Where tha yawn....

I went to a bookstore yesterday and purchased a Bukowski book.  At the counter, making my purchase, the clerk said, "Tomah."  I was kinda confused.  Travis had taken off on Sunday to head up to Tomah/Sparta to kick it with his parents and I was wondering if this guy knew more about me than I knew about him.  I was buying a Bukowski book and Travis reads Bukowski and Travis was up in Tomah and that's why the guy said, "Tomah."  And then I realized I was wearing my where the i divides t-shirt.   It's like the time I was wearing my Milli Vanilli t-shirt and people kept saying smiling at me.  I had forgotten I was wearing it and couldn't figure out why they were smiling.  

Over the weekend I was able to get my midi capabilities set up and ready to record.  On top of that, I also went out to the studio and dumped all of the session tracks onto my external drive.    That took about an hour of sitting there while the drives chatted.  I started working on one song... spent four hours adjusting and tweaking and modifying.  I figured out the output/send confusion I was having so now I can set the drum mix to an Aux fader and then pull them down or boost them if I want.  I also did some of my studio tweaking that our engineer seemed to be unaware of... opening a duplicate track with the same file in it and giving it a nudge to take it slightly out of phase to expand the sound... thicken the mix, if you will.  And the biggest surprise was the fact that I may not have to use pitch correction on the vocal track on that one song... (I'm still going to use it.  Joe doesn't quite have the ear to cover that himself.)  If I keep hacking away at the project, I should have rough mixes done in a week or so.  Then I'll let the band listen to what I've done and make their (pathetic) suggestions and then do whatever the hell I want.  Yeah.  That'll show them.

And there was a big tornado that took out my Aunt and Uncle's house in IA on Sunday.  Frickin' crazy.  There was a lot of phone calls on Monday in re: people being okay.  If you watch this clip at about 0:44 you can see what's left of their house. 

 No one in the family was hurt or worse.  This, of course, happens the week before my cousin is getting married.

And my friend with cancer had surgery today.  I haven't heard what the news is yet...  but my thoughts are with her.