I believe I read somewhere you are a software engineer (or something similar in the past).
Perhaps my way of running the pulseadio deamon system wide service, helps you in not keep loosing your microphone?
Have a look at my “journey” thread. The Mycroft / pulseadio section is perhaps also the solution for you.
Thanks - I used to do software QA about 11 years ago, so I am willing to “kludge” things (with a backup plan!)
I have read some of your blog ( 3 parts I think) - I will have a closer look 
Check out part-4, I pushed online yesterday. Grab the pieces you need (or all). Most interesting is the pulseaudio / mycroft configuration section.
You then no longer running pulseaudio as the user, but as system service and connect over tcp-localhost.
Perhaps that also solves you loosing the mic “crap”
@KathyReid, I did a bit of checking on my location issue and discovered the following through triangulation.
“Hey Mycroft” How far is Ottawa, Ontario? A. 340.3 miles
How far is Chicago, Illinois? A. 719.5 miles
How far is Atlanta, Georga? A. 747.9 miles
After triangulating the distances I came up with NY City.
“Hey Mycroft”, How far is New York City? A. 0.0017 miles.
So there you have it, I am definitely not in NY City. When I ask mycroft where he is, the location is reported correctly Other issue is my default settings are Metric so answers should be reported in kilometres.
I am not sure what skill is executed when I ask these questions. If I know I could dig into it a bit as well.
Let me know if you need any logs to assist in debugging this.
One more thing, I am pretty sure that wolframalpha is the fallback skill being executed here. If I ask the same questions on the wolframalpha website it uses some form of geolocation from my IP address to determine the distance. My thoughts are that somewhere during the TTS conversion using mimic the IP address wolframalpha is using is returning NY City as the geolocation. If the fallback skill is passed both the from and to locations wolframalpha correctly calculates the distances. I may try to dig into the fallback skill code if I have some time.
Thanks for reporting this, @pcwii
What I think is happening here is that Wolfram Alpha is based in New York, and is giving directions based on it’s location. If I ask the questions you did;
I get exactly the same responses as you do.
@KathyReid,
If you ask how far is Ottawa, Ontario from “your location” the correct answer is provided.
We may just need to modify the wolframalfa fall back skill to append the location for queries like this.
Good point. I will check it out.