Day 2387

When I picked up my tape recorder at the repair shop, it occurred to me that I hadn't picked the best time to restore and refurbish my old studio. This was an ambitious project and I should have waited until all the unexpected expenses and emergencies subsided. Of course, when are unexpected things ever going to quit happening. If I waited until life was calm again, I'd be waiting forever. At any rate, there are still many things to fix, but I now have two functioning old school multi-track tape recorders again.

As most of you know, I'm fascinated with gadgets. Ever since we began having power outages in our neighborhood, I've been looking for the perfect emergency power source. Backup batteries don't last long enough to be really useful. Gasoline generators get the job done, but they are noisy, heavy, and you've got to keep them outside because of the exhaust. Lately, I've discovered solar powered generators. Even the largest of these devices won't power your entire house, but they seem perfect if you just need some LED lights, a laptop, a few cell phones, and a small portable refrigerator to keep you going. The only drawback I can see is that they are ridiculously expensive. Oh, and you need a lot of sunlight too. I was looking at the Goal Zero generators today. Very cool. All I need are a couple of these, an Airstream trailer, a satellite phone, and some acreage up in the mountains and I'm all set. Hey, there's nothing wrong with dreaming is there. My fantasy has always been complete self sufficiency. When I hear someone say "It takes a village," or "We've all got to work together as a team," it just makes me want to vomit.

The weather was weird today. When we woke up, the air was still and the humidity was oppressive. This was not the best environment for Dot. She got tired on her morning walk and we had to walk even slower than usual to make it back home again. I was a little worried about her at first, but she's back to normal now after a nice long nap. As the day progressed, it got darker and darker and by mid-afternoon we were in the path of a raging thunderstorm. Not surprisingly, the dogs got frightened by the thunder and lightning and I had to spend the rest of the afternoon calming them down. The only good thing about all this was that the temperature dropped twenty degrees. I won't have to water the grass tomorrow either.

I need to think of some better passive income ideas. With interest rates near zero, the stock market has been a big disappointment. The stock photography market has been an even bigger disappointment. I'm a good photographer, but you literally have to have thousands and thousands of images in circulation to make any significant income. Ditto for running ads on my websites. All these things showed promise and were even occasionally lucrative for me twenty years ago. I blame it all on globalization. When you are competing with billions of people instead of a few thousand, prices come down dramatically. Some bloggers started writing books when blogging fell out of favor. I don't think my life is weird enough to use it as the basis for a novel. I'm certainly not going to write a motivational or self help book. I've got nothing in the motivational department. Don't expect me to lift you up. If you're enjoying this, you're probably happy already.

Rascal is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2348

You can never ignore Murphy's Law when you hire a plumber. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Somehow plumbing problems always end up being more difficult than they first appear. I was well prepared today. I had all the parts necessary to rebuild the leaking bathroom faucets. The only original part I had planned to reuse was a brass valve under the sink that the plumbing supply guys said was indestructible. Unfortunately, the sixty year old parts were so corroded that they were frozen solid and virtually impossible to remove from the porcelain body of the sink. While trying to remove the old faucets, the plumber broke the indestructible valve under the sink and we had to start over from the beginning. I took all the parts I bought yesterday back to the plumbing supply store and purchased a brand new faucet set that I hoped would fix.

I thought everything would be a piece of cake at this point, but the old brass water spout in the center of the sink was even more frozen and corroded than the faucets. I cut my hand trying to help the plumber remove the spout. The plumber, who was underneath the sink, cut his hand even worse. He also ended up having a small porcelain chip fall in his eye. We ended up having to saw the heavy brass spout off using a special metal saw. The important thing at this point was to not break the porcelain, because the plumber said the old basin would be impossible to replace. Eventually, the plumber realized that the sink had the upper hand and called a second plumber to come help him.  The two plumbers spent the rest of the day wrestling with the sink and eventually prevailed. I now have a very nice, and quite expensive, working sink.

Not surprisingly, Dot didn't like all this activity and ended up pooping fives time in the house. Trust me on this. Cleaning up after in incontinent dog is much more difficult when there is no running water in the house. We had to shut off the water to the entire house for most of the day, because the old sink had no shut off valves. By the end of the day I had a huge pile of smelly dog blankets and rugs sitting out in a pile on the back porch, waiting for the water to return so I could hose them off before throwing them in the washing machine.

This was a very expensive day. Before meeting the plumber, I dropped my car off at the Land Rover dealer for a required major service. There is a suspension problem that should be covered under the car's warranty, but the service maintenance is always on my dime. I love my car, except for those days when I have to pay for a major repair. The plumbing and car repair bills were enough for one day, but when I got home the was a call from the guy at the audio repair shop with an estimate of what it would cost to rebuild the second old tape recorder I'd taken to them. Yep. This recorder is going to cost just as much as the one I took in last month. All in all, not a good day. I really need to find a well paying job again. Maybe I should become a plumber.

Oh, did I mention that it rained today too and that the Internet has been down for most of the day. I had thought about putting the dogs beds out on the porch while the plumbers were working, but they are both scared of thunder and wanted nothing to do with going outside. All is well that ends well I guess. I now have a sink that will outlast me and hopefully nothing else in the house will break for a few months. Dot has finally calmed down and is resting peacefully. All I need to do now is figure out a way to upload this post without a working WiFi connection.

Holly is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2327

I enjoyed breakfast this morning. I returned to the hipster cafe and for a moment it felt like I was back in Seattle. It was a dark rainy morning and the place was filled with young people in plaid shirts sitting silently nursing their coffee while some slide guitar blues played on the sound system. Forty years ago I used to eat breakfast in the original Starbucks at First and Pike before I went to work at a downtown ad agency and the ambience felt the same. Everything old is new again I guess.

Occasionally, I really miss Seattle.  This is where I made the transition from architecture to advertising. Young architects don't make much money and when I realized I could double my salary almost overnight by becoming an advertising copywriter, I never looked back. It was surprisingly easy to get a job. Nobody majored in advertising in college back then. I once had an art director partner who used to be a Navy fighter pilot. One of my supervisors used to be a wrestling coach. Everyone was an extremely good bullshitter. I didn't have much of a portfolio at the beginning. I just told them I was an architect and I was in. Good times. It was just like that Mad Men show on TV.

Seattle was where I discovered music. I started writing jingle lyrics at the ad agency and decided I wanted to become a songwriter. I met a lot of musicians and had a great time, but never became the next Bernie Taupin. I did gradually start acquiring gear like I saw at the studios where we recorded the jingles however. Some of the gear, like the vintage multi-track recorder that just came back from the repair shop, still exists. I spent quite a bit of time on Google this morning searching for a PDF copy of the instruction manual for this recorder. When it returned from the shop, I realized that I no longer remembered how to use the machine. I've been using Pro Tools for so long now that using an actual analog tape recorder seems a bit like alien technology. After quite a bit of searching, I found a copy of the manual and downloaded it. Wow. This was a complicated machine. I must have been a lot smarter in my twenties and thirties.

Since it seemed a bit ambitious to re-learn audio engineering before lunch, I moved on to something much simpler. I installed the new cartridges in the big production printer and began the cleaning routine to unclog the lines. The printer works again. The tape recorder works again. I'm not sure that I'm running on all cylinders though. I find it harder and harder to begin anything that is remotely arduous or ambitious. I hope I don't become like my Dad. He was an excellent wood carver and continued to buy carving tools almost until the day he died. Somewhere along the line he got Parkinson's Disease and could no longer use the tools. They just sat there and accumulated dust in their original boxes. I don't want my gear to wind up that way. It needs to be used.

There were more tornado warnings today, but the really bad weather stayed to the West of us as it traveled rapidly to the Northeast. We got enough rain to scare Dash, but not enough to wake up Dot. Since she is almost deaf now, she slept peacefully through the storm. I'm glad I figured out my air conditioning problem yesterday, because it would have been hard to get a technician to come to the houes today. I canceled the emergency service call and rescheduled a regular Spring system checkup for early next month.

It's hard to believe that April is almost over. Summer will be here before you know it. I need to learn to appreciate the rain because it isn't going to last. In just a few months from now, I'll be begging for rain.

Parker is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2326

You'd be proud of me. Instead of wasting time on Facebook and wondering why nobody was reading the blog anymore, I decide to be productive. I cleared all the water off the roof, along with a huge messy pile of wet catkins that was trapping the water and creating duck ponds that would never evaporate. After the roof was dry and clean, I called the roofer and got him to agree to come out and patch the areas where the elastomer coating was peeling away again. I'll probably have to wait until the rainy season is over before the roofers actually get here, but at least I got the process started.

Since I was semi-successful with the roofer, I  called my watchmaker and asked if the watches he was repairing for me would ever be finished. I hate to bother the guy, since I know he's busy, but he's had three watches of mine for over two years now. He told me that the watches would be repaired by Summer and I reminded him in a friendly way that he told me the same thing last Summer. This watchmaker is very good and I'm in no hurry, but I still think two years is long enough.

The watchmaker isn't the only one who's slow. I took a tape deck in for repairs last November and just got a call yesterday saying that it had finally been fixed. To be fair, these guys did have to custom make a rubber pinch wheel that no longer existed anymore. When I went to pick up the multi-track deck, I dropped off a mastering deck that had the same problems with disintegrating transport belts. Rubber doesn't last forever. The rubber hoses in your car's engine eventually become brittle and crack. The protective foam in camera cases eventually turns into an awful goo. I'm discovering now that the rubber transport belts in tape recorders don't last that long either. I'm sure my Beta SP video recorders are going to suffer the same fate soon. The only difference is that they'll be even more expensive to fix than the audio recorders. Why do I punish myself this way? All this stuff is obsolete.

I was feeling pretty good about getting things accomplished when I returned from running errands this afternoon, but the feeling was short lived. The house felt warm and Dot was panting. It didn't take me long to figure out that the air conditioner had broken. I immediately called my HVAC guy, but they had already closed for the day. I methodically tried to revive the air conditioner by throwing breaker switches, rebooting the fancy WiFi thermostat, and disconnecting the entire system for a while. Nothing worked. I finally decided to try a new air filter, just in case the new thermostat software had some sort of sensor that would shut down the system if the filter got too dirty. The filter actually seemed reasonably clean, but I didn't have much to lose. Surprisingly, replacing the filter worked and the air conditioner roared back to life. This was a disaster averted, since Dot can't handle the heat anymore. I was worried about her. Hopefully the compressor will keep running through the night, but I probably should have the HVAC guys come out anyway. Better safe than sorry.

I had some website updates to finish today and did a good job of biting my tongue when the client suggested a number of things that I thought were silly. I don't fight these things anymore. If you want something that looks a bit clunky or might confuse your customers, it's your call. At this stage of my career it just amuses me that everyone thinks they're a creative genius. Ten years ago silly suggestions would have driven me crazy.

I hope I get to go to breakfast tomorrow. The next wave of severe weather is supposed to arrive around midnight tonight. Maybe the storm will be out of the area by morning. It's hard to tell. The weather forecasts haven't been very accurate lately. Accurate or not, I should have looked at the forecast before I went up on the roof this morning. If it rains, that was a wasted effort.

Lucky is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2143

I went and got the blood tests that my doctor needed right after we walked the dogs this morning. They always want you to fast before these tests, so it's easier to do them first thing in the morning and eat breakfast afterwards. A lady I'd never seen before approached me with a pile of forms to sign before they drew my blood. She said she was a representative of the lab that did the testing. I read page one of the forms and they basically said that I had to pay for anything that insurance didn't cover. What was this all about? Insurance has always covered everything before. I told the woman with all the forms that it was my doctor who insisted on all these tests and it was his job to get them paid for. The whole incident was irritating. Maybe I'll eventually get a bill and maybe I won't. That's not the point. The whole process of navigating the healthcare system is kind of like being lost in a corn maze. It's hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

Today was a writing day. I didn't think my writing assignments would take me as long as they did, but sometimes the muse just isn't with you. I struggled today. I often find that the "no-brainer" jobs are the hardest, because it can be very difficult to write something compelling when there is nothing to say. Really innovative products sell themselves. The rest provide job opportunities for people like me. I'm not complaining, mind you. I'll write about virtually anything if you pay me.

Yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my defective watch winder was being replaced for free with a brand new model. Today, I was disappointed to discover that it will cost three times as much as I originally anticipated to fix my old multi-track tape recorder. These two different approaches to a repair problem illustrate perfectly how we have become a throw away society. The watch winder was made in China and it was actually less expensive to throw the old unit away and replace it with a new one than it would have been to ship the winder back to the Chinese manufacturer. The tape recorder had to be repaired because it was no longer in production. Most of the repair cost was labor. The cost of the parts themselves was minimal. In the future I don't think anything will be repaired. It will all be replaced. It's so much easier to throw the old stuff away and let the robots build more.

While I was on the phone trying to get some medical records this afternoon, Dot had a major accident in the house. I smelled it before I saw it. It was like a poop explosion. She pooped all over the carpet in my office and then stumbled and fell in the poop. First I had to clean Dot up. Then I had to take her harness off and hose it off before I put it in the washing machine. Then I had to do my best to clean the carpet itself. It sure would have been nice if Dot had pooped on one of the dozens of small rugs we've spread around the house to help her walk. I can take the rugs to the laundromat or hose them off outside. The carpet is more of a challenge.

Tomorrow is another day. I'm hoping that Dot does well at her physical therapy session. I'm hoping that it doesn't rain. I"m hoping that the carpet still smells clean after it dries out tomorrow.

Abi is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2127

I was industrious today. I found someone in Los Angeles who can repair my broken watch winder and I found someone right in my own neighborhood who can repair my multi-track tape recorders. The broken recorder is housed in a five foot tall 19" equipment rack that served as my recording studio for many years. I thought it would be an easy job to unscrew the recorder and pull it out of the rack, but I was wrong. When I removed the screws from the front panel, the recorder wouldn't budge. I pulled the heavy metal cabinet away from the wall and looked behind it. It was only then that I remembered the countless hours I spent carefully bundling the maze of interconnected wires and cables together and securing them in place with zip ties. The installation looked neat and tidy, but it had been built for permanence, not convenience. I had to carefully cut the plastic zip ties and remove all the wires connected to the recorder before I could extract the machine from the rack. The whole process took two hours.

I looked on Google to see if I could still find instruction manuals for the equipment in the audio rack and was surprised to discover that some of it had acquired vintage status over the years and was quite desirable. This gave me an added incentive to fix the broken stuff, but I still don't know if restoring the studio will be worth the time, effort and money it is going to take. All this equipment represents a moment in time that has passed. I probably wrote and recorded at least a hundred songs using the equipment I was disassembling today. The last tape I worked on was still in the machine. It was dated February 17, 1986. The label on the tape was printed using a dot matrix printer. The Internet, blogging, and almost everything I do today didn't even exist back then. Maybe all I'm trying to save are the memories.

I feel the same way about film. I used to love taking pictures on film. There was an art to getting the exposure just right. You couldn't fix things in Photoshop. The whole process of going into a darkroom and coming out hours later with wonderful images was absolute magic to me. I never felt the same when I made the inevitable transition to the digital world. I use Pro Tools and Avid Media Composer to put commercials and videos together now. I'm a wizard with Photoshop. There is no magic in these digital tools though. Elvis has left the building. I have a few friends who have embraced this brave new world, but it's not for me. Give me an analog tape recorder, a 4x5 Sinar camera, and an IBM Selectric typewriter and I'm a happy camper.

Actually this is a lie. Give me these old things and I'm not happy at all. There's nobody left to fix them. Keeping vintage equipment running and properly maintained is a giant hassle. I used to know lots of camera repairmen, watch repairmen, and tape machine technicians. For the most part, they're all gone. I bet it will take over a month just to find the rubber parts to fix my tape machine. I have friends who used to collect vintage watches who have given up the hobby for these reasons. If it takes two years to get a watch fixed, what's the point in even having it?

Old dogs are hard to fix too, but at least they provide companionship. I was happy to see that Dash was steadier on his feet today. I don't know why today was a good day and yesterday was a bad day, but I'll take any good day I can get. Maybe Dash is learning to pace himself better. He walked slower today and didn't limp nearly as much. I'm doing a better job of keeping him from scratching the ground after he pees too.  Tomorrow we go back to the vet for another evaluation. I have a feeling that we're going to have to see an orthopedic specialist, but we'll see how tomorrow goes.

Kuuipo is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 2125

Dash woke up limping this morning. I don't know what happened during the night, but he is definitely having more trouble with his leg than he was yesterday. Maybe he landed hard when he jumped off the bed this morning. Maybe his knee went out of joint while he was sleeping. I'll never know. I've discovered that a lot of weird things happen to the dogs while we're asleep. So now we have two dogs with a total of six good legs between them. This is going to make life difficult. I suspect the only thing worse than having one lame Dalmatian is having two lame Dalmatians.

Dash makes things worse by being so stubborn. He won't poop in the yard, so I have to walk him really slow to his regular place in the park. He'd be just fine if he understood the concept of walking slow, but he'd rather hop on three legs really fast. I still hope he doesn't need surgery, but I suspect that there will be a visit to an orthopedic specialist next week.

I happened to turn on one of my old multi-track tape recorders this afternoon and discovered that the transport mechanism was broken. Damn! I suspect that the rubber belts and capstan wheels have gone bad, but I'd have to completely disassemble the complex recorder to know for sure. Since the rubber belts were suspect, I turned on an equally old mastering deck and it didn't work either. I did a quick Google search for old analog tape machines with the same problem I was experiencing and discovered dozens of people around the world with the same dilemma. In almost every case, their rubber tape transport belts had become brittle, gummy, or simply disintegrated. It was a sad story on Google. Replacement parts were hard to find and in many cases were just as old and brittle as the belts that needed replacing. Oh, all the repair shops that worked on these old analog tapes machines had gone out of business too. I'm fucked.

It's a familiar story. Sometimes it's an old camera. Other times it's a piece of electronic equipment, or even an old car. Rubber is always the enemy. Rubber hoses become brittle and break in old cars. Rubber light seals deteriorate in old film cameras. Rubber drive belts always break or disintegrate in old video and audio recorders. I spent a ton of money replacing all the rubber transport belts in my Beta SP camera and then I had to reluctantly conclude that the equipment was obsolete anyway. Will I go to an extraordinary amount of trouble to preserve a piece of equipment that saw its best days in the mid 1980's? Or will I just walk away? I think you know the answer.

Old dogs. Old tape machines. Old memories. I do my best to keep them alive. It's just the way I'm wired. Maybe walking away is better, but I don't see the point. I like my world to be comfortable and familiar. I wrote and recorded many, many songs using my old 4-track studio. Who cares if I can now buy a much more advanced 48-track recorder for half the price. The old equipment served me well and it was all I ever needed.

I watched a new episode of Dr. Who tonight. Maybe the reason I like this show so much is that it is old and familiar as well. The show has been on the air for more than 50 years. The special effects are better now, but the Daleks and the Cybermen are basically just the same as they've always been. Tonight's show attempted to explain the Bootstrap Paradox where a future event is the cause of an earlier event that happens in the past. The past event then becomes the cause of the future event, which is the past event's cause. Cause and effect become so hopelessly tangled that nobody can determine what caused the event to happen in the first place. It was too complicated for me to wrap my head around, but it was still a good episode.

Dash is sleeping now. He's a bit of a paradox as well. He needs to walk to keep his muscles strong, but when he walks, he limps, causing his muscles to get weak. Do I rest him or keep him walking slowly? It's confusing.

Neo is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 1649 - Summer Solstice

It doesn't really seem like the longest day of the year. The sun should be setting right about now, but since it's cloudy outside, it seems like sunset occurred quite a while ago. Solstice is a big deal to some people I know, but it's just another Saturday to me. The only Summer Solstice that seemed very memorable to me was years ago when I was going to high school in Alaska. My family was living in Fairbanks at the time and on June 20, we got in the car and drove north as far as we could. We almost had 24-hour daylight in Fairbanks during the Summer, but not quite. On this particular Solstice I remember climbing up a hill just above the Arctic Circle near midnight with my Dad and watching the sun still shining, low on the northern horizon. Winter skies were pretty cool as well. There were lots and lots of auroras to be seen.

There was nothing that exciting today. I saw a rabbit and a couple of ducks in the park. That was about it. It's amazing how quickly we can go from too much rain to not enough. We're gone a couple weeks without significant rain and the ground is already getting parched and dry. I made sure to water both the front and back lawn today. I'm determined to keep the grass growing as long as I can this year. We don't have an automatic sprinkler system, but I did put mechanical timers on the little oscillating sprinklers attached to the garden hose. I like these timers. There are no batteries or electricity required. The entire thing is just a simple clockwork mechanism that you wind up and then it turns the water off thirty minutes to an hour later.

I called in some prescription renewals this morning and the pharmacist told me that some of them needed doctor approval again. My GP has been renewing these things one month at a time until I go in and have another physical exam. I already made an appointment for an exam next month, but I guess I've actually got to have the exam before my doctor will go back to renewing my meds for a year at a time. I really liked my team of liver doctors. They really believed that a good diet and lots of exercise were the keys to good health. I don't think my general practitioner has ever met a pill he didn't like. He's always trying to prescribe something new for me. I'd really like to find a reputable doctor who could find a way to ween me off of all my meds. I'm tired of taking pills. I guess I shouldn't be too disparaging about the pharmaceutical industry though. As much as I hate pills, I need to remember that it was a pill that cured my Hepatitis C.

I took some stuff over to the storage warehouse today and spent a few minutes looking around. There are a lot of things I should probably just get rid of. It's just not useful anymore. I don't imagine that people are going to start using tape machines again. I still have tape machines from the days when I did a lot of video editing. Everything is file based now though. The tape machines are museum pieces.  Old software is pretty useless too. I have tons of software still in the original boxes from the days when you installed it using floppy disks. Some of this software was pretty cool, but absolutely none of it runs on modern computers. Framed photographs that never sold at gallery shows are taking up a lot of space too. Lord only knows why I have so many electric trains.

I'm not sure what I'll do tomorrow. There's an animal rescue website to update. I need to do some cleaning around the house. Maybe I'll go to the gym. One of these days, I'm sure the dogs would like to go to the dog park again as well.

Barley is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day