One year ago today: July 5, 2017, because they just know it . . .
Five years ago today: July 5, 2013, NeverWet, what a coincidence?
Nine years ago today: July 5, 2009, on learning German.
Random years ago today: July 5, 2007, another forgotten jam session.
Band rehearsal was a real success. We only managed through seven tunes. That’s enough to reveal he’s learning and doing the homework. Hopefully that keeps things cheery because the rest of today, I go to work on that plumbing. Wisely, I will drive over to the next town to buy the supplies. It may not be all that bad, since to move that water heater, the flooring is removed in almost the right spot. If, instead of a shower, I report a long soak in the tub, you’ll know I got this done. The photo is the only one I had handy, it is one of the fancy timmed doors over at Agt. R’s. Taken just as the sun came over the horizon.
First off, he is already at the stage of questioning his years of experience. This canyon has to be crossed and it is a real obstacle in the sense it means admitting what you did before may have been a waste. They were teaching you to solo, not to play in a team where somebody else is the captain. The primary manifestation is when the right hand will not bounce. Next time you see old black and whites of the folk music groups, you will often see the guitarist “pumping” the chords. But the Class of 80 have had it (if you’ll excuse the expression) drummed into their brains that up-picking is wrong. This is donkey, my style uses up-picking all the time.
The development today is Twood has now defined that as a problem. The brain is working, but the hand will not respond. It’s a clear case of how spotting the problem is half-solving it. Next, he’s still weak on the method, but he sees the advantage of memorizing the song structure rather than the chord patterns. This doesn’t work every time so just do your best. I learned it by noticing the patterns when keying in the lyrics. I mean, just look at the mess most guitar players make trying to post lyrics on Songsterr.com and you realize most of them truly, really, don’t have a clue about structure.
For now, the other revelation is that Twood is picking up on the way I arrange the music for duos. Pare it down to the essentials, but ensure the essentials are always there. He now realizes for much of the time he has been over-playing. This is a familiar error. In a small group, the guitar player tries to go for the fullest sound possible, and it sounds bad. Next time you watch a professional play, notice how little he is actually doing. Aha. I’ve repeatedly told that if you over-strum, you will get tired and you’ll get sore fingers after two hours. He did.
The best news to date is that he’s spotted something else. That when the music is arranged properly, you don’t have to be all that good. This revelation counteracts the natural tendency to play everything as perfectly as possible. Perfection produces the “guitar lesson” effect on stage, which encourages people to listen rather than party. I comes across like you planned to impress rather than entertain. Hey, Glen, show them what I mean. Twood was a little uncertain when we began over my description of the music as versatile beyond what any solo guitarist could achieve. We made a believer out of him.
I’m considering making up a short video of the strum patterns that I know work well, since he’s fast at picking things up once he sees somebody else breeze through something. The stores open in an hour. See you later.
Taylor plays a Deering.
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I hope you like cold showers for another day or two. I got under the planks and took a look at the old plumbing. The connections are entirely flex copper tubing. No rigid connections anywhere, and they are compression joints. I can see right away every repair will be temporary. The problems will just migrate down the line. The good news is all the piping is located in a bunch right under the kitchen sink. I’m really only concerned with the hot water lines, and the total length I’m looking at is maybe twelve feet. Thusforth, the plan is to leave the existing tubes in place and run in PVC, bypassing the whole copper sections. By adding a couple of stems, which I would cap off for now, the assembly would then be ready to connect the new bathroom lines.
And after mucking around in the dirt all morning, it’s time for an extended coffee break. There is a way I can change the bathroom plumbing if I’m content to have the u-trap to the front of my cabinets. Imagine this, if you look under your bathroom sink, you see the u-trap goes into a drain located in the wall at the back the space. Mine would merely have that drain at the front. It’s still inside the cabinet, but against the front instead of the back. I can see no reason this would not meet code.
Don’t you hate it when you saved something for years, and now can’t find it? I had a little metal tray of valve stems, and in there was the neatest tool for removing the stems. I know it is in the case with my robot parts, but where is that case? Off I go to buy one, and it will be cheap plastic.
That book I’m half-reading, “Open Boat Across The Pacific” makes an abrupt change beginning at Chapter 12. It transforms from barely tolerable brag-fest by somebody rich enough to own a boat and take enough time off work to sail the planet to now imparting real information to the reader. I would recognize this style anywhere. Nor is he a trained writer, something else I can spot. Now I’m reading it with some zest. Instead of saying a boat is big, he now changes to the more wry expression, “There are advantages in a rough sea to putting the bow a long way from the stern.”
Then, in Chapter 13, the book (written in 1982) mentions somebody I knew around that time. Seems to me he did go sailing. It was Bob, the guy who used to crash at the Convent. The Convent, with all the nuns? No, that is the house that Harry’s father, a real estate mogul, could not sell, so he gave it to Harry. It had like five floors and seven bathrooms. At some point, all the neat people in town crashed there. The kitchen was unbelievable and all the plumbing fixtures were imported from Italy. Sorry, I was a teenager back then with no camera. Harry even had a recording studio in the back.
And how many times have we seen this? Somebody with a fancy phone or camera that doesn’t know how to get their pictures off it. I used to charge $80 for this service. I’ve seen phones with 2,300 photos and normally they don’t bring it in until something goes wrong and they are in danger of losing the data.
ADDENDUM
Welcome to America. Have we just been the victims of an elaborate scam? If so, don’t declare us fools, for we cross-referenced everything. At least to the first level. The snag with that is these big crooks, like the outfits that rip off Medicare, they know how the system works. St. Augustine is claiming they sent the check to Tampa, who is saying they have never heard of St. Augustine. Then we get a call today stating if we do not pick up the check by tomorrow, we will ‘never see the money’. What’s that smell?
The one difference this time is that the entire event is well-documented. How, for a month, we have reported back to St. Augustine that Tampa is either not returning the calls, and on one occasion denied that they had ever heard of either the client or had any dealings with St. Augustine. I personally contacted both places on behalf of the client and completely informed each of what the other was saying. Furthermore, we were not informed of any deadline until today. Now, St. Augustine is behaving as if they can’t understand why we have not contacted Tampa, when, in fact, we contacted them not less than six times—and informed St. Augustine of that fact.
[Author’s note: later, I scanned over all the correspondence, mapquesting each address and tracing each phone number. Unlike other blogs which scrub mistakes, this one rarely changes information, even when there is an error. This makes the trailer court more true to life than the sanitized blogs from the Atlantic corridor. Now I’m convinced they are not scammers, just so incredibly inefficient that, shall we say, $14,000 can go missing. An alternative explanation is that they are so incredibly stupid, they figured we didn’t want the money. Or maybe we were too lazy to drive the 61 miles to pick up the cash. These situations are not wild conjecture, they are Florida.
I left specific instructions for phone calls to begin at 6:00AM tomorrow, calling every half hour until a human voice answers. Then a list of questions to be asked, then call me with the results.]
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