I should never have made the goal to get my audiobook finished this month...well, half finished, I'll never finish the whole thing in one month...because as soon as I did, it's like all the bells of hell started ringing and the demons were loosed to prevent my ambition.
On Monday, I got up with big plans to narrate and record as many as four stories that morning, but the second I sat down, a horrible grinding mechanical rang out in my neighborhood. I looked and saw that my neighbor across the street had a crew of workmen redoing their hardwood floors. I don't know what the noise was exactly...it sounded like a reciprocating saw cutting through two by fours, maybe combined with a sander at the same time...the racket was dreadful, and it never quit.
I sat and waited, watching out the window for them to quit, but they kept at it, and the noise never completely went away. Sometimes it was quieter, but then it was punctuated by very loud sections in between. At last, however, one of the worker drove off in one of their trucks, then returned with bags of food. The noise stopped, and they all assembled around their table saw to eat.
I dropped everything, and ran to the study to record a story as quickly as I could. I was planning on doing the shortest stories first, and working my way steadily toward the longest ones, so I could probably finish a whole story or maybe even two in the time that they ate. I managed to spit out "The Tomorrow Bowl" before they finished, but seconds into doing "My Daughter's Balloon," they began sawing again.
I put everything away and gave up for the day, but after a while, I noticed that they weren't sawing constantly like they had been before. The grinding reciprocating saw sander noise had stopped. It looked like they were laying the floors now, and they only emerged now and then to cut a piece of the wood into the shape in needed to be to fit the space.
I decided to give it another shot. I could pause whenever they started the saw up, then continue when they were done. They only used the saw for a minute or two each time, so it could work. Well, I did manage to get "My Daughter's Balloon" recorded, but it may have been the most frustrating experience in all of my narrating career. Over and over again I had to quit in the middle of a sentence and stop to wait for the noise to pass. Then, of course there were the constant diesel trucks that everyone in my neighborhood seems to own passing by outside as well. Those things are so loud that I have to stop and wait for them to pass as well.
The worst was that our stinking cats kept doing stuff to exacerbate that. As if I didn't have enough noise to deal with, both cats decided they had to be in the room with me. One of them even pushed the door open by leaning on it, causing a loud, annoying creaking sound. Eventually, however, I managed to finish the recording. It took just over thirty minutes to record a story that's final run time was thirteen minutes, but I made it.
The next day, I decided that I would get started earlier, and hopefully beat those flooring guys to the punch...if they were coming back, that is. Turns out they didn't, and I was cruising my way the "The Wrong Ingredients" when a new noise echoed through the neighborhood
"No! I'm only five paragraphs from the end," I despaired. But there was nothing I could do. The noise was loud and constant. I turned off the recording and went out to see just what the hell I was dealing with this time. This is what I saw:
Crazy. As if the grinding reciprocating sanding saw wasn't loud enough, now we've got a full-on wood chipper grinding log sized branches to pulp just up the street. What the heck do I have to do to get a little peace and quiet? I'm never going to make it if I have to fight this hard every day just to record some narration.
Pray for me people. If nothing else, just pray for my sanity, because I'm on the verge of losing it in this venture.
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