So long, decade

 What's the message I'm supposed to take out of the last ten years? So much pain and suffering... personally spent a few ticks north of 80 percent of it fighting cancer, a battle that will, at best, result in a life-long DMZ situation in there.

I'm still here, though. If you're reading this, you are, too.

Positivity analysis: I don't trade paint with heart attacks when I go to the doctor anymore, I've spent another ten years at the helm of stringed instruments and performed semi-professionally for about 18 months (and even got an actual paid gig one of those nights), I made a car last me for over nine years, I'm another ten years down at work, I've been dragging friends with me to the state fair the whole decade, I made new friends toward the end here, I helped old friends tear down and rebuild a fence, I taught my housemate how to change her oil, I taught a bunch of people at work how to use a new computer system, I've gotten better at food and drink, I've donated to charity as part of a collective effort a few times, I've even made efforts to read Real Actual Books (which represents a significant battle of will against whatever my attention problems are).

I don't have an expectation that 2020 will be better. I don't have any expectation that the 2020s will be better. I know I will be, though.

Cranking out 500 miles

Per the Content Vortex standard metholdology, it's been nearly two fiscal months since the last post, and during that time, I haven't had much in the way of shareable thought. We rounded out the semester, my one employee figured out how to overpower unending nausea, the students aged out of 2019, and - hey look at that - it's the end of a decade.

Current mood: I drank four beers to smooth out the 520 mile trip from Columbia to Clyde. I like driving, but I think an 8.5 hour (10:20 to 7:40? we'll call it that) drive is about as long as I feel like going anymore. I made five stops total, though I'd call the initial gas-up the departure point, since it was less than 15 minutes into the trip. I did two legs with stop intervals over two hours, and that felt about right*. I think I covered one and a half episodes of Knowledge Fight, during which point Dan finally lost his mind about Alex's bad-faith arguments, and I also covered the two-part 'history of adoption' episode of Behind the Bastards, in which one of the most evil people in the last 200 years was described at me. It's an interesting contrast with some of the work I end up doing now, on trying to fund stable care for youths who actually need it, versus the outright theft of children that got the modern concept of adoption off the ground starting in the 1920s.

Anyway, I'm not really in as much pain as I'd think, considering. I'm glad I have a more comfortable car than I did two years ago; while I value all 170,000-plus miles I spent in my Sentra, not operating a clutch constantly, combined with more generous factory spring rates and suspension damping for a somewhat heavier chassis makes all the difference in the world for longer trips. The dope sound system in the car helps, too, which doesn't matter much for vocal reproduction as it does the necessary couple hours of music to avoid going insane from just nonstop human voice for an entire day.**

Once arrived, I got a little decompressed, slammed down my Blackstar Fly amp, played about 15 minutes of bass to help recenter, and then cracked open the brews. Western North Carolina has a robust brewing scene, although the beers I drank tonight came from New Belgium, which only has a brewery in Asheville, and from Southern Pines brewing, which is over by Fayetteville. Tomorrow starts the local stuff, but either way, I never really appreciated how a cold one or few helps to just completely lop the edge off a day of sitting still and paying attention.

A quick note on I-81: Sunday before Christmas isn't a bad day to drive. The trucks are off the road, so the clumps that form are moving at, say, 62-65 instead of 57-60. Cruise control at 72 is perfect for pretty much the whole of Virginia, and the brief portion in Tennessee is barely traveled, at least as far as I-26. I-26, however, was where the rain and fog kicked up. While I'm thankful I have the early formative experiences of driving Oregon 42 back and forth in nonstop rain in mid-40s temperatures in cars that handle poorly, it only gets me so far relative to the delights of other people not being comfortable in the conditions, and it does nothing at all to address the fact that western North Carolina must be some kind of big-L Libertarian paradise that doesn't value painting new lines on its state- and county-maintained roads.

*When last my dad and I drove from Phoenix to Sandy, we shot through over 210 miles without stopping, might have been the whole 270 of that fuel interval. My family is 'bad' at car trips.

**This is DECIDEDLY a 'me' problem.

Fretting out, part two

Having let the neck settle overnight and then readjusting for straightness in the bendable part, it's now become clear what exactly that little wink in the fingerboard reflection corresponds to: a low spot from about 10, maybe 10 and a half, up through 18. This manifests itself like rising tongue, as the guitar plays fine up to about the 12th fret position, but I suppose is technically different enough to justify going back and correcting my assessment.

11" radius block is on the way, and I have the rest of my chalk and sandpaper ready to go!

Fretting out on a fretless

One of my basses, an Ernie Ball Music Man Stingray 5, has [edit: what looked like] a problem with rising tongue, which is a kick up at the end of the fretboard, that can't be dealt with by setup alone. By way of measurement, if I have my strings set to say 6/64" at the 12th fret, the height at the end of the neck swings down to 5/64" as the fingerboard ramps up away from the neck joint. I don't know why this has happened, but it's probably been this way since the instrument entered my orbit 15 years ago. Prior to 2017, the action was unreasonably high, as the instrument needed a shim and I didn't know enough about guitar setup to know that's what I needed to put in there. Once the neck was shimmed properly and could be set to human-playable (read: sub 10/64") string heights, the buzz set in.

So, I've set to work on trying to solve this finally. First note: despite my optimism, ordering a 12" radius sanding block does not impact the reality that all modern Ernie Ball Music Man StingRay instruments have an 11" radius. The StingRay Classic and Old Smoothie instruments are 7.5", but no amount of optimism will make the 12" radius gauge match the fingerboard because it's not right. Once I had the 11" block on order from stewmac, it was time to tear the thing apart and set the neck to level to prep for sanding. An interesting question arises: how does one determine whether or not a neck is straight if you know part of the fingerboard is not? Normally, you'd use a straightedge down the whole length of the board, but if I do that, I either get backbow everywhere except fret 2 and 21, or I get too much relief the whole length of the neck. The solution is to use the slotted straightedge from Neck Check, as it's not long enough to touch both ends of the board simultaneously. You don't expect any curvature to happen on the heel, so you wouldn't normally need to check that part of the neck for truss-rod-correctable straightness.

Here's where I had a moment of inspiration.

Question: how do I then know, for sure, what I'm looking for?

Answer: if the neck is straight, and I line up a straight line feature of my house and look at it in reflection down the fingerboard, a straight neck will show me a straight line reflection fading out of focus the closer it got to me. A curved neck would, instead, show me a curved line and then no reflection.

Here's what I see when I look at mine, sort of kind of, as it's hard to line up a phone camera with the centerline of something and hold both still enough for pictures:

filename: "goobered fretboard.jpg"

So that little wink off to the left shows where I need to do my work here. The line is straight from the nut up to that point, and that point to the end is where the fretting-out buzz occurs. I'm excited, after all these years, to have a fretless bass that will play right. I had a fretless Jazz Bass I got in 2001 or 2002 that I took home with me on winter break once; I sold it in 2005 to fund the second in a series of bad decisions I was talked into by friends, and that is a disappointment I occasionally find myself feeling when I realize I'm missing out on a mystic ice blue or ice blue metallic Jazz Bass in my life, but I think having my StingRay in good, playable working order will more or less completely fix that. I'll still find myself wishing I had access to something in ice blue metallic, but I already find myself wishing I had instruments in nearly every color I've ever seen, so at least that wouldn't be anything new. Someday, they'll sell me a blue bass with a matching headstock... or a green Mustang bass with maple fingerboard.

Anyway, that's where I stand right now - I'm going to hit it with grits 220, 320, 400, and 800 and see what the finish looks like at that point, and if it's shiny enough, if the kink is gone. If it needs more, I have 1000, 1500, and 2000 ready to go. Update coming once the block is here and sanding starts!

Oh good, a bass

I brought a bass guitar and amplifier to work today to 'round out' the collection of things that let me pursue an arts while I work for a college of arts (and humanities). The bass I picked is special to me; while I would make the argument that all of my basses have a place in my heart, this one is my brother's, and I helped pick it out for him and would send it back having been well cared for and set up if he ever wanted to pick it back up. It plays well; it's effectively an off-brand precision bass copy, but it happens to have been reasonably well made, with no fret sprout or sharp hardware, with its only real failing being that the wood behind the sunburst finish isn't the world's most interesting piece. In my estimation, its only other weakness is that it's a precision bass, and so the neck is wider than is comfortable for my tiny hands. As I've been spending time with my short-scale StingRay bass, though, the width is a bit less of a challenge than I might otherwise have been willing to tolerate.*

I had about 15 minutes at the end of the day today where I had time for music, and I got the bass set up and played a bit. I can tell you for sure now that I am a bassist and not a guitarist. I love the Mustang guitars; the short scale and small body make them just friendly to play, but I never had much of a taste for melodies due to my early exposure to third-chair clarinet, and easily settled into a better understanding of harmonies (due to same) and bass lines once I moved to bass clarinet (and, later, baritone saxophone). That, combined with the now 19+ years of experience playing bass guitars, and the instrument is just more comfortable in my mind than guitar. I love the fact that I get to have both in my office, but, where bringing in the guitar previously brought me a feeling of relief, having the bass present feels right.

* - A brief rundown on bass proclivities: my first bass was an Epiphone Rock Bass, from sometime after the batwing headstock debuted. I don't remember its neck profile, but when I bought it, I knew so little about the subject that I tuned it by ear to D-standard because I matched the low string to the lowest note on Rage Against the Machine's self-titled album. Once I figured out that there was a real standard tuning, I quickly determined that the poor instrument's truss rod didn't seem to work... it's possible I was also so convinced by Bass Player Magazine that tweaking the truss rod would break the instrument, though, that I never really tried very hard. Either way, it played like a bow and arrow. I ended up falling in love with a five-string Spector NS-2000 bass the next summer, which was my instrument for something like three and a half years. Even though the scale was longer (35" versus 34"), the narrower string spacing meant that most of the music I wanted to play was easier... fewer runs on single strings, more intervals to cover between strings, so reaching from say C to D# was something my short miserable pinky could actually help with. Since that came so early in my journey, I got used to the tighter spacing such that for a few years, I actually couldn't play a standard Fender Precision neck without getting tired immediately... 1.75" versus the Jazz width of 1.5" was somehow too much of a difference for me. I have two five-string basses, one a StingRay 5 and one a Warwick Corvette. The StingRay sits at fitting 5 strings in 43mm width, the Corvette 5 in 45mm, and a Jazz bass does 4 in 38mm with a Precision at 4 in 43. Both of my fives are more adjacent by a wide margin to the J width, so since I spent the first 14 years of playing with narrow necks, narrow necks will always feel more correct, especially in light of my biological failings. Fortunately, practice can at least sort of help me deal with it.

Booze rumination: sheets

As I get in bed and think to myself, "wow, I love getting into a bed with cool sheets, it feels great," I also find myself wondering at what point it crosses from cool to cold... During the winter months, cold sheets are the greatest torture of getting into bed, one alleviated only by time and contact, unmitigated by the softest and fluffiest of blankets atop the icy torture. I could just sleep in blankets, I suppose, but I think that would be too warm. Maybe it's worth trying; Target can sell me a second Warm Fluffy Blanket*, but whatever.

Pictured: the Author, from wikipedia, via a CC 3.0 attribution to Samuel Blanc

I run warm. Traditionally, it's been my strongest asset: not most important, as I think I'm better at listening than being warm, and I'm pretty sure I'm better at playing bass guitar than surviving a snowstorm. Once fall strikes and evenings in the low 40s become the norm, though, my sleep definitely gets better as I'm no longer fighting the disruptive sensation of airflow on my shoulders or feet. Ever since I got my ferritin levels under control, though, I've had a little less tolerance for cold. As a result, I have a little bit of fear that this winter will represent a significant challenge in sliding into bed... I won't have the sensation that I will warm up quickly, and feeling the cold sheets will be more of a psychological burden than in years past. I guess keep an eye on this space to see how things go, but I'm worried I may be slated for incorporating an electric blanket into my daily routine, in the same way that I had to bring in a humidifier for the dry January and February air, and a small fan for the July and August heat.

This is also probably due to the fact that I grew up in coastal Oregon, where the warmest we ever expected it to get in the summer might have been 75 (average high 65.4), and the coldest it'd get in the winter was maybe 37 (average about 40). We had between 10 and 15 degrees of spread between average high and low, too, so it was just kind of "chilly" from October through March or April.

* - I can't remember if the blanket was actually called Warm Fluffy Blanket or Warm Fuzzy Blanket. It's possible it wasn't either, but if that's the case, the name was definitely almost as ridiculous.

Elevated Mood, or: My Car Won't Start and I Have A Bass To Put In C Standard

I had an episode today that sort of affirmed I'm not in direct control of how my brain processes the things that happen to me, and it came about as a byproduct of having something profoundly annoying and inconvenient happen to me, further inconveniencing a friend, and costing a small pile of money.

I was on campus a few minutes past when my coworkers all left. I had a few text messages to send and a voicemail to delete (thanks "Student Loan Services," I thought we were done with that scam), and by the time I got around to trying to start my car, it was about 7 or 8 minutes after everyone else left. Press button, nada. Just relay clicking behind the instrument panel and occasional odd chunking sounds from under the hood responded to my efforts. I tried shutting down as much extraneous stuff in the car as possible, but no dice. The hard start I had this morning was the battery chooching its last. Brief aside: the date code on Ford Motorcraft batteries is a two-character stamping on the side of the lid. Mine came in characters two and three and was J2, which correspnds to October 2012; I believe this was original to the car, but I don't know for sure. The car is a 2013 and I've seen one other stamp that indicated an October assembly timeframe, so it tracks that the battery was nearly seven entire years old and was probably the reason I wasn't able to listen to music for more than three minutes after killing the engine.

I got someone to come back to school by instead suggesting I call our campus transportation folks and making them come jump my car, so I had one thing go right that I'll feel bad about for a couple weeks. Even after about a minute of being attached to his car, mine did not want to start and only succeeded after two or three rapid-succession tries. Okay, great, car running, drive up to Autozone, die of old age waiting for the two guys in front of me to figure out their stuff and have one of the staff members help me out, get the battery out to the car and we find out that I only half remember how to take the battery box apart. The employee joins me and we puzzle over it for a while and finally accidentally pop the rest of the battery cover off the back half of the box and get the thing removed. I start working on disconnecting it while he helps someone with a less stupidly-designed vehicle... this required me to use needle nose pliers to wedge the negative terminal off the old battery, freeing it from probably a couple years of leak-induced corrosion and leaving that wonderful blue buildup all over everything. I checked out my parts tub looking for a battery brush and found not only that, but also an unused package of the little felt anti-corrosion rings. A few bucks later, I had a can of battery cleaner, too, and did my best to wipe everything down and clear as much garbage as possible, and a few moments later, we had the new battery in and the car up and running. A quick jaunt across to the Wawa and I was gassed up and finally ready to go home, about 90 minutes after I was released from work.

Down in excess of $180 and over an hour of my life to a stupid problem that someone at the dealership should have tested for last year before I bought the car, I would normally have been irritated beyond words... Instead, I found myself in the best mood I've been in for years. I felt like I was on top of the world, having diagnosed a failure and performed most of the replacement work myself. Additionally, hey: half day, got stuff to do, gonna get caught up on stuff, et cetera et cetera.

So the rest of my day consisted of: set up for an oil change, talk to the neighbor who's moving back down here to get out of construction and start driving for UPS, do my oil change, clean up after same, pull the trash can around back, talk to my other neighbor, drive off to recycle my oil, come home (now 4:30, when I'd normally get off work), empty the dishwasher and put my stuff from last night into the dishwasher (thing needs time to dry, ran it late last night), go downstairs and start work converting my Ibanez SRMD200 to C-standard tuning. I hemmed and hawed over which bass would be better for the job - the SR Mezzo or my Squier short-scale Jaguar Bass - while I waited for the strings to come. Some of this was general indecisiveness, as I feel the SR Mezzo sounds less inspiring than the Jaguar, but I also needed to know which instrument the strings were going to fit before I filed the nut slots to accommodate the thicker strings. I went with a short-scale DR five-string set (SNMR5-45, helpfully stocked by Fret Nation for those playing at home) with the intent to go .065-.125 for C standard on a 32" scale. This should have been somewhere between 32" E standard tension and 34" B standard tension, but I don't know for sure because I don't know the mass per length of the DR strings and also don't care (it's more of a theoretical nicety than anything that makes a real difference, as long as it's not hilariously high tension). The strings came, they were going to work on the Ibanez, so I picked it as it has the easier nut to replace if I want to go back. The slots were filed pretty generously from the factory, with the lowest string being .115, so the filing was short work and the strings went on quickly and I got it up to pitch. It needed about a fifth of a turn on the truss rod, that was it. Two of the strings were a tiny bit flat on intonation, but no other playability setup needed to take place. I dropped the action a bit because I don't think I ever set the neck back correctly after moving the instrument from Eb standard to E standard, so that helped make it even better, and as far as I can tell, no issues with tension and floppiness or anything. I say that coming from a now dedicated short-scale player, with three 30" scale instruments and one 32". I can tell there's a difference if I think about it, but they feel natural to me like a 34" does... I don't care what it feels like to fret and pluck, just how it sounds and whether it makes me want to do the work of playing it. Anyway, it sounds pretty good... I don't think I'm super sold on the strings I picked, but it looks like the only answer for getting a .040 and .060 on the top two strings with a .105 and .125 on the bottom is to merge two sets (expensive) or hope someone can sell me a custom gauge set. Key is compatibility with the medium scale instrument, as winding length is important - I need the taper to happen before the tuning post if I'm using a .125 or .130. After playing the instrument in its new tuning for a while, I had dinner, I watched a brief moment of a football game I didn't care about, and then I went back downstairs to play some more on that and on the short-scale StingRay.

It's been a busy evening, an even busier day. I'm kind of exhausted but my brain hasn't shut down yet - my mind is still racing, still on that elevated mood trip. I was hoping I could have a beer to help settle that, but the one I grabbed was, while being labeled a blond ale, hopped like an IPA. It was the most disappointing thing I've ever had to drink. And so, prescription pharmaceuticals to the rescue, I guess... I don't like that all that much, but considering it's been written for me specifically to make my brain stop so I can sleep, I'll take it.

Oh and if you're worried about it - I have blue light filters on all my electronic devices. As soon as I'm done yammering here, I'll be closing this and moving on to audio-based shutdown procedure.

So that's been a lot of words that I don't think I initially set out to type. I'm glad I've cycled out of depression and am feeling better about the world, but I really have to get a handle on this million miles an hour thing from the hypomanic phases. Maybe I should build and sell some amplifiers, but that takes a lot of setup work. Still should be pretty worth it at this point... I don't think I'd have to relearn the whole trade.

Being heard on a train

Important background information: this post contains images of spectrograms, a quasi-three dimensional representation of sound over time. For the specific software that generated these, the graph scrolls from left to right, meaning older sound is on the right, newer is on the left. Brighter and yellower means more intensity, darker and bluer means less. The vertical axis of these charts is a logarithmic scale for sound frequency, starting at 10Hz, with the next major line at 100Hz, the next at 1,000, and the final at 10,000. These are probably done via a fast Fourier transform in software on a smartphone and are not likely super accurate, but make it possible to make interesting connections and comparisons in broad strokes.

Friday night, it became apparent that I wasn't going to be able to have a conversation with my friend while we were still on the metro. After we gave up, I took a quick spectrogram of the sound of a 7000-series Metro car* for recordkeeping purposes. That image is below:

The significant bulk of the background noise on a train starts at 40Hz and runs out around 3kHz. Earlier disclaimer about accuracy in mind...

The next night, I remembered to take a spectrogram of my own speech in the relative quiet of my living room. In a normal pitch, I said something to the effect of "so this is the sound of me talking." The second sentence is lost to the sands of my memory, but you can tell when I was making sibilant syllables by the stuff up around 5kHz. I ended the second sentence with a question, which you can tell as the harmonic series deflects upward as the lines approach the right (and you can tell my vocal cords had trouble staying together as I lost upper harmonics above 500Hz). My voice and most of its meaningful harmonics are between 80 and 800 Hz.

Because I didn't manually set the microphone gain manually, there's no way to directly compare the intensity of my voice to a train. I am willing to put as many as five dollars into a bet that the inside of a train is louder than my normal speaking voice, but I'd also bet I would compensate by trying to speak louder while on a train. Normally. Probably not so much if it's Friday evening and I'm trying to be considerate that I'm not yelling at a friend.

The entirety of my voice is within the spectrum of the train's background noise. I'd suspect I'm not special in that regard, but I do think it's interesting and wonder how many other people don't talk while on the Metro for this exact reason.

*7000 series cars make use of no carpeting and have more right angles present inside that older Metro cars, with taller, steeper seats. I have a feeling the cars have a different noise profile than the older models I would last have ridden on several years ago, but I don't know for sure. I just think it's worth noting for some reason.

What a difference a year makes

This time last year, I was getting ready to head out to my dad's. September 21st, I believe, I landed in Salt Lake and then we drove up to eastern Idaho to stage for a few days of off-network wandering, heading in and out of Yellowstone, the Tetons, and a few other surrounding places in the region before and afterward. I was on top of the world; I think I've been to Yellowstone officially four times as of that last trip, and I know how lucky I am as most people probably have to regard visiting that sort of place a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Same with seeing both sides of the Tetons without any cloud obfuscation in a 24-hour period, although I do think I've only done that once.

This year, I am lucky to be able to speak and now, as of today, breathe while I walk up a hill. I have to get in touch with the speech therapists to get them to measure my voice and take a look at my folds, but I think they're going to like what they see (and I think I'm going to be able to convince them we don't need to pursue any medications, topical or injectable). I care less about being able to speak. This space has been a good way for me to run my mind, and honestly, even what I had a week or ten days ago would have been more than acceptable for the rest of my life. I'm so very happy that it got better, but I'm even happier than I can probably mow my lawn without making involuntary vocalization wheezes now. I can go up the hills in my neighborhood without losing my breath halfway. I can hold enough air in my lungs to finish sentences like the ones I write here, which is to say 'sentences that are entirely too long and meandering for anyone to bother tracking to their conclusions.'* That is the biggest milestone for me: the ability to function.

To put this here if I haven't put it anywhere else: when people undergo a series of thyroid or neck surgeries, there's a chance they don't recover vocal function. That chance is apparently something like 5-10% for the first surgery, 15-25% for the second, and a dismal 50% for the third. My surgeon stopped telling me that line of thought at three, so I offered the conjecture "then I must be incredibly lucky even considering your notoriety for being good with preserving nerve function." He gave an awkward laugh and effectively said "we don't have enough data, but it sure seems like it." I don't suppose there are many people that have a mobile enough metastasis at a young enough age for a fourth surgery to play into it.

We'll see what exactly the next couple of weeks hold, but it looks like my specific set of edge cases that are my awful neck continue to defy expectations.

* - okay, I admit, I made that one PARTICULARLY bad on purpose.

Electronics: Short-scale Stingray Bass

So here's an interesting analysis - what's actually happening with the "gain boost" (formerly "bass boost") push-push on the 2019 Music Man Stingray Short-scale? In playing with it at the store, I arrived at the conclusion that the best description for what it does is "in the down position, it's the 'sounds like a stingray' setting. In the up position, it's the "MORE." setting."

After playing around with it some more with my Ampeg BA-108v2 practice amp, I realized I've heard the effect before - I made a high-pass box to help with biamping between a bass rig and a guitar amp that cuts at 200hz. I believe my parts for that included an 8K resistor, but I don't know for sure... I just know I calculated what to throw together based on what's in my crap drawer. Anyway, I figured "there's probably an RC network in here and they probably set it up so that the down position does actually sound close to a standard two-band Stingray with the controls flat" I'm surprised to see something a bit more complicated than that on the circuit board, but we'll start with what I did get right - the RC network on the right side of the board. The components are marked RBST and CBST - presumably Resistor BooST and Capacitor BooST respectively, as they're attached to the push-push. The resistor is 15K, which if my memory from a while ago is correct, would filter below about 105Hz if connected to a .1uF cap. .047 puts it closer to 225Hz. (aside: 15K is quite a high load, which is why the output drops significantly when the circuit is engaged. Solid state preamps seem to be finicky about this and will give a huge difference in output volume, while tube preamps seem to be much more forgiving in dealing with the extra signal) The spec sheet for the instrument says that the tone pot uses a .1uF cap, which is marked out on the left side. There has to be a significant difference between the two values, otherwise in engaged mode with the tone knob turned down, all signal would go away (which is what happens if you use the strangle switch on a Bass VI along with the tone knob).

I haven't done any further reverse engineering as I'm not interested in taking apart a brand new instrument, but it does make me wonder if a similar tactic couldn't be applied to the Mustang PJ to get a "sounds like a P-bass" mode. I may experiment with this on an external breadboard just to see what happens; that could be a cool pedal project someday, though, as it doesn't particularly need to be inside the instrument to work correctly, and I'm not interested in changing out the JINSUNG marked pots in there, as they feel really good, while push-push and push-pull pots decidedly do not.

It also probably would have made a great restraining circuit for the DiMarzio Model P+J set I had in my short scale Jaguar bass, but those pickups ended up back in their box as I decided the push-push pots were too awful for me to continue using.

Hey uh... CTS? Yeah, CTS... you guys want to make some decent-feeling switching pots?

But I'm supposed to be using it

I tried singing in the car on the way to pick up wood pellets for the grill; that didn't go great, but at least I can move my voice around a little bit. I tried to issue a thanks and joke about being a dumbass for giving up on reading the note on the payment terminal after "Use pen to sign" and trying to tap "debit" with my finger. He was living in a different world; unimpressed, in an almost stereotypical "teenager working retail" detached state.

After that, I tried recording a demonstration of a new bass guitar; the talking went fine, but the recording was garbage. Probably about 5 minutes total speech there.

And that's been it - I've fired out a few "hey bud"s to my cat but otherwise haven't had anything to say for myself in about 7 hours. My voice is working fine, I'm just not using it.

I'm sure that's exactly what the therapist wanted me to do, right?

Strength: or, Storytelling

Twice now in the last two days, I've ended up telling the entire story of #natsmetastaticthyroidcancertreatment to people who apparently had no idea. Well, apparently: the first, yesterday, I thought I had mentioned something to Larry before, but apparently not... but today's audience was a pair of folk that definitely had absolutely no idea what they signed up for when they asked me how I was recovering from my cold. After spending about 25 minutes explaining the ins and outs of having had two different surgeons get all up in my neck, two people looked at me dumbfounded, as to how someone so previously unassuming could have had such a complicated (horrifying?) story to tell about why they were talking a little funny but better than last week.

So the question arises: am I a good storyteller?

I know I can write out a lot here, and I know I can just fill dead air with assembled facts about existence. I used to actually pride myself on being able to talk and talk without actually revealing anything about who I am and how I process the world. It was a skill that kept me from having to actually engage with new people when I started school here... as someone who was a pegged off-scale-high introvert, the easiest way to process "I'm in college" was to spew endless facts and never actually explain what relevance they had to me - to summon encyclopedic knowledge about my own experience as a substitute for sharing why it was my experience, and not someone else's. Part of going through therapy for being a basket case ahead of treatment for surgery involved reaching a level of comfort analyzing why being able to do pull-ups off the backboard at my friend's house is something I remember (a fleeting example of teenage athleticism), and why I'm so proud of the night at band camp I ended by trying desperately to pass out by locking my knees at attention (we all go through an anti-authority rebellious phase, and mine happened to last about half an hour one September night).

I guess I can thread beads together to make a necklace, is what I'm getting at.

The interesting thought comes in something I said the night before my surgery... "This isn't strength. This is autopilot." The thoughts are connected by the dawning horror I witnessed as three adults who seem to like me watched me explain the years of suffering I've endured at the hands of chance. I've been through a lot. When I dealt with my third neck surgery, it was less than a year after I had booked my right thyroid lobectomy, and just about 14 months after my first biopsy. It was old hat, basically... I had developed a tolerance to procedure and was ready as if no big deal were on the docket. Fast forward five years as I prepared to undergo number four and I found myself petrified in a way I hadn't been since I managed to get the inertia together to go for biopsy in 2013. My heart beat firm but shallow, I felt an absence of life in my face, and my thoughts were void of any recognizable emotion. I realized at some point it was because fight-or-flight hadn't set in, and that I was looking at instead a self-preservation emotion that boiled down to "maybe [surgery's] visual acuity is based on motion like t-rex" (yes, I know, not how it really worked). If I didn't move, none of this would catch up to me. Then 3:45am rolled around and it was time to load up and head up for funtime. Anyway, the scheduling was nothing - it wasn't real - while the actual trip to the hospital was the passage of millennia, the slow machination of water replacing everything I hold to be my own identity with what I'm supposed to do, with the automation of "fill out this form and show up at this place and hope you don't flip your shit before they put you under." It works... it's a working strategy, but probably not a healthy strategy. Maybe it is. Maybe it's healthy because it did get me in the door, because it did get me treatment for disease. I definitely can't recommend it as a treatment to other people. I don't perceive what I did in July as "strong" - it was, surely, in the sense that I could have just ignored it. I definitely wanted to ignore it. But when most people think strength, or what most people would think of what I did as strong, I would imagine they probably imagine a fearlessness, a machismo, an adulthood. I felt like a terrified child that night, and when I think back on it, I don't admire anything resembling strength, I admire my tenacity or perseverance. I admire the fact that I actually woke up with my alarms and got in the car.

I think what I identify the most with in my own experience is the wave of dread washing over a new audience. I don't want to call that good or bad - I don't want to diminish the accomplishment, and I think it's important to recognize and appreciate that I did actually go through with having more disease removed - but I know it's important to describe it as the way I dealt with this specific adversity. I'm not a stone... in many ways, I'm the terrified child my parents brought to the hospital with the mystery illnesses, or for one of the myriad head injuries I inflicted upon myself by approaching life brain-first.

If only it'd gotten me into therapy a little sooner...

Resolution of a Broken Voice

It was five weeks again. Almost to the day - about 9pm Tuesday of 4 weeks 6 days, but sitting in my living room and all of the sudden, I have a voice that popped right back in and hasn't gone away since.

This week led to a confirmation of suspected diagnosis: partial vocal cord paresis involving the right flap. I've been given a series of exercises to do to try to get things moving again normally. These involve MEOOOOWing across a range of frequencies, issuing a bunch of sharp or drawn out NYEEEEAH and childhood taunting "NAH NAHNAH NA NAAAA NEEEE." It's interesting. As it is returning now, my voice is lower than it used to be. It'll be interesting to see where it settles, but I have told the doctors - all of whom are upset with my apparently lack of speed in recovery - that I'm beyond thrilled to be able to talk at all.

Glossary, Pt 1

I make a lot of mistakes when trying to recall nouns for things. Recent examples:
My car's windshield being a "laundromat."
Hard-boiled egg being "hot air balloon"
Aircraft on landing approach: "wheels-bus"

I will probably expand on this over time, as I keep saying things badly.

Documentation of a broken voice

Part I: 2013
I do not have good notes from 2013, so after checking in with several people who had to spend a lot of time dealing with me, I have a clearer picture of how things happened. I woke up from surgery with the ability to push out three words at a time before completely running out of breath. The surgeon was mortified at how I sounded when I spoke to him over the phone. Over the course of five weeks, my voice did not apparently improve much at all; I had 'a few words' of barking and then apparently I got very good at loud whispers. When my voice returned, it was sudden and a more or less complete recovery, save for a lot of range.

Part II: Six intervening years
The only things I had to say after my range recovered from not being used at all for over a month was that if I talked and walked at the same time, I ran out of breath a lot. I have it on good authority from a speech therapist that this is a fairly common long-term impact people in my situation notice and report if they put the pieces together. It probably comes from one side of the larynx not coming in to the center and, in exertion, a wider aperture for speaking than one would normally have, and the subsequent more rapid loss of air.

Part III: 2019
IIIa: Pre-surgery, I was asked to participate in an evaluation to know how gentle the surgeon needed to be with my nerves. I had apparently made a full recovery; both flaps were flapping and moving all the way in to the center. Evidently, the left side was visibly more muscular than the right, likely from years of compensation. Both meeting in the center likely explains why the "talking while exercising" problem got better over the years. I was also informed that I am "very protective" of my vocal cords, as I don't tolerate being scoped very well at all. Fun fact to file away for 'weird things to be self-conscious about.'
IIIb: Immediately post-surgery, I had intermittent fits of voice. I have come to understand that this was the result of mucus I couldn't clear from my throat while I still lacked the ability to cough. As time went by and I could clear more and more, I arrived at the point where I could summon perhaps four or five words, then I'd need to take a breath, and after a while, my voice would die to a whisper. As time has progressed, this has actually gotten better... I still run out of air, but what I have of a voice has been getting steadily stronger (while still very weak) with the passage of time, and I tend to have more of it at the end of the day than I did last week or the week before. I am one day shy of five weeks out, with follow-ups for post-op and speech therapy next week. It's going to be a fascinating visit, as I will find out whether or not the sensations I feel and the hypothesis I've developed correspond to reality: I think the right side vocal cord is in a paralysis partially closed, and the reason I've been improving is that as the left starts to compensate, as it did last time, it's got less and less distance to cover. I also know that clearing the consequences of seasonal allergies causes the strength of my voice to collapse pretty quickly in the morning, but most mornings, I do wake up with a sound recognizably mine.

mothwalk: 9/2/2019

One of the nice things about living in an area that's reasonably forested for 2019 is the abundant supply of caterpillars we get in the fall. I've been sidelined from serious walks, but as I start to get to where I'm both bored enough to want to deal with the breathing complication and willing to tolerate the yoyoing humidity levels from day to day, the rewards are still out there waiting. I didn't take a picture of the one American giant millipede we saw, but here's the moth activity.

 A snowberry clearwing egg

 This stunning hairdo on a rosy maple moth caterpillar

 Bugguide is loading slowly, so I don't know what kind of sphingid this is. Or if it is one.

 I have no idea what these usually-fuzzy chaps are, but this one isn't skipping proleg day.

 A prowling geometer

Again, slow loading pages are preventing me from properly identifying this otherwise neat caterpillar.

I'll have to hit the books when I get home to see if I can figure out what these are, but seeing as how I haven't been able to play real-life pokemon like this in over a month, I actually want to know on a visceral level.

The Legend of The Throwing of the Pickles

I have a pickle problem.

This is a cautionary tale, an entertainment, and a distraction from more depressing issues.

Notably, I love dill pickles and will eat them as snacks, and apparently do not terribly mind eating too many pickle spears. This has resulted in me getting occasional gifts of pickles from catered events at work. Usually it's a bowl with maybe 20 or 30 spears in it and we'll have it last a few days thanks to our refrigerator.

This last time, it was a bit more. It was a catering tray from Jason's Deli with probably five or six pounds of pickles in it.

I started cracking in at it and had killed maybe five or six in the first ten minutes at which point I proclaimed I needed to slow down. Over the next three or four hours, I think I must have had at least 24 or 25 pickle spears. The tray was noticeably diminished in gravity by the time I had run out of energy and needed to head home.

Side note: I was three weeks out from major neck surgery. Still well within the length of time I have been instructed to "begin trying to look left and right more each day."

The pickles needed to go.

Our refrigerators are both mini fridges, more appropriate for a dorm room than an office. They work great for keeping sandwich parts ready, but aren't going to take a full catering tray of leftovers. We also don't have reusable containers around for excess pickles (though, apparently, that may be something we need to add to the list), so to the trash they went. That's fine, they'd been open and out of the cold all day and were starting to get soggy and discolored. I loaded up my stuff and grabbed the pickle tray and headed out the door.

I made it about two thirds of the way down the stairs and my heel caught the landing.

I am fine. I was fine. Somehow, for the first time in my life, my instincts of self-preservation kicked in and I caught myself with both arms on the handrails. I knew I needed to not fall down stairs while I still had glue on my incision.

The pickles took flight.

Flash forward: I collected my thoughts and went to the hallway phone. The one intended for people having problems in classrooms to use for getting help. It didn't work. A ringtone, it takes key inputs, but no ring. So I fished my phone out of my pocket, still with tinge of pickle juice on my fingers, and called up stairs. "Hey. Yeah. Hey can you meet me downstairs by the dean's office with two rolls of paper towels? .... Yeah, the pickles. .... I fell down the stairs. ... yeah I'm okay."

I didn't just drop the tray, I threw it forward and away from me.

It made sense, I needed to get my left arm out to the side to catch the railing before I fell far enough that the nerve damage I had at the time kept me from being able to reach high enough to grab it.

Correspondingly, there were pickles, pickle juice, and seeds <em>everywhere</em> on the last five steps of the flight and within about a six foot radius of the bottom. We got it cleaned up pretty well; the stairwell vaguely smelled of pickles that afternoon and the next morning, but it was fine by the next afternoon. The pickles all hit the floor. There were no survivors.

Personally, I learned a lesson: never look a gift tray of pickles in the mouth, or anywhere. Don't accept gift trays of pickles. Make sure they're in jars.

Cleaned out

I lost nearly 300 posts to dead links and broken photos, but I think I'm good to go forward now. Like I mentioned last post, I will try to revisit my Lightroom library and post some random shots from over the years, and I might also consider rolling phone photography into that just for comparison of "I wanted to take photos" and "I needed to document this with a picture!" They're different mindsets for me, for the most part... or at least they used to be, when phone cameras were garbage.

Also, a fun exercise in how my life's changed or not: I have apparently had problems sleeping for years. As far back as the beginning of this experiment, I'd have timestamps of between midnight and 4am on a pretty regular basis. I also have gotten a lot out of the time I spent in therapy, as I don't get mad at nothing anymore.

A return to the written word

After two and a half years of no activity on this platform*, I've decided I'm going to try to start writing again with some regularity and purpose. During the intervening months, I have neglected comment moderation, content production, and purpose of blog. I also have lost track of the photography aspect of this blog, which means most of the old pictures I've taken and posted over the years are lost to whatever hosting they had previously lived on; I'll end up deleting those posts, which will take me a while to sort through. That's a bit of a bummer, but it does create a neat opportunity to start revisiting the last 13 years of digital photo archives and occasionally posting a look back and giving me the opportunity to ruminate on the circumstances of individual photos in ways I would not have otherwise done.

Blessings in disguise and all that.

So what's ahead? 

First, I have to post the diagnostics and analysis I did for my Ampeg SVT-III Pro (1995 model, hence III instead of 3) and what I ended up doing to repair it. I need to post some thoughts on the 5F1 "clone" I made. I have to talk about the repairs I did on the Tektronix 317 oscilloscope I repaired back in 2018, and the Tek 465 I got and refurbished before that. I will probably have a little bit to talk about the Tek 2336 I had for a while, because it was fun and because I had to commission some 3D printed latch parts to get it to stay closed.

I also have had a LOT of health experience and can write your eyes out with thoughts about dealing with thyroid cancer for six nonstop years.

I'm going to largely stay away from politics, but I may have to write some things on current events involving people who look like me doing reprehensible, racist things.

I may have thoughts and observations about biology. I probably will have thoughts about climate. I love some of the biodiversity we have around here and will be sad to see it go when climate change comes to reclaim the earth from us. I really do like spending time outside and watching the butterflies and moths, and then it's on when it's millipede season here.

Finally, you may also end up getting some thoughts on music, music production, and my limited understanding of music theory. It's what I end up doing a lot of ongoing learning about, so here we are: an outlet.

You may be wondering "why?" if you're reading this. I am currently dealing with a complication from surgery that's left me without much of a voice. It's not as bad as it was when this last happened in 2013, but I still find myself yearning to produce "new" thought and information. Hopefully, a keyboard will work to scratch that itch, as posting to blogger is a lot cheaper than buying a ton of music hardware and writing music nobody will listen to because most people seem to dislike tracks without lyrics. I'm sure not in a place I can sing right now, so saving money it is. So, with that, I'm back.

* - There's a reason I called this place "the content vortex" and it has everything to do with my personal history of forgetting to update it or pay attention to it for months at a time. I just usually do better than two and a half years.