Long day

Began the day: heading up to WFUV in the Bronx, where I’ll be an occasional substitute newscaster starting on January 5th. This means I show up at the studio an hour ahead of time, scour the wires for local-ish headlines, sports, and weather, pick the 4-5 stories I’ll put in, tighten up the AP prose, practice reading the ‘cast a couple of times, and then read the thing live at the top of the hour, immediately following NPR’s three minute newscast. Since most of the time I’ll be substituting during oddball off-hours, I may be the only one in the studio. The shows are all pre-taped and queued up; the two-minute gap is pre-programmed, so one can’t go over and doesn’t want to go under.

Fun stuff. 8 a.m. on Saturday, Jan 5th, will be my first for-real one. I’ll get o

Continued the day: On behalf of a radio show based in DC, I took my recording gear down to an office near the UN and recorded an expert on the UN being interviewed (via phone) by someone down in DC. Later, the show’s engineers will take the high-quality recording I made of the expert and their high-quality recording of the show’s host and composite them together: Voila! No crappy telephone sound. It sounds like the two people are in a studio together, and was referred to as “a tape sync” by one person I talked to and as a “double under” by someone else. Sat, held a microphone in front of the guy’s face, sent the resulting wave file off via FTP. No fuss, no muss.

Continued the day: had dinner with Kate at a sushi place nearby. We’re a lot tighter on cash just now than we’ve ever been before, so we’ve been keeping our expenditures to a minimum. It felt like a real treat to go out. Afterwards we went and sang in the Messiah Sing-In at Lincoln Center, which was a hoot. I’m very, very glad we bought the scores weeks ago and had been practicing, though there were particular sections I wish we’d practiced a lot more. Ah, well: that’s what nex year is for.

Splurged on a taxi to get home, since Kate has to work tomorrow.