So.

Really not sure what to do with this thing.

So.

So I’m apparently buying some land in Lava Hot Springs, Idaho, tomorrow.

The Right Thing

My wife’s first husband was a fighter pilot with a penchant for exotic pets and a bit of an impulse control problem. He apparently had fish and snakes and lizards and all sorts of creatures; he didn’t keep them in the best conditions, and so it was apparently pretty sad.

The last exotic creature he got was a freshly-hatched umbrella cockatoo. It arrived and, as near as I can tell, he quickly thereafter shipped off to fight in Desert Storm. Where he crashed and died.

And so my wife was left widowed with a bird she never wanted, but which she hand-fed as a chick and cared for for the next 23 years.

We surrendered the bird to a local avian rescue and adoption service today. She’s just become too much for us to handle.

It’s a sad day, but we both know that we’re doing the right thing.

To Do:

• Grade 3 1 MA surveys of scholarship
• Grade 3 MA grading reflections
• Grade 17 7 Advanced Writing final essays
• Grade 19 10 Freshman final essays
• Grade 19 Freshman finals

I Dream A Dream

Last night, I dreamed that I loaded up all my gear, went to the venue, set up my PA and did a soundcheck.  Everything was fine.  It was cramped, and for some reason my PA rig was in front of me rather than off to the side, but, you know, it was fine.

And then I decided to take a nap, so I went to take a nap.  And I overslept.

And then as I ran back to the venue, a David Wilcox concert broke out nearby.

And then everyone turned into zombies and the last thing I remember was being eaten by zombies.

This was also not a nightmare.

My Android Adventure

So Shelley and I, after being on prepaid phones for years and years, decided to get with the times and get us some of those new-fangled smart phones.  I had been using a hand-me-down iPhone 3GS with an a la cart data plan, and I was ready to get a phone with a nicer camera.  After poking around, I learned that I could get two phones with unlimited data and texting on T-Mobile for about $100 a month.  Sold.

Buying the phones was an ordeal, largely because Shelley was trying to port a pre-paid phone’s number within T-Mobile, which they’re not really set up to do.  It took hours. Shelley got some kind of phone with a keyboard.  She loves it.

I got a Samsung Galaxy II, mostly because of the nice 8 megapixel camera.

It worked fine for the first little bit, and I was happy that most of the apps I rely on were available for Android.  And then it started to be annoying.

• It is constantly updating apps. When it does this, the phone slows to a crawl and apps hang or become unusable.
• It crashes. Often.  Just yesterday, while on my run, it updated a bunch of stuff mid-run, which meant that my podcast app started failing. Then, when I got home, it turned itself off and wouldn’t respond to the press of the power button.
• You know how when you slide to unlock on an iPhone, it just works? Not so much on this phone. It works most of the time. Sometimes it doesn’t.  And then the phone just sits there, unusable, until it decides to unlock.
• You know those earbuds with the play/pause and volume buttons?  Only the play/pause button works on an Android phone.  You can’t adjust the volume at all using the earbuds, which is super-annoying.
• Friday the alarm decided not to go off.
• Because all it takes is a press of a button and a swipe anywhere on the screen to unlock the phone, it is really, really easy to unlock the phone when pulling it out of your pocket.
• Once, the Google maps app crashed so hard that I had to reboot the phone.
• There are hardware buttons for volume and power, but the buttons for home, back, menu, and search are all touch sensitive, which means that I’m constantly accidentally invoking them when I don’t mean to.
• When someone sends me a link in a text message and I click on it, the phone pops up a dialog box asking me what I want to do: open the link? make a bookmark? copy the text?
• The stock keyboard is awful, so I had to replace it.  But the new one does annoying things, too.  On an iPhone, if you delete something that is autocorrected and then retype it, the phone is smart enough to know that it shouldn’t autocorrect it again.  Not so much with this phone.  If you accidentally tap outside the keyboard, the phone becomes super-touch-responsive and makes the keyboard go away.
• The battery doesn’t last very long, and my first experience with the battery draining completely was that the phone, apparently, does not charge unless it is powered up.
• The phone is constantly, constantly, informing me about something.

I went to the T-Mobile store today and put my name on the priority list for an iPhone.  I’ll have to plunk down $100, and my bill will go up by $20 a month, but at this point, it’s worth it just to get away from this phone.

A Musical History

• Both of my parents are musicians and singers. My mother is a singer and piano player and an organist. My father is a singer and a drummer who can also plink around on the piano and the guitar. One of my uncles is a singer. Another uncle, now deceased, sang and played piano. In short, there was a lot of music in my life as a kid, and there was never any question about whether I would play an instrument, it seemed to me. It was just a matter of which ones.
• I played some trumpet, which I didn’t like. I played some piano, which I found frustrating, since I couldn’t play the bass bits. Then I picked up the guitar.
• I don’t remember when or why or how. I think I was about 14 when my father figured that I would need to play left-handed, instead of laying the guitar flat on my lap and playing in open tunings.
• I wanted to play the music I liked back then: James Taylor, Dan Fogelberg, the Police. While the cool kids in high school were listening to Guns ‘n Roses, I was driving around on Friday nights listening to James Taylor’s Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon.
• In those early days, I remember two guitars: first, there was my father’s mid-1970s Sigma (a Japanese off-brand of Martin guitars), which was the acoustic guitar that I played until my fingers bled and which was the guitar I really think I learned to play on; later, my father gave me an Epiphone stratocaster knockoff and a Crate wooden amplifier (I don’t want to believe that it was the now legendary CR-1, but it might well have been). It seems like I did nothing through high school but play guitar. I took it everywhere. I played it constantly.
• A girlfriend gave me a copy of a fake book called “20 Easy Songs for Guitar by the Police.” The joke there, which I didn’t know at the time, was that there were no easy songs for guitar by the police, so my first chords beyond the most basic ones were these unimaginably complex 13th or augmented or diminished chords.
• I had a little band back then, too. We never really did anything other than practice, but we played every weekend and made music and learned how to play with other people and how to read signals from other players and how to keep time and we fantasized about what it would be like if we had nicer gear. The funny thing now is that some of that crappy gear I had back then is now vintage, and I’d kill to have it back.
• I don’t remember the first time I played live, but I’m pretty sure I was about 16 or 17, playing with my father at a festival downtown.
• My memory is a little fuzzy, but I believe that when I left for college I had three guitars: the Sigma, a mid-1960s Kay archtop that sounded terrible and played awfully but which looked just awesome, and a Washburn RS-10 that I would absolutely kill to have now in a left-handed version.
• I fell into a group of musicians in college almost on the first day. My roommate (whom I knew already) was a bassist and guitar player. I had met a drummer during orientation who knew a singer. His roommate turned out to be a bassist.
• We all hit it off, staying up late and writing songs and making music. We played the fabulous open mic nights at the Pub Down Under, where a hundred people would show up and sit, quietly, on the floor, listening to musicians who were just amazing—Pat Sansone, Steve Deaton, Tara VanDevender, Emily Graham.
• The group of us rehearsed. We bought slightly better equipment. I bought, first, a decent Washburn acoustic guitar that I played for a year or so until I heard Steve Deaton’s Seagull guitar one night at the Pub Down Under. Then I saved my money and bought one of those.
• The band formed officially and started gigging regularly in town. Then we started gigging out of town (sometimes to empty rooms; sometimes to a room full of skinheads).
• Somehow, and I honestly don’t remember how, I started playing solo gigs around Hattiesburg. I played a handful of university gigs. I played a single night at Robbie’s (a frat bar that I hated). I played regular weekly gigs at the Wild Magnolia. I occasionally got asked to play at a bar opening for someone. I played fraternities’ pre-parties during the day, where the guys would drag a couch out on to the patio and sit with their girlfriends and listen—and then not recognize me on campus the next week.
• When I went home, I sat in with my father’s band, playing while they took a break.
• I traded my Washburn electric for a very rare Takamine GX-200 electric guitar that would never stay in tune. My collection of equipment got increasingly complex, going from a couple of effects pedals and a terrible Fender amplifier to a Digitech effects processor, power amp, and a huge 3×12″ speaker cabinet to a complex foot-controlled effects processor with guitars switching through an A/B switch into separate effects and EQs and even speakers. It was ridiculous.
• One night, after it took me something like four trips to get my gear out of the trailer in Vicksburg, I said I’d had enough. When we got back, I traded it all in for a Crate tube amplifier and a delay pedal. I have never looked back.
• I took a job in a music store, and while working there, I fell in love with this weird Canadian guitar: a Godin ST-1. It was a sort of pinkish color and we were selling it for about $1400. At that point, I was getting ready to buy a nice electric, and this was in my price range. I worked out a deal with my boss to let me use it while I paid it off. When I graduated from college, he told me just to forget about whatever else I owed on it. This was incredibly kind.
• Around this same time, we began seriously recording in a little studio in Meridian. Pat Sansone was the engineer, and I spent a fair amount of time in the studio with him working. I learned a great deal watching and talking with Pat and really fell in love with recording.
• And then, suddenly, I had graduated from college, done a semester of MA work at USM, and was preparing to transfer to Oklahoma State University. We played one last show at Tal’s, and I left the next morning for home, and then Oklahoma.
• When I got to Oklahoma, I only knew one person, so I spent a lot of time alone. I was also young enough that I had plenty of time to spend hanging around the local music store, Daddy O’s. Stillwater had a neat music scene—a lot different than Hattiesburg’s—but after I recorded a demo I didn’t have any trouble finding regular gigs. I put together a nice little PA system. I played, often, a couple of nights a week, doing the human jukebox thing at The Stonewall and Willie’s on a regular basis. I played alone at first, and then, later, with my friend Todd Petersen.
• And then, around the tail end of my doctoral work, I stopped playing live. I did it largely because I was either studying or writing and I just needed the time—often from the early evening until about 3 AM.
• When we moved to Utah, a few things happened. First, I didn’t know anyone. Second, I was too old to hang around music stores all day and meet other musicians and network. Third, I had a job and I needed to focus on it. So I didn’t play at all. For years and years.
• I bought Apple’s Logic and a USB interface and recorded lots and lots of things.
• When I got tenure, I decided that my reward was going to be a nice guitar. I ordered a hand-made Breedlove C25. It took them four months to build it. It’s the finest guitar I have ever owned, and one of the most amazing ones that I have ever played. I put a miniflex mic system in it, just in case I decided to play again.
• Walking across the parking lot one day, I bumped into a colleague I knew was an Irish piper. I said “I have a kind of weird question for you, but do you know anyone who needs a guitarist?” He invited me to one of his monthly Irish sessions, which was well-attended and a lot of fun, even though I know nothing about Irish music.
• At that session, I met up with a fiddler. We rehearsed once and played a gig at an art gallery that I was uncomfortable with and didn’t feel prepared for. It paid $75. I told her to keep the $37. This was the first real indication I had that places around here don’t pay very well.
• Later that year, I went home to be with my sister, who was having her first child. She and her husband are musicians, and we had a blast making music into the wee hours of the morning. Somewhere in all of this, my father pointed out that I may have to suck it up and play some poorly-paying gigs in order to land some better paying ones. In other words, he shamed me into playing live again.
• When I got back home, I contacted a colleague who runs a music lab to see if he had a room quiet enough for recording. It turns out it did. He also had a very nice Neumann microphone for recording vocals and a equally nice matched pair of Rode mics for recording the guitar. I took a few hours and recorded a few songs for a demo. I mixed them over the next week and then I asked my friend Todd to make me a CD insert.
• Right before Christmas 2012, I dropped off a CD at the only place in town where I hear about people doing anything like what I do. I told them I’d call them in a couple of weeks.
• I called from the road, but the manager said that she hadn’t listened to it yet and for some reason couldn’t find it. I called again, when I got back, and she said she still couldn’t find it.
• I decided just to bring her another one, so I went down there for lunch one day. I told the server what was going on and asked him to drop one off for her. She’s super busy, so I didn’t want to bother her. He took the CD and went off. A few minutes later, he came back. He said “Dude, you’re going to think I’m a huge idiot for this, but she didn’t lose it. I took it off her desk and I’ve been listening to it.” He then proceeded to ask me very specific questions about lyrics in the songs. He also explained that he’s the guy who gives the owner the thumbs up or thumbs down on booking gigs. I called back a few days later, and he booked me for a Thursday night.
• I realized that I need some equipment. I bought new speakers. The ones I’d had in Oklahoma were huge, 15″ things, and cost $600. My new ones are smaller, 12″ ones, and cost half that and sounds just as good. I bought a new 31-band EQ. I bought a few new cables. I bought a rack-mountable power strip with pull-out lights. I’d always wanted one of these, but thought they were an extravagance and usually opted just for a cheap, normal power strip, instead.
• I joined Facebook—almost entirely so that I could use it for announcing gigs and connect with local musicians.
• In the middle of all this, I bought a DIY telecaster kit. Many of my friends had no idea I played guitar.

And now I’m prepping for a gig, something that I haven’t done in ages (either gigging or preparing for one!), and I’m consistently amazed at how much of this is just muscle memory. I’m also amazed at how I’ve lost a couple of notes off the high end of my falsetto. I assume they’ll come back once I get back in the habit of singing.

But I’m also struck by how this thing that has been so much a part of my life for so long simply hasn’t been here, for a decade. And so things that were common knowledge about me—that I play, that I sing, that I write—haven’t been in place.

I’m hoping I can get things back to normal.

Telecaster Build

So I’ve been playing guitar for a long, long time, but I’ve never owned a left=handed electric guitar.  All of my electrics have been right-handed ones that I’ve flipped over.  This is generally OK, but there are things that are annoying (the controls are up top, the cable comes out of the top, the pickups tilt in the wrong direction, the tuners are wrong).

I picked up a little left-handed telecaster DIY kit on Ebay.  I’ve always had stratocaster copies—never had a telecaster—so I thought this would be an interesting experiment.

The kit arrived in the middle of last week, and once I got free from my obligations, I sanded it with 100 grit sandpaper, then 220 grit, and finally steel wool.  This is what it looked like once I was done sanding:

I wasn’t sure how it would take stain, so I drove down to SLC with a woodworker friend to MacBeath’s lumber, where I picked up a couple of feet of the basswood that this guitar body is made from.  I sanded those down and tested stains last night, finally settling on a red chestnut finish.

Today, I set about staining.

Here it is with the wood conditioner applied:

And then the first coat of stain:

And the second coat:

And the fourth coat:

And the sixth coat:

And then dry fit together to check the placement of a couple of parts:

Once the stain is dry, I’ll smooth it out with some steel wool, and then I’ll hit it with a light coat of a satin varnish, which should darken it up and bring out the grain even more than the stain does.

Then the hard part: installing the bridge and the neck and doing the wiring.

Storm Moving In

Storm Moving In, a photo by midwinter_ on Flickr.

We had freezing rain move in this morning while I was on my run. This is what it looked like from up above it.

Snow!