A Happy New Year Ramble

Yeah. I know. I’m a bum.

I’m tired of writing about my sorry life, so I haven’t written anything, as you can plainly see.

We had a good Christmas. Then Lovely Wife got sick the day after Christmas, and I caught whatever creeping crud she has this weekend.

So we both now sound like 90 year old men with croup, and that’s about the size of things around here. This is the second year in a row I got sick the week after Christmas. This year Lovely Wife and I are both sick.

I’ve been reading some science fiction by Jack McDevitt, whose books are human based in a future with faster than light travel. His characters are much more deep than many other science fiction writers that I’ve tried. I’m getting into science fiction lately, having gotten bored with the usual spy/thriller type novels I am attracted to. But it’s tough finding new authors, the ones that are listed on the internet as “great” and “instant classic” I’ve had to put down out of sheer boredom or flat didn’t like the way the author wrote. You know, when you have to slowly churn through each and every paragraph because the author writes in grandiose words and sentences? Plus, I have a feeling that some of the authors were not American and I was just too ignorant to be able to follow their slang and the way they expressed thoughts.

Fiction shouldn’t be hard to read, it needs to be fun, otherwise, what’s the point?

And I got my Les Paul rewired. Jeesh, what a nightmare. And me being me, I would try to rewire it in the most complex way possible, and my first stab at it didn’t work out too well. So after those hours of patient soldering, I had to undo each and every solder joint, clean everything up, and start all over. Plus with my screwed up back, I couldn’t sit there forever and the whole process ended up taking three days.

But in the end, I have a wonderful sounding instrument with all new switch and volume and tone potentiometers. It had a short in it before that I knew I needed to fix. So I just waited until I could buy all new innards and, well, it’s now a much more versatile guitar than it was before. It has the ability to switch in and out and combine and disconnect various bits of the electronics that now allows this one guitar to sound very close to several different types of guitars.

In case there's a lone guitar geek out there who cares, my guitar is now wired like the Jimmy Page Les Paul model guitar that Gibson produced in the late 90's for an incredible $5000 each. Of course, mine's not that purdy, but it sounds fantastic. I found a reputable shop in California that will do this mod on anyone's guitar, but they charge $200, including parts. The quality parts that I bought and used cost me $70, so even with all the effort, my guitar came out in great shape and I saved $130 plus shipping to CA and back.

I know, boring, but it’s exciting to me.

In further news, Lovely Wife has interviewed with a local company and will be moving from her part time job as our church’s secretary to a better paying full time job with a mortgage company.

We’re hoping that this won’t be a really long term thing, but we’re running pretty close to the bone every month on bills and some extra money will allow us to stop treading water and actually pay off bills and get a bit ahead.

We have a cold front coming late Wednesday night that is actually supposed to take the temperatures here down to freezing or a little below that. Amazing. I don’t think it’s actually gotten below freezing more than two or three nights in the 11 years we’ve lived here.

We’ll just have to wait and see if that actually happens. At any rate, we’ll finally see some cold weather. I’ll have to dig out my hoodie. I know it’s here somewhere, but I haven’t worn long sleeves in a year.

I was going to add a couple of neat photos that I took, but I'm getting lots of bad attitude from SmugMug, the online photo place I use. It's great overall, but sometimes it is incredibly slow. Grrr.

I'll post them over the coming days, after I try to come up with Seven Things About Me from a tag. That might be difficult. I've pretty much spilled all my life's guts here on this blog at one time or another, but I'll try.

Thanks to all who have visited and left comments. It means a lot to me. I hope to be able to get back into the swing of posting and visiting and commenting on all of your blogs soon.

Happy New Year!