Recording tomorrow!  Recording tomorrow!  Three people confirmed for recording tomorrow!

Which, since I write this on Tuesdays but post it Wednesdays, is actually tonight.  Ooh, I'm time travelling.

The plan is to finish recording Chapter Three; Sunday is also set up for recording, hopefully Chapter One but if not it will be Chapter Two.  Hm... it doesn't sound real exciting when I put it like that...however, I do have individual titles for each chapter... ok, Wednesday we will finish recording Gang Aft Agley; and Sunday we will hopefully record The Spy is Falling, but if not we will record part of Conrad the Extractor. 

Yes, that's much better.  Should have done that sooner.

Since I didn't record during this past week (unless you're reading this next week) I began to put my oh-so-massive brain to the task of what the group website will look like.  Oh, I have a wonderful image in my head.  It's beautiful.  It's amazing.  It's everything I want.  So, I put it on paper:

This... might need a little more work. 

But it's more than I had before.

*whistles*

We did it!  We did it!  We did... half a chapter!

That is, two people came to record on Sunday, so we recorded two voices out of five.  Since they're the main voices, it works out to roughly half.  Or maybe it doesn't.  Just go with me here.

This week, we recorded Chapter Three of Part One (previously Chapter Four of Part One).  Not going in order since Chapter One has only four people, three of which will be most convenient to record at the same time and I haven't been able to get the third scheduled yet... but we'll get there eventually.  It's not necessary to go in order.  I, at least, have it all in my head (oh my, it's getting crowded in there), so I know exactly how I want these guys to sound... even if I'm not exactly the best at conveying it as a director: "Try reading it more... like... gunky.  With some freebling".

Hah.  I don't even think I'm that descriptive.

So.  Short post this week.  We should be able to record more voices for Chapter Three next week; might be able to schedule recording on Chapter Two this Sunday but I am not sure yet.  In the meantime, here's something I didn't think to post a picture of yet (strange how things this cool can slip your mind):

                                                    Keyboard!  MIDI... Synthesizer... thingy!
 
Tried to get the whole thing in the picture but I seem to be still-camera impaired...  And now I am off to dream more dreams, catch them in nets, and stick them to cardboard with sharp pins.

For want of a text, the confirmation was lost.
For want of confirmation, the sitter was not called.
For want of a sitter not being called, the recording was called off.
And all for the want of a responding text.

And so it goes.  Had two people lined up and good to go this weekend.  But... I did not hear from the third.  I could have gone ahead and scheduled anyway, but technicalities which I shall not go into here make it rather a good idea that this third person show up as well.  I waited.  And tried to get in touch.  And waited again... Eventually, it was the day before and it was too late to get a sitter.  

I cannot stress this enough: 

This is why confirmation of plans, particularly with those of us who have kids to schedule around as well, is so
important.

Ok, rant over*.  I don't believe in dwelling (although it's a little hard to when the thing you are dwelling upon keeps happening again and again).  So I move on.

*Update:  I just finally got a text: this third person had not gotten in touch with me this week because they
were having surgery and were in the hospital for a couple of days.  Well.  Don't I just feel like a horrible, cranky... person now.

Unfortunately, this means there is still nothing recording-wise to report.  But I have been getting a few other
things accomplished...

... Finally wrote my drop-in line on the play what I wrote (see previous blog posting for more on this).  I had one thing about my play that was bugging me; a character is continually referred to but is not actually part of the action for much of the play.  The reason why was inferred, but not clearly enough for my liking.  Not that I wanted to hit people over the head with it (never underestimate your audience's intelligence) but I didn't want people wondering about it overly much either, as it would have been distracting to the action.  Ooh, that's fun to say.  Distracting action.  Distraction, as it were.

... Getting... closer... to having that DVD recording of a friend's stage play complete.  Should have had this done at least a month ago.  Part of the problem is my sudden perpetual busyness, part is that I get so caught up in the details of such a project (and there are more than enough without me adding any).  I want so badly to do a great job... but since the play finished up in mid-May, at this point it's more important to get them something, anything at all, really.  Hope to have that done this week.  No!  I WILL have it done this week!  Ha-ha!

...I'm writing this blog posting!  Woot!

That's more than it sounds like, for those of you who are not blog writers.  Particularly with a project like spirespire, where the goal is to post at least once a week.  You've noticed, I'm sure, how currently many of us are either posting very little or are not posting at all (and I don't blame them!).  Said it before, and I will keep saying it because it's true:  life intervenes.  Personally, I try not to skip a posting because a) I might need to skip one down the road if there's a national emergency or something so I want to hoard them like sick days, and b) I think it's important to my goals to post something, anything, even if it's continued failure (or supposed continued failure) to meet them.  Eventually, things will come together, and eventually I will be DONE (yeah, right), and having these posts to look back on will remind me how the journey went- which is important.  When I try to meet those future goals that I will most certainly have, and then life intervenes and I get bogged
down with how I are not meeting said future goals, I can look at this and go, "Oh, yeah... that's right." 

But this doesn't work for everyone, and each week it can either be impossible to sit down for a decent length of time at the computer (it normally takes two hours out of my Tuesday night, when I attempt to wrangle this unruly beast), or we just.  Simply.  Do not.  Have anything.  To report.  

Which is really frustrating.  But as I said... all part of the journey**.


**And speaking of Journey, I have not had a movie quote in too long, as my brain has been too fried to think of one.  So here's a twofer:

"Steve Perry.   Steve... Perry!  Steve Perry."

and, in honor of the late great Ernest Borgnine:

"You kids with your loud music, and your Dan Fogelberg, your zima, hula hoops and Pac-Man video games..."

3/1       247.2
Pounds lost in March:    17.4
Pounds lost in April:      4.8
Pounds lost in May:       8.6
Pounds lost in June:       6.6
7/7      211.0

So I gained 1.2 pounds this week.  It was a great week for my workouts, a great week in the kitchen, a decent handling of the holiday on Wednesday... but despite no real slip-ups, around Wednesday morning, the scale started to creep up.  I am experiencing some girly issues, to put it delicately, but they've never affected my weigh-ins to this degree.  Maybe it's the heat? Maybe a combination of those two factors? I don't know. 

Usually after a big drop like last week's, I have a pretty positive attitude about a small gain the following week.  But 1.2 is not a small gain in my book, and I've been pretty bummed about it since I woke up yesterday morning.  Yesterday I woke up at 213.8, so it could've been a lot worse this morning, and at least I'm headed in the right direction now.  I predict a big drop next week, and I'm sure I'll be thrilled about that then, but in the meantime, I'm pretty down. 

To cheer myself up, here's visual evidence of how far I've come.  I finally had the "halfway done" wedding dress shoot that I wanted to have once I hit the weight I was at when I bought the dress, and my Mom and I couldn't line up our schedules, so my friend Sarah was the photographer.

So what I'm doing is clearly working.  If my body needs to take a week off from responding to it... heck, assuming the current trend continues, if my body needs to take every other week off from responding to it, so be it.  I'm just going to do what I've been doing until it stops working. 

Before I go off and pout a little more, a running update:  I'm moving right along, sticking to schedule.  There have been a couple of runs where I haven't hit the speed I need to hit the first time out, so the next day I'll try it again and hit the mark.  It's a process and it won't happen overnight just because I want it to.  Last night I actually went out and did my run during a rehearsal break (I'm currently in Sweeney Todd at College of Lake County)- you can do these things when you are only supposed to run for five minutes!- and I was doing laps in a well-lit parking lot, and hitting my target speed until a community college police car started trailing me.  I know he was only concerned for my safety, but it threw me off and I slowed down to a jog for the better part of a minute until he went away.  As a result, instead of going .5 miles in 5 minutes (I'm really excited to hit that milestone), I went .47 miles in 5 minutes.  So close! 

Okay time for breakfast, and then pouting, and then drowning my sorrows in something tasty from the Freeze, then getting over it and moving on.