dwenius

Necessary Toys, or, and now for something completely FZZZZAP.

2011-10-30T03:54:58Z

At some point here I will post a gallery of pix of the garage destruction/remodel. For the purpose of this post, all you need to know is that 1) for many weeks now there have been anywhere from 2-15 unprotected open pathways between the great outdoors and the comfy indoors, and 2) one of the less-reported but painfully obvious after-effects of Tropical Storm Irene in VT was a late hatch of a particularly active, large, hardy bunch of mosquitos.

So in brief, we've been fighting off the bloodsucking fiends for what seems like ages now. But thanks to our geothermal contractor, I now have a remedy that can be weilded from the comfort of my desk, which happens to be nearest to the source of most of the infiltrations.

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It's always something

2011-10-29T17:48:21Z

The downstairs bathroom, the one that is due to be ripped out and replaced by the new one in the mudroom sometime in the next 3 weeks, sprung a leak this morning. Luckily the water dripped straight down the joists to the basement right into the sump well. Unluckily there was some slop to the dripline and one of our small, lovely persian rugs got wet. I shop-vac'd the hell out of it, hung it to dry, started a fire upstairs and turned on the goethermal system even though the house is warm. Well-circulated super-dry stove air ought to save the rug.

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Unfinished business

2011-10-26T04:45:53Z

I know I keep saying this, but: I can't do anything these days without running into the memory of Brett. Search email, he's in the results list; same for chat logs. Clean off desk, here's a postcard of one of his artworks. Sort pictures, duh, there he is. Except he's not. It's going to be like this for a long time, I get that, but I would like to move further down towards the "Acceptance" part of the Kubler-Ross model just about any old time now, please.

Today's example: I clicked over to SoundCloud to find an example track to test out shortcode-embeds on the blog [Note to LJ and DW mirror-readers; I have no idea if this will work for you, apologies in advance]. As soon as I log in, there is Brett peering at me from the sidebar with a ridiculous hat and bug-eyed DJ goggles. And yes, of course I clicked, and I listened, and I wept. So my example track is the ~9 minute collaboration below, "Wednesday."

These were the first sounds to come out of the studio when Brett and re-built it in 2009, after the water-heater flood and remodeling in the El Cerrito house. We were just noodling around testing out all the routing and for once, hit record. Brett is playing the Waldorf Q and I am on guitar; the clean guitar part and a dry Q part were laid down in the first take. Then we came back in and Brett played with the FX on the synth track while I overdubbed the fuzzy e-bow line. So this is composed solely of first takes. It's not perfect; we lost the plot partway through because of some now-forgotten distraction and after that point it's a little less together all around, but I am very happy with the first few minutes. Brett took it home and did some post-processing to create this final version; if you listen closely, you can hear him working pretty hard to "fix it in the mix"

As far as I can remember, this is the only piece of music we ever put to tape together. I have plenty of regrets about my life but that's at the top of the list. I have some of Brett's studio gear here with me now, and on that gear there are patterns, sequences, and samples. I have unfinished business to attend to, which is part of the reason for the changes I'm making in how I spend my time. More later, for certain.

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Blunderstorm! Cascading posts from WP to LJ and DW (ASAP or GTFO)

2011-10-21T22:07:44Z

This is a test of the post-mirroring system. This is only a test. LJ and DW *should* see this post with appropriate footers, thanks to the JournalPress plugin. Fingers crossed…

Ok, took a couple tries to get DW to cooperate, but we have achieved blog-saturation!

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Tomorrow: 8 day work trip. Today, more fishing.

2010-08-02T02:49:03Z

After dinner tonight I took the canoe out and caught 3 smallmouth bass (plus a perch). All of the bass were jumpers. It would have been 5 but two of them threw the hook in mid air. None of them big enough to keep. But still, that's my idea of a perfect way to watch a sunset :)

Fishing magazines, catalogs, and tournaments go all googly eyed for largemouth bass, but for my money there's no better fighting fish in fresh water than a smallmouth that jumps more than twice its length out of the water.

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