, etc. The album will be tied together by a guy (me, many people are saying) broadcasting over the radio as he makes his last stand against some unnamed monsters. Yesterday I uploaded a song for a mix check (mono Sonos speaker, car audio, studio stereo monitors, phone and laptop speakers, airpods) and soundcloud suggested a tag for the genre: Moombahton. My song's not really moombahton at all, but it was a genre that I'd never heard of before, which is pretty rare, so I'm gonna spend some time listening to it in the near future. I'll probably steal some Moombahton elements for another track on the album, 'cuz Spooker of the House is a variety of styles, but loosely all electro pop. And my bandmate for a different music project is recently sending me some good stuff to chew on (lol, looks like that guy has a set of electronic tenor drums, which is what I played on drumline back in the day). I bet that guy grew up with this band. I'm gearing up to code something in a few weeks that'll be pretty engrossing. An expansion and refinement of some code I wrote a few years ago which will make video data products unlike anything else in the world. There's also another blossoming corner of my field that I'm keen to familiarize myself with, so that'll be fun. I already have enough new content for two or three pretty quick papers, so it feels like it's gonna be a year or two that I can really have some fun while still staying productive. Can't wait for the solar eclipse on April 8th. Got some family coming into town for it. My parents live pretty close by, in the path of totality. My relatives can have the guest bedroom, it should be pretty nice weather for camping in the yard.
We're slowly starting to work on a plan to get our garden from 90% brickwork to 'as little pavement as we need'. We had a garden designer help us think through and make a first design, which we promptly iterated over until it looked almost nothing like what he drew for us. But it's still useful to have done - gotta start somewhere. Now I just hope there's a few warm/sunny spring weekenddays to get the project going. So far this winter has been oscillating between "cold as fuck" 20% of the time and "mild, but raining" 80% of the time. Last week saw the first sunny mild days which was a nice change of pace, albeit another climate record shattered.
Have an osteochnodral lesion in my knee. Getting supershot prp. Need to stop having cause to use our product! Getting old sucks, but I suppose it's better when you've got a longevity company to help ya along.