Hey, Skipper, i spend most of Monday (and last Friday) doing St Pat's gigs at assisted living and retirement communities.    Mostly they want the Irish-American songs that they're familiar with, but I get to throw in a few real Irish songs. Anyway, it's always a fun time, with the audiences singing along.

The downer to my St Pat's Day was that I was all set to use my new MacBook, with its built-in video camera, to record my two programs today.   This would have been especially nice, since both these facilities have really good sound systems, so I could have ended up with some really good video clips to use for promo.   But after I deleted about 12 gig worth of old "thumbnail" videos to make room for the new ones, when I opened iMovie to record my first program, iMovie set about to reconstitute all the 'footage' that I had deleted! This process took pretty much my entire hour!   Aarrgh!

Oh, well, I thought, I'll just video the second program. So I got everything set up at the second gig, with the laptop positioned just right to give a good pic (not too close, not too far away, not off to the side), and I proceeded to record the whole program without incident.    And the video footage did, indeed, come out beautifully.   (Well, I could complain that I look fat in the video, but I fear that's just testimony to the accuracy of the camera.)
The only problem with the video: NO SOUND

It took me quite a while to figure out why I got not sound this time, since I'd done other videos the same way and the sound came out fine. I finally remembered that I'd been tinkering with the Sound part of my System Preferences and, for some reason, I had set the sound input to "external microphone" instead of "built-in microphone."

Such a pity, because the programs went well, and to me everything sounded really good - better than I do in some venues with poorer acoustics or when I use some of my more portable equipment.   

Other than that, it was a good St Pat's Day in Portland, Oregon.

Rainy (what else is new?), but good. :)