I took two days off last week when I honestly ran out of interesting things to do, realized my vacation had built up to 28 days already and felt I just needed to get away. Today is my last day of vacation and retirement is looking real good right now. I just don't need the hassle of work but I guess I'll go back Monday. :-)
I discovered that I can listen to my favorite (I think it's my favorite anyway)Madison, WI radio station via streaming on the Internet. Early indications are that they play lots of the same stuff that I hear on WMVY , my former favorite Internet radio station. Not quite sure if MMM in Madison might be too commercial-laden though. MVY doesn't play many commercials. I just thought maybe it would be cool to be part of the "Madison scene" rather than linked to Martha's Vineyard, a place I've not yet visited. We'll have to see how this goes.
I've been playing guitar lots while I've been home. I got the Martin Backpacker back from Theresa and gave her my nearly brand new Fender Squire and a small amp. She wasn't messing with the Backpacker much anyway and I'm so glad she was willing to swap. I love playing something that says Martin on it. There may be a very expensive Martin in my future someday. Not right now...but someday I may walk into a music store and fall in love.....Then again, I was just doing a little Facebook (yes, they let college staff have accounts on Facebook)crawling and one of the members of the "Guitar players have better licks" group is showing pictures of a new Les Paul that he bought. Yeah, I'd like one of those too. I don't know that I'm really into Electric playing but those Red Les Paul's look soooooo cooooool!!
I found chords and lyrics for a bunch of the songs from John Prine's Prime Prine album and I've been playing them. I had been wanting to learn "Please don't bury me" for a long time and never realized that so many of the other songs on the "must-have" Prime Prine album were so easy to play. Playing and singing makes me feel better. I did, however, determine that I can make a movie of me playing a song using my web cam. I don't sound as good hearing myself on a recording as I think I do when I'm performing. Guess it's not going to make me quit though. Playing and singing feels good. Having the Backpacker laying around and easy to pick up makes me play more often.
I also found my old Eagles and Dylan songbooks that I'd been wanting to look for for many months.
Ok. How did I aquire the cool western hat you ask?Well, Liz and I went down to Iowa on Monday and jumped into the old farmhouse where Lize's mom used to live before she passed away in 2002. It is unheated but still has electricity. Our intent was to get some stoneware crocks, an old hall-tree and a couple bedroom sets for the kids. We cleared stuff away and tried to find stuff in the attic on Monday. Having done that, I felt the need to get a respirator for Tuesday. The attic was sooooo dusty and so was the bedroom upstairs where we had to move lots of stuff to get the bedframe.
I managed to get all of JL's old hats. The one above is nice. So is this one.
And this one is called "The Wedge by Mallory". It says "Style selected by Sam Snead".
This last one, even though it is a 7 1/8 like the other two seems a little smaller. I like hats. I also got John Leo's collection of farmer hats. Here's a sample.
There are lots of seed-corn and implement dealer hats. I really need a place or a way to display all of them....We rented a U-haul truck in Clinton, Iowa on Tuesday and filled it with crocks, furniture, hats and quilting material. I thought we were going to dump all of the bags of cloth for quilting at Theresa and Robin's cuz Robin is a quilter but many of them ended up with us........Here's how I feel about that.............
We left on Wednesday morning with me driving the 10 foot U-haul and Liz following in her CRV. We stopped at Theresa and Robin's and dropped off their bedroom set as well as a few bags of cloth for Robin to peruse. We killed a couple hours keeping Snickers and Maisey, their cats, company then set off for Oshkosh. We arrived in Oshkosh at about 4 p.m. picked up sone KFC and took a walk around Geoff's new neighborhood. Laura arrived at about 4:45 and we went inside. She showed us pictures of her new nephew, born just a few days ago to her sister and her husband. Geoff arrived home from work shortly after 5 and we viewed their progress on texturing the walls of the living room. It's coming along well. We unloaded his bedroom set into the garage and then came home.Thursday was supposed to be a big snowstorm and we were worried about returning the U-haul before 9:15 a.m. but there was very little snow and we had no problems. It cost nearly $400 for the truck, insurance and fuel but things went well and the furniture (as well as it's sentimental value) is worth at least that much.
I was going to do the taxes this week but I haven't yet and I don't plan on it any more this weekend. It'll just have to wait.
So, anyway, that's what's going on around here. I don't want to go back to work on Monday, but that's life.
Ciao, babies!
