Well, needless to say life and work has been incredible this year, which is why I’ve been more scarce than usual here and out there. I’ve just decided that I must maintain my priorities in order to maintain equilibrium, on the business as well as personal fronts. The great news is, my business is up over 50% since last year-to-date.

Looking back, now I can see that I was really frazzled about a month ago.

MEGA WORK
First of all I had been working… a LOT. I was spending upward of 12 hours/day on work from January-April. But as they say, “ya gotta make hay while the sun shines.”  Nope I wasn’t recording 12 hours straight, but also had a certain measure of administration that came with all the voiceover projects.

We also took on a home remodeling project. A worthwhile effort, that consumed a ton of time. Then my laptop screen went out…for good.  I was scheduled to be out of town for a week, and needed SOMETHING for mobile computing.

NEW COMPUTER
So I decided it was time to get a new laptop computer. The configuration was extremely difficult as my version of Pro Tools did not like Norton Internet Security 2010. I used Audacity for about three days.  Then while I was out of town with my shiny new kick-butt laptop, I erroneously compressed a boot log file while running disk clean up.
POW. Dead in the water. Until I flew home.

Note from Dell techs: If you’re using Windows XP, Don’t use “compress files” during disk clean up.  This function actuallly makes the hard drive work harder to uncompress files it needs and makes seek time longer, thus slowing down your machine. In my case it compressed one of the boot log files and my computer had to reboot from CD.

All the while scripts were arriving. Clients waiting. Pressure mounting.

The techs at Digi tried, but we could not get Pro Tools working, and my msconfig settings and registry were so out of whack  by that time, I opted to start over, with a full reformatting of the hard drive.

Shortly thereafter I literally cried over spilled milk one day. It was all about frustration.

That was then.

The reformatting turned out to become a beautiful thing. Slowly but surely I’ve been adding needed programs and applications, and running ProTools, even though it is still temper-mental. But so far so good on my work-around.

Note to self- Investigate alternate audio processing software solution at VOICE 2010 .

OH YEA- THE GREENING
So what’s this “Greening of”  title all about for this article? I admit I got a bit off topic, but one of the things I was planning on blogging about in honor of “Earth Day” was how I was getting working to make my own work habits a bit greener. But that was during the time of that little bit of personal “hades”I described above.

They say challenges are the things that make you grow.  Now the dust is still settling, around here and I have made a change that I feel will help conserve our planet’s resources.

I used to print every script. Not any more. Even though I recycle and reuse whatever I can. When I do print something I’ll print on the back-side.

But I’ve now taken it a step further. I now record by reading the script, from a computer monitor in the booth. I can mark my copy, put notes in, and  in the process, have saved time, money, paper, electricity, and laser toner, plus the wear and tear on the printer.

So there you have it. Now I’m only about a month behind in my blog post ideas. Just kidding.

WHAT WEEKEND?
This weekend, Memorial Day Weekend, I will be sticking around home. I have a commercial to record and a long-form e-Learning script to complete before Tuesday.  Monday evening is my acting class. Yes. Monday.  Memorial Day. All I can say is I’m committed, although some of you reading maybe I should be committed!

Tuesday is going to be a full day.  It begins with ISDN session, followed by a studio visit from my pal Dan Lenard , and then packing for a four-day stay in Los Angeles for VOICE 2010.

I WILL however, work at exercising my “green” thumb this weekend, spend some “girl time” with my daughter, and get out into the sunshine, fresh air, and my garden.

Challenge, balance, centering, breathing. Creating, having fun and a little relaxing.
Oh yea. RIBS on the BBQ. Later!