I Made It!

It is around 8pm and a very busy travel day has concluded. I am settled into my hotel room in Coral Gables near the University of Miami. Fortunately everything is quite convenient because the traffic is horrendous. Yesterday I awakened feeling like a cold was doing its best to threaten my guitar bliss. Well I'm not giving in! Today I do feel worse. My plane flights were a bit on the stressful side, beginning with a 60 minutes delay at SBN which ultimately left me with 20 minutes to navigate myself to my Miami bound plane from Atlanta. It seems that every time I have had a connecting flight it was necessary to practically run to the next boarding gate but this was the ultimate. I deplaned with less than 20 minutes to make it to the next gate. In fact once I made it to the gate most of the passengers had boarded and my name was not in the system leaving me concerned that they had automatically moved me to later flight. Now my biggest fear was that my guitar would be loaded on a different flight. It was a tense 45 minutes as I waited at the baggage carousel for my guitar and luggage. Kudos to Delta, they got it right and I have my trusty 6 string with me. My cold has caused some complications in fact during the descent into MIA I thought my ears were going to burst. It was pretty darn unpleasant and has currently left me hearing in mono because my left ear has been left with reduced hearing. I hope I didn't pop an eardrum or something. I guess the sinus meds I took weren't effective enough. Once I checked into my room my next goal was to find a drug store and to get some more meds which I have done and am getting some relief. I have talked and texted with John numerous times. It is going to be pretty tough to manage 9 days without my soul mate at my side. I probably won't see RG tonight. He has commitments with the festival organizers and some of the other performers. Workshops begin tomorrow morning so we may touch base to make plans to meet. In the meantime I will take advantage of this "me" time and get some practice in.

If All Goes Well

I will be flying out of South Bend in about nine hours. I plan on hitting the bed earlier than usual tonight. I did wake up this morning feeling kind of sick. Not a good thing with so much on my plate for the next 9 days. Maybe it is a little bit of a cold that I will shake quickly. I've been downing Vitamin C and fluids to battle this bug. It is affecting my throat, not sore but scratchy with the feeling that if I spoke a lot I just might lose my voice. Also a feeling that my asthma wants to kick in is lurking. Positive thing about this Richard won't have to hear me whine when I hit a rough patch in my playing. By now I had better have everything prepped and ready because the point of no return is looming and if I have forgotten something hopefully it is something that is easily acquired in Miami. So I had better hang onto my brain and focus.

OMG It's Getting Close

Well Monday morning will see me blurry-eyed and panicked at the same time. I'm going to need to be at the airport at 5:30 in the morning, yes I said morning. The toughest part will be kissing the hubby goodbye...I'm going to miss him. Do you think anyone would notice if I slipped him into my luggage and if he just didn't show up for work for seven days.

The last few days have been all about tying up loose ends and there have been several. Tomorrow I will do some packing of incidentals. If I was really organized I'd make a checkoff list. Nah. I'll wing it. Doesn't everybody forget something on a trip. Let's hope it won't be my guitar or any of the essential accessories and music that I will need.

Yesterday, I printed off fresh copies of my music and that took a surprisingly long time to accomplish. I organized all of the pieces of paper relevant to flights, car rentals and lodging. I updated the Garmin and inputted the addresses that I know will be important during my travels. I also packed up my guitar and hauled it over to the insurance company to get a special policy written to cover loss and damage during traveling. Now the really exciting prelude to all of this was cleaning out the gutters on the south side of the house. Even with all this stuff, I managed to run through several tunes sporadically through the day.

Today I added another movement to the gutter cleaning symphony as I shifted attention to the west side of the house and cleared the rotted spinners which serve as a perfect medium for many of the pods to sprout into baby trees. John calls our clogged gutters the "Hanging Gardens". Perhaps they could qualify as a "wonder of the world". What is really quite funny is that I never used to fuss about my fingernails, clean and trimmed was the ideal. Now most manual tasks stimulate a concern about whether I will mess up my right hand nails that are currently at a perfect playing length.

I practice packed some clothes into my guitar's gig bag. My plan is to use the gig bag as luggage since the guitar will travel in its flight case which is cumbersome and heavy for hauling around. Once I settle into the hotel the gig bag will be cleared of the clothing and the guitar will be transported to the workshops in the gig bag.

Made it over to Fire Arts a tad bit early. So I had time to pull out the guitar that I keep there and work on Study in Bm. The Summer Studio kids were totally stuck into their work and didn't need constant guidance so I took a couple breaks and grabbed the guitar for a few more minutes of practice. Playing the studio guitar makes me appreciate my Breedlove C25, it just fits my playing better than the Atlas.

Although it is late. I think I will run through a few pieces before calling it a night.

Moving Right Along

Yesterday provided me with another opportunity to spend hours outdoors completely immersed in guitar practice. I set a goal to get Study in Bm memorized and although I fell a bit short of that intention, I did make considerable progress. I also spent some time with Falling Slowly and Star of County Down. My buddy the metronome joined me for practice and gave me the virtual smack on the knuckles whenever I strayed from the beat. I found a passage in Star...that I had been misinterpreting. So I focused on that area by repeating it numerous times in and out of context of the whole piece. I also worked on Anji again, ran through Dance and Study for Margot a few times along with Scarborough Fair, Accordion Bells, and Maison Blanche. Readers of this blog will have to accept that they will be hearing titles of tunes repeated on a regular basis. Such is the nature of trying to improve...not much chance of that happening without playing pieces over and over. I told RG the other day that I look forward to the time when I can just nail a tune without stuttering around and flubbling sections. He said to expect that to start happening in about 10 years. There comes a point when you have practiced something so many times that it actually becomes part of you. I get inklings of that sensation but they aren't sustainable yet. It is a zen thing that use to be a regular part of my karate training. With my physical limitations I have lost that connection during karate practice which has unfortunately been replaced with pain. I suppose I am somewhat "driven" by the need to experience zen and my music is now the path. As I review all the changes that have occurred in my lifetime, I am sometimes overwhelmed by how varied and rich my life has been thus far. Although I've always been drawn to the guitar, even as a youth, just 3 short years ago I would have never predicted that playing guitar would have become such a dominant part of my existence.

A Day Late......

Busy Busy day yesterday. How in the world does anyone get bored? I took care of several tasks through the day. I called in my prescriptions and then called the doc's office because my insurance plan is demanding that I switch my prescriptions to their mail order service. I had to drive about 30 miles just to pick up the new prescription orders. Now I have to sort out faxing them to mail order company. Stopped by to see Naomi and the grandkids who are doing pretty well even though the boys are definitely fully into an irritating stage of adolescence. Here's hoping they move on from that soon. They will be spending a good deal of today and tomorrow with me. I hope the weather clears and they can help me with some yard tasks.
My guitar practice fell into the early part of the day and one of those sessions that started at around 10pm and ended around 2am. I am slightly concerned because my left hand especially is developing a bit of stress pain. So I am playing in shorter bursts, stretching both hands thoroughly before, after and in between playing. I think I'll blame it on Study in Bm which requires some 2nd fret barres that are giving me trouble. I've adjusted the action of my guitar, attempting to make the barres easier to play but I'm finding that also creates low E buzz when I go to an open tuning. I can ease the attack on that string to avoid the buzz but..
I think I'll remove the bridge saddle spacer that is currently installed and see if that makes a difference. In the meantime, I'll baby that left hand and hope that what I'm dealing with is a bit of muscle strain that will lead to increased hand strength, similar to lifting weights and experiencing some "burn" afterwards. I am getting a slightly quicker and smoother transitions into the tricky chord change in Study in Bm. So there's a bit of improvement happening. Finally re-found the video of RG playing Anji and spent of bit of time watching and listening to that yesterday as well.
I also stopped at the eye doctor's yesterday and fortunately was able to jump right into an eye exam. Yep the prescription needed to be strengthened. New glasses are ordered. It took me forever to pick out a set of frames. The task was accomplished with the help of one of the women working there who actually was able to key into my taste. Let me say that everyone will definitely notice that I have a new set of glasses. My parameters included a list of "NO's" no phony tiny gemstones, no frilly ultra-feminine styles, and definitely no "Sarah Palin" knock-offs. I think my new frames are rather "contemporary".

What a way to multi-task

Yep it 's been quite a productive day and even though it is nearly 11pm the day isn't over. I did some much needed cleaning in the house...kind of sporadically, the walk past it, stop and give it some attention type cleaning. The most sustained thing was taking the livingroom rug outside to the deck in the fresh air. I actually shampooed it out there. Works perfectly in good weather, dries nice and fast. Beyond that it was normal stuff, vacuuming etc. Now I actually accomplished a task that has been on the agenda for many months. Back when Windows 7 was nearly ready to release. I pre-ordered an upgrade copy of the OS for a mere $49 from Best Buy. It's been on the shelf ever since so today was the day to do the big upgrade from Vista to 7. I must say the process was quite seamless. I am actually very impressed. It appears that everything has transferred over and I have full functionality of everything I have attempted to access thus far. This is probably because everything I have is 32 bit capable and that is the version of 7 that I upgraded with. I kind of monitored the process but I was actually able to practice guitar through a good deal of the time with a small diversion of driving out to school to pick up some stuff I needed for Summer Studio at Fire Arts and there was that cleaning thing too. I made some more memorization progress on Study in Bm. There is one "difficult for me" chord change that I will most likely have to repeat a minimum of 50 times to get my left hand to do what it needs to without a huge lapse in time. Spent some more time on Falling Slowly, Anji, Scarborough Fair, Dance and Study for Margot as well. Ran through Accordion Bells a few times too. After the workshop kids finished up this evening I picked up the guitar I keep at Fire Arts and noodled around a bit. Julie and Jackie have a show opening on the first Friday of October and they are really pushing to have me play guitar during the festivities. I might have to suck up my apprehension and do this for them. We'll see how this grant work goes......I don't have much of a repertoire yet.