An Exciting Find

When we moved out to Texas, my son was a five-year-old. But that was seven years ago now. He's twelve, and much less likely to get into heavy mischief. Once I decided that such a time had arrived a few years back, I realized I could finally set my microphone up on my desk in my study and leave it.

For years, I would box up the entire set up every week and put it away, and then, when Rish came back the next week, I would remove it from the boxes and put it all together again. Sometimes, we'd screw up the set up, and the microphone would accidentally be facing backward, and we had to re-record stuff that wound up unusable. I think Rish got pretty irritated with the whole annoying necessity of it, and wished that we could just leave it set up from week to week, but I didn't dare. In those days, I had three mischievous kids that might mess the equipment up. They grew up, but then we had one more latecomer who stretched the time out further.

It was around 2020 or so that I realized I could safely set up my microphone and leave it up, but at this point, I ran into a snag. I couldn't find my stands. I had boom arm stands for the mics, but at some point, I'd put them away somewhere, and I could no longer remember where. Instead, I had to make my permanent set up using the desk stand. That didn't work well, because I realized that the spinning hard drives on my desk were leaving a humming sound in my recordings.

So, I was back at square one again, basically. Each time I recorded, I had to drag a bar stool into the study and set the desk stand on top of it, so that the mic wasn't on the desk with the hard drives. I wished I could just remember where I'd put those damn stands. If I had them, I could put the mic there, set them up next to the desk so that they didn't touch, and be totally fine, but no, I'd put them somewhere for safe keeping and, of course, forgotten where that somewhere was.

Things continued on like that for years, until this past week. My daughter was coming back from college, and my wife cleaned out her room to prepare it for her return (we'd been using it as a sort of storage room while she was gone). I came home from work, and there were my two mic stands sitting in the middle of the study. Turns out, the place that I'd put them for safe keeping was my daughter's closet. I don't remember ever having done that, but there you go.

So, at last, I have the stands, and I was able to get my mic set up in it's final boss state.

Today, I sat down and recorded a story using it like this for the first time. It was so glorious...of course, I haven't listened through the recording. I bet it's screwed up somehow, and it won't be quite as perfect as it seems, like maybe the stand was touching the desk and the hum is there throughout. I don't know. But I've learned to expect the worst. Not Nihilism or anything, just experience.