Damn You, Rodents!

I’m covering a day shift at my mother’s house today as I slowly get back into the swing of that thing. Today is trash day, so I put the barrels out on the street last night so that I wouldn’t have to worry about them this morning.

The squirrels get into my trash barrels all the time, but they have never staged an attack while they were on the street. Until today that is.

The damage wasn’t bad, but one barrel was open and there was a small amount of trash scattered across the front yard. When I went outside to fix things I found two squirrels, three chipmunks and a handful of various birds checking out the wreckage.

Oh good, now the squirrels are cluing the rest of the wild kingdom into the buffet that is the crap we throw away. It’s like some perverse Disney cartoon.

Damn you, rodents. Fuck you, squirrels. We have foxes, bobcats, hawks, owls, and on one occasion a coyote living in the woods behind our house. None of those super predators eat squirrels? Come on, assholes. Control our rodent infestation!

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Rewrite Or Two Parter

I put lead guitars onto the song that got the vocals during car music this morning. All tracking is done on one song so barring any catastrophic failures I’ll have a song to send into RPM this month.

Before recording that lead track though I recorded the first thing to pop into my head when I picked up my new guitar tonight and wrote a whole song form around it.

You’d think that was a good thing, right? It would be if the first thing that popped into my head hadn’t been 95% the same as the chorus of the car music song. It’s 34 bpm slower, and the turn around in bars four and eight is different, though still similar. Otherwise it’s the same thing.

So what to do with it? Is it a rewrite? No… it’s part two of a two song suite. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Let’s go with that.

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Car Music Fail

I knew this was going to happen eventually, and today kinda became the day.

If you go back to all the car music posts from the last year or so, at some point I start talking about having signal flow problems. There are signal drop outs and extraneous noises and things that make takes unusable. Eventually the system I use for my personal Rolling Truck Stones Thing was going to fail. Today I only had two songs to work on and I spent a full hour on one of them, just trying to get the signal to hold together for eight or nine bars. It was so painful.

The frustration comes from not knowing where the breakdown is happening. What could it be?

  1. The microphone
  2. The connection between the mic and the mic cable
  3. The mic cable
  4. The connection between the mic cable and the USB interface
  5. The USB interface
  6. The connection between the USB interface and the USB cable
  7. The USB cable
  8. The connection between the USB cable and the USB to USB C adapter
  9. The USB to USB C adapter
  10. The connection between the USB to USB C adapter and the USB C port on the computer

Today’s issues happened in more than one USB C port, so I know it wasn’t the port. I also know it isn’t the sound card or GarageBand itself because both of those work perfectly when I’m at home and using a different USB interface. That rules out the tail end of the chain, but every other device or connection could be the culprit.

The next time I do this I am going to take a different mic, a different mic cable, a different USB cable, and a different USB adapter. If it still happens then I know the interface itself is the problem.

The upside is that I actually did get that one song finished. It probably sounds like dung, but it’s finished. So the trip was a success as far as the goal to record one song per month is concerned. It was a frustrating, painful fail as far as everything else was concerned.

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Hand-Me-Down

I’m pretty sure this is the second time I’ve received this particular set of Bang and Olufsen headphones from my wife. She gave them up in favor of something else, gave them to me, then decided she didn’t like the something else so I gave them back to her, and now they are getting old and she already has a pair she prefers, so I am taking them back again.

Are they the best headphones I’ve ever used? Probably not. Are they awesome? Absolutely!

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Rick and Morty Night

Today is Fathers Day. Did all the fathers out there have a good day? I hope so. It was a good day here but allow me to remind everyone that Stepfamily Day is September 16th.

Today is also important for another reason. Today is the premier of Rick and Morty Season Five. Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network at 11:00pm. I had to check and make sure that I can stream Cartoon Network using the FiOS app on my iPad, but I sure can. We’re about 2.5 hours away from the episode and I already have the stream running… just in case. We’re lucky there’s a Family Guy, you know?

Happy Fathers Day
Happy Rick and Morty Day

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