Thunder Moon

[wyld_dandelyon]

Thunder  Moon, Buck Moon, Crane Moon, Middle SummerMoon...or perhaps Plaster Moon, Painting Moon, Cable Moon, Mysterious Crash Moon

Well, the mystery about the crash isn't what crashed (that was the drop ceiling in the kitchen) but how it crashed onto the table and the sink without breaking a single glass, bowl, or dish.  The only broken glass was the lightbulb in the hanging lamp I'd hung over the sink, but which has been unplugged for weeks because the switch started to short and I decided a switch that threw visible sparks was officially defunct.  But why'd it have to happen now, while I'm in the middle of repainting the back stairs and also another project that I am pushing hard to have done by the time the kid gets back from Europe? And why'd it have to happen on a night with a filk, so I spent part of the filk at my house cleaning up the mess instead of at Angka's house singing?  (One of these days, I'll get the LJuser= thingy down to automatic, but so far I keep doing it wrong and being in enough of a hurry I don't want to preview my posts a half-dozen times, so it hasn't happened yet.)  I know we wanted to get rid of that cheap ugly drop ceiling someday, but not this year.  Sigh.

Otherwise, we keep on having thunderstorms every few days, I (finally) got cable installed (more for the high speed internet than for the TV, though that's not a bad thing either); I've done some writing, a little music, and am trying to get enough sleep every night.  My allergies and old CPAP mask aren't cooperating with the latter, unfortunately; I have a new mask on order.  Probably nothing I can do about the allergies with all the rain, the mold count has to be sky high.  And I want all these things done so I can do more writing.  And painting.  And music.  And even reading.

In the meantime, this was late because Thursday was cable installation day; Friday, by the time my arm was getting tired from scraping water-soluble "texture" off walls I need to paint, the cable service had gone out (...we are experiencing a cable outage in your area, technicians are working on it, there is no need to remain on the line to report it...) and last night was the filk.  And the unexpected  kitchen  "remodeling".

Due to the delay in getting to the filk, I drove there in a very pretty, and not too thick, fog.  That was pleasant.  And better than another thunderstorm, for the music and the guitar, anyway.  Time to restring the guitar.  I gave up on drop-D things--the low E (or D) string was sounding terrible even when the tuner assured me it was tuned right.  Played mostly songs where I don't use that string much; The World Inside the Crystal; Lullabye for a Weary World; Robin Bailey's The Day After; Kathy Mar's Circle Song; a few others. 

 

Comments

[freeimprov.livejournal.com]

Don't believe tuners. They'll get you close, but never 100% right, especially on lower strings. Use it to get in the neighborhood, then hand-tweak it to the song. This is especially true of anything with a drop D... start by tuning the low D to the regular D string, then check it against the A and G strings for harmony.

I hate tuning guitars.

you should try tuning autoharps!

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

I've got a chromatic tuner (have to, for the autoharps), it does pretty well with the lower strings, especially using an orchestra tuning pickup. And I fiddled with the string for a while afterward; it just didn't sound good tuned to D or to E.

That's always the first string that sounds terrible on this guitar in any case, when the strings start to get old. There's no help for it but to restring the guitar.

[mdlbear]

It's <lj user="username"> -- note the space between the "lj" and the "user".

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

I do have the formula; either I'm being dyslexic in how I apply it (quite possible) or there's some software compatibility issue that leads to flaky results. And I've been too busy with things that seem much more important to me to take the time to pay enough attention to figure out which it is and what's the best fix.

[mdlbear]

Ah. In that case it's possible that you're using WYSIWYG mode rather than editing the raw HTML -- that's usually what does it.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the advice!