Normal?

Things have been kinda crazy the last 6 weeks or so. I knew it would be, but I did not expect to be such a horrible blogger through it all.

As soon as we returned from our big road trip people started arriving at our house for a week long conference. During the week we were able to accomplish most of what we came together to do. We also spent time at the beach, shopping, Chichén Itzá, Dzibilchaltún (two Mayan ruins), museum and general site seeing around town. This was a group of pastors and missionaries who work with the Deaf here in Mexico. We were doing a planning meeting for camp this summer.

My wife went out of town with two other ladies who were here for our meeting. They all went to Cancun and Cozumel and left me here with the kids for a couple of days.

Today the kids and I went to the park and zoo. The zoo was closed, but we were able to ride the train that takes you through the main attractions of the zoo. We also went and picked up mail that has been collecting dust in the post office for almost 2 months. The highlight of the day…the immigration office. Ok, so maybe that was not the most exciting thing we did.

I am putting the final touches on a new Missionary Talks interview that may be up later tonight or tomorrow.

It looks like things are going to be getting back to normal pretty soon. Finally.

My Thought Spot SE 01: A Pickle For Christmas

This is a special episode of My Thought Spot. I took part in a group recording project. This is the final result. There is some short audio on this recording that I added myself, but you may grab just the audio from the group project so that you can embed it at your site, or put it out in your own podcast.

Be sure to visit Podcast Pickle when searching for new podcasts to listen to.

Enjoy this episode and I will have a regular full episode out in a few days.

Missionary Talks 41: William Carey (part 1)

Last night I posted the long awaited William Carey episode. I have been working on this for many weeks. The research for this was not nearly as easy as it was for David Livingstone. Not that the research was difficult, it just seemed that the storyline did not flow as smoothly as it does for Livingstone’s life. It took a lot more work to write the script.

I was able to record it with my new microphone. I had to do a whole lot less post-recording processing on the file to make it clean. The new microphone, mixer and ground combined to give me a great sound. At least far better than what I previously had.

Please check out this episode and leave a comment on what you think about it. The second half will be coming out next week. I have not started editing it, but I have all my steps written down for what I did to the first half, that should make it go a bit smoother.

With the increased audio quality, it makes me think I really need to change my intro/outro audio. I would like to completely replace them, but I don’t have any better ideas. Right now I am just going to re-record the spoken part and mix it into my drum chant.

Missionary Talks 39: Brenda Edwards

Two weeks ago when I was on my trip to Tampico I got a chance to interview Richard and Brenda Edwards. They are a couple who spent a few years in Kenya as missionaries. In this episode, Brenda tells us about taking her children to Africa and some concerns she had as a mother. She also talks about shopping frustrations.

While recording we were in competition with a dog barking in the house. I tried to eliminate those sections as much as possible, but you can probably still pick out the dog in some places. There are also some random traffic noises. But, I think it is clear enough.

I am still working on the William Carey script. I have had some computer problems on the machine that I was writing on. I will have to move that info onto my main machine and try to get that knocked out this week. I will be recording the William Carey bio on my new microphone. I hope to get a good clean recording to work with. With just a little bit of money I have been able to clean up the sound in my recordings. It won’t affect the next couple of interviews for Missionary Talks, but you will be able to hear it in the next episode of My Thought Spot, which I am editing now.