Updatia Type Stuff

[ellyssian]

A couple of new Brandonisms:

neener neener - used as one might guess, this little gem is also mistakenly used as a follow up to a safety-related scold, as in: "I don't have to. Neener neener." He was rather disappointed to find out that not only did he have to, but I didn't find it as entertaining as his big sister did - who egged him on to it and stood in the corner for the half a minute I pointed this lack of entertainment out to him. She was also the one who taught him this gesture.

'Eakey, 'eakey! - revenge upon big sister, as her band nickname makes for a scathing insult when wielded by one who will be three years old tomorrow.

male bonding - what happens at the house when Deb takes Rachel out, leaving Mr. B with Justin or me, or if all three of the guys are home alone. Sunday - as the girls ran out for a quick soccer photo session - male bonding involved a hammered dulcimer, chanter, recorder, rainstick made from a bit of cactus, native wooden flute, orchestral flute, electronic percussion, and a djembe. We suspect that the result of said male bonding was what really scared the bear away from next door and saved Hugs & Kisses from death by stupidly barking at a small bear twenty times bigger than them. The neighbor yelling at said bear was probably less disturbing than three of us playing a variety of instruments rather badly. We did discover that the modern orchestral flute is the only instrument on this planet (or any others we've been to) that I can play better than Justin. This isn't really saying much. We also proved that the wind needed to play trumpet can be aimed into a highland pipe chanter, and it sounds better that way then when I try.

Later in the day, we played a tiny little bit. Rachel and Justin practiced a number of things. I spent most of the time discovering that active pickups need batteries to work, 9-volt batteries last somewhat less than a decade even if they're not used, and, most importantly, that some moron kid who had his 1969 Guild S-60 refinished and assembled with three active EMG single coil pickups really should have said "Yes, please" when the guy doing the work back in the early to mid Eighties asked if he should cut out some of the back to provide access to the battery. The strings were at least a dozen years old, so it was worth it to take them off; it was unfortunate that the entire front pick guard had to be removed (involving the removal of all the strings) to be able to plug in the guitar and hear the results via an amplifier. There's a buzzing on the first fret, killing the open notes on the D and B strings, but other than that it plays much better than I had remembered.

I worked with Justin for a little bit on some improvisation - trading blues lines back and forth. He gets overly frustrated trying to think about what note would sound good, and what should come next. He is apparently a little un-trusting that centuries of music theory agree that any of those seven notes in the scale would work - five, actually, as we stuck with the pentatonic for the exercise. Early in the day, he watched and then worked through the first exercise in the piano lesson DVD I picked up for him. Funny enough, it stressed a few things I had said were critical for him to learn from it: posture, finger position, & improvisation.

Saturday, I took care of some things I had to do - but really, there's so much going on, and so much to do, that I didn't get enough done this weekend.

There was a really impressively powerful thunderstorm in there somewhere as well.

Comments

[opakele.livejournal.com]

Have I missed Hugs and Kisses? Is this the neighbor's dog?

[ellyssian.livejournal.com]

Not at all.

It's two dogses, two very barksy, leetle dogses.