I must confess, it doesn’t feel much like Christmas around here.. 2 years ago this month my mom died, I’m now taking care of my dad.. who has alzhiemer’s… I’ve been pretty tuned out of mass media lately.. so none of the usual Christmas messages have reached me.. I feel like I should be with family, but no one has invited us.. so its all just rather hard.

But then I started searching youtube for Christmas music, and my move improved.. its funny how.. even when you feel so out side of this world.. not connected to.. whatever Christmas is supposed to be.. somehow there’s still magic in the day…

Bet Middler on Acid (as Cheesy as they want to be)

And just cause we can’t get enough….

Just cause…

Every Body Loves Charlie Brown

King Diamond, you can’t beat this!!! (This one is SOOO my favorite!!! Just warms my black heart!!!)

A little Motorhead?

How about a little old fashion Iron Maiden?

And our old friend Rob Halford

 Yeah, so that def lifted my spirits today.. help yours any?

I will no doubt blog more on the subject.. unless lawyers should instruct me against such things… but I figure I should say something at this point.. though I will keep it ominously bare of details… suggestive to the imagination.

I’m on the verge of an emotional breakdown.. or.. maybe I’m not. There’s an ambiguity to it.. to it all.. but there are definitely moments where I feel myself to be at that verge. It could be cast into the light of appreciating that today is the 2 year anniversary of my mom’s passing. As near as I’m able to understand, the pain is still more then I’m able to fully take on.. so I experience it in ways where its like.. various psychological forces acting as intermediators between myself and the pain.. but this month.. every once in a while I find myself dropping down into that pain..

To further complicate matter’s there is my father… whom it is my job to take care of. No, I don’t feel I’m doing the greatest job at it.. but.. there is this intervention force, that is now thinking about taking my father away.. placing him in some sorta “home” -ish situation… my approval doesn’t matter…. they’re just going to do it.. and.. while my plan was to put him into an assisted living situation… to begin looking at it sometime after the new year.. It is that this intervention force… errr… it all looks quite dark to me.. like humanity subordinated to the machinery of the state.. so while I don’t object to my father being put in such a situation, I do object to the course they take in achieving this.,.. To how I’m treated.. and even, in places, how my father is treated: The Process

They have inaccurate perceptions of things, and they don’t care that these are inaccurate.. they will not subject them to debate..  or that there manner of proceeding could do more damage then good.. they seem to merely care about there perceptions..

The part of me that thinks my father could be better off in such a scenario is not terribly bothered by all this..  I mean that I’m having trouble coping, and that it may be adversely effecting my father… but the system still echo’s Nietzsche’s line “The state that coldest of cold monsters.”

Anyway, I’ll likely post more sometime soon.

I’ve been going without internet for a while now.. well.. actually I only have internet on my laptop, not my desktop.. which is all backwards… I went without any internet for about two days… and this apparently triggered a freak out online.. which is sorta mysterious.. and mystically my friend Greg PC showed up at my door to help matters… he’d never been to my door before.. and somehow the knocking at the somewhat late hour freaked me out and it took a while to regain my head.. so why not talk about this story?

It all started when I bought a certain microphone preamp.. Microphone preamps can be quite expensive.. I’ll likely make a post about this soon.. I got mine for a little less then half the list price.. well, it was used.. but Jesus, half off the list price? I would not have been able to afford this preamp other wise.. and it was a kind of preamp I REALLY wanted! So lots of excitement.. couldn’t wait to try it out.. but there was one problem..

The manual was more adamant then any manual I had ever seen.. on the importance of grounding.. which is to say.. the 3 prong plug thing.. blah blah blah.. and in the room that used to be my studio.. there was no such 3 pronged plug.. which meant.. if I wanted to play it safe.. I’d have to move the studio.. which.. was no small feat!

The biggest issue, of course, was the internet.. Version is my ISP.. it comes into my room via a drilled hole in the wall.. to this modem with wifi.. which I connected to via an ethernet cable but.. its not terribly mac friendly the way they’ve set it up.. so.. in order to ACTUALLY have wifi throughout the house.. and to actually be able to move files between computers.. via Wifi.. I can’t use there wifi..

I don’t really know what I’m doing.. so I wont go into all the gory details… but something funky was going on.. and I don’t get it.. where I couldn’t get my bass station and time capsule to get internet via the modem.. which is both why I had not internet for two days, and also why this laptop is my only internet connection.

I don’t really understand the networking thing today.. all the details..  Mac’s tend to simplify all the technical stuff.. but.. they simplify it to a point that.. if you have to go out of the simple zone.. you’re suddenly in this very disorientating world.. if you don’t know what your doing. Definitely painful!

But the good news is the studio is now mostly moved.. to the TV room.. which is sorta dramatically different, and has 2 dramatic implications.

1. Its a lot bigger.. which means I can bring parts of my studio into service which I’ve more or less had hidden away for ages… like say my 16 channel digital mixer
2. It’s a lot bigger.. which presents a different sorta acoustic situation.. the principle issue for acoustics in this situation is you don’t want the acoustics of the listening space interfering with the sound your ears are hearing.. and small spaces are notoriously hard to deal with… in the TV room.. there’s lots of space.. so.. by the time the audio bounces off a wall or something, and gets back to my ear.. it’s so low in volume.. that its not really coloring my impressions.. plus there are fairly sound absorbing surfaces in the space.. so.. I could finally make the move away from headphones to monitors.

I suppose this bears talking about. For a number of reasons it is considered a no no to mix on headphones.. but, given a choice between low end monitors and a terrible acoustic environment.. and higher end headphones.. take the headphones!!!

The jump to monitors, at least for me, is pretty mind blowing.. and yes… they are, at least in terms of price, low end monitors.. but I think they are quite nice.. as does Mr. BT.. and the guy at the store was like “yeah, if I had only this much to spend this is what I’d get.” Oh.. and not only are they relatively cheap.. but they were having a Thanksgiving weekend special deal on them!

Of course the only trouble is one of the monitors is defective.. so I have to go return it for another pair once they get them in.. hopefully tomorrow.. but.. what you find is a whole lot more detail.. you’re able to hear.

This is a somewhat odd thing.. you listen to.. well mostly I’ve been listening to the sound track of command and conquer.. which I’ve always regarded as a somewhat generic sound track.. but now that I can hear the details.. I’m actually quite impressed.. of course you can argue that they sure as hell should have made it sound better on lesser speakers.. but that’s sorta besides the point..

Anyway… yeah.. so I feel like I’m leveling up!