A very bad start - what kind of house guest knocks over a glass bedside lamp and has it shatter to a thousand pieces? But Neal and Coleen were exceedingly gracious and allowed me to stay on. At nine o clock prompt I started recording - whether I was awake or not! Took some time to get into it, and a mysterious whine and a tendency to produce echo notes that were never there slowed things down a bit at times, but we got four songs/tunes fleshed out, with harp and voice tracks OK. I do not enjoy working to clicks, and actually Neal had a hard time finding a click track at all with his new software, so in fact most of the time I winged it, played the Autoharp track all the way through and then sang to that. It works for me and is actually quite fast when I really know the song and can sing it in my head. For tunes, I have to do that anyway of course. Took me only about a dozen takes to do one of them with just three mistakes that Neal could edit out. The good thing is that you never make the same mistake every time, so if you do it often enough, you can stitch together one perfect take! Not going to tell you what we did, wait till the CD comes out - if ever!
Lovely dinner, on the porch, looking at the fireflies in the video above. Magical creatures. Later on, getting dark, we walked round Coleen's Folly - an area of the garden with rocky outcrops that Coleen is taming. Loved the door with no frame, the bottle tree, and the Woodhenge from their felled Elm tree, the trunk of which as been left like hands open to the sky. Fireflies covered the fields to the distant hills, a train took 10 minutes to pass by, hooting, and the fireflies ascended to the treetops. And I saw a groundhog!!!
