Pacemaker

Ah!  Now between classes and wrapping up most of the current freelance work I have on my plate, I should have the mental energy to turn in a few Ramblers in the next couple of weeks.  I'm not sure exactly WHAT I'll be writing about, since my brain still has the needle hovering just above 'E,' but if the past is any guide, just the physical act of writing will get some ideas flowing.  And I promise they won't all be the Rambler about Rambling kind.

Other little updates:

The Yarn Barn: I've in fact finished painting the Yarn Barn a few weeks back, and successfully mounted it on the wall in Yesenia's creative space (not the hell sure what we call that room, these days...), but I realized after a couple of weeks that a) the colors I chose to harmonize with the walls in the room were harmonizing too well, to the point that the barn was kind of camouflaged, and b) although I had hung it quite stably, I found that sitting underneath it was giving me deep anxiety.  Putting a and b together, I opted to paint the wall an accent color and to add further (mostly token) support to the bottom edge. The wall has been painted (sort of a mud color, really) and the new 'feet' have also been painted, so all that's left to do is attach the feet, drill holes for them and rehang the barn.  So that should be done this week.. that deadline was in no way prompted by Yesenia's comment that it was turning into another half-finished project.  Being exiled from her creative space is taking quite a toll, and no number of warm baths seems to take that edge off.

Albums: Okay, so there are two albums mostly in the can, and have been mostly in the can for the last year or so.  What's the hold up?  The hold up is that my original plans for bringing in players and singers to respectively handle the guitar solos and backing vocals have mostly come to naught.  I've always had problems with guitar players (a joke that ran so thin during my Copper Man days that I started to bitterly think of it as a riff on Spinal Tap's drummers), but the fact that I've found it easier to get two excellent drummers, a killer organ player, great trumpet work and even a bagpipe solo with minimal fuss while still not being able to lock down a single guitar solo is a scenario that's depressingly familiar.

Hopefully, this is going to change pretty soon.  Backing vocals are the first down, and I've rethought how to approach them from my original conception of a uniform all-male team (Ansley and Bran), recording together in a loose, CSN style.  Since there are two albums, it'll now be broken down to two male singers recorded at separate times for the first album, and a mix of whichever female singers I can round up for the second album, which is helpfully already titled Women in Prison, so there's at least some nice thematic unity there.

Guitar, I don't want to curse, ala PCMA irony gods style.  I'll tell y'all when there's something in the can, and not a minute before.

And after all of this recording is done?  Then what?

I'll get back to you on that...

D.

App

So, my MacBook is in the shop.  Again.  And so is my car - basically, I'm expecting to wake up in a tub full of ice, missing a kidney next.  Any day now.

But I digress.  About five minutes ago, totally at random, I decided to see if there was a Blogger app in the App Store.  And there was.  So it had now been downloaded and is what I'm typing this on.  How's that for timely?

Even without benefit of app, I expect the Rambler to pick up steam in the next couple of weeks - I don't think I have 'seasonal affected mood disorder', or anything like that, but February made me pretty much not want to do anything that required me to be awake and thinking at the same time.  

So: let's see what Spring has in store.  I welcome it with anticipation and iPhone in hand.

D.

March Marches On

You may note that the Rambler has been taking a time out for the last few weeks - this is not-coincidentally related to the fact that my web programming classes resumed in early February.  Somehow, these classes seem to take over my life, even though they're only two nights a week and I'm not paying that close attention, this time around (as my grasp of the material shows).

The classes in this round are Advanced CSS and PHP.  I get the former more than the latter, and learning CSS top to bottom is really one of the two main reasons I'm in the program in the first place. The second reason being Javascript, which I'm starting to dread.  I'm dreading it mostly because it's a language pretty similar to PHP, which means there's actual programming involved, and that's where my ability to parse the internal logic of the code breaks down.

So, expect a number of intermittent posts that consist primarily of me whinging about all this.  I apologize in advance.  I'll at least try to keep the despair entertaining.

D.