12-21-2009, 02:02 PM
The middle of last week, I'm trying to voice a novel. I'm putting out a free audiobook. It should be easy, and I'm so glad we're no longer in Daly City. Up there, we were on the landing/takeoff path of SF airport. We'd have to pause our conversations at regular intervals while an airliner went over. If we ventured out on the balcony, we'd be deafened by 280 traffic.
But now we're in Mountain View. Nice quiet, small-town Mountain View, in an area with 50-plus-year-old houses and little traffic or noise of any kind.
Or so I thought. Once I started miking, I discovered airlines going over. Not like Daly City, but enough to mess up the recording. Small planes, too, and occasional loud cars or trucks, and Caltrans whistles. Then there's that damned dirigible whose motor will linger for ten minutes. The mike recorder won't pause. You can only stop it, then start a new file -- which is a bother. So the accepted approach is to just wait out the noise, then resume speaking. But you end up with huge files that way. One hour equals one gigabyte. Yes, gigabyte.
So the planes, trains and automobiles give it a rest and I finally get going good -- until the phone rings. I expect Wells Fargo or the Mercury News. But there's a deep voice at the other end. It's my younger brother Greg. Dang, wish I had his voice. He asks if he's interrupting anything. I tell him no, no. I mean, he only calls about once a year. This is rare. Extremely rare. So he asks whether my foot is any better. Nope, it's not. I'll likely get it operated on next month and pay out of pocket, because our health insurance is crap. He asks if I've given any thought to coming back to Indiana to visit Mom. I tell him yeah, I'll get a ticket for January. He tells me how much Mom appreciates my visits. The holidays are very rough on her these days. Most of the family has gone Jehovah's Witness, which has gutted all our holiday gatherings (don't get me started on JW). Now it's just Greg and me. So I try to visit around the holidays, but not on the holidays, because it's such a pain with the schisms. Greg and his wife take my mom out to eat on Thanksgiving, Christmas, her birthday, etc., and hang out with her, which I'm glad of. And when I come back, he and I hang out together and usually do a couple beer-and-bad-movie nights -- only no subtitles. He refuses to watch movies with subtitles. So anyway, Greg and I talk a bit more on the phone and I agree to come home in January, then he says he won't hold me any longer and signs off.
I go back to miking, discovering a noisy flock of crows outside, how the house cracks loudly every few minutes (an artifact of the plywood we put on the roof), how Fudge chews loudly for fleas in her fur, and the occasional pings of a can of Turpenoid (used to clean oil brushes) near my desk as it expands and contracts in the heat.
It takes me the rest of the week to do four episodes (the recommended number before you even think of going live), and finally, at two this morning, I go to bed with the first episode posted on iTunes and on my website.
At 6:30 am the phone rings ominously. It's my mom. Her voice is breaking.
Greg just died.
But now we're in Mountain View. Nice quiet, small-town Mountain View, in an area with 50-plus-year-old houses and little traffic or noise of any kind.
Or so I thought. Once I started miking, I discovered airlines going over. Not like Daly City, but enough to mess up the recording. Small planes, too, and occasional loud cars or trucks, and Caltrans whistles. Then there's that damned dirigible whose motor will linger for ten minutes. The mike recorder won't pause. You can only stop it, then start a new file -- which is a bother. So the accepted approach is to just wait out the noise, then resume speaking. But you end up with huge files that way. One hour equals one gigabyte. Yes, gigabyte.
So the planes, trains and automobiles give it a rest and I finally get going good -- until the phone rings. I expect Wells Fargo or the Mercury News. But there's a deep voice at the other end. It's my younger brother Greg. Dang, wish I had his voice. He asks if he's interrupting anything. I tell him no, no. I mean, he only calls about once a year. This is rare. Extremely rare. So he asks whether my foot is any better. Nope, it's not. I'll likely get it operated on next month and pay out of pocket, because our health insurance is crap. He asks if I've given any thought to coming back to Indiana to visit Mom. I tell him yeah, I'll get a ticket for January. He tells me how much Mom appreciates my visits. The holidays are very rough on her these days. Most of the family has gone Jehovah's Witness, which has gutted all our holiday gatherings (don't get me started on JW). Now it's just Greg and me. So I try to visit around the holidays, but not on the holidays, because it's such a pain with the schisms. Greg and his wife take my mom out to eat on Thanksgiving, Christmas, her birthday, etc., and hang out with her, which I'm glad of. And when I come back, he and I hang out together and usually do a couple beer-and-bad-movie nights -- only no subtitles. He refuses to watch movies with subtitles. So anyway, Greg and I talk a bit more on the phone and I agree to come home in January, then he says he won't hold me any longer and signs off.
I go back to miking, discovering a noisy flock of crows outside, how the house cracks loudly every few minutes (an artifact of the plywood we put on the roof), how Fudge chews loudly for fleas in her fur, and the occasional pings of a can of Turpenoid (used to clean oil brushes) near my desk as it expands and contracts in the heat.
It takes me the rest of the week to do four episodes (the recommended number before you even think of going live), and finally, at two this morning, I go to bed with the first episode posted on iTunes and on my website.
At 6:30 am the phone rings ominously. It's my mom. Her voice is breaking.
Greg just died.
I'm nobody's pony.
