This week on FilkCast

Jun. 24th, 2025 06:38 pm
ericcoleman: (Default)
[personal profile] ericcoleman posting in [community profile] filk
Anthony Gilbert, Kristoph Klover, Kathy Mar & Taunya Gren, Draketo, Frank Hayes, Mike Whitaker, Alexa Klettner, The Blibbering Humdingers, Ju Honisch, Norm Sherman & Dusty Mangum, Jordin Kare, Jellicle Timewarp, Philip Allcock, Twotonic, Barry & Sally Childs Helton, Mary Crowell w-Betsey & Kade Tinney

Available on iTunes, Google Play and most other places you can get podcasts. We can be heard Wednesday at 6am and 9pm Central on scifi.radio.

filkcast.blogspot.com

The Chord's the Thing

Jun. 23rd, 2025 09:57 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
I swear that I am going to find the chord diagram generator again and use it to add diagrams of some of the odder chords to my PDFs that I play from. The problem is that when I haven't played a song for a while and then I encounter something that I have notated as "A aug5 sus4" where I have *clearly* gotten that notation from some chord naming program, I just start to swear.

I have concluded that "A aug5 sus4" is "take AMaj7 and move it up one fret and make sure that you hit the high E string", as opposed to the same song's "Bm7/A" which I'm pretty sure is "take AMaj7 and move it up one fret and make sure that you hit the fifth string and *mute* the first string".

Grumble.

One Hot Ballgame

Jun. 22nd, 2025 10:34 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
I went down to Wrigley Field where I met Elliot (who has recently moved to Chicago with his wife, Emily) so he could see his first baseball game there. It was fun chatting with him as the wind blew out on a miserably hot day.

When I got back to my car after the game, I was reminded that the remote parking lot has you park facing west. I got into the car and dropped my sweaty back onto the superheated black leather seat and turned on the car and the air conditioning. Thankfully, the air conditioning worked. The car thermometer showed that the temperature was 104 degrees which was *very* believable. It was also consistent with the reading at a bank that I passed by while driving home, which showed 101 degrees, matching the car thermometer at that point.

As I said, miserably hot.

Today, I am thankful for central air conditioning that works. :)

Done Since 2025-06-15

Jun. 22nd, 2025 11:08 am
mdlbear: (distress)
[personal profile] mdlbear

Welcome to the start of summer, and maybe of WWIII. This post that came across my Mastodon feed this morning kind of says it all:

You don't have to prefix things with "doom" anymore, that's just the default now. You can just say scrolling.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, ...

I had my oncology appointment; I'll be getting a hormone injection (tomorrow, and apparently they do house calls for that) rather than continuing with abiraterone (which insurance won't cover because not metastatic). It's good for six months, which will take me through the end of my 2-year course of treatment. I'm okay with this.

Last night I fell down a rabbit-hole troubleshooting my little script that prints out the URL of one's last post. See this commit. Pretty sure I can blame AI bots for that problem.

I fell down another rabbit-hole Friday, which started by looking for the overture to Wagner's opera Der fliegende Holländer. Turns out that J. Slauerhoff, whom our street is named after, wrote a poem about it. It's in his book, Eldorado. I expect to have a little fun trying to translate it. (And note in passing that doom is also mentioned in that connection.)

ysabetwordsmith has some good links about dealing with Heat. It was supposed to hit 30C (90F) today, but it looks like we may be getting a thunderstorm instead. It'll still be too hot indoors.

ExpandNotes & links, as usual )

Halfway Home

Jun. 21st, 2025 11:19 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
I got through another three songs today, adding new guitar tracks and sometimes new scratch vocals. This gets me halfway through the album.

I also found *another* song that I have shifted to a different key since I recorded the scratch tracks, so that's been rebuilt now. I'm looking at the lyric sheet which clearly indicates that the song is in E and then I start the playback and hear my cheerful announcement that the song is in the key of A.

No, no, it is not. Not any more...

Rolling...

Jun. 20th, 2025 10:50 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
Ok, things are going more slowly than I might have hoped, but I have managed to record fresh guitar tracks for five of the songs slated for "Crosstime Bus". I've also done various bits of fix up on the drum tracks and I recorded a new vocal for "Love at First Sight" since the original scratch vocal was not really a very happy thing to listen to after the transposition for the key change.

This leaves eleven songs to go. I hope to make more headway on this tomorrow.

Sunday, I'm going to go watch the Cubs play the Mariners. And it will be *hot*...

If It Isn't Broken...

Jun. 19th, 2025 07:47 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
It is sad when the *second* worst thing that happened last night was Ruby getting skunked again.

I had plans to do a lot of recording this weekend. Now, whenever I need to do some recording, I usually wander down to the studio and discover that it is time to install a whole bunch of updates. It was pushing 9 PM, so I figured I could quickly run down to the studio, install the updates, and hit the ground running today.

I already knew that there was a Cubase point release that I should go ahead and install, so I did that. Then I noticed that there were three Intel updates waiting to be installed. Ok, I could take care of that too. No problem. A couple of reboots, but no problem.

The Intel update screen lists (among other things) my motherboard type and the current BIOS version. I looked at that and said to myself, "That BIOS is pretty old. I wonder if there is a newer one that I should install." This was my first mistake.

On the ASUS website, there was a brand-new BIOS for my motherboard, less than a month old. Looked good, so I figured I'd install it. This requires putting it on a memory stick, booting into the BIOS, and then loading it from there. I've done this sort of operation before, so I didn't have too much trouble with it. There was also a newer version of the Intel ME utility, so I installed that too. All good.

Having installed a new version of Cubase, I figured I'd fire it up so that it could inspect all of the plugins, because that sometimes can slow things down on the first restart. Still no problem.

Well, there was no problem until Cubase told me that I needed to pick an ASIO driver. It should just default to the Universal Audio Thunderbolt driver. Except I picked that and Cubase said "What Thunderbolt device?"

Oh, that is bad. Let me start up the UA application and see if it sees the Apollo unit. It does not. And the Thunderbolt cable is plugged in. Ack!

I start searching the Internet. Apparently, this is a problem with older versions of the ASUS Thunderbolt add-in card when the BIOS for this type of motherboard (and its various relations) gets updated. I check the Device Manager and it tells me that there is a problem with the Thunderbolt port. Yes, I had figured that out. Removing the device and putting it back does not help.

Maybe there is a newer driver or firmware for the Thunderbolt card. There's no new driver, but there is new firmware. I set up to flash the card with the new firmware and discover that it won't take it.

Apparently, there are *two* slightly different versions of this card. I have the older one, which will not take this update. There does not appear to be an update for the older card.

Maybe I can get a newer version of the Thunderbolt card. Micro Center does not carry this card. Amazon does. They can get it to me around July 1st, which is not compatible with recording this weekend. Or next weekend.

Ok. How can I get up and running? I *do* have a laptop with Cubase installed *and* a Thunderbolt port, but that is the same port that it uses for charging. About now, I realize that I could probably bodge things together with a Thunderbolt dock, but it was approaching midnight last night and I was running out of brain cells.

The latest generation of PC motherboards has a number of boards that support Thunderbolt directly on the back panel ports. My new office PC is one of those. I am not going to move my freshly-configured office PC to the basement for this. Really not.

I could *buy* a new motherboard. Which will require buying a new processor and new RAM. And a new heatsink. That is going to be annoyingly expensive and a whole lot of work, but is an available backup plan.

Let's try reverting to an older version of the motherboard BIOS. What version had I started with? Eventually, I realized that I still had it on the computer in installable format, so I copied it to the memory stick, rebooted, and installed the older BIOS. So far, so good. Let's boot up the computer.

The computer does not boot up. It beeps eight times. My phone tells me that this is a sign of a problem with the CMOS memory on the computer.

I am old. I know what to do about this. I shut off the power to the computer, pull the plug, and pull the CMOS battery. If I wait until morning, the computer will forget all of the BIOS settings and I should be able to get back into the machine. (Later, I check the manual and find the location of the two pins that I need to short to clear the CMOS. They are inconveniently buried behind the Thunderbolt card. I try fishing at them in the morning with a screwdriver, because why not? I'm not sure if I ever got to them...)

It is now nearing midnight and time to head up to bed.

At some point during this fiasco, Julie comes downstairs to tell me that Ruby has encountered a skunk, so if I smell something when I go upstairs, don't panic. It is apparently less bad than some of the previous skunkings. Gretchen has rubbed the dog down with some odor killer called "Pooph" and the report is that it has improved the situation. Gretchen, meanwhile, has gone off to the bedroom, having had enough of all of this for the night.

When I get upstairs, things are not *too* stinky, so I turn off the kitchen exhaust fan and head upstairs to join Gretchen. It is a *long* time before I can manage to get to sleep (which includes watching another episode of "Leverage" so that we can both wind down).

This morning, I get up, get cleaned up, and head down to the basement. I fish around for the clear CMOS pins, decide that I am not going to remove the Thunderbolt card to try to get at them right now, and put the battery back in. Then I fire up the computer.

Happily, after a mild round of complaints, it boots into the BIOS. I turn the Thunderbolt support back on and reboot. Windows fires up, I start the UA application and it informs me that there is no Apollo unit attached.

Then I plug the Thunderbolt cable back in. And now I have a connection! And there is much rejoicing.

And then I fire up Cubase and it tells me that there is no device connected. So I fire up the UA Console app, see the message "Connecting to Apollo", and now Cubase can see the device and lets me select the Thunderbolt ASIO driver. I open up a song, hit play, and there is sound from the speakers.

My mood is *greatly* improved.

So, kids, this is why you just shouldn't mess with a system that is working. Just ask old Uncle Bill.

In other news, the house still smells mildly of skunk downstairs and we are trying to air it out. Ruby does not seem to be very skunky, for which I am thankful.

At least I didn't have to run out and buy peroxide last night.

Thankful Thursday

Jun. 19th, 2025 11:42 am
mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)
[personal profile] mdlbear

Today I am thankful for...

  • My keyboard arriving last Friday without any problems. NO thanks to FedEx, which has failed to deliver m's keyboard to their home in Seattle. Twice.
  • Remembering a very little bit of how to sight-read.
  • Finally solving my audio input problem. NO thanks to Zoom and Audacity, which fail in entirely orthogonal ways to sanely handle my UA-25.
  • Thanks to them, however, for at least allowing the system default as a device. Differently, of course.
  • Linux command-line tools, including (but not limited to) Grep, Find, Ls, Sed, and of course Bash, for always being there when I need to do some trivial but off-the-wall bit of data-mining. Like listing all Thankful Thursday posts with fewer than four list items.
    $ for f in ../2*/*/*thank*; do echo $(grep "li>" $f | wc -l) $f; done |grep ^[2-3] 
      3 ../2019/09/12--thankful-thursday.html
      3 ../2020/06/05--thankful-friday.html
      3 ../2020/06/25--thankful-thursday.html
      3 ../2021/04/25--thankful-sunday.html
      3 ../2022/02/24--thankful-thursday.html
      2 ../2025/01/03--thankful-thursday-addendum.html
      2 ../2025/06/12--thankful-thursday.html
    

NO thanks to 2025!me for continued procrastination., and NO thanks to 2022!me, for letting the MakeStuff/music toolchain languish with no maintenance and inadequate documentation, making it way harder than necessary to put a two-song concert set online. Which might get done this week.

14 Years

Jun. 18th, 2025 09:01 pm
ericcoleman: (Default)
[personal profile] ericcoleman
The day before, when we had got to the hotel and realized that I had forgotten my stage rig. It was sitting by my desk at work.

Also Pauly Shore was sitting on a bench in front of the hotel working very hard on us noticing that we weren't supposed to notice him, but of course we were supposed to. But hey, it was Pauly Shore ... so we ignored him.

My boss overnighted the case to us. The hotel lost track of it for a bit, but we got it in time to play our first show.

14 years ago today. The very first full length Cheshire Moon show.

Looking at the set list is fun. Half covers, we still do one of them occasionally (She Moved Through The Faire). We only play two of the originals still, Out Of The Light And Widow's Garden. We will occasionally play If I Were The Rain if we have a second voice for it.

Pronouns (parody of Wimoweh)
Child Of Stars
Lighthouse
If I Were The Rain
Out Of The Light*
Halley Came To Jackson (Carpenter)
Temple Of The King (Dio/Blackmore)
World Walker
Follow That Road (Hills)
Swamp Witch (Stafford
Bloodletting (Napolitano)
She Moved Through The Faire (trad)
Widows Garden*

Since then ... a couple things have happened.

Let's see, over half a million miles on three vehicles. Two wonderful train trips. We flew to England. 4 Albums, three EPs and a couple of singles. Pushing 200 songs written. 200+ shows played (I lost count a few years ago). GOHs at 10 cons, played at many more. 300+ episodes of FilkCast. The Filk Hall Of Fame.

And all because two people met walking down a hall at a con.

The most important thing. Lizzie is sitting across the room from me while I type this. With me retired we're together all of the time, and that suits us so well.

15 years together this fall. 14 years married. The best time of my life. Thank you, all of you, for giving us this life.

We're Taking the Afternoon Off

Jun. 18th, 2025 06:34 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
I am off on Thursday for the Juneteenth holiday and will be taking a vacation day on Friday, because four-day weekends are few and far between. I intend to use this time to try to catch up on many things that I need to be doing in the studio.

This does not mean that I am not *sorely* tempted to head down to watch what is now a scheduled straight doubleheader between the Cardinals and the White Sox tomorrow afternoon, tonight's game having been rained out. Two Cardinals games *and* the usually better food on the Southside...

I have things to do. :)

Bits and Pieces

Jun. 17th, 2025 09:59 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
My annual required training for work is now completed. Yay, me!

I have also fixed all of the bugs that popped up in the scan from the static code analysis tool. Also, yay, me!

And I found the bug in the compile of an older feature branch that was introduced when we mixed the new jar from their project with their fixes for the static code analysis tool with the old branch that doesn't have those fixes yet.

In other news, we decided to make superburger for dinner tonight. I had figured that we would have potato chips with it, but when I was looking for the cranberry pecan chicken salad at Sam's Club to bring back for Gretchen, I found a tub of their loaded potato salad, which includes sour cream, cheddar cheese, and bacon. It is very good.

It is also a three pound tub of this stuff. I foresee a lot of potato salad in the near future.

This week on FilkCast

Jun. 17th, 2025 06:45 pm
ericcoleman: (Default)
[personal profile] ericcoleman posting in [community profile] filk
Alexander James Adams, Renee Alper, Karen Willson, D.J. McGuire, Juliana McCorison, Char Mackay, Anne Passovoy, Sean McGaughey, Ernest Clark, Gary McGath, Drake Oranwood

Available on iTunes, Google Play and most other places you can get podcasts. We can be heard Wednesday at 6am and 9pm Central on scifi.radio.

filkcast.blogspot.com

Training Day

Jun. 16th, 2025 10:10 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
Today, I started on the various bits of mandatory training at work. There are a lot of them.

Tomorrow, I hope to finish them. :)

A Bit of Father's Day Recording

Jun. 15th, 2025 11:13 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
Gretchen's knees were giving her heck today, so I went out to lunch by myself. City Barbecue had dropped a coupon for a free dessert in my account, which convinced me that going there was a fine choice. I had a lovely brisket sandwich that I think had come directly out of the smoker. I had the peach cobbler packed to go and took it home to Gretchen, where we split it, which is a *much* better choice than trying to eat it by myself. :) I also picked up food from Culver's on the way home, which meant that no one had to go out and feed the kids.

I had now arrived at the stage where it was pretty much time to do some recording for the "Crosstime Bus" album or just kick myself in the head. I'm not flexible enough to kick myself in the head, so my choices were limited.

I picked up one of the Universal Audio Sphere modeling mics a while back and have used it on a few things, but I have never used it to mic an acoustic guitar and I wanted to give that a try and see what the results were like. Cleverly, I read the instruction manual before going downstairs. The target song for today was "Love at First Sight", where I had used pitch shifting to move the original vocal and guitar scratch tracks to capo 2 while leaving the drums intact. The scratch tracks had to go, starting with the guitar. I retrieved the lyric sheet from my office, along with my iPad, which I pretty much only use as a Cubase remote. Realizing this, I took the charger along with me. If I'm using the tablet in the basement, it can live in the basement. I also grabbed the guitar and took it to the basement with me. Cool! All set.

Ha! I fire up Cubase and the iPad remote software and verify that they are talking to each other. Ok, let's go to the Apollo unit and turn on the phantom power for the mic. And I need to configure a stereo input to grab channels 1 and 2 so I can route them to the mic modeler and get a stereo guitar track out. Input configured, all good.

I ducked into the recording booth and realized that *nothing* was configured correctly. A dead USB microphone had been wished onto the top of the rolling cart where the iPad was supposed to go. It left. I moved the guitar stand to the opposite side of the room, because I was planning to sit while recording, which meant I needed to pull the cart closer into the space the stand had occupied. And then there was adjusting the microphone. One of these days, I will find a mic boom that doesn't slowly sag under the weight of any microphone of size. And for this application, the mic needs to be turned 90 degrees from the normal position, because I'm using it to capture a stereo image.

While I'm in there, I put on the recording headphones and verify that I can hear playback, having remembered to turn on the headphone amp while passing through the engineering side of the booth. The headphone cord has developed an annoying short, but wiggling the cord gets everything working.

I fire up Cubase and the iPad remote software and verify that they are talking to each other. Ok, let's go to the Apollo unit and turn on the phantom power for the mic. And I need to configure a stereo input to grab channels 1 and 2 so I can route them to the mic modeler and get a stereo guitar track out. Input configured, all good.

Except that there is no signal on the input or the target stereo track. I expect some noise. I twiddle the knobs on the Apollo and nothing happens. Let's go in and play the guitar at it, because maybe I just need some reasonable volume. Nope, no signal. And I realize that the Sphere mic lights up when it is powered. This mic is dark. Grumble.

All of this is more difficult, because I need to be in two places at one time. I have not yet mastered bilocation. I want a noticeable sound source in the recording booth so I can track the signal in the engineering booth.

I have a phone. I pull it out of my pocket, set it to play "Mamma Mia" on a loop, and leave it on my chair. Back to the engineering booth I go. There is still no signal.

Ok, let me pull up the UA Console application that is used for routing things. Unlike the Apollo unit, the Console app believes there is no phantom power to the mic. Power up channel 1, power up channel 2, and -- surprise! -- the mic lights up and I have signal. Make sure the signal is routed from the input to the track and I should be in business. Time to go record!

Back to the recording booth. Close the doors, adjust the position of the sagging mic, check the tuning on the guitar, put on the headphones, press record.

There is no sound in the headphones.

What the heck? There was sound here a minute ago. I check to make sure that the short in the cord is not the culprit and convince myself that it isn't. Stop everything and go back to the engineering booth.

I have a very old silverface Apollo Firewire unit that has a Thunderbolt card installed. Somehow, the mapping that the latest version of the Console software has supplied is shifted by two positions, so that almost all of the hardware is entering in the wrong location. Hardware location Line 1 and Line 2 are mapped correctly, but Line 1 is then mapped again to Line 3, Line 2 to Line 4, and so on. I'm getting sound, because Line 1 and Line 2 have correct mappings, but the software Monitor channels that feed the headphones are not getting any signal.

I remap *all* of the channels on the Console. I *save* the mappings as a preset. I hope this works. In the meantime, I found another set of headphones in the engineering booth, plugged them into the headphone amp, and once I had mapped the Monitor channels correctly in the Console and *then* made sure that everything was mapped correctly in Cubase, I had sound in the headphones again.

Rah.

Unplug the headphones in the engineering booth. Go back to the recording booth, close the doors, fix the sagging mic, check the tuning on the guitar, put on the headphones, and let's hit record. There is sound!

I blow the count in, but there's sound.

After a little while, I have multiple copies of the guitar track, at least one of which is pretty satisfactory, along with two backup tracks to use to fix any glitches.

It would be a good idea to replace the pitch-shifted vocal, which sounds terrible, because it was a scratch vocal and the pitch shifting has done nothing to improve the sound quality. Back to the engineering booth I go to create another stereo track, but I'll use a *different* modeling program here so that I end up with a mono signal that I can plug a number of different types of mic into and see what they sound like. Piece of cake.

Back to the recording booth. Close the doors and now I need to raise the mic so that I can sing standing up and also turn the mic 90 degrees so that it's in the correct orientation *and* convince the whole assemblage not to fall over. This last just requires some minor boom adjustment. Then I put the pop screen back up and now I'm ready to try recording a vocal track.

About a verse in, I realize that I have left the lyric sheet nowhere near where I can read it. Do not underestimate my ability to farble my own lyrics under pressure.

Let's move the music stand so that I can read the lyrics. That's better. I do several takes to give myself choices, but the last one is, I think, pretty good so I can go play with it now. Mucking around with tracks and plugins follows.

I will listen to this more critically at a later date, but it's progress.

A learning experience. That's what we call it.

I packed everything up and went upstairs where I grilled some steaks for Father's Day dinner while Gretchen prepared baked potatoes and sweet corn. Dinner included the kids and was remarkably silly.

And that's a good way to end the day. :)

Done Since 2025-06-08

Jun. 15th, 2025 05:40 pm
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
[personal profile] mdlbear

I think this was one of those weeks that makes me want to give up on trying to characterize my week. It wasn't particularly good, it wasn't particularly bad, I didn't get a whole lot done, the US had a lot of mostly-peaceful No Kings" demonstrations, but it also had political assassinations in Minnesota alongside other symptoms of its slide into fascism.

Last Sunday was the 23rd anniversary of this blog's founding, back on LJ. Today is the 27th Father's Day since my Dad's death in February of 1999, and I've been kind of wrecked since Thursday. The keyboard I ordered on Tuesday arrived Friday; it's flawed but will do what we need it to. The one I ordered for m has not arrived yet. I may have the start of a toothache.

Thursday was my first, and so far only, Thankful Thursday post ever with only two items. Since then, both of my kids wished me a happy Father's Day, so next week should have at least that many. I had a blood tests and a CT scan done last week, but I won't get to talk with a doctor about them until tomorrow.

See what I mean?

Here -- give a listen to the recordings of my and m's 2-song "set" at DFDF two weeks ago. In keeping with the theme of the week, the first verse and a half of Millennium's Dawn got cut off thanks to technical difficulties.

ExpandNotes & links, as usual )

Surveying the Field

Jun. 14th, 2025 01:54 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
I am down in the basement today and will shortly (I hope!) get back to working on "Crosstime Bus", which I hope to have out soon. This would be good, because I have been working on this album for a very long time. Long enough, in fact, that the newest song on the album was written in 2006. The track list for this album is on the Filker website, along with the track lists for my other three studio albums and "Live in Germany (mostly...)", which is Gretchen's and my live recordings from when we were guests at DFDF. (Thanks, Smac!)

My question is this: when I am in a position to make another album after "Crosstime Bus", what ought to be on it? Let's toss out anything that is on the five studio albums (including "Crosstime Bus"). Songs that are only on "Live In Germany" are eligible. Songs written after 2006 are likely to be good choices, but maybe there is something older that I have managed to blindly skip over that should be included.

Note also that there are a bunch of individual tracks over on Bandcamp from the "Amy and Me" project which are from concerts where I've been fortunate enough to have Amy McNally accompany me and I think none of those are on a studio album, so if you want to know what some of these songs sound like, it's a good place to look.

Anyway, I have some ideas, but I would be interested to hear what you think.

Thanks for the input!

Prepping

Jun. 13th, 2025 10:42 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
I have a ludicrous number of things that I need to get done this weekend. Many of them are laundry.

But I also plan to do some recording, so I have hunted down the iPad which I use as a remote control in the studio and have now plugged it in to charge. It was sitting turned off at 82% charge, which is not terrible, but could be better. :)

Question thread #142

Jun. 13th, 2025 11:14 pm
pauamma: Cartooney crab wearing hot pink and acid green facemask holding drink with straw (Default)
[personal profile] pauamma posting in [site community profile] dw_dev
It's time for another question thread!

The rules:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer and in this comment thread.

Rooftop Baseball

Jun. 12th, 2025 11:34 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
My financial advisor was good enough to arrange a trip to a Wrigley Field rooftop tonight. I met up with Sam there and we had a fine time watching the baseball game and chatting about all sorts of things. Then Sam departed to go home and I discovered that I had managed to miss the instructions about where the bus would be to take us back out to Schaumburg, which was where my car was.

Well, if I waited for someone I recognized to come out of the building, I could probably get some information. And I figured it wouldn't hurt to try emailing someone, which I did. Anyway, I hung out there until my advisor came out and I asked him. But *he* had not come on the bus. Oops.

But he did have the number of the woman who was the organizer, so he called her and reported "Irving Park and Sheffield". I thanked him and set out toward Irving Park Rd., following my usual path back up Seminary, because that leads to where the school buses are for the shuttle back to remote parking.

Arriving at Irving Park, I figured that the *right* place for the bus to be was somewhere west on the south side of Irving Park where buses go, as opposed to east towards Sheffield where -- to the best of my knowledge -- there's no place to be parking buses. So I lit out to the west and eventually found the right bus.

There were only two people on the bus when I got there. They had left in the eighth inning.

Meanwhile, many people were now trying to make sure that Bill did not miss the bus. And all of them found that I had gotten to the bus before they did. :)

I have always had a good sense of direction. But it does help to listen to the instructions.

And then disregard the instructions when it turns out that they aren't *quite* right. :)

Thankful Thursday

Jun. 12th, 2025 09:47 pm
mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)
[personal profile] mdlbear

Today I am thankful for...

  • Thomann and Sweetwater. Minor grumps at Thomann for having a US site that looks tempting until you find out that shipping and tariffs are added at checkout. Major grumps at my old standby, Musician's Friend, whose site is totally broken when seen from Europe. Major grumps at ME for not having installed a VPN yet.
  • Online filk circles. NO thanks to the weird audio problems I was having tonight during Eurofilk. But I got one song (The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of) out. (I wrote it for my father, who died 26 years ago. And Father's Day is this Sunday.)

Not feeling terribly thankful today. Sorry.

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