Hi, all--what a long, strange trip it's been. Oy. Even double-oy (seven).
I know I have missed too much to ever catch up on, so I won't even try. Here are the Cliff Notes of my life over the past couple of months:
1. Started new job, which is going incredibly well. What a nice change after the emotional wasteland of my former church gig. Unfortunately, that wasteland did not place an ad to hire my replacement until 2 weeks after I ostensibly "left," which meant they asked me to continue to record services for them, which normally wouldn't be a problem except for:
2. Our computer died unexpectedly about 3 weeks ago. The day before Gabe's huge science fair project was due. Of course. And of course we hadn't saved to floppies/CDs for a week or so. Triple oy. One of Betsy's tech-head friends came over and we managed to cobble together a system out of pirated parts of other computers we had lying around (doesn't everyone). I ordered a new computer which arrived in bits and pieces over the past couple of weeks, which brings me to point:
3. The monitor came first and was missing a small clip to keep the cords in place. I spent almost a week speaking (I use the term highly figuratively) to people from far off India, none of whom evidently were aware that the British controlled their country for a century or so and that they were supposed to understand simple phrases like "I need a replacement clip." I "spoke" to almost 30 people in various departments, none of whom grokked a word I was saying, until they finally escalated my call to official complaint status, which meant I got to speak to someone in the US!! The punchline: they couldn't just send me a clip, they had to send a whole new monitor. Finally the new computer is here, which leads me to:
4. No "old" (like a year) software works with Vista without a lot of infuriating tweaks and workarounds. Luckily I am very intuitive about downloading drivers (even if they're not the "right" ones) so I've pretty much got my system up and running, including my brand spanking new version of:
5. Finale. I'm a bit upset that it won't import all my Encore files (because I had the latest version of Encore, which it doesn't support), nor will it handle MIDI files created by Encore, but it looks like it will do a lot of other cool stuff. Are there any Finale mavens here? I'm not getting a rousing welcome at the Make Music Forum due to my insouciance at asking "basic questions" (like why are there big blue triangles on my vocal score, which turns out to be a bug, evidently unfixable).
Betsy is in Bend for a few days, so I have the boys, but this is literally my first "day off" in weeks. I've already shampooed the carpet and cleaned the kitchen (shades of MattH). What a great day off.
Sad to hear about Larry's dad, and, to a lesser extent, the demise of Footlight. I've missed all of you.
And, BTW, Gabe won First Place at the science fair (his project is about reverse speech), and his mentor thinks he'll probably win the district-wide event next month due to its novelty.
