Who Wants to Transcribe an Interview?!

We finally got some form of April showers! Fire danger in the area is currently considered “extreme.” We just need another week of showers (no wind) and maybe there will be moss in the forest that actually squelches when you step on it instead of making an ominous “snap, crackle, pop” noise.

I went into the studio yesterday to record a commentary and to get some work done on the radio documentary I’m producing. After about six hours of work (I had expected to work for about four hours) I had one 45 minute interview about ¾ transcribed and I had conducted and recorded another hour-long interview for the project. I should mention that I have another hour-long interview that needs to be transcribed and on Tuesday, I will conduct another lengthy interview. I’m accumulating long interviews for the project at a frightful pace, so frightful that I’m not sure how I’m going to transcribe them all (someone told me Wednesday that transcription takes abut 5x the length of the actual interview, and I believe them!) and produce the first documentary for June broadcast.

I might just become the schmuck who makes the summer intern do the majority of my transcribing. As a former intern of the organization, I would have jumped at the chance to take on this tedious and time consuming task. Okay, so that’s a lie.

But . . . I also know, that as an intern, people often overestimated the amount of time it takes for assigned tasks to be completed and that a large portion of time is always spent nervously twiddling thumbs in your work space while you pray that someone will remember you and give you something to do. It was always nice to have to have “something to do” to fill the times when you ran out of actual interesting tasks.

At least, that’s how I’m justifying it.

When you spend as much time as I did yesterday in a teeny production studio which really just a glorified way of saying “ill-ventilated closet,” you start to get a little twitchy. Yesterday, as I typed away, stopping and starting recording over and over again, I kept feeling something: a twitch, a tickling on my upper thigh. The sensation came from near my pocket where I kept my keys and chapstick. Probably just those objects shifting around, I told myself.

But, although it had been several months since I’d had a feeling like this, I had my suspicions about what it really was. Finally, I pinched a bit of my jeans fabric together. I felt something small and hard trapped between my thumb and forefinger. I reached into my pants and pulled out a wood tick.

Turns out transcribing does give you ticks!

And yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s tick season. Those hateful, awful little insects are out there lurking in the tall, dead grass, waiting for you to pass through so they can jump on your pant leg and subsequently, suck your blood. I apologize for the gross imagery, but I have long harbored a deep dislike of ticks, so much so that I once wrote a little ditty called “Ode to a Tick.” It went something like: Ode to a tick. You are an ‘ick.’ Probably not my best effort, but I never claimed to be a poet.

Years ago, this region of the world was free ticks, but it seems the warmer, dryer summer we’ve been having seem to have brought them in droves. They’re one of the most disgusting harbingers of spring, but there’s also not a whole lot you can do about them.

Now that I've grossed you all out, here’s this month’s travel, in album form.