My Weekend Alone – Day One: Dealing with Setbacks

by Chris McGinty

A couple of weeks ago my roommates told me they were going out of town over the weekend of whatever today is to whatever Sunday is; in essence, leaving me with three days to myself. Now I’m sure some of you might think that my first thought would be to throw a wild party here hiring strippers, and inviting an ex or two. If I was any sort of editor I would clean up that last sentence for redundancy.

The truth of the matter is that my thoughts immediately turned to what can I do while they’re gone that I normally can’t do when they’re here? One such thing is recording. On occasion I write and record songs, most of which I don’t bother to let anybody else hear. I’m funny that way. The fact of the matter is that most of the work I do can be done wearing headphones. I use an older multi-track recorder that uses mini-disks. Um, let me go look up the brand real quick for those of you who care. Here it is. It’s a Zetatech PK-6089-a, with a ZZ22 Speed Chip and HQ Interface.

Tell you what. I’ll write it down and mention it in tomorrow’s blog. I don’t feel like walking back to my bedroom right now.

This blog is about setbacks though, so let’s deal with them a moment. What I’ve noticed is that life has a way of just slapping you around sometimes. You plan to do something, and something else comes up. Unfortunately, it’s a very ongoing process, which causes you to constantly check your priorities, lest you never get your priority items done.

It seems that the moment the roommates said, “Hey we’re going out of town,” the various things that would drag me out of the house and away from what it is I wanted to do with the time started popping up. Really it wasn’t a whole lot, but they all popped up right after I was told. There are two shows I could go to tomorrow, one in the afternoon and one in the evening. Nathan needed help moving some stuff to storage. One was speculative that knowing my luck it would happen this weekend (but it didn’t) which was that a party that was supposed to be last weekend would be rescheduled for this weekend. Finally, some friends asked my roommate if he could feed their dog while they were out of town. And well, my roommate is out of town. Yeah. I can’t just let the dog die. Can I?

Still all of this seemed manageable, within reason. I planned to record all week and get the instrumental tracks recorded. Since I plug into the multi-track and listen through headphones, this could be done in my bedroom at anytime during the day or night without bothering my roommates. I would still make enough noise that it had to be in my bedroom, but no problem. Until we had an electrical malfunction last weekend, and I have no power to my bedroom until probably Monday. Yeah, the Monday after whatever this Sunday is. This is what I mean by setbacks. Even deciding against the one show, the party not being rescheduled for this week, and helping Nathan not taking too long, I still am not spending my weekend as I planned.

And I thought maybe I might have some advice on avoiding setbacks, but like I said, things never really go as planned. Now that I’ve gotten this far, I realize that no, I guess I don’t. Maybe tomorrow… along with the brand name of the multi-track recorder.

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