David > Recent Status Updates

Listened to 11 and 12, in book 2. Especially 11 seems harder than most in book 1, more polyrhythms! And book 1 already offers plenty of challenge for me for playing.

Charlie just finishes med school and gets married, but he can't get a med license because timing so he practices unlicensed for a year. His young wife had a tough, lonely time of it, being the depression, and then WW2 comes along.

Some history from when Charlie graduated from high school. He and 2 friends took a Model T to Los Angeles without telling anyone, and ended up hopping trains to get home after they had found jobs serving food to get some money to survive. Drehle makes a point of Charlie never mentioning he was scared on this trip, even tho he likely was.

Charlie lost his dad at a young age (IIRC he was 9). He worked hard not to dwell on the absence.

Spent some more time at the piano with this book. A fair few will be (already are?) fun to mess with even if I won't be able to get them well enough prepped for anyone to hear me attempt them for a long while! Even when they sound simple and repetitive they almost all have some fast position shifts that I don't do well. Still fun to play with!

This is not a book I will complete in any sense - I'm not able to play all the pieces in it at my skill level, and if I could I'd not be able to prep them all this year. But I've already followed the score while listening to all of book 1 and attempted playing 3 or more of those etudes. I plan to work on etude 5 to start, and possibly 2 also. I just got this book and I'm happy with its contents - good stuff!

So much nautical talk! It gives the air of authenticity but does make for somewhat difficult reading in places if you're not familiar with the terms, as I am not.

Soon they will be truly underway, but so far have just taken the Sophie out for a test sail with two larger cannons that turned out to be too heavy for the small ship.

Sounds like the Sophie will have a good doctor (no surprise, since this character is mentioned in any overview of the book series).

This is the one "classic" book Ellen put on my list of recommendations for this year, inspired by our shared viewing of the wondrium course on England, Scotland, and Wales during 2023. I was able to catch the Russell Crowe movie version before it left Prime at year end and figure it would be good to try to read it around the same time, plus its age makes it easy to get a library copy.

I'm in a new phase of enthusiasm for playing some piano after not touching it (much) for years. I'm hoping to pick up some good tips and motivation from this book that we've had around for a long while, in addition to some new music to spark some fun (Corea's Children's Songs and P. Glass Etudes).

"Most new products fail." And it seems if we were involved in the creation of a failure, we'd typically rather not hear about it!

I'm sure we've mentioned it before, but we had to comment this time about how many parallels there are between politics today and the situations before, during, and after the civil war. It's also interesting to get more background info on the 14th amendment, which seems to be in the present day news almost every day lately.

Many lol moments already, like the one with Calvin on the stepladder's top step, back to the kiddie pool in the yard, and Hobbes saying "Better hurry up, I hear your mom yelling something."

In the chapter Who's There, he presents Eckhart Tolle and his 'power of now' experience and observations. Do we really have a 'self?' Is Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" actually a sensible statement or is it a logical mistake? Such questions that strike at the core of most of our existence for most of us are hard to contemplate!

In this chapter Goal Crazy he dares to state that maybe goals are not the wonderful thing they're supposed to be. A big, oft-cited study of Yale grads from 1953 on goal setting doesn't appear to have any documentation, ie it probably didn't happen. Better, he claims, to embrace the uncertainty than to chase goals just so we don't feel adrift.

Interesting observations about meditation in the previous chapter. It's not about calm, but just accepting what the brain is doing/thinking? The week-long retreat sounded up and down with definite valleys for him.

Part of the puzzle starts to be revealed, by Marcellus of all creatures.

Stoic philosophy with a dry sense of humor - liking it so far.

One of the sub teacher panels was lol worthy :-)