Jamming, shopping, and bribes

I’ve been a busy bee…some of it pretty creativity-oriented too!

I played the Poet and Patriot Irish Pub’s open mike this afternoon.  Being there is always a treat for me – it’s just such a fun, mellow environment.  A dear friend came from Alameda to see me play – not the first time he’s made the trek for me – and we chatted about getting *him* playing guitar at long last too.  I’ve also really enjoyed having Ted, who does the sound setup at the pub, jam along with me on a bass the last two times I’ve been there…he’s got some serious chops, and more importantly, a soul that just cries out for and through the music.  Wonderful to play with him.

The weighed-down feelings I’ve had the last few months seem like they’re starting to lift but I still really have to work to keep myself productive in general sometimes.  I found a surprisingly effective way to do that is to offer myself small bribes – er, incentives – to get things done.  So every now and then when I find myself in a royal case of the I-Don’t-Wannas, I offer myself a little incentive [meh, bribe] to get a small group of tasks done.  I’m not the sort of person who has – or even wants – a ton of stuff, so eBaying for something just because is a very rare treat, even if it’s very small…which means that I can convince myself to do a lot if it means I’ll get permission to raise my maximum bid on something interesting by fifty cents…the fact that it has to do with my music just makes the creative edge that much better!

Movement on ProTools

I wasn’t really planning on approaching this topic the day after getting back to California but it just kind of popped up…well, from what the folks at my laptop manufacturer tell me, ProTools’ new upgrade, 7.4, includes supporting Vista.  I actually wrote them an email asking before if they were planning on doing that but for whatever reason I never got a response…it seems strange to me because I’d think it would be easy enough to take ten seconds to write back, “get the 7.4 upgrade – it supports Vista…” but, well, it’s not my company, so realistically they might not function in the way I would imagine.

Anyway, what this means is I might just be closer to getting ProTools running on my laptop!  YAY!

Fly in the buttermilk

Okay, the good news is I have the laptop computer I’ve wanted for four years. I am really, really excited about this. I love it. I am SO happy to be sitting here typing away over – get this – a wireless broadband connection. I am REALLY happy about this.

So, plenty of buttermilk…yet I have to acknowledge the one little fly doing the backstroke on the top: it runs Vista, and this means I now have two computers and neither one of them is ProTools compatible. I’m not going to ruin the experience of having a wish of four years granted by freaking out about this, but realistically this is a problem and I have to figure out what to do about that. I can…

1. try – most likely in vain – to send back the ProTools software where I bought it, which would mean
   1. trying to get a different CBR program…which would involve still more time, money, energy, and confusion I can’t really afford, or…
   2. just planning on continue to kick it 20th century-style, which is stupid
2. have a different operating system put into this computer down the road – a heckuva thing to have to consider doing when I just uncrated it two hours ago
3. wait for ProTools to support Vista, which might never happen

Good thing this buttermilk is so tasty or else I’d be on eBay right now, shopping for a cannon to rid myself of the fly.

Even more frustrated

Last night I finally managed to drag out Ye Olde 6-string and play for an hour…which gave me the recording bug again. I decided I’d move on to the third step of installing ProTools…and realized I had NO CLUE what the manual was talking about. Due to illness and major life changes, my one-month free phone support allowance was already over by the time I contacted the company for the first time today. To get any more help over the phone I either have to pay $3/minute for the call or buy a $99 1-year phone support package. Cute.They understandingly let me have some support today anyway…which led me to find that I lack basic hardware that’s needed for this (M-Audio), need to update to a new service pack, don’t have enough RAM, and have an unsupported processor which means that even if I fixed everything else the thing might not work.

I’m hoping the new laptop I just got which is literally still sitting in the box will turn out to be ProTools compatible, otherwise I’m stuck with a $300 software package I can’t use, and I still can’t do recordings on my PC – I’ll have to keep on kickin’ it 20th-century style with my dang multitracker from high school!!!

One not-so-little gesture

I was so busy today – first sleeping until noon to catch up on two days’ sleep deprivation, and then working like a madwoman all day today – that NOTHING on the “want-to” side of my to-do list happened all day. I sent out job application materials, made a sign for an upcoming promotion, all kinds of things…but not one purely fun thing happened all day. Even while I was on the phone with a friend I was supervising my computer as it did its typical cockeyed printing jobs.

I looked at my to-do list a few minutes ago (it’s now almost 2am here) and said, “is there ANYTHING I can do to salvage my Saturday? To say that I got closer to something I want to do just for my own enjoyment somehow, in some concrete way?”

So I took the big plunge and ordered a CBR (computer-based recording) software package. Do I have the money for this? No. Will I ever have the money for this? Eventually but by then I’ll have missed out on a lot of opportunities to learn and use my creativity, and with all the hard work I’m doing I need to balance it with some industrial-strength play. Soon I will enter the 21st century as a recording artist – no more will I be dependent on the multitracker I got in high school to produce a recording, and no longer will I be restricted to a maximum of seven tracks on a song…the flexibility will be pretty amazing from what I understand. I’m looking forward to it.

A touch of silk

Well, I’ve got the collar tacked onto the marotte now and I’m realizing that the points aren’t going to have nearly the draping effect I’d envisioned. This is fine but I want to do something to achieve that effect, so I started thinking of something I could just put billowy little mounds of underneath the collar…ribbons? More cotton? No…it needs to be something a little floaty and translucent for contrast; there’s enough solid stuff on this item already that…ah!!! Silk scarves.

Thanks to the miracle of eBay, finding affordable silk pocket squares is not at all hard…except for one small thing. The dominant colors in this piece are blue, yellow, and orange. Blue pocket squares abound. Yellow pocket squares don’t abound but are nevertheless easy to locate. Orange pocket squares, however…no.

And so I found myself crawling eBay at 11:30pm when I should really have been moving on to other tasks and topics, trying to come up with the right search terms…I even left eBay (gasp!) to do some shopping elsewhere on the web, only to find that while yes, one could in fact find orange pocket squares, either the shipping cost three times as much as the scarf, or the squares themselves cost more than the rest of the materials for the project combined.

I eventually found that the cheapest way out that still yielded an appropriate result was to buy an amazingly bright necktie and pocket square set on eBay. The pocket square, being translucent, has a nice strong color that will be perfect for my project, but I had to laugh when I realized a tie existed in the solid version of that color. I mean, if you wore such a thing in public you would be blinding everyone who crossed your path! I have no idea what to do with the necktie, except for maybe keeping it in my car as a substitute for emergency flares, but anyway that isn’t the point – I scored a good strong orange pocket square, and even with the tie it was half the price of getting it alone anywhere else online.

So my next steps, then, are to finish attaching the collar, make the handle, add eyes and eyebrows to this bad boy, and, when the scarves all arrive, attach them to the underside of the collar.