Wednesday is my day off from retail work, which makes it my designated day to record my parts for each week's edition of This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio and to try to get around to doing whatever else needs doing. I always run out out of Wednesday before I run out of Wednesday things to do.
Another busy Wednesday. We had an 11:00 am appointment south of the city, and before that we had a commitment to check in on a friend's pet bunny while the friend is outta town. Knowing the sprawling and disheartening Hellscape that characterizes commutes on always-under-construction Syracuse streets and highways nowadays, we left early (9:15 am), provided the li'l...er, BIG rabbit with his necessary morning produce, and we were appointment-bound by 10:00.
The meeting itself was actually two meetings back-to-back at the same office, one with our financial advisors and one with our health care insurance advisor. We were there for two and a half hours, but it was a productive process. We got back to the northern suburbs at two o'clock, stopped for gas, and stocked up on fresh comic books at Comix Zone. Realizing that our only nourishment had been coffee and pumpkin muffins five hours ago (almost six hours by the time we got around to actually eating), we grabbed pizza and chicken wings at Paladino's Cicero Pizza and returned home for a late lunch around 3:00. It would be our only meal of the day, but it was sufficient and satisfying, with plenty of pizza left over for a future meal.
The morning meetings had left us with a few follow-up tasks to address. I didn't get around to starting the radio show until 5:00. I was not able to do much prep work Tuesday night; the individual track annotation was unfinished, nor did I have time to repeat last week's experiment with dragging the files into their destination folder the night before recording. That lack of prep made an already-busy Wednesday an eensy bit busier still.
Nonetheless! Armed with the killer playlist Dana and I had built on Tuesday, I was able to record the show in just over an hour. I had decided I wanted to execute a Featured Performer spotlight on the late Ace Frehley, something of a last-minute decision on Tuesday, even though I'd been thinking about it for several days. I confess I've been mad at KISS lately; we won't go into the why of that, but you would be correct in guessing my disappointment in them is political in nature. Even so, I couldn't pretend the group didn't mean a lot to me, because they did, all of the real-world tsuris notwithstanding. The tribute felt necessary, I'm glad we did it, and I think it came out pret' damned swell.
A little after 6:00, with the radio show presumably done and just in need of a review before forwarding to Dana, it seemed a good idea to postpone its completion so we could make our evening bunny-feeding pilgrimage. When we got back home an hour or so later, I discovered some mistakes in the show: A track on the printed playlist that I'd somehow forgotten to include in the actual playlist, a back-announcement that came out too distorted, some playlist changes that needed to be made to accommodate the addition of the forgotten track, and another back-announcement that would need to be redone to reflect those changes.
I made the fixes, started to load the file, and discovered the damned thing was incomplete, and I would have to go through it file by file to discover what one individual file had gone MIA. I needed a break, so Brenda and I enjoyed some popcorn while watching TV. I got back to the computer a little after 10:00, compared a printed list of the playlist to the contents of the show's folder, and discovered the AWOL item was one of our show IDs. It's an ID that appears twice in the show, and the folder adamantly refused to admit the second identical file. I came up with a hack, FINALLY got it done, and clouded it over to Dana. It's a great show. It was an awful lot of work, but it's a great show.
And that exhausted Wednesday's options. No writing done on this week's Wednesday, other than, y'know, "This Week's Wednesday." All of my Wednesdays from now until Thanksgiving have appointments and commitments etched in ink on my calendar. That said, I'm still hoping for a bit more breathing space on some of those weeks' Wednesdays, and maybe a chance to fulfill a little bit of that goal I claim as my aim: To make something happen. Come at me, Wednesday. Wanna make something of it?
I compiled a various-artists tribute album called Make Something Happen! A Tribute To The Flashcubes, and it's pretty damned good; you can read about it here and order it here. My new book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) is now available, and you can order an autographed copy here. You can still get my previous book Gabba Gabba Hey! A Conversation With The Ramones from publisher Rare Bird Books, OR an autographed copy here. If you like the books, please consider leaving a rating and/or review at the usual online resources.
This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, streaming at SPARK stream and on the Radio Garden app as WESTCOTT RADIO. You can read about our history here.
No comments:
Post a Comment