All The Leaves Have Gone

Pre-winter winds are whipping through the area tonight.  We're in one of those erratic weather periods.  Earlier in the week the season's first snow visited us.  It was pretty inconsequential here in
South Bend but New Carlisle and my former school district were treated to the first snow day of the academic year.  These bonus days off school are almost always quite welcome.  NPUSC is about 20 miles west of home and the hills of Bendix County Park act as a battlement against dramatic weather events that come roaring in from the west. While NPHS area received about 8" of snow South Bend only got about an inch and the area a bit farther east was spared completely

The autumn has progressed smoothly.  I have really adjusted to not holding down a steady job.  Sleeping in as the result of staying up insanely late has become the norm.  I force myself out of bed by 10:00 am on most days after hitting the sack earlier in the morning around 3:00 am.  It is odd how I am enjoying little things like being able to keep up with laundry, cooking meals for John to enjoy when he gets home from work and having the freedom to schedule my own routines.

This has been a rather typical Saturday which I spent solely at Fire Arts. We had our annual artist's meeting.  Plans for the near and distant futures were introduced, discussed and decided upon. I have decided that now that I have more free time, that I would contribute time to keeping Fire Arts open for two more days during the week.  Soon I will be spending noon to 5 pm at the studio on Wednesday and one other day each week.  This will greatly help our artist members, give the public additional access days and provide guaranteed working time for myself.  It will be a "win" for everyone involved.

I have been splitting my time between household chores, artwork and playing guitar.  I have had to restrict my guitar playing time because of a nagging problem with trigger thumb.  I have a number of pieces of music in the works.  Richard Gilewitz and I teamed up on a project that he has incorporated into his workshop curriculum.  We developed versions of a basic 12 barre blues in the key of E.  This idea was spawned as I was whining to him about how our washing machine had broken down.  In honor of this very normal life irritation we christened the project The Washing Machine Blues.   It was a rather stimulating challenging to take the 12 barre pattern and create six  unique fingerpicking and six more strumming thythms resulting in a dozen different arrangements.  We approached it as an exercise that students could use to gradually increase complexity as they applied varied note values, dynamics,  special effects etc.  I did all the Tabledit work on the files and in the process learned much more about the program.  Richard has introduced our efforts to students in England, Ireland, and Australia.  He has made a point of telling them about my collaboration which is really pretty cool.  He has told me that the students are really enjoying the experience and the culmination of the workshop leads into each guitarist playing their practiced version as part of an ensemble.  I expect to participate in this experience if I make it to Gillacamp in Florida this February.