New guitar

Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking about getting a new guitar. I’ve been heading up to High Strung in Durham and have played with maybe a dozen different models, but the one I kept coming back to was a Blueridge BR-243. It’s got a beautiful sound and it’s very comfortable for me to play. The body size is “000” as opposed to the more common dreadnought size (like my first guitar) which means it’s easier to get my arms around and the shorter neck makes it easier to reach all of the chords. The back and sides of the guitar are mahogany ...

November 11, 2008 · 2 min · admin

Is this thing on?

Is this thing still on? Okay, it’s been about three weeks since I’ve blogged anything. As I’ve stated before, this tends to happen when I’m too involved in living life to actually write about it. Fortunately (unfortunately?) it’s nothing terribly exciting. Let’s see: Guitar: my guitar playing has been scientifically shown to have 10% less suck than it did a month ago. However, with such a large amount of suck to begin with, we’re still not at anything that looks like good. I’m getting more fluent with the open chords and can switch between them reasonably well. I’m just starting to learn barre chords – the E barre chord to start with. There are still vast tracts of untouched suck in the barre chords. Also, I’m actually thinking of picking up some lessons – the ones at jamplay.com seem pretty good. Work: still going well. There’s enough to do. I’m still not entirely used to billing by the (tenth of an) hour. Also, not really looking forward to flying to Ohio next week. I’ll only be gone for a day, but, ugh – who wants a 6am flight to Dayton! Break-in update: nothing much new here. Still looking to make it harder for someone to break in. Had a neighborhood watch meeting last weekend – that’ll be good. Turns out this may be neither contractors nor kids. There are apparently some professional (stretching that word a bit) thieves working this area. There have been some eight different break-ins near by. Non-profit work: I’m convinced that whomever coined the phrase “academic politics are so sorted because the stakes are so small never worked with a non-profit. It’s just amazing the degree to which politics enters into the smallest damned thing. New year’s resolutions: didn’t make any – never do. That said, I am trying to exercise more and cut down on my use of vulgarities. Profanity and cursing can wait until another year 🙂 I think that’s about it for now.

January 16, 2008 · 2 min · admin

progress - such as it is

Five years ago, I did a lot of Tai Chi. My teacher at the time constantly related the encouraging (?) story of a tai chi student who went to his teacher and asked, “teacher, when will my knees stop hurting? The teacher told him that his knees would stop hurting, “when he stopped learning. If the guitar is anything like tai chi, then I’m definitely still learning 🙂 Observations after a week of practice: ...

November 19, 2007 · 2 min · admin

Guitar was the case

Maybe random Monopuff songs aren’t the best blog post titles, but what the heck. K asked me what I wanted for my birthday (fwiw, I’m either very easy or very hard to shop for depending on whether or not you want to get me a gift certificate to a bookstore – thanks Mom!). From what I’m sure was out of the blue for her, I asked for a guitar – hey, I’ve always wanted to learn. ...

November 13, 2007 · 1 min · admin