Wonders in Wapakoneta

Ellen and I took a trip yesterday over to Wapakoneta, OH to hear the Raleigh Ringers in concert. It's my fourth time seeing them live, and they still never cease to amaze me. They played for nearly two hours to a packed middle school auditorium, and most in attendance had either never seen the Raleigh Ringers before, or never seen them live. To anyone who has never seen them before, make the effort. We drove three hours -- one way -- to see them last night, and it was well worth the time and effort to get there.

For the past few days -- when I wasn't in the car crossing state lines -- I've been engaged in full-out battle with my computer, trying to get it to work properly. Being the idiot that I am, I decided to let Windows Update work its magic on my system, and in the process, I let it update the driver for my sound card. Now, for the past few days, I've been having problems with Finale during playback -- mainly, having Finale crashing on me after the fourth or fifth time trying to play back part of the piece. I thought updating the driver would help.

I was wrong.

I'd had this happen once before, but I thought it was a fluke. When I updated the driver, it caused the playback in Finale to come out the speakers about three-quarters of a step higher than it should be. The problem would then bleed over into Media Player, playing all my MP3s back at the higher pitch, and only when I went into the audio control panel to play with it would it remedy the problem.

So, after several emails with the Finale customer support and the problem not getting solved, I've emailed the folks at Creative Labs, and in the meantime, I've rolled back my system and the driver, and that's seemed to fix things. It's only been two days of struggle with a heartless inanimate object, but I think I've come out on top ... sort of.

So, now that I've lost a couple of days of composing, it's time to play catch-up and try to get back on track. So far this month, I've got one two-part choral rough draft done, several handbell rough drafts, and one string orchestra rough draft. I've got several others started I'm hoping to get finished, and have a couple ideas of some more to get done this month. On the plus side, I've written more so far this June than I did last June, so I'm happy about that.

Now, to make the most of the last four days of the month!