Two Cats

I took a picture of just Lily too but when I pulled it off of the camera and onto the computer it was a little too blurry to keep. Sorry, Lils.

Coincidence? I Don’t Think So

The RPM Challenge ends on February 28th. The very next day, March 1st, The Mandalorian and our boy Grogu aka Baby Yoda return for season three.

Coincidence?

I don’t think so.

Car Music: 2023 Edition

I did it today. I went out and recorded some vocal tracks. Three songs. I got out of bed around 5:40, did my exercise for the day from 6:00-6:40, jumped into the car a few minutes before 7:00, drove to the movie theater parking lot, and recorded vocals for three songs. I was hoping to get to more, but I wanted to get home in time to shower and have breakfast before work.

I did song #’s 1, 2, and 4. I skipped #3 because I hate it more than all of the others and therefore have not written lyrics or melody yet. I still have four songs that are ready to sing, so there should be another car music tomorrow.

There was a new gear hiccup. Isn’t there always? I started getting lag. Where the hell did that come from? I’ve been doing this process for YEARS now and I have never once had an issue with lag. It started mid-way through the first song. I saved everything, killed off the Garageband session, restarted it, and everything was fine. It happened on the second song too and the same steps cleared it. It didn’t happen again. It’s yet another thing that can go wrong these days that never went wrong before. Annoying, but not debilitating.

Want to see my studio? How’s it look…

Nice, huh?

So tomorrow I hope to do more car music. Wednesday I won’t be able to because Wednesday is a work-from-the-office day and I won’t have time. Thursday and Friday… one of those two days I need to go to Lowell General Hospital and get some labs done. They open at 5:00am, so maybe I can do that and then do car music for an hour, and then do my exercise after work? The faux jogging (“yogging”) is currently taking about 40 minutes. I think I can hack that after work once.

I am up to 12 songs now. Remember when I used to do FAWM and my goal was 14 songs? Maybe my goal is once again to get to 14 songs. I know there’s one I want to drop before I submit the project to the RPM Challenge folks, 14 songs just gives me more options. Adding two more songs will also give me more guitar playing that can act as a warm up before I start recording leads… now that I have three songs that are ready for leads.

We’ll see how it goes. Shit loads of work left to do and only eight days to do it. I’m not panicking yet, but I am gettin’ there.

2023 RPM Challenge – Day 19 of 28

Again, posted to tumblr:

I failed to record any vocals today. I’ll try again tomorrow. I did write lyrics to two more songs (I have seven now) and I added two more songs, complete with rhythm guitars. One of the new songs is in 11/8 time, which is a first for this prog nerd.

Vocals in the car in the morning or die trying. Not literally, or course. We buried my mother last Tuesday, I don’t even want to think about death for a while.

And now for the obligatory Les Paul pics:

So the continuous auto focus zeroed in on the mic stand. Okay.

Florida Recap Post – The Tenth

It occurred to me today that I still haven’t finished with the Florida vacation picture posts. All that’s left is the last day at Hollywood Studios, the drive home, which I probably won’t write a post for, and all of the film. Do I want to do one recap post with just film shots or do I want to keep sharing them one at a time via the other page? I haven’t decided yet.

I still haven’t done the firmware update on my shiny new Z5, or Z 5, or whatever. I made some chicken for lunch, put on the two most recent episodes of The Last of Us (episodes four and five are pretty much a two-parter, right?) and that’s me procrastinating.

Anyway, here’s Hollywood Studios from January 11, 2023….

Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway is now my fourth favorite Hollywood Studios ride, and fifth favorite Disney World ride over all.*

X-Wing. If I had to pick one ship from Star Wars as my personal ride, it would be an X-Wing

*My top five Disney World rides:

Rise of the Resistance
Toy Story Mania
Splash Mountain
Smugglers Run
Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway

Cemetery Ornaments

Jen and I visited my mother’s grave today. There’s no grave marker yet. Well, there is but it’s just a piece of paper in a plastic holder. There’s no permanent stone yet. There also isn’t any grass, which is a little disturbing, but not really.

At the funeral service, I noticed a lot of decorations on the trees near her grave. I took this for my photo-a-day thing on 2/14:

See the Christmas ornaments? There were things like that all over the place. While we were there today I took a few more pictures.

So is this a thing? I don’t know if I’ve ever seen stuff like this decorating a cemetery before. Sure, I’ve seen things left on headstones and that sort of thing, but never in the trees. I kinda like it. There may be Christmas ornaments from me in these trees’ futures.

Another trend that I am not really fond of us having images engraved into headstones. Specifically, photos of the deceased. That creeped me out a little. When my time comes, please don’t engrave my picture into my headstone. Thank you very much.

Okay, I am going to make myself a little lunch now. Eventually I am going to put my nose to the musical grindstone and write some lyrics and record some guitars. Before that though, I think I am going to try to figure out how to load a firmware update into my new camera. I’m also starting to tag things differently both here and on Flickr. I’ve been tagging the new camera as “Z5”, but everywhere I look I am seeing Nikon list it as “Z 5”, with a space in the middle. I’ll do both for now. Wish me luck on the firmware thing. This is a new one for ol’ Robbie.

Cats

The Pair of Them

More Guitars

My fingers are killing me.

I took the four songs that I had recorded on Wednesday using an amp sim and redid them using a real amp. Tube amps, babie. You can’t beat ’em.

I also played with my new camera. I used the self timer and continuous autofocus to see if I could get a selfie while playing… because I am a content whore, don’tcha know.