Multi-tasking Madness.
Busy few days. Awww. Who am I kidding? My life is a “To Do” list.
Leave day job and go straight to Michael’s to buy some mini-easels for my chapbook display on Saturday for the poetry show I’m taping. Get home. Boot up Mac, PC and PC laptop while I change into sweats. Begin downloading video footage off of my HDSD cards onto Mac while I go in the backyard and put in solar powered lights my wife bought because I know it will make her smile. Go back inside and begin downloading footage off of my second HDSD card onto Mac while I search out some of my audio engineering podcasts and begin downloading them onto the PC laptop. Put in the DVD from a previous episode of the poetry show I will be taping on Saturday morning so I can figure out if I need to bring my own display table for my chapbook and other “go to my website” paraphernalia. There are three episodes on the DVD so I scan through them all to get an idea. It looks like I won’t have to bring a table or go by the craft store and buy a swatch of fabric to make the table look “classy”. Reality check. I’m still bringing some kind of table because I don’t trust the table in all the episodes I watched to be there, so I’m still bringing a foldup table and a swatch of fabric. That was time wasted. Plug my flash drive into the PC to print out my “go to my website” sign that will be on the table only to realize that I never transferred the file from the laptop to the flash drive. Plug flash drive into laptop, get the offending file moved over to it and replug into the PC. It doesn’t occur to me that all my computers are networked until now–the next morning. Print out the file and do a mock table setup including a temp chapbook as I have none printed yet. I decide that I like the way it looks and begin working on a song a client wants a new rough mix for on the Mac. I pull out the offending horn section, but find an interesting intro section that I forgot was there and kind of like. I create a stereo mp3 file of it (bounced it down). Decide that there is probably a reason I didn’t use the intro the last time I bounced the track down, and do another pass without the horns or the intro and spend an hour attempting to email the b*st*rd as it refuses to attach itself to an email while I do other knick-knack stuff in-between hitting the ”attach” button and getting the error message. I find time to throw random curse words in the general direction of the computer and screen. I do all sorts of troubleshooting, finally creating an mp3 file from the original mp3 file using iTunes. It works even though the iTunes file is actually larger than the one I bounced right out of Pro Tools. I decide I don’t care how it worked. Now I can move on to other things. Go back to PC and begin the final formatting of the chapbook for printing which is a beast unto itself. Midway through, I panic thinking that I am doing it wrong, but it turns out my logic is good and settle down. I put the NBA playoffs on in the background to help settle my nerves while I work–music just distracts me. Work on the file for two hours solid until my wife comes home. We eat dinner and watch “The Savages”, a movie with Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman until we go to bed, much later than I should be going because I’m up in a few hours to do the day job again, but I can’t help but want to spend the extra time with my wife. She’s the most amazing woman I know. What the hell. Sleep is for suckas anyhow.
