Sorry - long time no post. Been busy at work and trying to stay warm and get the bathroom finished. Finally got the godforsaken floor done (well, the subfloor, anyways).  We ordered the fixtures last Friday, they should be here this weekend. Then we can decide on final placements, get the plumbing done, and proceed to the finish work part of the program.

The Faithful Reader will recall I posted a while back about my need for a mixer. Apparently my blog is wired into the global wish-fulfillment matrix, since not a week after that entry I scored a beautiful vintage Tascam 12×4x2 board off of Ebay for way, way less than a new surface-mount wonder. I ordered a few replacement knobs and a manual from Teac/Tascam, and have pretty much figured out how to integrate it into my studio. I gotta order a crapload of cables, but that’s to be expected in this business.

Been writing a bit, got three new songs in the oven - products of my recent “hey, I grew up in a creepy holler, I should be writing creepy holler music” epiphany. Demos soon - I promise.

TTFN

So, the latest here at the chateau d’saster would be me completely redoing the framing for the bathroom floor. You’ll recall I had to sister one of the joists, and install blocking between all of them to make the structure more rigid. Well… I spent most of today ripping all that work out after finally realizing the reason my subfloor wasn’t flat was because I’d only been leveling things in one direction. Normally, that approach would work, assuming your reference points are, in fact, level with respect to each other. Guess what? All the old joists are bowed (except the one especially evil bastard in the middle that’s 1/2″ thicker on one end than on the other), meaning my cribbing followed that arc precisely. Woulda been cool if I were building a boat, but I’m not, and it wasn’t. Anyways, several hours of prying, pounding, cursing, cutting, and panting later, all the cribbing was out. Y’know those flimsy-looking galvanized steel joist hangers? Them things are made to stay put once you nail ‘em in - I had to take out somewhere between 16 and 700 of them today, with 6 nails (driven into 100-year old lumber) in each. Then I got to rip the new joists to width, cut ‘em to length, and pound them into place with my new favorite tool (5lb hand sledge). I’m out of bolts, so there’s a trip to the hardware store tomorrow (everything locally closes early on Sunday), but I went ahead and laid the plywood back in place to keep the cold air in the cellar. Plus, it gave me a chance to see if this approach worked any better. It did! I now have a subfloor that’s both flat and level. w00t!

In other news, I’ve given up on trying to buy a banjo off of eBay. Everyone I like shoots out of my price range. Granted, I’m cheap, but this isn’t something I want to spend a bunch of money on just yet. Sooo, looks like I’ll be making myself a banjo. There’s lots of ways to do it on the cheap: cigar box, mountain style (flat boards rather than a bent hoop), gourd, etc. I’ll probably set up a separate section here on the site for instrument building projects, just in case anyone else is innerested in following along.

Now that I’ve finally gotten my head around how to deal with Gmail’s horrifying lack of folders, and have discovered the joys of feeds via Google Reader, and have committed the majority of my writing activites to Google Docs, along comes this:

RTM + Gmail

And while I’ve tinkered with the lovely Ta-Da Lists app from the legendary 37signals skunkworks, and given one or two TiddlyWiki GTD implementations a go-round, this just nails it shut.

*sigh*

My dear friend Dan has blogged one of the funniest things I’ve read in a while.  See for yourself.

Finally found a theme I think I like. It could stand a bit of tweaking, as it’s not, y’know, dark enough. Then again, most days my ideal theme would be black text on a black background with a few black images thrown in to keep it interesting…

Cold. I despise being cold. This big old house is never warm, except in the summer when it’s to hot to breathe. The downstairs bath is still gutted - I discovered last weekend that a joist needs replacing (or at least sistered), and the fact that its dark by the time I get home from work is doing nothing to encourage me to work on the weeknights. I did get all the wiring re-routed Monday evening, so perhaps this weekend I can get the joist in and start on the floor - that might help the heating situation a bit.

In other news, I’m looking for a mixer. Specifically:  12+ channel, at least 4-bus, decent, older, affordable (so not Mackie/Yamaha/Behringer, but not a Trident either…).  I’ve got it in my head to minimize the options I have when recording, so I’ve decided to start treating my PC as an 8-track recorder.  Granted, I can bounce to my heart’s content w/o worrying so much about noise as one would in a truly analog setup, but it will still force me to work within a set of confines. I’m hoping establishing a set of ‘rules’ will help me get unstuck.

Got the banjo cleaned up and rebuilt - took quite a bit of polishing to get all the years of crud off all the metal bits - it still shows its age, though, so that’s cool.  I put a set of regular strings on it, they just don’t work quite right with this short scale length.  I have a tenor set, just need to take 15 minutes and put them on.  I’ll post pics eventually…

But here I am. I’ve moved telstar falls to a new hosting service, and a new domain. If you’re one of the two or three folks who read my blog, you’ll no doubt have seen the redirect posted on the old site. There are still some bugs to work out (none of my mp3 links are working ATM), but I’m pretty much settled in.

Obviously, I didn’t get 2MS finished. Been crazy busy at work and on the house, not doing a good job of reserving time and energy to make music.

Just as a counterweight to my last post, I thought I’d share some highlights from the weekend:

1. Great food at the HOB (good drinks, too)
2. PT’s opening act 3 were pretty cool. Their sound is an interesting fusion of nu-metal, 80’s hair metal, space noises, latin percussion (!) and synthy beeps and bloops.
3. A lovely drive around Lake Erie to Geneva, where we met up with a gentleman who is going to try and reanimate my dead Moog
4. Spent a few minutes in downtown Geneva buying chocolates and esoteric books – including a nifty pocket-sized copy of Liber AL vel Legis (although not at the same store, alas).
5. Another lovely drive back towards home through northern Ohio farm country where we found, much to our surprise, a multitude of vineyards. I didn’t know that was wine country, so when we go back up to retrieve the Moog there’s more exploring to do.

…so the big dumpster showed up on Friday, as expected, and we started tearing the fixtures and fittings out of the bathroom that evening. Yesterday (Tuesday), the last of the plaster & lath came out of that same damn room! Between Friday and Tuesday, the following happened:

1. Learned toilets are much easier to remove with a hammer than with a wrench (note: toilet not reusable after this technique).
2. Two hours wrestling a cast-iron tub out of the house and into the dumpster – ended up dragging tub through the house on a moving pad and flinging it down the front porch steps.
3. Discovered bathroom ceiling had been dropped about 18” to hide disintegrating original ceiling.
4. Ripped out vinyl tile, plywood, 60’s tongue-and-groove, tarpaper and original tongue-and-groove before we hit non-water-damaged subflooring. We now have a two-story bathroom (or an oubliette, depending upon your preference).
5. Found out how far off my original estimate of effort for this project was. It took both of us about 3 1/2 days to gut the bathroom, and completely filled a 10 yd (that’s 10 cubic yards, BTW) dumpster with the debris.

In the midst of all this, we decided to go ahead and call in an electrician to move our meter (out of the way of the planned deck) and install the new breaker box. We found a local outfit who have been (a) prompt (b) reliable© competent and (d) reasonably priced. It’ll be nice having that out of the way, it’ll mean I can get the rest of the new circuits run.

In other news, we watched Stranger than Fiction last evening. It’s like a Douglas Adams pastiche shot through an M. Night Shyamalan lens. Funny, touching, and dare-I-say-it moving. Bears almost no resemblance to the trailers, highly recommended.