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On Wednesday night we went to the Indie Memphis screening of Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (documentary about the only bank that got prosecuted by the feds after the 08 financial crisis, a small family-owned bank serving the Chinese immigrant community...). It was good, what you expect going into it but a good story. And (spoiler alert?) the outcome was nice. Interesting they got the one juror to interview about it (even though she was one of the few strongly holding out against the bank til almost the very end, where it almost went to mistrial). I mean, you know anyway, but it's insane just how long a trial can go on. Jesus. What else? Okay, Thursday was Mary Beth's birthday. Well, I got word from my manager that I will be able to take my vacation coming up (complications of switching over and being hired on and being in the no-vacation first three months and all my time starting over and Cook not paying out my accrued vacation time, fuckers) but it's sort of a hush-hush thing. After work Mary Beth and I went and had dinner at Red Fish, that new sushi place at that mansion on union. Later we watched Tampopo. It was good though I started getting really tired and was having trouble staying awake the last half or so (my physical condition, nothing to do with the movie). Then yesterday was my birthday. Had some slight triumphs with a production deployment at work that hadn't gone well the day before. Came home to some presents from my lovely wife: Deep Listening: a Composer's Sound Practice by Pauline Oliveros and Sounding the Margins: Collected Writings 1992-2009 by Pauline Oliveros! Two books by my hero so I'm pretty excited about that. We went on a little adventure down to Mississippi to eat at this shack called Sidestreet Burgers in Olive Branch. Really good stuff and we also got these nachos that were incredible. Back at home we ate some rich chocolate bundt cake that she'd made on the deck outside. And we just hung out and had some fun together. Not a whole lot else, low key birthdays but they were nonetheless good. I did have a somewhat sad realization this morning: there's not enough room in my case for the eurorack module I next most want. Yeah yeah, "boo hoo" but still...

Last night I ended up watching The Living Skeleton. How do I describe this movie? It's a b horror movie, but it's shot with arty angles and lighting. It's definitely competently filmed, but that contrasts with the effects which are rubber bats and a few rubber skeletons. And the plot is completely nonsensical. There's even a sort of explainy twist at the end but that ends up making less sense than it did before. I mean, it's not nonsensical in an abstract or crazy way, I mean you can connect the dots, it's just lazily written. After work I went over to Nate's to help him with a few mix ideas for the album he just finished recording. So I got to hang out with his fat cat Jojo who is awesome and Pattie (his awesome baby!). We made a few small adjustments on a few tracks. Played around. It was fun. He lent a module that doesn't fit in his case currently: Krpls Circuit Bent Digital Waveguide. So hopefully I'll get a moment to play around with that. Also got in the mail a violin bridge. Maybe I'll break out my violin again at some point.

Not a whole lot yesterday. Ran errands and all that. I did get some stubs to do a remix for Qemist. They're due the week after next so we'll see if I have time to get around to it. I think it'll be fun to do, but we shall see how/if it goes!

Mary Beth and I went downtown last night. We stopped by Scoops Parlor and had some scoops of delicious bourbon ice cream. It's that place across from The Arcade that you usually see and think about stopping at only after you've just eaten at The Arcade and you're painfully full so that's off the table. We were going to go to this screening of this documentary about Orange Mound at Clayborn Temple but we got there an hour early thinking it was starting an hour earlier than it did. We went away but never ended up making it back. Later, I finished editing the last Memphis Conrète set that Amy asked for for the Sonosphere podcast.

This morning I picked up my last paycheck from Cook. Now, yeah, now I'm no longer employed by them. I did get pretty pissed off when I asked about my accrued pto and they let me know they don't pay any of it out. Motherfuckers. Really, fuck those cheap ass fucking fucks. Good thing I at least kinda recently took time off for the festival. I have a whole week that I'm about to take so there's all this time saved up and they're not doing shit about it. Fucking motherfuckers. I've never had a job fuck you over like that. If I'd've known I would have taken off a bunch of time (though knowing them they probably just wouldn't've approved it or some shit). Anyway, that aside, you know those dreams where you're back in school and suddenly find out you have to do a presentation and you didn't know and you're completely unprepared? Well, I had a similar scenario at work today. Not that drastic, but still. I got a message asking if I was coming to a certain room number. I said okay and went and there's all these people filling the room. I ask what's going on and it turns out they're doing the thing where all the teams present their epics for the upcoming pi and read out what they're doing and size it and people ask questions etc. I hadn't been included on the email invitation so I was completely unaware of it. Now they're doing it where all the tech leads are the ones who do the read-out (in the past, it was the product owner). We did the meeting on our stuff before and there's already a printed sheet with our information prepared by our product owner. But during the first few teams' readings, I had to go through that sheet to familiarize myself with what I had to talk about. It didn't end up being bad, we did talk about this stuff yesterday or the day before, but just that surprise of coming into a room and finding out I'm going to have to speak in front of a bunch of people and I didn't know anything about it. I was freaking out a little bit at first. It was much better organized than these things had been in the past (before it was always everyone in the same room, and there were two groups doing it at once and it was crowded and hard to hear anyone and kinda chaos, this time they split up the different groups into different sessions so there's only one person talking at a time and more organized and less chaos, the only bad thing was the lack of advanced warning). After work I ran and grabbed Mary Beth and we went up to Asian Palace for Courtney's birthday. A bunch of people were there. Even saw Shefali who I hadn't seen in well over a decade. Though I think my armpits stank and Josh smelled them so that's pretty embarrassing. Came home to a package from the Barnes and Nobel Criterion sale: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Ghost World, Blow-Up, Bicycle Thieves, and Stalker (the last one was a pre-order and it's really not even out til next Tuesday, so I super-have to make sure I watch it before then to uh, I dunno, make the most of it or something?).

Yesterday evening I met Luis up at Kroger. He's about to go on a trip to Portugal so I was going to pay him for the merch sold at the show, some of which he wanted paid in Memphis Concrète t-shirts for his labelmates back in the old country. We also stood around the Kroger parking lot a while and chatted about shit. Right as we were leaving, a guy came up to us with some sage advice. That we shouldn't shop there, instead we should go to Cash Saver. He had an expressively disdainful face to match. Kroger charges too much, as he looked with disgust at his crumpled receipt. He would have gone to Cash Saver but for an unfortunate event where he was banned for disorderly behavior, due to having been drunk at the time. Well, then after a night of restful sleep it was back to work today. What else? I think that's about it for now.

Our big day-defining activity yesterday was getting lunch buffet at India Palace. We had the typical indian lunch buffet reaction of being super-full and immobile and just rolling around in our fullness for most of the day. We ended up later watching Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. It was fucking fantastic. Definitely slow. In the beginning, while I was appreciating it, it did feel a little draggy (mundane/tedious, and I was enjoying or at least appreciating it, especially the composition which was spectacular throughout and even in theory what she was doing with the tedium as it's clearly an essential part of the film). However, after a while something pretty astonishing happens. With the gradual shift in repetition, the same mundane activities start to become, in and of themselves, compelling and riveting. Partly due to the subtle and gradual shifts and decay in routine activities, but also there's a hypnotic effect that starts to pull you in. All in all it's a pretty astonishing film in both theory and execution and it does some pretty amazing things with the medium. After that we watched the latest episode of Twin Peaks. Now it's halfway through!

Work today was mostly normal. I did get an email asking if I'd gotten the email with my offer. I hadn't gotten the offer email, just the email about the email. Later in the day I followed up again and it was waiting for my manager to sign something. So I tracked him down and he did and right before I left I got the email. So I have my offer! I'm going to review it a little bit before I sign it. I likely will, we'll see how it goes.

So I put in my two new modules, get my case reorganized, everything set up and ready to go. Then I plug it in and none of the modules are powering up. The case has power, the lights on the case and power supply are lighting up, but none of the modules are lighting up. Two things I can think of. My case is almost full (where it's starting to be a real pain to put things in with the limited open area I have to reach and get behind stuff) so the modules I put in may be the straw that "broke" the power supply's back (more power being drawn than it can handle). That's pretty likely. I'm pretty sure the Morphagene is a power-sucker. I can try unplugging a few things and seeing if that gets the rest running. The other thing it might be is I plugged something in wrong and fucked some shit up. Here's hoping it's not that. I may end up having to upgrade my power supply which will be a pain in the butt, but we'll see. That'd be better than breaking all my shit, of course.

During my lunch break I went to my post office to pick up a package for a notice I received yesterday. Well, it turns out that they took it back out for delivery again today. So that was kinda a waste. But I was set to meet Amy to interview for the Sonosphere podcast. Since I was planning on going to the post office anyway I had us meet at Midtown Crossing. It was a really good conversation. I'm not sure how much great stuff I said interview-wise, but we just sat around and talked for a while about music and the festival and just other general conversation before. Anyway, it was a good chat and had a good time and I hopefully said some decent stuff but I wasn't really event focused on it as an interview which was cool I guess. Probably because we waited until after we ordered to really get started and were just chatting before and the interview kinda went into it from there. I stayed a little late 'cuz going back into midtown (/crosstown) made it a pretty long lunch. Back home Mary Beth and I started in on a little bit of I Love Dick. Anything else? I guess that's about it for now.

Mary Beth and I went for a walk up to the park yesterday afternoon. We were going to go to the Brooks to look at some exhibits but had forgotten they're closed on Mondays. So we just went walking in the old forest instead. It was a pleasant little frolic. Then had a nice rest of the day. I bought and downloaded Izotope RX so I can hopefully do whatever cleanup I'm able on Saturday's Memphis Concrète recordings. We'll see. Mary Beth and I watched episode eight of Twin Peaks (rewatch for me, but she hadn't seen it yet). So good! Then we started in on the second season of Better Call Saul and started GLOW as well. Late into the night we played a few games of Decipher. And we just overall had a good time together yesterday. Nice long long afternoon to evening.

Had a little ceremony for Horace's "birthday." Still had the bags of his fluid solution (water and electrolytes, "lactated ringers"...injected gatorade for pets?). We cut those open and poured them out in the garden area underneath the window in front (in our pseudo-porch) that he loved to go out and sit at so much. Said a few words. Cried. Missed Horace. We took it easy most of the day. I eventually went up to Growlers to see the Spiral Stairs show. I should have left a few hours later. I was trying not to get there too early, but there were a lot of opening bands and I got there at the end of the first one's set. Getting to shows early is too ingrained in my blood. And I was there alone so it was a bit boring for a while. Boink! played and they were alright. Tim of Fuck's current band I guess (I think Alex from the Flyer was playing keyboard). Silly little light songs. Some of it was alright. Snowglobe was Snowglobe, never really liked them going back to the way back. Some of the guys in the band are in Spiral's backing band. So after sitting there for a few hours I finally got to see him. It was okay. That might be a little generous. It was mostly pretty boring. His more recent stuff (counting everything post-Pavement, and honestly a little of the Pavement stuff towards the end there too) is pretty bland. He played a few Pavement songs: "Date with Ikea," "Kennel District," "Passat Dream," and "Two States" (the latter being what he closed with). So a heavy repping of Brighten the Corners. Not exactly a dream set, but hearing those songs were the highlights of the show. I'm glad I at least checked it out, but I do feel a little longing that I missed the Nots show last night. Slept in a bit today and woke up to the smell of Trudy's poop as an alarm clock. Good morning!