Doing Battle Again

I've been doing battle with lawn crews and their roaring leaf-blowers and weed-eaters recently. The other day, I had big plans to record stories all morning long, and make tons of progress on the audiobook of Three Vampire Weekend. Guess what happened.

That's right, 17 minutes and 42 seconds after I started recording, a lawn crew pulled up and cranked on their leaf blowers. They went on for at least an hour. I think they must have been servicing the lawns of three different neighbors at once. I had to twiddle my thumbs for a while, and I got a lot less done that I hoped I would.

I did get one whole story narrated, though. "Onward, to the Breech" is done. That's something. Still a lot more to go, though.

A few days later, I was back at it. I had to record a bunch of retakes, because, when I was recording "That Damned Cat" before, I was up too close to the mic, and my plosives punched through the pop filter leaving ungly thumping sounds in the audio.

I finished those up, and started into the last part of "The Frayed Ends of Sanity". I only have chapters 8, 9, and 10 left to go, and then I can start into "The Elephant in the Room" which is about half the word count of the book, so even though it's the last story, I'm nowhere near almost done, unfortunately.

I narrated about three paragraphs, when suddenly a f@#$ing leaf blower started roaring again. 

I sighed, realizing that, even though I'd only just begun, I was going to have to stop for now and take it back up later.

I went to click stop on the recording I was making and save what little I had, when something weird happened. The counter on the record time started up when I clicked the stop button. Wait a minute. What was going on? Oops! I realized that I'd gotten prepared to start recording those chapters in "The Frayed Ends of Sanity" but I'd never pushed the record button. The paragraphs that I'd narrated for the last couple of minutes had simply been for fun...for practice. I wasn't rolling on them.

In fact, the f#$%ing leaf-blower had saved me. I would have kept going all the way to the end of the story and through the author's note before realizing that I wasn't recording if it wasn't for the leaf-blower guy.

I guess, nothing can be all bad...not even a f#$@ing leaf-blower.