Starting the read

At this point the book changed our lives in a couple of different ways.
1. The way that we interacted with what we ate.

I would challenge you to read this book. Pay close attention to the chapter "Million Mile Chicken". Just to TRY to bring you some meat from an animal that lived close to you (think about the gas used for transport, refrigeration, it really does add up quickly), the farmer has to fight, argue, fill out paperwork, spend time that could have been used doing more productive things than negotiating with buyers, etc. You may begin to question the label "Fresh" on the product you buy at the grocery store.

2. I moved to making any spare time that I had into reading time. After getting the book and the microphone in the mail, I started recording. Here are some lessons learned:
- Make sure that the version of Audacity you are using is the most current version. I realized, after recording the first two chapters several times, and each time when attempting to save the whole program shutting down, I found that I didn't have the most updated version. This created a lot of anger and frustration with the whole project. About three weeks were wasted here, with lots of technical intervention from Vince. I don't have much patience for details once I start to get frustrated!

In the meantime, I got a response from Joel!
--- Beginning of message ---

from Joel Salatin
to Theresa Lyons
date Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 9:54 PM
subject Re: Everything I Want to Do is Illegal

Apr 21


Hi Theresa--

Oh, of course read it with gusto--great drama and verve.

This sounds great. I'm in no rush--just go at your pace and let me know
how you get along.

Many thanks.

Joel

space and equipment

Two more topics to digress on for this post!

Space: I am lucky, no I am blessed, to have a very strange neighbor. The house next to ours is the house where his parents lived, and he grew up. He actually lives across the street from us, and owns the house next to us. I haven't been in the house next door, but evidently, it's the same as it was when his parents died. This means that the house is quiet, except for when Fred sets off fireworks. He likes to do this, but I like him anyway because we're the same temperment.

Anyway, it was MOSTLY quiet in a our back bedroom, since that's the room furthest from the road and closest to the "no one lives here" house. Sometimes, Fred's friend Jason, uses the that driveway to move stuff around with big machines, but generally not until after he starts drinking (around 9am).

Well, back to the space. I decided on the back bedroom as the place to record, knowing that was the best option. In general the quieter, the better. You can't do anything about ghetto-copters (learned that too).

Something else you never think about is the fact that the microphone needs to be close to your mouth, and the laptop. Close but not too close, the water to drink close but not close enough to spill all over yourself, the book and the laptop.

Eventually, I'll add a picture of the set up to this page.


Now let's think about equipment. I'm used to recording in VERY expensive sound studios, where all you do is saunter up to the microphone to speak.

I asked some friends if they had a microphone to spare, but no one did. We saved up some money, and I bought this wonderful microphone:

http://www.bluemic.com/snowball/

I think the best part about it is that it's multi use. It has a switch for multi or single directional, so it's good for podcasting or single reading.

In addition, the price was VERY reasonable--- only $80.00 on Amazon.

Next, I needed a copy of the book that wasn't the library's. That was pretty cheap too $15.00.

Finally, the laptop. We have two of them, A Dell Inspiron that I use that we've had to replace the hard drive twice on (Runs Linux only because of it's unreliability), and Vince has a HP TX 1300.

Finally, software is what I needed. I found a version of Audacity online, and downloaded it onto my computer.

You'll hear more about troubleshooting all of the problems on another post. Suffice it to say, that's all we needed!