Walk Softly and Carry a Big Schtick

I had expected to be tired after Windycon, so I arranged to take Monday off. This was clearly the case, because both Gretchen and I managed to keep falling asleep during the second half of Tracker last night as we were watching it on the DVR. Well, the good news is that it was recorded, so we were able to watch it tonight and understand who the heck this character was who had popped up by the end of the episode.

The other reason for taking Monday off was that I *also* had Tuesday off for Veterans' Day and connecting everything together for one long session of getting things done seemed like a good idea. I have many things to get done.

The first was catching up on the convention laundry. I popped that into the washer before heading out for lunch and a couple of stops to grab stuff for dinner. When I finally got home, it was nearly time for Gretchen to go pick up Julie from school, so the right order of business was to put the load of wash in the dryer, fire up the studio computer, and install the new version of Cubase and the various plugins that I had picked up from Universal Audio with the latest upgrade.

This is easier when the computer fires up. After a bit of messing around, I realized that it wasn't just the computer being stubborn. It was everything plugged into the particular power strip I was poking at, which was apparently dead, dead, dead.

(Now thinking about it, it's just possible that the GFCI had triggered on that outlet, but thinking about it some more, there are two power strips plugged into that outlet and I'm pretty sure the other was still delivering power, based on what lights I saw on the assorted bits of equipment. These power strips / surge protectors are about as old as the studio, so having one fail isn't a great surprise.)

Anyway, I ordered a new power strip / surge protector that should be here tomorrow and will then start trying to figure out which plug needs to come out of the wall, because all of the cords are running under the console. In the meantime, I figured that I would unplug and remove the old Focusrite Octopre unit that's going to be replaced by the used Apollo 8 unit that I bought from Jeff Bohnhoff. Unplugging was easy, getting back up off the floor less so, getting the unit to slide *up* and out of the rackmount was simply not happening without a second person there.

Before dinner, Julie was down in the basement and was good enough to push the unit up so I could extract it. Then it was finally time to *open* Jeff's unit, which had been sitting in its package for weeks. That was easy enough. The unit looks to be in excellent condition and has now been installed into the rack. Assuming that the new surge protector arrives tomorrow, I'll get it plugged in and wired up.

And maybe I'll install Cubase 15...

Day two of Windycon is in the books. So far, so good, although sales could be better. But we had fun, especially at the art auction.