Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Exhausted. Too tired to feel frustrated over car stuff.

As y'all can tell from the timestamps on previous entries, I did not get to sleep at a reasonable time this morning. Woke up in the afternoon still tired, and ran around getting reading for today's performance. Thrir Venstri Foetr doesn't play amplified all that often, but experience has taught us that this particular hall does work better with microphones, so we brought some. Since we also knew the church's mixer would have most of its channels already in use, I took my mixer.

This wouldn't be a big issue, except that most of the time my mixer is the hub of the stereo in my office. I've got the cassette deck, CD player, radio, computer sound card, a guitar or bass (whichever I've got by my desk at the time), and a feed from the VCR in the bedroom to manage, so piping everything into the mixer (and then taking outputs from it to go to the sound card and the cassette deck, as well as to an amplifier) made sense. Obviously, I don't wind up needing it on gigs very often. (Usually I'm plugged into a mixer owned by a bandmate or our soundman (if it's a Homespun Ceilidh Band gig, or equipment supplied by the venue.) My cunning plan was to gang my mixer to the church's mixer to effectively make their mixer big enough for as many inputs as we might want. What happened was very similar to that: it turned out the church had a second mixer this year, which they hauled out just for us and connected to the mixer they were already using for the cast and singers. We did things my way but I didn't have to pull my stereo apart after all. Oh well -- I'll get everything plugged back together again in a day or two. And it was convenient that their secondary mixer had a couple more channels than mine -- we wound up using nine channels (and a tenth might have been nice), and my mixer only has eight.

Afterwards, figuring Bowie is at least as close to Annapolis as Bowie is, I went to my mother's house to return her van and pick up the Honda so I can get that inspected and registered ... and the Honda wouldn't start. No electricity at all from the battery -- not a low battery, or a "pretty much dead" battery, but a battery you couldn't even tell was connected. Whoops. And no jumper cables. So now the plan is for me to buy cables tomorrow and run down to Bowie, jump the Honda and drive it straight to the garage that'll do the inspection, and ask the garage to figure out whether the problem is the battery or something else.

In other news, I got a chair.

I've more to say about all of this, but I'm too tired. I'm going to go to bed and succeed or fail at this sleeping thing now.