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Monday, March 11, 2002

1:15:37 AM
SIN: So Eric's weekly newsletter arrived just as I was going to tail off for the evening. Only got about 20 minutes in today so far, well actually its tomorrow but it still counts for yesterday, trust me ;-) Think I'll have to get some more in before giving up for the evening. I need to get him to put anchors in the newsletter page so that I can point directly to each one. In the mean time, the newsletter page is here. Latest are at the bottom.
Our condolences to SINner Kenneth Schug who's wife of 50 years Miyoko Ishiyama Schug passed away. 50 years ? in this day and age this is almost unheard of. May all of us be as lucky as they to see 50 years of marriage.

Wednesday, February 06, 2002

10:12:14 PM

Lesson this evening, Wednesday's are always exciting ;-) I do my best to be embarrased as stuff I can play at home goes out the window when it comes time. So I played a much nicer Seagull guitar tonight than mine. Definitely have guitar envy. One of the other instructor's was there playing afterward and man was this guy good. I'll never get from Shoe Fly to the stuff he was playing. Very motivating, came home and practice, practice, practice, added A note on third string which of course causes complete paralysis of the very well trained fingers next to it. First use of the second finger on the left hand too. This means pain until we get the calluses going. Have to get the EZ update out today, ughhh. Maybe later ?

Wonder if this will upstream as my category updates yesterday were going anywhere without a push.

2:42:09 AM
Last quick guitar thought from today, the guitar and dishwater hands just don't go together. Despite calluses on two fingers trying to play after doing the dishes is impossible. Maybe I can trade this role since Someday Is Now and we need to remove all obstacles in its path ;-) Who'd have ever thought to put doing the dishes on the risk list for this project ?

2:26:24 AM

From the newsletters from EZ, I have been pleased to others experiencing some of the same things. Not that I didn't expect this but it is curious how some seem to have read my mind exactly. Here are two....

"Oh sh**, he picked me." (Shepherdson, Nancy) // As bad as I wanted to do this, I've been finding ways not to do this for years and EZ did something musical so there will be sooooo many people doing something similar that he'd never pick me. He did. In hindsight, another Sinner (Debbie Flapan) provided data to show that there are only about 10 of us doing musical SINs. Go figure.
"This is not going to be as easy as I thought." (Patt Russo) // ; This was a killer in the first 2 or 3 days after my first lesson as I tried to play this guitar. I mean I was only playing two strings and only with my right hand but suddenly it appeared to be much harder than I'd imagined.

1:52:21 AM
So I have a lot of SIN blogging thoughts which I haven't managed to get here because I always have a guitar in my hands and the keyboard is elsewhere. Maybe we can Dave to add a guitar interface of some sort ? Time to hit a couple.

1:49:13 AM
So we are in the wee hours of day 37, working on line 56, measure 224 and page 12. Doesn't sound too impressive but somehow it feels pretty good. Last week/lesson, Clarence mentioned one of his much younger students, about 12 or 13 (man 37 feels old in these discussions especially when he uses his hand to show me just how tall they are) who asks "how many times we going to do this ?". He means playing each wonderful piece over and over and over and over. Clarence in his infinite guitar wisdom says "untiiil we get it right". This is the mantra currently and the extra is (that's the letter i plural) is just Clarence's special drawl which makes his point. My update to Eric is due and I promised I wouldn't be last this month. We'll get this out tomorrow, whoops today.

1:28:55 AM
Just finished nightly practice session, we are now banging (and I mean banging unfortunately) out 3 chords on the lower three string. Tonight while mixing chords and picking strings I heard something which sounded like music. It even flowed, not like the fabulous tunes I have butchered a note at a time but the chord seemed to progress into a couple of notes and back.

Monday, January 28, 2002

2:56:16 AM
So we are at day 19 with guitar and 28 SIN days total. We are in week three of practice. Second week was tough as the finger pain set in and I just couldn't keep playing (well practicing, it doesn't sound like playing). I have missed only one day since the guitar arrived so I am feeling pretty good about this. There definitely have been some valleys already when I thought, there was no way I was going to succeed.

This week we have 16 new lines which brings us to 49 total. Last week I arrived at class feeling pretty weak on that weeks stuff. This week we will be ready. We have exactly 4 songs in the repetoire. Well at least four that sound like music. Which ones ? Yankee Doodle (with only 3 strings so they made up the last few measures), Jingle Bells (too bad we didn't do this in December), Round the Mulberry Bush and Shoo Fly. The book (copyright 1965, yikes) is full of waltzes which I just don't know or understand. I play 'em for practice but have no clue when I hit a wrong note. Need to visit Google and see if we can't find a beginner's book from atleast the '90s.

So one of the latest dilemna's is the calluses building up on the left hand. They sure help playing but sure feels strange trying to use these fingers to do anything small like pick up a small screw. Wasn't planning on losing my fingers on my left hand when we took on this challenge.

Other dilemna's ? Should we put the guitar on the left or right knee ? Do you keep the first finger on the first fret (F) when playing a G ? likewise with a C and D ? I have found I drag the index finger so I tried to move away from using both fingers but was amazed how wired this was in my brain already. It isn't easy changing. I know there are more but there's a job fair tomorrow, what fun. Good evening.

Thursday, January 24, 2002

3:23:09 PM
Now we will try to make the Radio categories work so that we can keep the SIN (guitar) stuff together and maybe the fostering stuff too. This is supposed to work but I have seen a fair amount of posts to the Userland folks about difficulties making it work. So here we go.....this is going to get posted to atleast 3 different blogs, or so we hope.

Monday, January 21, 2002

10:55:18 PM
Test entry, this one we want to be longer than a line to see what it looks like, test, test, test, test, test,test, test, test, there goes my old girlfriend there goes another diamond ring, all those late night promises I guess they don't mean a thing, baby what's the story ? did you find another man, is is easy to sleep in the bed that we made, if you don't look back I guess the feelings start to fade away..........

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