where have i been...

I'm not sure really, but I have been quite busy. I finished with my therapist last week after seeing her twice a week for six years. She is leaving the country to start a new life abroad, or at least that's what she told me. That has been a bit of a shock for me. I guess the most shocking bit about it all for me is that I'm still not cured. The good bit is that we will have an extra £350 a month to spend, which will come in handy what with the new addition to the McMuffin household.

Speaking of which, I have been quietly suffering the hormonal tides of Mrs McMuffin's pregnancy. Fortunately, it is all beginning to take a turn for the better. That has taken up a lot of my time and energy.

I guess mostly I have been working, and, surprisingly, enjoying myself at work. In truth I'm not really sure if enjoyment is the right word, but at least I am not complaining about it. The team is very nice, my managers are very nice, the workload is manageable...everything is just nice. So nice, in fact, I think I might stay here for a while. I have applied for a job managing the out of hours service, and I have got an interview. I only sent in my application on Monday, five days late, of course, but I had a telephone call yesterday inviting me to interview today. I had to turn it down because I need some time to think about the job and to do some reading around it.

The other big job I have been doing is working on music for the wedding of the year. I went through my entire music collection and selected around 400 songs. It took me hours and I now have RSI in my little finger from all that leaning on it as I clicked around iTunes. I can still feel a slight pins and needle-ly tingle in it. Anyway, Ms Gypsy Tart and Mr Rock Cake wanted the music that people could dance to but it had to have rawk sensibility. It sounds easy, but it's been a much bigger job than I expected. Mrs McMuffin told me yesterday that she would have sat down for a couple of hours and picked some music. What does she know? Designing the perfect mix is an artform. I have used three different applications to help me do it. iTunes, of course, then the music was passed to MusicMagic Mixer which analyses the music and selects playlists based on the songs sonic similarities. A very, very clever bit of programming, by the way, and well worth checking out. Finally, I had to be sure that all the songs played at the same volume, so I passed it through iVolume, which is a little application that alters the volume of each song to a perceived volume. I set it to 90db, which sounds fine. Surpringly, some of the songs had to be altered by as much as 50%.

I printed off a list and we sat down with the lovely couple last night and over a glass of wine, they decimated the wonderful list. I have to admit it was a bit of an effort not to storm off in a huff, after all they were dissing my music. Fortunately, I was able to rein in the 16 year old in me, and remember that it's their wedding. Even so, how could anyone not like Mandinka by Sinead O'Connor, or Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode. These people just have no taste. The worse crime Mr Rock Cake committed was to say that Son of a Preacher Man by Dusty Springfield is crap. I don't know...it's true, you can take a horse to water...

I have now whittled the list down to a mere 335 songs, which may not seem a lot in the grand scheme of things, but bare in mind we will probably only have time to listen to about 80 of them, at most. I burnt them all to disc for the lovely couple to review over the next couple of weeks and printed off the playlist. In fact, you can have a look at the Wedding Music Mix if you want. This is just the louder middle period music, I still have to prepare the beginning music and the ending music. I just know that some people will not be able to resist commenting on the choice of music, so I will make it easier for you, Steve, and invite comments.

I must get on now. I am supposed to be working at home this morning, and I wanted to get an early start. So far, I have spent the last 90 minutes burning discs and writing this post. No, I really must get on now.