I was trying to memorize another verse of "Au bon vieux temps" (In the Good Old Days) by Boris Vian when I remembered that I'd washed my shorts yesterday and hung them out on the deck but forgot to bring them in in the evening when they were probably dry. During the wicked thunder storm last night it didn't occur to me that they were out there. I went out on the deck and my shorts were gone. I looked to see if they'd been blown off the deck and at first I didn't recognize the flat, black thing that was lying in the middle of O'Hara, but then I realized they were my shorts. I went down in my bare feet and got them. They were soaked and dirty but seemed intact. I'll need to wash them again today.
I decided to video record my song practice while audio recording it in Audacity. It didn't take as long to get Audacity started because I'd established the settings last night. But unlike Ableton in which I can turn off their monitor but still play the electric guitar through my speakers, in Audacity I can't hear myself without the monitor and consequently the delay. I tried singing a song with the delay but it just threw my timing off.
I dug up an old Apex 850 dynamic mic that I bought at a Long and McQuade sale about twenty five years ago. I've hardly ever used it but it has the three pronged jack and it fit into the interface where my guitar had been plugged. The cord is long enough so I can extend it to the doorway and hang it over my chin-up bar so it dangles in front of my amplifier that sits on a shelf between the living room and the kitchen. That way I was able to play the Kramer in real time and record it. When I listened to the recording at the end it sounded pretty good. I was able to use the distortion and the reverb from the amp when I needed it. There are a few things to tweak like sometimes the guitar was too quiet and sometimes my voice was too loud on some songs but I think that can be fixed with gain adjustments so I don't turn up the guitar volume too high in the room.
After having ruined all my recordings from this summer, this was pretty satisfying. In some ways that month and a half wasn't a waste because trying to record decent takes of my songs with lots of repetitions for a month and a half actually made it easier to play them for the new recordings and I made fewer mistakes this time. I haven't checked the video yet and after I do I might have to adjust the position of the camera.
Because of all the set-up that I had to do to switch to the amp, song practice ran for at least an extra half an hour. But now that I know how I'm going to do it, it shouldn't take as long next time I play the electric, which will be on Monday. I'll play the Martin on the weekend and that should be even quicker because I won't need the amp to hear myself play guitar.
I weighed 84.4 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I've been in the morning in four weeks.
I rewashed the shorts that the storm had blown into the road and I hung them out on the deck again.
At around 12:30 I walked over to the hardware store and bought four sheets of their coarsest sandpaper. Back at home I cut it in half and hooked a strip to the sanding block. I only had time to do a bit of sanding of the plywood on the floor before lunch.
I weighed 85.2 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back.
I weighed 84.4 kilos at 16:45.
I started chiseling the last big piece of slate for fossils. I only got a few bits of green veins of root. The last piece is now in six pieces.
I was caught up on my journal at 18:19.
I reviewed the video of this morning's song practice. The camera was tilted a little too high and so the whole guitar wasn't in the frame and the microphone was too low. The camera microphone picked up the guitar louder than my voice but on the audio recording the voice is louder than the guitar. There are certainly fewer mistakes on these songs than there were when I started in June. I don't know if there are any keepers from this set because of the look and because I have to settle into recording and playing again when I thought I was done. In some ways the electric sounds better in a video when I play it through my speakers but I can't do that without delay in Audacity. Tomorrow I play the acoustic and so it will be a more normal setup without the amp. On Monday and Tuesday I'll play the electric again and maybe I'll have a better feel for it.
In Movie Maker I synchronized the intro of "Sleep in the Snow" from the concert video with the intro from the studio audio. But then the concert video has me starting singing a split second sooner than the studio recording. I may have cut a bit of the concert intro to line them up again.
I finished scanning some colour negatives from October 1987 with mostly shots of my ex-girlfriend Brenda, some of them in the nude. Man was she ever gorgeous!
I grilled four souvlaki and had two with a potato and gravy while watching season 4, episodes 12 and 13 of Petticoat Junction.
In the first story there is a different young doctor than Doctor Don Bailey and they treat the character of Doctor Don Craig as if he was there all along. He announces that he's leaving the valley because there is not enough need for two doctors at Doc Stuart's office. Kate has the idea that if he stays he could be the house call doctor of the valley and be transported by the Cannonball. That is working out fine but then Homer Bedloe arrives, looking for an excuse to shut down the Cannonball. He calls up his secretary and gets her to find out if any infractions are being committed that would end the franchise and he is thrilled to learn that a train must make a complete run from one end of its line to the other in 24 hours. The thing is this schedule angle was something Bedloe did early in the series. Bedloe is riding the train and making notes of every stop and the amount of delay. When Bedloe goes outside the stopped train to stretch his legs Kate reads his notebook and realizes his plot. So rather than stop to treat patients she has the patients get on the train and be treated while it's rolling. They complete the run just in time and Bedloe's plot is foiled.
The second story is a Christmas episode but most of it uses footage from the very first Christmas story of the series. It only adds the character of Steve and the third Billie Joe. Bedloe tries to shut down the train for having Christmas decorations. Bedloe's boss Norman Curtis intervenes and saves them from Bedloe by forcing him to dress like Santa's helper and act jolly. In the original story he forced Bedloe to be Santa.
The third and final Billie Joe Bradley was played by Meredith MacRae, who was the daughter of musical film star Gordon MacRae and actor Sheila MacRae, who played the second version of Alice Kramden on the Honeymooners. At the age of 9 she made her first film appearance in By the Light of the Silvery Moon, starring her father. She was a regular as Sally Morrison on My Three Sons from 1963 to 1965. She was a semi-regular on What's My Line? and appeared on many other game shows. She co-starred in the movies Earthbound and The Census Taker. She was also a singer and cut two records on her own as well as two with The Girls of Petticoat Junction. She had a BA, was a journalist and a documentary producer. In the 1980s she hosted Mid-Morning Los Angeles and won a local Emmy in 1986 for her interviewing skills.
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