Tuesday, February 19, 2013

If I Look a Little Deeper Thru the Pile in the Spare Room, I Will Probably Find the Lost Chord

I simply cannot believe my incredible foresight, good sense and just plain damned- all dumb good luck.  

I have been going bonkers for the past few days trying to research some way to turn my warbled audio bits into some medium able to be plugged into a blog.  I have partially digested mounds of totally indigestible material from Wikipedia, Google, YouTube and  You-Name-It and have emerged bleary, exhausted and despondent over my stupidity or the lack of decent information.....I do not know which is most to blame.  Worse yet, I am stuffed full of those indigestible fragments of information I really do not want and fear I will never be able to get rid  of. Sigh.

Anyway, my oxlike stubborn streak is all that saved me from finding a bridge to jump off of.  (For those of you who do not know, Los Angeles is NOT a city of bridges.....we have no rivers, lakes, creeks or streams.....it was a damned desert before we fucked it up....,well, there is that concrete ditch euphemistically called the Los Angeles River which is simply a huge drainage channel for those few days in the so-called rainy season when we get more rain than the sewers can handle and they all overflow somehow draining into the river and then water gurgles thru it down to the ocean, but it is usually a dry, cement  eyesore and  even if there were a bridge over it, I would not be caught dead jumping off of it into the Los Angeles River.....I'd be a laughingstock and I'd probably break both legs.........oh dear.....I do believe I digress).



Well, as I was saying, I did some very hard thinking and recalled vividly that at some point in the past decade or two I had purchased a Camcorder for the purpose of photographing all of my objects and furniture for insurance purposes and, naturally, never did a damned thing about actually doing it.   It had to be somewhere in the house, because god  and everyone else knows that Lois NEVER throws anything away, except for an important document now and then, and the logical place for it to  be would be the room I used to call the Office before it became too cluttered with discarded and/or outdated electronic equipment to the point of ridiculousness (otherwise known as the Place Where Everything Goes to Die or Become Obsolete).  I have not had the courage to look for anything in that room for about 3 years, and yet, I somehow summoned up courage I did not even know I had, marched in there today, went unhesitatingly to the corner where I felt it might be buried, rummaged around through a daunting stack of dreck and found a carton containing a Mini Camcorder  including Invoice and Instruction Book, no less.  (What?......no gasps, cheers,applause, huzzahs?......well, I sure as hell cheered and even huzzahed a little.)

I am not going to draw this out interminably.  (I think I have already done that ).  I immediately recruited the trusty Florence and demanded  (read that "begged") her to read the instructions and figure out how the thing worked and teach me......if at all possible.  We had a raucous and rousing afternoon of taking cockeyed videos of each other  (and the ceiling and many times of my thumb) while making obscene comments which, we found, were faithfully picked up by the recording device inside.  The day ended with me taking a video of Gussie sitting on my computer with me singing to her as she turned her back on me and marched away.  Tsk.  She seems to hate my singing.......I can't imagine why. 

Of course, all of this will take a bit of practicing with this, yet another, damned gadget, but I have high hopes of someday being able to take a video of the hummers or even Gussie while I serenade her.  When we downloaded our tests to the computer I was amazed at how reasonably decent the pictures were and even the sound from that teensy mic came out fairly well thru the computer's teensy speakers. 

So now I have the means, if not the courage to post a video of my warbling.  Now comes the 2nd hardest part.......managing to get through an entire song without hitting a clinker, gasping for breath or bursting out laughing.  The 3rd hardest thing will be the actual attempt to upload the file to the blog, and, needless to say, the most excruciating part will be making myself hit "Publish".  I dunno about that.

Well, as you can see, one never knows what tomorrow will bring around here.  If you had told me 10 years ago what I might someday be using that camcorder for I would have been nonplussed or worse.  (What IS nonplussed.........is anyone ever "plussed"?)   Who could believe......?


Tune in tomorrow or the next dayor maybe the one after that for the next installment.
(and I gotta warn you, folks.......you are bound to be crushingly disappointed  or, who knows, uproariously amused.  

Or not.
.