If you’re anything like me (which you should be, wink wink) you’ve always loved Bob Dylan’s song. He poses a litany of seemingly unanswerable questions, and then suggests that, “the answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”
Well, as much as I love the song, I have always been struck by the disconnect.

What question is the wind actually answering?

I think I just figured it out. This question is:

Why isn’t Jim recording today?

The answer, my friend . . . . is the damn wind. It is SO windy today that I can’t narrate.
I am scheduled to record a few corrections (they’re known as ‘pickups’) in an audiobook I narrated last week: I mispronounced the name of a town by putting emphasis on the first syllable instead of the second; I transposed 1885 into 1855; the crazy-sensitive mic I use picked up a chair squeak at one point.

I can’t record because that same crazy-sensitive mic hears the house rattling and trees blowing so any pickups would sound different than the original narration. The house is creaking like an old sailing ship.

It’s an occupational hazard that I’ve learned to work around. Tuesdays are “trash days” and nearly every afternoon the neighbor lady has her grandkids over to play in the yard. One of these days I will invest the $$$$ needed to build a sound-proof room, but until then I will just have to brew a cup of tea and ponder “how many seas must the white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand.”