Yesterday our little band had the opportunity to record at the Institute of Production and Recording in Minneapolis, MN (Across the street from this place). A friend of a friend is going to school there and needed a guinea pig for his project. Well we were it! It meant four hours of FREE studio time for us to crank out some songs.
They recorded us on this great big 36-channel Digidesign system.
I pretended to know what I was doing, but...
Really it was these guys who were the masterminds.
I had no idea that recording involved so much time sitting around, waiting for the techs to get the levels right.
Eventually we got to play.
While they were setting up to do the vocal tracks, I took some photos of the guitars.
Here are some shots of the singers setting up in the isolation booth:
This is a poor-quality video I shot of the singers laying down a vocal track. You cannot hear the instrument playback that they were singing along to.
And when we exited the studio, the Minneapolis skyline greeted us!
Stay tuned for when we get our songs back from production.
On July 4 during the day I did a little yard work, which included hosing off the cobwebs & dust from around our entry way and the patio area out back. I rinsed everything down to ground level and then used the hose to wash it all away.
Well apparently this activity rubbed somebody the wrong way:
I have never been afraid of the local ants found in Minnesota, but I am not ashamed to admit that bugs in general creep me out, and bugs around my home mortify me. If you listen to the audio closely you can hear my Darth Vader-like breathing. Not so much like an ominous tough guy, more like Woody Allen, having a panic attack.
Needless to say, shortly after the video was shot I went inside and got my WMD and nuked those suckers. I beat my fist on my chest in a territorial display and bellowed, "This is MY House! MY House!"
I don't know what the ants thought of it, but my neighbors got the idea.
One of the things that always bothered me about Darth Vader was that clearly the guy was intubated, yet he was able to speak clearly. Based on what was shown at the end of Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader was apparently the recipient of a tracheotomy, since obviously no tubes were running into his mouth. Still the guy could not only talk, but enunciate like nobody's business.
I get it that the deep voice was an amplified projection with special effects to sound scary, OK? What I mean is that the amplified projection should have sounded like a scary amplified person who was trying to talk with a hole in his larynx. But I guess that wouldn't have sounded so scary. Weird that a civilization capable of greater than light speed travel and genetic cloning would have to rely on bionics to put people back together.
That night at the local fireworks display retribution was exacted upon me and my family. Later the boy and I slept out in the tent in the back yard as an intermediate step in the slow transition to a lifetime of camping. We lay together, safe inside the netting and fell asleep as father and son, looking at the stars and dreaming of galaxies far far away.
My sister is selling me my dad's old Lund S-16 fishing boat
My lawn came up approx. 33% dandelions this year
Oh yeah, and there is this matter of the wife's tight-fitting clothes and her inexplicable craving for bizarre foods including pickles (Honestly thought that one was a myth)... Yes, we are pregnant again with our second child. We are at 14 weeks as of today. We kept the first trimester mum due to a blood clot that we could see in the early ultrasounds. With a lot of prayer and taking it easy, as of last week the clot is gone and everything looks good for a late November (Thanksgiving) baby.
We are going to an all-inclusive place in Cancun for all of next week to lay in the sun and do... NOTHING!
Am I boring you? For those of you looking for better content I suggest you look no further:
This video was taken back in late November by tita Ciello when she visited us here in MN. Someone wasn't in the mood for singing - He purposely mispronounced the words, spoke the lyrics, etc...
Yesterday was the wife's "American" birthday, as this was the day that she stood with 1,179 other people from 86 different countries and took the oath and became a United States citizen. Most of the people who stumble across this web journal do not know much about my beautiful wife; this is by design as I avoid putting too much information out on the web about my family. But today I will take exception, as I feel the need to tell the world just how very proud I am of her.
She was born in the Philippines, on the largest southern island. Her parents are down to earth hard working people, who have gone to great lengths to provide good opportunities for their children - My father in law even spent over ten years working in Saudi Arabia when local job conditions were so poor that he would not have been able to support his family. I don't think that my wife has ever forgotten her father's sacrifices, because by his actions he opened her eyes to life's possibilities, if one is willing to step outside of their comfort zone and leave home.
She finished high school at 16 and enrolled at a local college, which she completed in four years with a degree in computer science. At age 20 she found herself in the same depressed local economy that had pushed her father out of the country. Acting on her mother's advice she relocated to Manila, with the plan to live there until she either found a job or she ran out of money. She went through a season of living out of her suitcase, moving from relatives house to friends house and in and out of boarding houses. Each day was spent walking the streets of Makati, knocking down the doors of every business, looking for someone who would hire her. She was rejected too many times to count and did not acclimate to Manila well at first - On one occasion she was even accosted by a street thug, who ripped a gold chain right off of her neck as she was riding in an open air jeepney.
Twice a week she would call home crying, begging her mother to let her come home. Time after time her mother would reply that God is faithful, and that he would provide for her. Finally a company expressed interest in her and hired her. Not long after she was recruited for a position in Singapore, where she spent almost a year before transferring back to Manila.
One day she received a call from an American recruiter, who had a copy of her resume from her Makati days. It seemed a rather large company in the U.S. had a problem with several of their computer systems and there was a shortage of American programmers fluent in the original system language. In September of 1997 my future wife set foot in Minnesota. She has only been able to get back to see her parents one time, and has not been back to the Philippines since Christmastime of 1999. She misses her parents a lot and still talks to them at least twice a week. Her parent's faith and sacrifice has paid off, as her sister is also here in the U.S., living in Los Angeles.
In December of 2000 we met and fell in love, marrying in 2002. Our son was born in 2003. In the time since we have been together I have been at her side as she went through processing for both her green card and naturalization. It boggles my mind the sheer amounts of paperwork, the money spent, the hoops jumped through and the lines waited in, just to obtain something I got for free just because of an indiscretion by my parents.
So baby, congratulations on this payoff after all your hard work - Enjoy your day in the sun, because you have without a doubt EARNED this!
There was lots of music to listen to in the 80's. If you veered away from the crowd once in a while you could find some really good bands. Bands that played music that is not currently being heralded as "80's Classics." Bands that played the music that you can actually remember listening to - You can even remember where you were or what you were doing, even if it was nothing you thought was important at the time. That is really what mainstream culture is trying to cash in on, every time you hear a radio station play some awful tripe and attempt to market it as the 'music of your youth.'
It's the bands that never made it big, who were at right place at the right time, exactly when you were ready to listen, whose music means the most. When you listen you can be sure that your memories are your own, and not some marketing plan that was uploaded to your brain by the mothership.
Kee-ripes... look at their hair! They had the whole flock of seagulls thing going on, plus the turned-up collars. Yet even though this video is hopelessly time stamped as an '80's song, I still enjoy watching these clowns pretend to jam in the woods, among the fall colors.
I'm not sure what all the bullfight footage was supposed to represent, though.
This song has been 'eating at my brain' for a while now:
Song: re: your brains Artist: Jonathan Coulton
Song Premise (From jonathancoulton.com): "If Hollywood has taught us anything, it's that being trapped in a mall surrounded by a million zombies would be really troublesome. But how much more annoying would it be if the head zombie used to be your co-worker, and he was kind of a prick even before he got infected? And now he's right outside and he just keeps talking and talking - still the same jackass, only now he wants to eat your brains?"
Hope you all like the new navigation and the rotating header images. The navigation is all CSS and works in IE 6, IE 7 and Firefox. Haven't tested in Safari. If any Ginkgo biloba Tofu eating, soy chai latte drinking, VW Jetta driving Mac users stumble across this web site, please drop a line and let me know if it looks OK.
Home grown music Friday - "Rain on the Trailer" by the Glenrustles. These guys don't have a video to post.
That Mallard is still nesting in our planter. I've been afraid to mow our lawn lest I should upset her or somehow usurp nature's balance with an internal combustion engine. Our house was starting to look like one of those garbage houses that you hear about on the news, where the water has been shut off for the past 6 months and the people inside have been pooping into garbage bags.
I couldn't stand it yesterday so I finally mowed the lawn. Much to my amazement the girl was as cool as a cucumber and allowed me to do my thing. I got about my business as fast as I could and now we are no longer an aesthetic blight on suburbia. Except of course that we still cannot plant anything in our planter, because there's a duck already planted there. Squatters, I tell ya!
Here are some pictures I took this morning. I'm not bashful anymore. I just opened the front door and leaned out and took these.
I did a quick search on youtube this morning, really stoked to hear that there was a new Loch Ness Monster video. Well, I watched it and I'm sorry to say that it pretty much sucked.
But I did find this extremely cool Jose Feliciano video. Watch the whole thing: The dude goes completely off the fretboard!
A blast from college days. This Husker Du song is from the Flip your wig album (which I had in vinyl). I had a 90 minute tape with Flip your wig on one side and Elvis Costello's King of America on the other. The labels have fallen off of it but I still have that tape. It gets moved into whatever vehicle I am driving.
Walking around with your head in the clouds Makes no sense at all Sell yourself short, but you're walking so tall Makes no sense at all Is it important? You're yelling so loud Makes no sense at all Walking around with your head in the clouds Makes no sense at all Makes no difference at all
I don't know why you want to tell me When I'm right or when you're wrong It's the same thing, in your mind, the only time I'm right is when I play along
You concern yourself with evidence It's evident to me Well you say you've got the tiger by the tail But I don't see these things that way
On the way in to work this morning I heard something I liked on the current:
Patty Griffin - No Bad News
"Why don't you burn it all down, burn your own house down, burn your own house down Try to kill your own disease And leave the rest of us, there's a lot of us, leave the rest of us Who wanna live in peace to live in peace."
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