The Cook County soda tax has been placed on hold by a local judge. The next act in our morality play is now proceeding as usual, as the Cook County government is now issuing dire warnings about the draconian cuts that will be required if this relatively small in the whole budgetary scheme amount of money isn't available.

This includes, of course, a fifteen percent cut in personnel for the Cook County Police, because the first thing that they always threaten to cut is the police. I'm sure they'd threaten to cut the fire department too, except that Cook County doesn't seem to have a fire department to cut, based on my brief Google search. That's all controlled by various municipalities and townships. Well, you threaten where you can...

In any case, I am old enough to remember Tom Lehrer. For those of you who don't, here's the original. And the altered lyrics follow:
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It has been extraordinarily busy here for the last few months. It was thus that we found ourselves coming up on the end of the school year and having not yet written a song for Katie's teacher, Mrs. Sharko. We knew what we wanted to write, but actually putting pen to paper was being challenging. We had had discussion on the subject with Katie and Julie. We had nothing actually written down.

And then on Thursday night, I started my vacation.

And at 3 AM I woke up Gretchen and rapped out a verse to her.

"Can I go back to sleep now?"

"Yes. Yes, you can."

Not much later, but much more awake, we managed to finish pulling everything together. While performing the song as a rap was a possibility, setting a tune to it was going to be a better choice. :)

And today, Katie was able to take the recording of the song to Mrs. Sharko, who likes it.

It is only deadline that would get me to record something with this case of bronchitis... :)

Anyway, here are the lyrics:
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I got back from Marcon stupidly late and then plunged back into work today.

Work is being very cold and wet...

If I can get the van packed, I can be on my way to Marcon.

Sadly, I don't think that will be accomplished before the next meeting.

There is nothing like preparing to go to a con and realizing that none of the electronics for the dealer table have been charged recently. Nor have I actually tried pairing the Square readers with the new phone.

I could set up the pairing, of course, but that would require that the readers be charged.

*gleep*

Marcon is coming up shortly and I will be driving that way soon.

The question is: Can I finish everything that needs to be done before I leave town?

Magic 8-Ball says: Outlook cloudy. Ask again later.

It has been a complex day.

The insurance adjuster was our early this morning to look at the wind damage from the storm last month. The result of this is that we'll be replacing the roof, which is, overall, a good thing. By the time we were done sorting all of that out, it was nearly noon.

A bit later, Gretchen and I went out for lunch. Shortly thereafter, it was time to pick up the girls from school. Gretchen had to take Ruby to the vet for a checkup, Julie having decided to join her. I figured I would go down into the basement and try recording a vocal track. I wasn't entirely happy with the first try, so I did it again. And as I sat down to listen to it, the power went off.

Oh, good.

Gretchen had just come home to take the girls out for ice cream and I decided the better part of valor was to join them. While driving around, I called ComEd and discovered that they thought the power would be out for a couple of hours, so I suggested dinner. (Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first. Or something like that.)

We eventually arrived home after dinner to discover that the power was back on. This was followed by a game of Apples to Apples by candlelight, because Katie and Julie had wanted to use the candles while the power was out. After this, I spent some time following the Cardinals game on MLB Tonight.

And finally, I went back down to the studio. I started up Cubase, loaded up the project, and discovered that the reverbs wouldn't load due to an iLok problem. A reboot didn't fix it, so I had to reinstall the iLok software. Once that was done, I started up Cubase and found that the last recording had vanished into the ether. *sigh*

I also discovered that Cubase had dropped a maintenance upgrade yesterday. When you install an upgrade like that, all of the plugins get verified the next time the software is loaded, a process that takes far too long. So I downloaded the upgrade, installed it, and launched Cubase so that the plugins verification would be done the next time I was ready to use it.

It has been that sort of day, I suppose.

Day two of vacation back at home and I'm making some progress on an assortment of projects.

I would be making more progress, I suspect, if I hadn't pulled a muscle in my upper right arm. I have a nice little knot up there that hurts a lot when I do the wrong thing.

But it's getting better. :)

We are home from FilkONtario and really, really tired. The trip took a bit longer than we'd expected, despite excellent weather. The big glitch was a wreck that happened on the 401 while we were stopped at one of the enRoutes. Traffic was massively backed up, as the wreck forced traffic into a single lane on the shoulder. Given that they were just finishing cleaning it up as we passed by the scene of the accident, it's entirely possible that we would have been there when the accident was happening if we hadn't stopped, so the stop looked better and better, all things considered.

I had a good time at the con, but traveling long distances with the girls is being challenging. We need to figure this out.

Of course, we have a year before the next FKO...

Our heroes have had breakfast and are now trying to get cleaned up and back on the road. See some of you soon!

Well, the new mic sounds good. The vocal still needs some work. :)

The new microphones arrived this afternoon. I hope to get time to work with them this weekend. :)

This does not seem like a lot, but it was a very good thing, as it has allowed me to play with some things that I've been kicking around.

Now I need to introduce them to some different ears to see what the result is.

(Yes, I know what my ears say, but they are not the be all and end all of getting things mixed correctly. :) )

I'm home from Dorsai Thing and really, really tired. But the conversation and singing were good. I even got to play a bit of the shard game in Ingress.

And we watched Moana tonight, which is an excellent film and seems to me like it should be on Hugo short lists.

Bed, though. Bed is acutely needed.

To quote Bill Sutton's mom, "He never used to rhyme Wang with Thing until he moved to Atlanta."

But Bill is back in the Indianapolis area now and the habit has apparently stuck.

See some of you there!

I am greatly puzzled by how I have managed this, but it appears that I have finished the Dodeka taxes. The forms are all filled out and just need to be printed and mailed. I do not actually recall the last time that I didn't have to file an extension for these.

I suppose this means I need to sort out our personal taxes next. :)

Taxes are the other half of the equation and I am working on the Dodeka books to try to get everything closed out so that I can get the rest of the paperwork together for my taxes and get it to the accountant so he can sort all things out. I have managed to get all of the credit cards and checks entered into the register, so I now have a fair idea of what we spent. I have pulled all of the sales from Square and entered them into the spreadsheet, so I now have a fair idea of what we sold.

Somewhere around here is the closing inventory, which still needs to be entered into the spreadsheet.

Then it will be time for the dumpster dive through the e-mail as I try to find everything that still needs to be accounted for.

But I am close to the end of the process. I'm not exactly sure when I'll get all of the way to the end, but it could be tomorrow.

I'm not betting on it though.

Last night, I dreamed that I had completely spaced Saturday's SpaceTime Theater show at Capricon and failed to show up for it. *sigh*

Too much to do, not enough time to do it. :)

See you at the con!

The van is packed up and ready to go to Capricon. We're not ready, but that's a different problem altogether.

Having succeeded in reordering from most of our suppliers, we have more CDs than we have had in quite a while. This includes quadrivium's Scattering Seeds on the Pomegranate Tour and two new albums from Heather Dale, Spark and Queens of Avalon with S.J. Tucker and the matching DVD for the latter. (Matching the CD, not Sooj. :) )

Now, if I can just get done with work...

Having listened to the tracks for The Grim Roper with Gretchen, I have made adjustments and am trying again.

I have also fixed the website so that it doesn't try to play every song at once when you go to a page with MP3 links on it. :)

I went out in my car and took a listen to the new mix today. It still needs work, but I have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done.

So, progress.

There is some danger that I may be done mixing The Grim Roper.

Maybe. I need to give it a listen in a couple of places with fresh ears. And let some other folks listen to it.

But it might be just about done.

In the fine tradition of projects like this, it has taken way too much time and a final infusion of money to push it over the finish line. I had thought that I would not be spending much on the studio this year, but then I ended up buying a new pair of studio monitors to replace/supplement the ones that failed. And then I realized that with a little bit of jinking around, I could get a legitimate copy of Melodyne Studio for $549, which is $150 less than it usually goes for, if I bought it now.

Nice little product. I have plans for it. :)

And then I needed some vacation. And the new version of Cubase.

I think it's going to be OK.

And then I can mix something else...

We had a wonderful Christmas here, getting up early to open presents, having a leisurely lunch, and then having Smac and Katy drop in for dinner on their way to visit his kids for the holiday.

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas too!

I'm continuing to break in the new studio monitors. I yanked some more sample tracks from my music collection down to listen to on the new monitors and they sounded really good, so this is all encouraging.

In other news, I may have sorted out some more of the nasty little buglets that are creeping around my code at work. I'll know more in the morning once this compile is done...

The new monitor speakers arrived today and I have installed them in the control room. They come with calibration software for the iPad, so I used that to make some tweaks. And they still need to go through their break-in period, although they've had a few hours of being blasted with "The Chain", because, well, big old drum line. :)

They sound really good. I am hoping they don't actually sound too good, which is a strange thing to worry about, I suppose, but you want your mix to sound good on lesser speakers as well. Of course, I've got the Mixcubes for that.

I listened to a few other things that I had lying around the studio, including some AIFF files from Dream of a Far Light. The subwoofer was very excited to hear some of them. (I'm not sure if these were final files or test mixes that were sent down when I was recording a couple of Amy's fiddle tracks for the album. There was, however, a lot of bass down here. :) )