I just spent a number of hours putting together a weather app from a YouTube tutorial. The app doesn’t work. I really don’t know what is wrong with it because I finally got it to where Dev Tools showed no problems. Still, it keeps telling me I have an invalid api key even though I have confirmed that I am using a valid key. I’ll need to check this code against the other weather app I created in CodePen. Let me do that now while I am thinking about it.

No luck. I made a few minor adjustments but still struck out. I’m really not sure what the problem is.

Coding is a fascinating hobby that I have spent far too much time on. Ultimately, I want coding to be part of my professional skill set, similar to musical and academic work. Still, I really should not spend as much time on it as I do - I’m avoiding other parts of my professional work. I need to be practicing music, reading, and writing. I feel confident that this freewriting blog is helping me with the writing, but I haven’t read anything substantial in a while, and I haven’t been practicing music. That all needs to change; I can’t let these things fall by the wayside. If I do, I’ll lose my edge.

This all assumes that I begin to work again. I am tired of unemployment - it is dragging down my entire psyche. It’s the depression hammering on me, I know, but at some point I need to say to myself, “enough is enough.” Until I do I am going to continue to wallow in this depressive funk.

Thinking about and practicing music is what will most likely lead me out of my funk. I need to be able to separate my ego from music, though, since I constantly do battle with myself, beating on my head over where I should be rather than where I am. Maybe what I should do is begin going through my Berklee notebooks in order to refresh my memory on some concepts I learned. My experience at Berklee was intense, to put it lightly, so I would imagine that my notebooks have some gold in them. That’s the kind of school that drops a lifetime’s worth of study and practice on you without breaking a sweat. Those notebooks are the key to something.

Among the things that I remember from Berklee was the study of arpeggios and approach notes. These, along with scales, should provide a solid background for single-note playing. Improv is a real weakness of mine, although improv does not really come directly from scales and arpeggios. I need to bear in mind that scales and arpeggios make for a nice warm-up, but they are not music. It’s a lot like writing by reciting the alphabet over and over again. Probably one of the best uses of my time would be to learn parts of tunes playing arpeggios and approach notes, and then practice them in all keys. That and regular transcription should help to greatly improve my improvisation.