Category: Generic

Weeding the Gutters

We had a tree growing in our rain gutter.

No, really. It was about three feet tall and branching out like crazy. We had a debate in the house over what to do with it. I was all for letting it grow to its full potential and provide us with extra shade in the front yard on hot summer days.

How’d you think that flew?

So today I had to buy a ladder so that I could get up to the gutters to pull out the four foot tall oak tree thriving on top of our house. I went with an eight foot step ladder because it would fit in my father’s van which we are borrowing while our CRV is repaired after last week’s hit and run (more like hit just barely hard enough to do a little damage and slowly drive away). Anything larger (and safer) wouldn’t have fit. I got some bungie chords too, on the off chance it stuck out enough to keep the door from closing. It didn’t.

When I got home from Lowes I hid in the corner of the living room in the hopes that my beloved wife would think that just buying a ladder was enough and that the five foot tall tree sprouting out of our house would get scared and magically relocate itself.

How’d you think that flew?

So out I go. Up the ladder. Boy there sure are a lot of leaves in the gutter. Now I want to get one of those iRobot rain gutter cleaners. How much ass would that kick? Anyway. There were a few weeds growing out of the decaying leaves. I gave ’em a yank and dropped them onto the ground, ever hopeful that I would hit a squirrel. No luck. Eventually I got the six foot tall tree. I had an axe and a two person saw. Actually, I was wearing a checkered flannel lumberjack/grunge rocker shirt just for luck.

It wasn’t a seven foot tree. It was a weed. About 18 inches tall.

Now it’s a dead weed.

Success! Who’s the rooftop gardening king, babie??

This Day in History

In the wee hours of the morning 37 years ago today, my father woke up little six year old me and my nine year old sister to give us some news. Mom had the baby. We had a little brother and his name was John.

That’s nice, we said. Then we rolled over and went back to sleep.

No offense, John.

Happy 37th birthday to my baby brother! Everyone wish him a good one.

Note: I don’t actually remember how we reacted. Logic dictates it was probably sleepily. I don’t think we got out of bed. I think we waited until the sun came up to go and meet the new addition to the family.

And Again, Yet Another New Song

Not sure about the mix for this one. My left ear hears much better than my right, and I do all of my work with headphones. Sometimes when I have two doubled tracks split left/right I end up having a hard time keeping them balanced. I over compensate one way or another and then I end up throwing all the other tracks out of whack as well. That might have happened here.

Overall I kinda like this one, but as with the last song I uploaded the cutting and pasting feels really choppy. Bad punches all around. The lyrics are about my 1997 decision to go back to college which, at least for a while, turned into a kind of career for me.

New Song

This is the 28th finished song for 50/90. I hope to have #29 posted before I sleep tonight. At that point I’ll be out of mixable songs until I can sneak in some vocal time next week.

Progress, kids.

Two New 50/90 Songs

Here’s the first one…

There’s a lot of weirdness going on here.

First, King’s X has a song on their Dogman album called “Go to Hell”. It’s 30 seconds long and it’s balls to the wall and just when you start to feel the groove it ends. I thought I might try something like that. Fast, loud, and over before it goes anywhere. That didn’t end up happening with this song, but that was one of the ideas.

Second, GarageBand for iOS doesn’t have a lot of options as far as time signatures go. I wanted to do something in an unusual time, but I was sitting in a doctor’s office waiting for my mother’s appointment to end and I didn’t have my MacBook on me. So I just did some math. Eight bars of 6/4 time is the same number of beats as 12 bars in 4/4. So I set the segment to 12 bars of four and just played something that felt like 6. It worked. Hooray. Then I tried to replace the original drums using the OSX GarageBand’s Drummer function. All the fills were in the wrong place. I spent 3 minutes messing with it before deciding to just use the original drums. I did change the sounds though.

Third, as 50/90 approaches the end of the second month, lyrics are getting hard to come by. Even when I do have a subject to write about they are just hard to put together. I had an idea for forcing inspiration. I would look up old New England folklore and write lyrics based on those stories. That song is my first attempt. The story is about a guy who, backed with some zombie muscle, kidnapped his crush from her wedding. Not before killing the groom, of course. It’s a nice family friendly tale.

Here’s a link to the story.

And now here is the second song…

Last month I did a bad instrumental thing inspired by the quiet little instrumental breaks in the last couple of Pink Floyd records. I don’t like the way it came out, but I did decide right away I’d try something similar again before 50/90 ended.

Well, here it is. Break Time pt2 is also Floydish, only this time I was thinking Obscured by Clouds instead of Division Bell. I like this one better, but it’s still more or less a throw away.

Bikes

I’m working from home today and the kids are here with me.  It’s the first time all of the schedules have worked out this way and wouldn’t you know it, it’s the last Thursday of their summer vacation.

They spent most of the day doing what most kids prefer doing during summer vacation:  They sat on the couch watching Disney Channel On-Demand.  They may have snuck in a Disney movie on Netflix too.  Not sure about that.

Anyway, round about 3:30 (half an hour ago) they decided to go for a bike ride.  Excellent.  They both have two year old brand new bikes that if they have been used more than twice (hence my calling them two years old AND brand new) I’ll eat my hat.  I told them to check for flat tires, knowing full well that there would be four of them, and that there is a bike pump out there with their helmets.  Twenty minutes later they come in and tell me that they can’t figure out the pump. 

The pump is as simple as a bike pump can be.  Put the nozzle on, clamp it down, pump, take the nozzle off.  They couldn’t figure it out.  I think they may have been trying to put the nozzle over the air tube’s cap.  I demonstrated and came back inside.  10 minutes later I get called out again.  They still can’t figure it out.  When they take the pump off of one of the tires it goes flat again.  I did it for them, and I think there was a leak in there somewhere, but it was really just a matter of pulling the two pieces apart quickly and putting the cap on. 

My first thought through all of this was, these are the two smartest kids I’ve ever met (and I grew up with a lot of really, really smart kids) and they can’t figure this out?  Has Disney Channel melted their brains?

No, that can’t be it.  Next I started trying to think of how I learned to use a bike pump.  Someone must have demo’d it to me at some point.  But who?  And when?  And how?

There are two morals to this story.  One is to stop being an asshole and taking for granted that the kids know everything.  They know a ton of stuff about a ton of stuff, but they don’t know everything, and just because you were bike riding 10 hours a day when you were eight years old doesn’t mean that two genius level kids who barely ever ride bikes will know what you knew.

The second moral is… You’re getting old and forgetting stuff.  Stop doing that!

Soundcloud Can Bite Me

So Soundcloud, is that an ad I see in my stream today? Sure, it looks like a “promoted” song, but it’s an artist I don’t follow and have less than zero interest in yet somehow there it is on the top of my stream. If it looks like a commercial, sounds like a commercial, and reeks like a commercial, then it’s a commercial.

First you gave outside companies the ability to remove songs from our accounts without notice. Now you put commercials into our streams.

This is what I use Soundcloud for… When I’m recording something I upload it so I can listen to it in the car to see if the mix sucks. When things are finished they go to alonetone where they belong. Soundcloud’s service has never been that good. I only used it because it’s free and it lets me not muck up alonetone or iTunes Match. Now even the free account costs too much.

Bite me, Soundcloud.