Hi! I’ve just noticed that I’ve had 1,000 views of my blog! I’m a celebrity! However, this will be my 103rd post, so I’m an unknown. 🙁 If you don’t follow me on Twitter let me tell you I’m loving my Kung Fu class. I’ve got my kit and I’m not afraid to pose in it! It’s a pity the Beth couldn’t keep it up, it’s really spiffy. Don’t know that she’d have loved the last class though, swapping punches so your arm collides in defence/attack with your partner’s. It soon starts hurting and doesn’t stop! Grin and bear it, it’s good for practice and it toughens you up. I’m aching still though. And I’ve got bloody friction burns on my arse from all the sit ups! Again! All good though. My sax lesson has had a positive turn around as well. When I went this week I had a few of the things that I have been struggling with come together. Then he turned the page to a new chapter and it was a checkpoint. Instead of learning something new it is three set pieces supposed to consolidate your learning to date. As usual sax-sensei Pete pointed me at the new stuff and told me to have a go. It was for a complete change, a lot easier than the previous exercises. I didn’t do it perfectly, but for a first time, sight reading as I went along, it wasn’t too shabby. I was quite pleased with myself, then he told me that the pieces were from a grade 4 exam! (Or level 4, I forget.) The point being, these are pieces on which the student would train for months before an exam and I did a reasonable attempt first time out of the bag! Not trying to blow my own trumpet here (if anything, my own sax) just saying how surprised and delighted I was. Then he said now we’re at chapter 17 you can move on to ‘100 best tunes book’ or some such. Learning by playing songs, some of which I will already know, rather than by bending my mind around hideous exercises. If you recall, that was what I said I was going to leave my lessons to do in my last blog. So that it going swimmingly. Here is something I found that seemed to be begging for the title ‘Ships Of The Desert’ Also on the pictures front, here is that Sisters of Mercy/ Merciful Release logo that I want as a tattoo Groovy, or what? Perhaps you have to love the band. I’m currently enjoying a long weekend. I was off Thursday, in Friday, now off Saturday, Sunday and Monday! Bloody lovely. On the subject of work, I have been moaning lately about being sent into the freezer all of the time. The place at which I work has the contract picking and delivering to the Iceland stores, so it’s not too unexpected that I would work in the freezer now and […]
Continue readingTag: Saxaphone
New Year!
Momentous milestones! We’ve all made it into 2010, it’s my first blog entry of the year and my one hundredth entry on MySpace. Welcome to the new century! I thought I’d summarise 2009, as pertains to Wendy and me, but first let me tell about last night. Our neighbours, who, in fairness, rarely hold parties, told us they were having one on New Years Eve. Fair do’s again, if you can’t party in the new year, when can you? Then they said they’d hired a DJ! A feckin’ DJ! Ours is a block of three houses, this neighbour is the one in the middle, so to all intents and purposes is in a terraced house. And they were hiring a DJ. So we expected loud, and as they are into their cocaine, we expected it to go on a bit. Happily Wendy’s brother, Peter, invited us around to see in the new year. This was welcome as Wendy gets really stressed out about noise nowadays. We set off to Pete’s and Emma’s (his wife) at about eleven pm. (The ability to jump in the car whenever we feel like and the feeling of moral superiority are the best consolations for not drinking!) We came home at about half past three, and next door were still at it! We went to bed by four am, and the music was only quiet, but because they were all coked up they were unaware of how loud they were being every time they went outside for a fag. After a fitful sleep we got up at twelve noon and they were still going! Respect to the quality of the product, but shit! They started to disperse before one in the afternoon, now all is quiet. We are tired and a bit miffed with them, but in the small mercies column, it’s only the fact that my day off happened to fall today that stopped me from having to get up at ten to five this morning. OK, whinge over, back to the review. Let me paint a word picture of this time last year; I was working in the De-kit department, I was still paying for training towards my HGV class II license having already failed the test two or three times, I was training in Taekwondo and Kung Fu but was having to decide between them because we were so poor, Wendy was still a volunteer at the Citizens Advice Bureau and we were unmarried. Phew, how times change! In January I passed my class II, to the relief and surprise of many. Then over the year I set about the class I (articulated lorry) training and tests. Many tests. There was the moment of high drama when it looked like we had run out of credit and I still hadn’t passed, then miraculously the credit card doubled our limit unbidden. (God bless those unscrupulous bastards!) Finally, in July, I passed. The relief has never been so great! £ 5,615 to get both […]
Continue readingThis an’ that (innit!)
Hi, I’m enjoying a long weekend off work. I was off Thursday, in Friday, off Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Bloody lovely! I’m just waiting for an email from the National Lottery and all will be perfect. The one blight on my well being is my poorly thumb. I dropped a pallet container door on it at work. The door itself is only light, you could pick it up with one finger. It is five foot tall and tubular steel and it fell over just as I was reaching to pick the one beneath it up. It cracked me across the quick of my thumbnail and sweet Jesus did it hurt. I was hopping around for a couple of minutes, swearing and laughing, unable to believe it was hurting so much! For that much pain you want to be sticking a limb back on, not fannying around with a small bruise under your nail. The lack of street cred was crippling. Wendy said I’m a big baby. Thanks for the support there, wifey. It woke me up and I had to go and ice pack it (and neck some ibuprofen) at two in the morning. This has a knock on effect on the comfort of my saxing. Yesterday my saxing was as painful to me as it is to those who hear it. It’s my right thumb, the one that takes the weight of the sax and holds it forward in position. Poor Bucky. I’ve known suffering. Wendy was banging on about the time she broke her arm and had to try and sleep with four steel rods drilled through the bones in her arm. Small fish compared to a bruised thumb. But we men don’t like to make a fuss. No point is there? It always gravitates to ‘ I was in labour for thirty six hours’, anyway. The saxing is progressing apace, despite the suffering for my art and the withering lack of sympathy I endure. As I said on my Blogger blog (will have to pick one or the other soon, it feels like I’m developing a typing stammer) Pete, the sax sensei, isn’t giving me chance to master one chapter of the book from which I’m learning, before he’s turned the page onto two new chapters. I’m always playing catch-up. He said he’s pushing me because he thinks I’m capable. Little consolation as I spend an hour murdering new notes I can’t read, and times I can’t do. Hey ho, it means I should get up to speed quicker, just harder. Finding his way down to Baker Street… Which is another point, all the bloody sax bits I’ve been looking up from pop songs seem to be played on alto sax’s. Dammnit! The floor! I’ve finally got around to lending that forty five degree angle cutting device off Wendy’s brother, and whilst by no means perfect the job became do-able as the colonials would have it. Look: I never said I was a floor laying woodwork monkey, […]
Continue readingLike, so down with the kids, me.
Hi there, I’ve not been posting because nothing much has been happening. I’m getting better at the sax (but as I had never knowingly played a note or read one before a month ago, up was the only way I could go). I’m still not sacked or driving, so work remains a status quo. There are movements in the right direction, they have the new tugs at work now (the units used solely for moving trailers around the yard) so the rest of the fleet shouldn’t be too far behind. As soon as they get the new rigid trucks I’ll be in the office asking for the keys to one of the old ones. I’m hoping that when I go back off this holiday they will be there. As for this holiday, I booked the weekend off months ago, when I was still in dekit, not knowing if I would be off for it or not as I would be changing rota’s when I moved into the warehouse as a picker again. Turns out I was off this weekend anyway, so I cancelled the holiday. Then they said ‘what are you doing taking those days off? You should be on a different rota.’ So I had to fight to keep on the rota they had initially given me, saying that I’d booked holidays around the days off on that rota, and had cancelled the holiday for the weekend I needed for my grading. They let me stay on my first rota. I realised a few weeks ago that I would not be getting a day off on any of the days my classes were on this week (the last week before my grading on Sunday) so I booked from Monday off. That would have given me four lessons in which to cram. First lesson yesterday, at a place with which I am not familiar. I went on to the website, or rather tried, and it said something about an error with the server. Balls. Then my headache kicked in again, so I spent most of yesterday afternoon on the bed with a sleep mask on to keep the light out of my eyes. Then a good portion of yesterday evening as well for good measure. Finally started to clear about nine or so. Today woke full of beans. Website still down. Remembered I had one of the chaps mobile number from way back. I sent him a text asking if there was a class tonight (not been to this one) if so what time and where. Eventually got a reply, joy! So to cut a long story to a smidge less than interminable, I went and by some miracle actually found it (!) but when sah bum nim Caroline arrived she said that Grandmaster Loh was off abroad coaching one of the Scottish lads who was in contention for a medal in the world championships so the grading was off until the twenty first of November! Marvellous! Still, it made […]
Continue readingSax and bugs, not even dole.
The nasty enervating illness I have been labouring through is waning. To prove that every cloud has a silver lining (and that where there’s a will there’s a platitude) it seems to have sapped my will to worry about work. If I get sacked I’ll just have to deal with it, at least I’ve got a week off, paid. And if I’m not sacked I didn’t have to work through that nasty cold. It was weird, I didn’t have a runny nose, or anything much except a little bit of a cough and tired eyes, but I just felt so weak I barely felt able to stand up. That and a temperature. Bad, but brief. Three days, and I was on the mend yesterday. Which reminds me, I need to swab out my sax mouthpiece now, in case it’s possible to reinfect myself! The sax is coming along apace. I have two books; "Learn as you play saxophone", and "A new tune a day for tenor saxophone." The former is the one my sax-sensei Pete teaches from, the latter is more challenging. Both want me to read music and play at the same time in chapter 1. That really is challenging! Pete asked me if I had any musical experience, I said I could play the triangle but subsequently confessed I could not read music. He said it was alright, that people often learnt as they went along, but I sensed an inward sigh. I think I’m doing well though. In the space of a week I’ve gone from blowing like mad and being pleased I got something that sounded like a note, to expecting to hit each note of the middle (damn, lingo breakdown! Not sharp or flat, the middle bunch of notes! Damn , damn, damn!) octave, and worrying about keeping to 4/4 or 3/4 time! (You go girl!) Wendy, whilst appreciating the rate and degree of my improvement, is less than ecstatic about my practising. Hearing someone try over and over to get the right time and notes of ‘Chanson de nuit’ and ‘Au clair de la lune’ whilst you are trying to have a quiet chill must be irritating. Did I mention the soundproofing was a flop? The egg-trays are apparently an urban myth, they give you wonderful acoustics, but don’t stop next-door from appreciating them. Genuine sound insulation relies on density and thickness. I briefly examined a professional soundproofing site, worked out that one wall of a soundproof box would cost around £500, then gave up. I have resorted to the old standbys of a thick pair of socks down the horn, and practising my fingering without the mouthpiece in (on top of the hour’s blowing). The socks are, at best, a token gesture. There are that many holes in a sax that the horn is just the final projecting bit. I’ve taken to sitting in the hall upstairs, with all the bedroom doors, the bathroom door and the front-room door downstairs shut (so there […]
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