Category: Generic

Bad Sleep

I’d say I’ve been having lots of bad sleep lately, but that implies I’ve had lots of sleep.

I’ve been staying up too late and getting up too early and I’m feeling it.  I am tired.  So very tired.  I’m still using the CPAP machine every night, and still wearing my Apple Watch so I can have some numbers to analyze each morning.  The numbers aren’t very good.  Not enough restful sleep, too high a heart rate, too screwy a sleep schedule, too many interruptions.  The usual.

There is one additional sticking point right now.  My nose.  More specifically, the huge pimple at the very top of my nose, right between my eyes.  It doesn’t bother me at all when I wear my glasses, but when I put the CPAP mask on it hurts.  It also makes the mask seal feel a little weak and I seem to be leaking air more often than usual.  Mostly it just hurts and it either makes it harder to fall asleep or it wakes me up.  Stupid zit.

I have a bunch of non-music things to do this weekend that will likely throw off my February routine.  I am kinda hoping I can embrace that disruption a little bit and allow myself more sleep.  It probably won’t happen, but I’ll try.  It’s also a long weekend so it’s a safe bet I’ll be driving to some semi-secluded location to record some vocals while sitting in the car.  I was able to pick one off this morning before work but it took a long time.  Much longer than it usually takes me to vomit up a vocal idea.  Whatever the difficulties, the song I worked on today is on the short list to become track one once everything is finished.  I also may have put together potential album covers this morning.

Here’s to a good night sleep and getting the vocals right in one take.

Facebook Memories

This picture popped up in my Facebook Memories today. Me and Kevin In the proto-Lizardfish days of 2012.

Look at how few pedals I had. Isn’t that cute? Wah, volume, a tuner, and the amp’s channel switch. It was so widdle.

Mother Nature Hates Me

I just don’t get it.  Why does Mother Nature hate me so much?

I only telecommute one day each week, and I need the time between Jen and Harry leaving for work and school and me needing to punch into work to work on vocal tracks for RPM.  I seriously bank on that time to get through a lot of what I need to get done.  It’s really important.

Last week was the first Thursday in February and it snowed.  Harry had a snow day.  No singing on mic for me.  Today is the second Thursday in February and guess what… it snowed again.  We didn’t get a whole lot but it was enough for him to get a two hour delay.

What the actual….

It’s Mother Nature screwing with me, isn’t it.  This is all about me.  Two Thursdays, two snow storms.  I hate snow!  I really need my Thursday mornings, damn it.  Knock it off!

At least today I was able to get a little recording in during lunch.  Two more songs done, both of which had been started earlier in the week.  I’ve got that going for me at least.

Untitled

Sax Continued

Okay so tonight’s recording-in-my-bedroom session has answered two important questions.

  1. Can I still play the saxophone?
    The answer to this question is yes.  I can still play the saxophone.
  2. Can I still play the saxophone well?
    The answer to this question is an emphatic, hilarious, no.  I cannot still play the saxophone well.

I can still improvise on a blues scale in C though.  It’s like riding a bike.  Totally second nature.  It took a little more time to get acclimated to improvising on a blues scale in F, but I blundered my way through that one as well.

 Untitled

I think I may have answered another question too. I mentioned in a previous post today that my computer fell off my desk this morning. I had no idea how that could have happened. Then when I came back to the office after my little recording-in-my-bedroom session tonight I saw this:

Untitled

Ms Patches sitting pretty, shamelessly right in the middle of the laptop stand. I think Scotland Yard has itself a chief suspect in this case. Elementary, my dear Patches.

Sax

I posted something on the RPM Challenge site last night that included a passing mention of me needing to record some saxophone.  Someone commented asking if I played.  I wrote a reply and I figured I would add it here for posterity… or not, whatever.  I’m posting it.  Sheesh, the judgmentaling going on.

Sax was my first instrument. From 89-91 I was a music major in college and sax was the instrument that got me in.

When I started playing guitar in high school though it took over all of my musical interest. Every now and then I feel a need to re-establish my sax skills and I’m feeling that right now in a big way. I don’t think I’ve played at all since… 2013? Maybe?

The biggest hurdle is going to be stamina. The muscles in my jaw are not ready for me to start playing again and I expect I’ll get a solid five minutes before I’ll have to stop and rest for a while. I’m hoping I can play a little and then rest a little and repeat until I finish everything.

It’s going to take a while and it’s going to sound bad, mostly, but I kinda need to do it.

Also… I don’t own a tenor sax. I only have an alto. As saxophones go, tenor is the shit. Alto is meh. I need to get my hands on a tenor.

I really just wanted an excuse to use blockquote tags.

Remote Control

Check it out, I have been using the Logic Remote iPad app as a… ya know… remote.  I’ve only ever used it as a midi controller to add midi instruments to GarageBand files, but over the last few days I’ve been using it as a remote control while recording guitar parts.

When I put together my workspace I put the computer on one side of the room and the pedal board on the other.  I picked up an extension chord for my headphones, which allowed me to step on pedals while the tape was rolling, but it was the remote that let me stand by the pedals the whole time I’ve been working.

Well, most of it.  I can’t select regions from the remote (can’t I?) and I can’t set up loops (can’t I?) but it does everything else I need to do.  The best part??  It actually works!  The midi controller functionality is a mess (though it’s infinitely better than it used to be) but the remote control works!

Untitled

I picked off a vocal this morning, wrote a new song and recorded guitars for it tonight, and recorded the guitars for the only remaining pre-existing song too. I’m up to 14 songs, all with rhythm guitars done (the new song from tonight still needs a bass guitar part though, don’t forget!), and two of them have vocals too.

I have to have all the tracking done before vacation. Will I pull it off??

I think so but I’m starting to feel the crunch. The vocals are the logjam, I have to keep plugging away at them. Two down, 12 to go!

Oh yeah… and saxophone.  Argh!

I Didn’t Think of That

Given that last season the Boston Red Sox were a painful disappointment, and that this past off season has seen them lose their President, their manager (in one of the biggest cheating scandals in league history) and their best player (to the friggin’ Dodgers in what is effectively an embarrassingly awful preemptive salary dump), you can probably forgive me for not being fully up to date on the day to day goings on in Red Sox Nation.

It turns out that today is the day that pitchers and catchers report for Spring Training, with the first practice scheduled for tomorrow.  We don’t have a manager, and we don’t have a Mookie, but it’s still nice to know that the official kick off to the 2020 season is here.

As I was reading a headline that mentioned the big news (as opposed to yesterday’s big news about the finalizing of the trade with the friggin’ Dodgers) I was struck by a revelation.  Light dawned on Marblehead, as the saying goes…..

I am going to be in Florida during Spring Training.

Oh.  My.  God.  After 40+ years of die hard Red Sox fandom, I will, for the first time ever, be in Florida during Spring Training.  Now we’re staying at a Disney resort so we won’t be renting a car, but maybe it’s worth researching a way to see if we could day trip down to Jet Blue park and catch a game.

Then reality set in.  I live in Massachusetts.  Massachusetts is a little tiny state.  You can pretty much drive from one end to the other in a couple of hours or so.  Florida isn’t a huge state, but it’s bigger than MA.  How much bigger though?  I went to Google Maps and looked up driving directions from Disney World to Jet Blue Park.  It’s about three hours.  It’s almost, but not quite, the same distance as driving from Fenway Park to Yankees Stadium.

The dream died then and there, but not before a question drifted through my tiny brain:

How much would an Uber from Orlando to Fort Meyers cost me?

Nope.  Nope.  Nope.  Spring Training Baseball Dreams Shattered.  I’ll just have to settle for hanging out with The Mouse.