Craziness

Last week Jen and I were talking about money.  We don’t have any.  We had planned a wedding that was going to cost more than we had the means to pay.  We were headed toward a lot of debt and probably a lifetime of working it off.

So we scrapped the entire wedding plan. 

We set a budget, based on a ton of research that Jen did… she’s wonderful, and figured out how long it would take us to save that amount, and then set the new wedding date for then.  May 30, 2009.  We replaced the hotel package that would have been great but was too expensive with a hall and a caterer that we can afford.  When the wedding is done there will be enough money left over for a major honeymoon too.  My brother, sister, and one of my best friends all did Alaskan cruise honeymoons.  We’re thinking about a cruise to some place warmer.

So far everyone has been perfectly understanding about the changes.  I still have to talk to my sister and her husband, and I feel like a right foul git for not having done that yet.  I also haven’t been to see their baby, my brilliant nephew Patrick who is 8 weeks old today, in a few weeks either.  We’ll be seeing them Sunday, so I can get my baby fix then. 

Changing the subject away from our wedding to a different wedding, my friends Larry and Nawal are getting married next month.  Larry has asked me to be co-best man along with his nephew Nick.  Nick is in high school, I think he’s 15 or 16 years old… do you think I can get him to do the toast?  In all seriousness, it’s an honor and a privledge. 

Changing subjects again, NHL training camps open up next week.  The Red Sox are in the thick of the pennant race (although losing two in a row to the (Devil) Rays put a small damper on my enthusiasm) but I am starting to really be ready for hockey.  I’m starting to jonez pretty bad.  Over the summer I made a firm commitment to not buy season tickets for the Lowell Devils again.  They have been too aweful for too long, and I have much bigger responsibilities now.  My time can be better spent doing other things.  Still, it didn’t take long for me to cave on that ideal and now Jen and I each have a 10 game package.  However, as the season gets closer with each day I start to wonder if 10 games are enough… or would 20 games be enough… Maybe 40 is just right?  Damn I am spineless sometimes.

Subject change:  I wrote a song over the weekend.  That makes one unfinished song from August and one unfinished song from September.  I’m on a roll!  All it cost me this time was my $900 lap top.  I bought a USB audio interface, the Lexicon Lambda, so that I could run out of my Mackie board and directly into my computer.  The Lambda included a copy of Steinberg’s Cubase recording software.  On Sunday I loaded the software and the drivers onto my lap top and plugged a mic into the interface and it worked!  I can do away with my outdated, obscelete 8-track now!  Happiness!  I shut it all down and went out to get dinner with the love of my life (hi Jen!) and came back to start playing.  I opened it all up again and tried to record 2 tracks of drum machine fun and Cubase couldn’t get the Lambda drivers to run.  Odd, thinks I.  I tried to see what would happen using Audacity as the recording software and it worked fine.  Great!  So I try to do a couple of overdubs and the lag time on Audacity was horrendous.  Totally unacceptable.  So on Monday I try to do some research and find a beta version of Audacity that gives you the ability to play with buffer sizes and what not to reduce the latency.  I load it on the laptop, check to see that it can talk to the Lambda, and it looks good.  I went and had dinner with the love of my life (hi Jen!) and then came back to it a couple of hours later.  Not only would Audacity not find the Lambda drivers, but the lap top crashed.  I reboot, and Windows wouldn’t launch.  You know Windows, right?  The operating system?  I do a hard shut down and reboot and it goes through all sorts of disc checks and what not and Windows finally opens.  2-3 minutes later I get the Vista version of the blue screen of death.  (a blue screen with some core dump looking information displaing for less than a second followed by shut down.)  Repeat this 100 times and you see how I spent my Monday night.  On Tuesday I tried to install XP over Vista and it says it can’t find a hard disc.  I reboot Vista again and in the 2 minutes before the crash it can see the hard disc clearly.  Fuck Microsoft, says I, and I try to install Ubuntu… and the CD just spins and spins and nothing gets loaded.  My lap top needs help.  I’ll figure it out though, I know I will.  In the mean time I need to go back to my 8-track.  I’ll live.

Another subject change:  I am quickly becoming obsessed with Firefox add ons.  I open up the list and just browse over everything.  So many things are cool.  So many things are totally useless.  I still think they’re cool.  It comes from taking Google Chrome for a test drive last week.  I like the look of Chrome.  It’s very simple and basic and not too busy or cluttered.  I really like that.  Browsers should be simple.  Still… it’s no Firefox.  There are a bunch of things that Chrome can’t do yet.  The big example so far is that it fails to do almost anything on mlb.com.  All of the links written in javascript fail.  So Firefox remains the first choice based on that alone… but if I customize the bejeezus out of it I can make it that much more of my first choice.  So add ons are added ad nausium. 

Subject Change:  18 days until Mary’s due date.  The date that hopefully see me becoming and uncle for the second time.  That’s right, it’s all about me.  (just kidding John and Mary)

Subject Change:  I know there is something else that I was going to add to this confused, bloated, overly long and disjointed post… but I can’t remember what it was.

Musical Subject Change:  Over the weekend we were hit by the remnamts of hurricane hannah.  That put Robin Trower’s song “Hannah” into my head for a while.  That in turn lead me to give a few of his old records a spin.  That in turn lead me to dust of some old Procol Harem records he played on too.  I’ve been pretty firmly stuck on the Procol ever since.  I haven’t listened to anything by that band for about 700 years, but after giving what I had a listen with much older ears I still love it all.  Check out the albums A Salty Dog and Home.  Trower’s guitar playing won’t dazzle you like it might on his first few solo records, but it’s still pretty good at times.  The stars of the show are definitely Gary Booker and Keith Reid.  I liked how they gave Keith Reid full band member status even though he is not a musician.  He wrote all of their lyrics.  Sure he never recorded anything, and he never had to tour or anything like that (did he tour anyway?  I don’t know), but he is as integral a part of the band as anyone else.  A final Procol Harem note… a message to Matthew Fisher.  Dude.  You didn’t write “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”  Face it.  You played the organ, and what you played is fantastic.  You deserve all the credit in the world for making it a hit (even though what you played on the organ was stolen… you have to admit that too) but you didn’t write the damn song.  Just deal with it man. 

Okay, that’ll do it for now.

Good day.