Pasithea

Working too late at work listening to a Lovecraftian radio play
and... Just as the story reaches its climax and the slithering stinking horror from the abyss is rising up...

The lights click out! O_O

The lights have some built-in thingy that turns them off late at night when it assumes there's no one there to save power. Though they stay on once you turn them back on.

I admit it startle me for a moment. Then I was totally amused. :D

I'm still on that music bent. Been playing a mix of guitar and keyboard every day. Works out alright with being gridmonkey. I can't really leave my computer anyhow so it's good to have something to do.

For both I've been working my way through a variety of books. When I get stuck in one, I switch to another.

So far, the best book for Guitar for me has been Happy Traum's Basic Guitar Lessons It's got a good progression for learning chords and stuff and it doesn't have cheaty TAB, string numbers or even note letters. Just music. Makes me sight-read a lot better. If I recall correctly, I paid 50 cents for this book when we were up in Washington. Heh.

Also, it looks like the stuff I worked on in school a year or so ago didn't all go away either so I'm picking up a lot quicker this time. I actually own 3 guitars. A 3/4 size off-brand mariachi band type steel string with a floating bridge and a warped neck. I paid like $5 for this at a garage sale years ago and first started trying to learn on it. I keep it because... Um... I'd feel bad about throwing it out and it makes good sound effects for animation.

The second guitar I bought, my 'nice' guitar is a Fender DG-20 dreadnought steel-string acoustic. Lovely sound but hard on the fingers. Bought it used.

My last guitar is a nylon-string Oscar Schmidt that I got at the flea market for cheap. Nice sound and much easier on the fingers.

I've been playing the Oscar for the past couple of weeks. The nylon strings are not as rough on my fingers for simple notes but the wide neck and thickness of the strings is making it a little harder for more complex chords.

Plus my acoustics have a disadvantage that I can't play them too late without the neighbors.

Of course, the last thing I need is another guitar. Thankfully I didn't buy another one. prickvixen loaned me her electric which I now have plugged into my headphones so I could play all night if I wanted to. Never played electric before. The strings are steel but they aren't as tight as the ones on my acoustic and don't cut into my fingers. The neck is also really narrow. Much easier for learning chords. Woot!

Eventually I may buy my own electric but first I want to A) stick with this for more than a few weeks and B) learn to play well enough that I can play in a store without being overly slef-conscious and pick out something that really has the sound I want.

Keyboard is coming along pretty quick too. I can do concurrent scales on both hands in different keys and I'm playing a fair number of songs that are more difficult than the last ones I studied in the class I took.


Making some progress with composing too but nothing I'd want to share yet.

I honestly keep meaning to post I just keep forgetting or being busy. So much stuff going on in my life lately.

I've still practicing guitar quite a bit and I've taken up my flute again. I can finally play E flat and D properly again! For years after the accident I couldn't form the proper aumbeture to play those two notes well (and on a C flute they're right in the middle of the range and some of the most common notes to play) Happy happy!

The guitar no longer blisters or even bruises my fingers and I now know the notes on all the strings and can play a few chords and have started learning multi-finger chords. Also beginning to be able to consistently put different types of personality into different notes.

*sigh* Bad me! I wanted to animate on Saturday but decided to make a ton of sushi and have people over for lunch and then I fell asleep because I'd been up until 4AM the previous night and I slept for like 14hours and woke up on sunday. :/

So I was going to animate again on Sunday but it was so pretty out I thought we should go hiking instead and I figured I could do animation later in the evening.


It was a beautiful day. We went to Grant Park which the online parks guide describe as hot, barren, mostly vertical and largely unused.

They were mostly right. In the 6hours we were hiking, I think we ecountered maybe 20 people the whole time. Some of the trails also just sort of disappeared as they indeed had very little use. But as for barren? It was BEAUTIFUL! We went slow and took time to take in all the details. I think we encountered at least 30 different types of wild flowers and we found lots and lots of interesting animal prints and ruts.

We were guessing the ruts were from wild pigs... And what do you know, we were right. Scarry! We saw a big black wild sow. (She was obviously still nursing but we didn't see any piglets) EEEE! Did I ever mention I'm Oikaphobic? Pigs scare me. Especially wild pigs. At least that answered the question of what the mountain lions were eating. Oh. Did I mention that this park had warning signs about all the mountain lions? O_O

So, we hiked up and up and up to 2300 feet and back down to 1200 feet again. We climbed to the top of the tallest hill near our route and sat for a while. Very good view of the Lick Observatory from there. It was neat. I found a rattlesnake den. I didn't see/hear any rattlesnakes but I've encountered enough in the past to know a rattlesnake den when I see one. Didn't bother it, obviously.

It was a lot of hiking 'n' I'm not in such good shape these days so we were looking pretty dead for the last couple of miles or so but... Geepers, not quite this dead.... We were buzzed by these huge black birds with white underwings and red heads, coming within about 10 feet of us at one point. Stacey thought they might be California Condors but I thought they were too small (Although don't get me wrong, these things were enormous, like a 5 foot wingspan!!!!) and that they'd be mentioned as a feature of the park if they were CA condors.

A little google searching today makes me pretty sure they were Turkey Vultures (which look incredibly similar to California Condors, except that they only have about a 6foot wingspan instead of a 9foot wingspan. Eep. Still humongous though. I didn't think we looked that dead! O_O I also didn't think vultures would look quite so pretty. You always see scary creepy pictures of them on the ground and such but in flight they're pretty beautiful. Black and white with a brilliant red head. ... I wonder if that has any thing to do with black, white, and red being the colours used for death shrouds in native american cultures. Hmm.

Geepers. I'm random. Anyhow, to finish up and get back to work, had a GREAT day but got a bad sunburn cause someone decided that sunscreen was just needless weight in our pack and we finished the day off with a trip to Todai and ate like pigs and probably put right back on every pound we too off while hiking. O_O Cie la vie.