First things first: The recurring series on this page, iPhone Astrophotography has taken a major step back recently. It seems that when you leave for work after sunrise and get home before sunset it is difficult to take bad pictures of big giant empty rocks in space.
I lucked out today though!
See it? The Moon? Do you see it?
Last night Jen did a kick ass job of finishing off the invitation printing by cranking out the reception cards and the directions. She is unbelievable. She also officially replaced her desktop computer with her MacBook by getting a new keyboard and mouse and hooking the lappy to her gigantic monitor.
We took it for a test drive by playing a little World of Warcraft. I managed to get it up and running on my laptop on Sunday (by taking the fully patched install from my desktop and just copying it onto my laptop. Why didn't I think of that first?) but I played on the desktop last night. It was the first time seeing the game on my own super awesome monster monitor. It looked so good I kept ducking when the big cats jumped at me.
Later this week we are having an evening of invitation envelope stuffing, and then we send them out. I'm looking forward to that. I hope that once the invites are in the mail I can stop flip flopping on who we should or should not invite. We want to keep the guest list as small as possible, but it is continuously creeping up. We set a maximum number of guests to invite and have done a good job of keeping below that, but we're at the point now where we are saying, if we invite couple A we have to not invite couple B. That's a little stressful.
Of course once the invites are out and the RSVPs start coming back we have to set up seating arrangements. I expect that to be stressfully fun too.
Tonight is my third weight watchers meeting. I promised myself I wouldn't weigh myself at home at all. I have broken that promise twice this week. The first time was Friday (I think... or was it Saturday? No, Friday) and I was WAY down. So far down that I got lazy and stopped watching myself. Sunday we had our St Patrick's Day boiled dinner and I absolutely sowed on the corned beef. I broke my no-weighing-myself-at-home promise again this morning and I am two pounds over last Tuesday's weigh in. Uh Oh. I need to get on track and start taking this thing more seriously. Starting right now.
This morning it took a lot of effort, but I did it. I kept the promise I made to myself on this page yesterday. I got up early and did some recording. Poorly.
The alarm went off at 5:00am. I snoozed twice and dragged myself up at about 5:23 or something. I had three reasons to get up early. 1: laundry. 2: it's trash day and we had a ton of it to get out. 3: Recording guitar leads.
After starting a load of laundry I gave myself about 30 minutes to work, and that was it. After that it was takin' out the trash time. I have tried to keep with the RPM spirit during this project and by that I mean, don't get caught up in perfection. Just get it on tape. On the RPM message boards you often see people talking about struggling with their internal censor, specifically with trying to either turn it off or somehow ignore it. The lead guitar parts are where I have by far the most trouble in this regard. I strive for the perfect solo, but I am no where near good enough to come even close to it... so I re-record over and over again.
I told myself that if I could get through a solo without hitting any bad notes, screwing up any pick attacks, or falling badly out of time I was going to keep the take. Lame Song #1 is only about a minute and 55 seconds long and there is only an eight measure section that needs lead guitar. It took me three takes to get something I can live with. Check that song off as finished. (although there is a huge amount of ground hum on the guitar tracks and I may have to do them all over again using a different setting on my Pod. Probably not though, I'll probably just mute the track on the few parts where the guitars briefly drop out so there is no noticeable humming... that's going to be a bitch to do in the mix, but it should work.)
Lame Song #2 has a ton of room for lead parts all over the place. I started out working on the first eight bars of the song and must have re-recorded 10 times. My goal of ignoring the internal censor was obviously not met in that respect. Finally it was 6:00 and I had other stuff to get to so I just did a run through of the whole song adding leads whenever the vocals dropped out. Most of it sounded good, but there was one badly flubbed attack during the solo that can't be left there, and there were about 16 bars worth of noodling around the vocals at the end of the song that were missing all together.
ADATs at their best have a bad reputation for occasionally just not printing to tape. It's very much like a drop out on a cell phone. One minute it's recording perfectly, the next it's not recording at all, and then later it's working fine again. That's what happened at the end of the song. The track was in record ready, the signal was getting to the tape nice and strong, and the record light was very much red. But after about three minutes of working fine it just stopped recording. I need to do almost all of Lame Song #2's leads again tomorrow.
I will do it. Oh yes, I will do it. While I'm at it I'll crank through songs 3 and 4 too. I'm feeling it again folks, I am feeling it again.
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