Well, I must apologize for my decidedly lacking blog updates in the past week or two. Believe me, I was not intentionally leaving you in the dark, I was just exhausted and swamped. I think I'll use these next few posts in a retrospective manner and get you up to speed, and let you know what in the world I've been doing.
In my last post, I left us hanging in Cincinnati anticipating the drive home. Well, we made it home safely! :) I was home just long enough to pack my things and move to Randy's house, since he asked me to house/dog sit for him while he was away visiting family. As soon as I let the dogs out, it was off to work. I was still very ill and felt miserable and had no voice, but you do what you have to do. No rest for the weary.
We had a relatively light week at House of Blues. No huge sessions. The most exciting thing for me was the opportunity to babysit for our regular client. She had to do some mix changes to one of the songs off the last project she was mixing there. Thus, the assistant engineer does a "recall" to put all the knobs, faders, and patches exactly as they were when they printed the mix the first time (this is a tedious process that requires very detailed documentation) and then our client made changes to the mix and spent several hours on the phone getting approval from the label via the A&R person, the artist, and the producer. However, she needed to bring her son to the studio, so the two of us went treasure hunting and played hide-n-seek. Of course babysitting has nothing to do with audio engineering, however, the theme of this blog seems to be relationships, and I thought it spoke well for her to trust me with her child.
On top of my regular hours at House of Blues, and my hours at the mall selling clothing, I spent many hours this week with Randy building an iso booth for the Leslie he just bought. A Leslie is the speaker cabinet with the rotating horn that is used with the Hammond B3 organ on an extraordinary number of songs. Randy was once a professional builder, and the two of us got out his nail gun and built an 8 foot high, self-enclosed room that was roughly 7' by 4'. We put several long nights in because he had a session on Friday he wanted to use it for. I learned a lot about construction and we got it just done enough to be functional the night before the session. Most valuable lesson? Wear proper footwear! I, not knowing exactly what I was getting myself into, wore flip-flops on day one of construction and dropped a 4x8 foot sheet of plywood on my bare toe loading into his minivan at the Home Depot. It bled for days, and looks absolutely disgusting, now 2 weeks later. I expect my nail to fall off eventually and in the past couple days had to start taking antibiotics because it got so inflamed and swollen. Gross. and painful.