We're Through It!

It's a glorious +18F tonight, and I'm all clean and shiny, with my laundry in the washer.

Yesterday (Saturday) was the final reprise of the arctic blast, with it hovering around 9F by daylight, and then dropping after sunset.

Alexa was saying it would get to 14 below, and NOAA was predicting negative 12, but in the end it only got down to ten below zero.

That was still damn cold, however, and I was trickling the water in the downstairs bathroom and kitchen, as well as running the oven at 350 degrees, which I did not do the previous weekend.

The space heater in the back room continued on as it had been all week, going full blast, and I had a humidifier going in the kitchen.

But come the morning today, it was 20F, and all the water was running normally.

It's going to stay 18F overnight, and tomorrow it'll be a fantastical 34F out there!

From here on out, as far as the app can see... which is into early February... it's gonna be above freezing during the days, and in the high twenties at night!

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I can't remember the last time I felt this relieved!

We had a pretty bad heat wave last summer, but I wasn't worried about the house burning down!.. or the basement flooding... or the water not working... or the cats freezing to death... or the car not starting...

Or the washer not working!.. I'm doing a double load tonight and I'm out of long underwear right now.

But the rest of the winter should be a breeze compared to the past week.

We always have one nasty week below zero, and sometimes it's in January... and sometimes it's in February... but it's never both!

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I slept in yesterday until 1:30PM, and then spent the whole day and night working on, Archeology, the song.

On the drives home, I'd determined it was too fast, and too low, so the first thing I did was transpose it up a step, and slow it down a bit.

Then I worked on the drums for a few hours.

I thought they were done, but they weren't... they did need quite a bit of fleshing out.

I spent most of the evening on the guitar track.

It's pretty intensive to piano roll a guitar, but I got it done, and that $70.00 I blew on the plugin last summer was worth it, because the results were pretty nice!

I also added some piano strikes at key points... as well as flutes & strings for the bridge parts... and marimba to accent certain parts of the percussion.

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Today, again I wasn't up until 1:30, but after walking Yvette I was back at it.

I figured out how to apply distortion to the guitar track, which made it even better... and then I spent the rest of the day doing the intrumentation for the interlude section of the song.

There's no way I can play, or fake a guitar solo, so the interludes... and many of the songs have them... need great instrumentals.

And I think I nailed it pretty well with this song tonight.

The ending measures of the song now seem a bit bland after the soaring orchestrations of the interlude so... I'll have to come up with something for the big ending.

But for tonight, our album's title song has really come a long way!

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And I'm sure I'll be doing the rest of the songs the same way, from here on out... adding guitars and most of the other instruments, in the same weekend.

Still, with nine songs left to go, we're talking... SUN MAR 24 as the day I'm doing this treatment to the final song.

So... vocals should begin in April... and get done in early June.

Allow another month for tweaking things and... the damn thing should be ready to drop by August!

But we'll see.

My target is still October, because... the bullshit factor.

But it all does seem doable!

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Tomorrow I've got to pay AllState with the AmEx before they snatch it out of my checking, and get on the horn with BMO.

This is gonna be the first normal, five-day work week since before the refinance was torpedoed in December.

So it's time to get back to the drawing board and hash out that long term survival strategy.

The PNC payment is really what's killing me, month to month, right now, but there won't be any renegotiating that loan until I've dealt with BMO's zombie balloon.

And that's all I know at this point.

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I've gone on, in past years, about how January is the month to come up with the plan, but this time around... I haven't done that yet... at least for the financial crisis.

I do have a nice plan for the album though! :D

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