Surreal Moments

I'm at the new gig in South Jersey again this week and have some odd occurrences to report:

1) The worksite here backs onto a small pond with a walkway around it. I was just out there collecting some thoughts and my eye was drawn down under the walkway: Floating in the water was a bunch of what looked like comic books... but on closer look appeared to be written in arabic. The cover of one had an eagle holding an AK47. Other books were below it... all getting waterlogged.

As I studied this, my eye tracked and saw a HUGE TURTLE - over a foot in diameter - sitting in the water just next to the texts. Guarding them?

I moseyed back inside.... and there haven't been any reports of global jihad breaking out in Gibbsboro New Jersey, so I'll just keep an eye on things. They're moving from that location in 2 weeks anyway.

2) Some may remember my brief career in the early 1990s doing arrangement work for lounge singers: I shorthand that as "i wrote Karaoke backing tracks", but in reality at the time, the true customer was single lounge singers with a single keyboard that could play "midi files".

Well tonight I saw the logical progression. As I had some VERY tasty Penne Arribiata at a restaurant recommended by my Italian boss, a lounge act came on stage. The lady was rail thin with hair teased to double her head circumference, and the guy had a non-ironic latin 'fro, a solid black sponge going down to a ponytail (I know - how did that WORK?).

The two of them sat with microphones on either side of a LAPTOP COMPUTER and a mixer. So they weren't even trying to pretend to play one of the parts, as my lounge singers felt obligated to back in the day. Better, when the lady was singing, the guy was playing with the knobs on the mixer, adding in reverb and delay to make her voice sound more exotic at certain points. When he was singing, she sat on her barstool and stared into space. It was a beautiful evening.

And it set me up with energy to do 4 more hours of work in the hotel room. See, in addition to my gig, there's another guy there who has a big deliverable and the other consultants have figured out he really isn't going to deliver much for the 400 hours he has billed, so they've asked ME to ghost write a bunch of his stuff (for pay, of course), so tonight I was reformatting and rewriting a bunch of reference documents. Good times.

3) Surreal moment number three wasn't really that deep: It was just me driving "home" to the ALoft hotel through some very industrial areas, with the sky just superblue with dusk, the lights just coming on, and wisps of orange and yellow clouds across the sky.

As I sat at a light, just ahead a freight train started across a bridge I was about to go under. Very slowly, pulling flatbed cars on which were stacked black metal boxes with the word "EPIC" stenciled on the sides. (Epic was the software we specialized in implementing at my last job... not touching it right now).

I drove under the bridge and on the left was a scrap yard, and as I glanced, TWO cranes literally FLUNG clawfuls of metal onto a small mountain. They wound back, swung forward, and released the gleaming metal. Then I drove up a 30 degree incline to a bridge into the sky (over a waterway).... then down to the hotel.

I'm telling you, it was a very peaceful and strange few minutes.

And that's my story for the evening. Night night.