Takin' Care of Business

I love that feeling when you have a particularly productive weekend. On this one, I

• Took my youngest son to a demo session with the local RC plane group. He got to fly a drone and an RC plane. That's a hobby I could really get into - if I didn't already have so many expensive hobbies!
• Had my car's oil and filter replaced, tires rotated, and interior vacuumed. I'd have had it washed too but it rained today.
• Replaced the footswitch in my wah pedal. The old one had gone bad and turned my wah into a howling beast, and not in a good way.
• Fixed my true bypass looper. One of the switches was acting up, so I first tried just re-flowing the solder joints and that fixed it.
• Fixed a problem with my Ceriatone DC30. It was intermittently dropping volume and randomly emitting static. Since the volume problem only happened on the top-boost channel, but on both input jacks of that channel, I suspected that it was probably an issue with one of that channel’s 12AX7 preamp tubes. I sprayed out the sockets with DeoxIT and re-seated the tubes a few times to try to clean the sockets and pins. Next I was going to try replacing tubes, but cleaning the sockets and pins did the trick! It's probably worth writing a post to go through the troubleshooting diagnosis on a problem like that. That’s something that doesn’t really take an amp tech to do, so it’s very much worth knowing. 
• Rewired my pedalboard to what I think is the ultimate arrangement for me. (At lease for now!) It's kind of an Eric Johnson type of setup, with access to 3 different signal chains for my primary sounds - clean, crunch, and lead. Only I do it with a single amp and a clever (if I say so myself) way to share a couple of the pedals between multiple signal chains. And that's without a programmable loop switcher and a minimal number of footswitch stomps to access a sound (usually only one)! The cabling job is still a bit sloppy because I just wanted to slap it together quickly to confirm that my weird way of using loopers would work. Now that it’s been successfully tested, I need to clean up the cable routing. Anyway, the whole thing is definitely worth a post and I’m sure I’ll write one. 
• Built my kids a pair of marshmallow guns for a battle with the Boy Scout troop. 
• Made pork carnitas for my family. We serve it more like Cuban lechon asado, with rice and fried plantains, and if possible, mojitos. Yum.

I hope my work week is as good!