Preparing for the week of insanity.

I anticipate interviewing my mother and father next week. (Note to self: come up with interview questions structured around what stories and comments you're including from the sibling interviews.) I am in Boston. They dwell in the South. As such, these will be phone interviews. Though the audio quality will obviously be much poorer than that of the sibling interviews, I think I can definitely make this work to my aesthetic advantage. The phone recording will mark a significant divide between my siblings' perspectives and that of my parents. Mostly my point. We'll see what we get. 

So, the actual process of making these recordings happen. I am taking a week off from work in an attempt to make this project come together (goal: 79.999% completed). It is fantastic to actually have time to work on my creative endeavors, but there was a lot of pressure to take my vacation over Emerson's spring break (much easier on my bosses / department to not have me around). Since Emerson's labs and audio suites will be closed during the break, I have to come up with a production setup using only what I have to my name: Pro Tools. Mbox. MacBook. And since my goal of 79.999% completion is extremely lofty, I am doing all sorts of things to maximize productivity.

Things I need to do: Steal monitor and keyboard from my office. Try not to garner suspicion as I pack these into my car to take home. Set up laptop screen to be second monitor (more screen space equals more productivity). Buy a mini-DVI to VGA converter. (Update! A co-worker has one I can use for the week... money saved!) Pick up my laptop in a couple days. (My machine kept experiencing a glorious kernel panic. I was praying it was not due to issues with RAM since Seth and I upgraded it ourselves a while back [which voids all Apple Care Protection help]. Luckily it was the logic board. So, the lovely chap at the Genius Bar will replace that. For free. Glory be! While I was there, I asked about a few other nagging issues that I have ignored because I cannot bear life without a computer and I will get my baby back with a new display, a new fan, and a new battery. Yesssss. The only sad (and somewhat stressful) thing: I am without a computer (and thus without the ability to work at home) for the next couple of days. But all this was a preemptive measure... can you imagine if my laptop skeezed out on me over spring break? Cannot. Think. About. That.

Things I have already done: bought a real computer chair off Craigslist. It will be my constant companion for roughly 50 hours in one week, so I consider it a justifiable production cost. Only 20 bucks! Score. Farmed out my desperate transcription needs to the best friends and family of all time (add my visiting teacher Martha and good friend Nicky to that list). Went through all the recordings of random thoughts I have had along the way for potential inclusion in the final piece... I will need to re-record these if I end up using them (recorded thoughts as they struck me... you hear everything from cars to small children in the background). Figured out a method to record the phone calls with my parents abusing the capabilities of Skype with the loving assistance of Audio Hijack Pro (which is in my top five list of audio software).