Beyond

I hope I never lose my sense of wonder. If that makes me naive, then so be it.

Monday 10 August 2009

of chaos and bottlenecks

Chaos: my house right now. The rewiring should be done this week, so there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Problem is, since moving all furniture into the middle of the upstairs rooms and pulling things out of closets and off bookshelves and piling them on the floor, I'm not sure I can squeeze my way through the tunnel to reach said light. Too much stuff in the way.

But it's going well and is being done none too soon, as repeated findings of wires whose insulation had cracked and fallen off over the years confirms. Some of the light switches were the original 1940s ones, attached by brittle wires. Pulling the baseboards off the upstairs rooms showed us a few things too. The entire house is, in fact, log construction. The plaster in the bedrooms only goes down far enough to be covered by the 10" baseboards (and oh! those baseboards! Original solid wood planks, held on with the old-fashioned square nails), so through the gap at the bottom of the lath and plaster we can see those original, hand-hewn logs.

The kitchen had an exploratory hole made in the ceiling and I looked up one morning and saw a broad, hand-hewn beam. Oooohhh... I stood there looking while little pictures of an exposed ceiling started filling my mind. D walked in just then and I said, "you know ..." and he immediately said, "we're not tearing down the whole ceiling!" and we had a good laugh. He knows me so well!

So that's the chaos. On to bottlenecks. The latest stage of recording, working with the MIDI parts, was only a precursor to having live strings recorded. While I love the sound, it was another stage and more scheduling that made things go later. There is a possibility, though, that we can use the MIDI tracks since none of the strings are up-front solo parts. If they were, a live player would be a must. But since they are more filling out the sound ("musical grout" my friend G calls it) and will be surrounded by the other instruments, the computer may do the job for us. We should be confirming that this week.

Today will be spent trying to clean my house and then laughing at my feeble attempts, then dropping the girls off to spend the day with Seren while I head to the studio for more MIDI work. Tomorrow I meet with the lady who will be my vocal coach. Truth is, I'm a little nervous on that front. I haven't had a voice teacher or coach before so the new-ness of the situation has me a bit on the anxious side. I"m sure it'll be fine, and am looking forward to it at the same time.

1 comment:

Canadianladybug said...

My house is not as chaotic as your but chaotic it is too these days as wel empty a room and paint, empty another one and paint, then the washer broke down so empty the laundry area and paint... By the time we are finished, the only room left to be done would be our bedroom.

To top it off - my in-laws have moved in for two months (which is great really even if it makes it more chaotic with barely enough space to walk in the garage - *grin*).

Chaotic is nice when it is to make it better....