Light at the end of the tunnel • September 20, 2018, 8:05 PM

Put into a nutshell, there has been rather little variety of activity in the last fifteen months. But I'm still plugging away at the decluttering and, ultimately in the process, the creation of an outstanding work environment for my music, and the setting up of my working at my music full time.

I took a break in January to do my annual tax preparation, and then in February began a seventeen-week process to digitize the first 102 of my 8-track tapes. To simplify the process, and because of playback issues with my 8-track players, I downloaded the corresponding material from YouTube or bought it from iTunes when it was available. Technically the YouTube downloads, in this case, aren't a violation of intellectual property rights, as they and my analog copies ultimately come from the same master source.

Sixteen weeks ago I set the remaining 8-track tapes aside for the time being to concentrate on my reel-to-reel tapes, some 42 of them in all. Because some of them contain more material on them than others, and/or are recorded at different speeds, I'm doing those at a rate of one tape a week, taking a week off around Christmas and all of January off to accommodate my income tax preparation. Though I will keep a few of those tapes, I'm looking to donate as many of them as I can to our church rummage sale in April 2019.

At that point I move on to the rest of my 8-track tapes, and then to other formats. All this is part of a three-year analog audio digitization project, which I'm aiming to complete around February 2021. After that I move onto my analog video material, and then to old software for my Apple IIe computer: the aim in the latter case is to convert the software for the AppleWin environment. By that time, I feel the decluttering and reorganization should be complete, and I can then start working on my music full time. In the meantime, I'm still plugging away at the church gigs and working with Cayenne Spice.

In April I underwent radiation therapy on my forehead to deal with a low-grade lymphoma lesion that had been developing there over the last ten years. These days, when I'm not doing an indoor gig, you're likely to find me wearing a hat of some sort, usually a Los Angeles Chargers cap, as my forehead is more sensitive to sunlight as a result of the therapy. I have since had followup appointments with my oncologist and lymphologist, and I'm good to go.

In the last two weeks, after years of dealing with spam, I reluctantly decided to close my old Sympatico addresses and create new ones on bell.net. Building goodwill into the new business address will be no easy task after years of building it into the old one, but I felt it was better to start with a clean slate rather than have to put up with the ad nauseam repetitiveness in complaining to the appropriate domains, only to encounter reticence, automatic responses, assembly-line organizations insisting on culling from scripts, or domains that insisted I contact some third party, and/or assumed I had more spam-fighting prowess than I actually do. I decided that taking the time to complain was already cutting too much into the time I'd rather be spending working on my music—new compositions, new arrangements, securing gigs and so forth.

All in all, things are going smoothly during this lengthy transition. Stay tuned!