Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Life is Full

I've neglected a lot of things the last couple of weeks -- back burner kind of neglect. With homeschool officially starting today and Charge Conference in a week and a half, I've had my brain in other places.

I've also started to practice the piano some. I was actually "good" at one point; I even started accompanying at church when I was 12 years old and considered a Music degree. I stopped playing when I was 24 when I was hit by lightening and suffered a bit of damage. It seems that lightening courses over the body, especially the brain, it causes damage like a stroke. By 3 weeks after the lightening strike, my 2nd degree burns were healed, but I had coordination problems, especially with fine motor control.

I mourned that loss for a long time and wouldn't even try to play. I've taken it up again -- I figure that most of Music performance is really mental and only partially the physical ability. I hope that by practicing, I can regain some of that physical ability.

In particular, I've been studying Jazz. It is quite mathematical in form; almost formulaic. If I can get a good walking bass line going and practice some riffs, with practice I should be able to get pretty decent at it. I'm also studying some of the history of Jazz, so I'm starting with "cakewalks" and "stride piano." The difficult things have been tremolos and little with the physical coordination of 16th notes in the right hand and triplets in the left. But I'm working on it.

After I get some proficiency with the Blues, I'm going to move to "Gospel" piano.

In other things: I'm working on Charge Conference papers, ordination papers and I have some mentoring appointments to make before January. AND I want to clean OUT the house. Blogging, Twitter, FB et al -- these are taking a back seat right now....

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