Scattered Thoughts . . .

I  honestly didn't think it would happen this week considering the way it started out but, fortunately, I was feeling fairly well this morning so I spent some time at the piano recording a few video clips.  I included the video at the bottom of this blog entry. I don't do too well at the piano when I'm not feeling well so my time at the piano is often quite limited.  I felt pretty miserable the first half of this week so it was a pleasant surprise that I had this opportunity today to put together a few recordings.   My extensive spinal injuries don't help at all either especially when it comes to the piano.  Spinal pain significantly limits the amount of time I can spend at the piano.   Trying to do anything that is the least bit artistic is out of the question unless I am feeling well and this is especially so when it comes to the piano.  I'm not one of those people who can relax or "feel better" by performing.  I must be feeling well right from the start

L ukey and Kenzie spent a few days with us last week during their break from school.  We had a good time with them and stayed pretty busy.  Gee had to work but I spent time doing activities with them each day.   Every now and then, Lukey and I will sit at the piano for a bit to do some improvisation and we did that again last week.  There is an audio clip, below, of our spur-of-the-moment ballad duet if you prefer to skip down to that so you can listen while you read the rest of this blog entry.   Lukey is now 10 years old and, although he has never had any true structured and regular lessons, he has an interest in the piano and sits at the piano to play at our house whenever possible.  Whenever I sit at the piano to play, he is quick to come over to the armchair right next to the piano so he can watch and listen.  In this way, he kind of reminds me of my cousin William.  William always sat right next to the piano whenever I played and he was a good page-turner for me since he read mus

Yesterday, while all the ladies were out bridal dress shopping, Lukey and I had some nice quiet time at the house. Naturally, we ran some trains on Lukey's layout while it was so quiet in the house... four different trains to be exact. That was fun. We then headed to the kitchen for some lunch.  After lunch, we knew the ladies would be back home before long so we didn't want to jump into anything time consuming. I then had an idea... I asked Lukey, "do you want to learn how to play a song on the piano?"   He enthusiastically replied, "YES!" while jumping up in the air like a little jumping bean. First, I attempted to teach him something simple... where to sit in reference to the piano... how to identify that middle group of two black keys. I doubt he'll remember this but he seemed to understand and it was his first introduction to this concept.   Then I figured we'd start with trying to play something simple like "Jingle Bells"...

It is a beautiful Christmas Eve... the house is quiet except for soft Christmas music being played on our home theatre... the gifts are placed around the tree... comforting drinks are being served... as Santa makes his way around the globe to visit all the little children of the world, we are relaxing in the warmth of our home decorated for Christmas awaiting the children and our Christmas guests...  We have some gifts from Monticello and a dated letter from President Thomas Jefferson provided to us by timeless Santa... There are so many gifts that they are stacked against the wall, climbing toward the ceiling.... So... where are Lukey and Kenzie???  They are probably wondering when Christmas morning will finally arrive... I'm sure 6am will be here soon enough!   Okay... where is my drink?

I already shared a video with many clips of this entertaining show in a previous blog entry but now I have some still photos to share.  Kelly Prescott and Doc Walker performed a short concert for us after the train pulled into the station. Once the train came to a stop, one of the boxcars opened into a stage. This Canadian Pacific Holiday Train travels from the east coast to the west coast doing shows at stops along the way. They raise money and collect non-perishable foods for the food shelf program which I feel is a very worthy cause. I'm really happy with the quality of these photos because the conditions were tough for shooting... it was very dark... it was cold... it was crowded and people were constantly bumping into each other... and, this is the first time I've tried shooting "concert photography" but I managed to pull it all together and get some great images!  And, I managed to get some great video too... you can view the video on  this blog entry.

I had planned to be immersed in a couple of photography projects today but Fedex and the weather have changed my plans.  Instead of photography, I actually sat at the piano for a couple of hours today and reaquainted myself with piano. That's the first time I've done that in three years!  My three biggest problems with playing the piano today that I wasn't expecting... it really  saps my energy (I'm in desperate need of a long nap)... it gets me overheated (which is bad for my health)... and, it hurts my spinal injuries immensely! Even considering these problems, I didn't have as many difficulties as I had expected. Yes, I am very rusty and could use some serious work on some technique as well as my sight-reading abilities but, considering I haven't touched a piano for three years, I'm a bit surprised by how well I did today. Since I'm not doing anything related to photography today, I decided to share a few more piano recordings from quite a few yea

Whenever I think of autumn and traditions, I am reminded of fond memories of fallen leaves covering the ground, cool crisp air, playing touch football in the street and seasonal "Peanuts" episodes.  Naturally, "Peanuts" reminds me of Schroeder playing his favorite Beethoven pieces but there are two other songs from the "Peanuts" episodes which were written by Vince Guaraldi that always come to mind this time of year...  First is the show's theme which is called "Linus and Lucy". Most people refer to this piece as "The Charlie Brown Theme" but that is actually a different piece! The well-known "Peanuts"  theme is actually called "Linus and Lucy". Also, I am quickly reminded of another piece called "Getting Ready" so I'm sharing both of these recordings here in the same blog entry. So, in the spirit of autumn and halloween, here are two clips I recorded on piano back a number of years ago....

I bought a couple of "My Passport" external drives a few days ago so I could backup all my years and years of files and photos. I had these files strewn across numerous external drives and I recently started to have problems with one of these drives. It was time to upgrade. These 2 terabyte "My Passport" drives arrived a few days ago... I immediately started copying all the files from all these drives... then, yesterday, I backed up this new drive onto a second "My Passport" drive.  This morning, I randomly checked the drives to ensure everything copied accurately... it all looked good. Then came the scary part... deleting files on my computer which I had already backed-up redundantly on these two new drives.  This process of deleting took much more time than I had anticipated but it resulted in freeing up about 75% of my desktop computer's hard drive. After freeing up all this disk space, I ran a registry cleaner to tie up all the lose ends