Thursday was sweet

Quickie here since I've spent all my evening recording. I got up on time again but got out later 'cause I showered. Hateful time-consuming showers! Grr.

Work was good. Finally met with Tom and got a big list of things that need to be done...right before I left for the day. Oh, the irony of it all.

Had a pity party with Jess on the way to class 'cause neither of us could go to New York with everybody else from Akron. Yay for cell phones making drives go by fast.

No more Cherry Vanilla Dr.Pepper slurpie at Seven Eleven. BUT....they had Coke Blak! So I got a ridiculously overpriced bottle of the coffee-cola "fusion beverage," and was incredulous to find the coke flavor analogous to the dumb little gummy coke bottles I ate as a child. Heck, you ARE Coke! Can't you make your coke flavor right?? And I learned at the dentist yesterday that Coke is the third most corrosive drink for teeth. The other two? Gatorade and Red Bull. Yessir.

Ate my pizza scrounged from meeting leftovers at Nova and gave up on the final homework problem. The units of the permeability constant were totally bizarre, not to mention he never actually talked about permeability in the book, and I don't think there's "pyrex gas."

Class was good. The last lecture. Reaction kinetics, and I knew it all already, basically. Last lecture of the class, and Dr. Yates' last lecture at Pitt. He's moving to the University of Virginia to start working in astrochemistry. Pretty crazy sweet for a 71-year-old! We had bananas and double-stuffed Oreos for snacks. He gave me back 7 points on problem 2, bumping my exam 2 score up to an 88, with which I am content. We're flirting with a B here....we'll see :-/

Got Daniel a Coke Blak on my way out of Pitt and talked to Lydia Heymann on the phone (sorta). I randomly decided to find out what was down Bouquet if you don't turn right on Bates, so I did, and ended up pretty much tooling down whatever roads I felt like, following a newfound sense of Pittsburgh direction, and eventually coming right out onto second avenue halfway home! Yeah man!

Came home and went downstairs to record. I thought about setting up a metronome and laying a good steady guitar track for "Nail-Pierced Hands," but instead I played around with drums on "On My Side." I wasn't really planning to record anything serious, but I ended up fine-tuning a good drum track, after which I wanted to put down some bass. So I ended up crafting one of my best bass parts ever over about 20 takes, hunched there in the big chair in front of the computer. And dude, I have fallen in love with my little ART Tube Levelar, a guitar pedal-shaped real tube compressor I picked up for $25 used at Guitar Center. It gave me the bass tone I have cried for for the past year. I still am amazed and overjoyed when it slides down the fretboard on the recording and doesn't lose any volume. Amazing! I love that little pedal!

And then I grabbed the atrocious little no-brand Les Paul imitation guitar Rick Reynolds gave me, and ended up laying some solid, creative guitar tracks. Once again, the Tube Levelar gave me a crazy sweet fat steady tone. I kept one of them that was played kind of on the fly and has some mistakes. The tuning might be a bit off, and regardless, I'll probably redo it, but I like what I played. All in all, what I recorded this night stuns me. The drums sound like real drums, the bass sounds like real bass and a real bass PART (something that has eluded me), and the guitar has that beautiful Les Paul tone and some sweet low-level accents. The bass and acoustic are intertwined harmonically, creating a musical sum greater than its constituent parts. Basically, God dropped another amazing recording in my lap, and I have there on the hard drive something I've spent the last 6 months wondering if I could ever make.

So I'm pretty happy! And Mike Q's new pictures on Flickr made me happy too 'cause there were sweet ones, amazing ones, cool ones, weird ones, and interesting ones. And some of me, which is always a plus :-D

Tomorrow Dad leaves for a 5-day trip to visit Grandma Sweetie in Texas. I'll go to care group right from work. But most importantly, I'll get up at 5:39am.

--Clear-recording Ambassador