I have a new musical instrument!

I have been wanting to get an organ to practice and learn how to play the bass pedals on for a long time and have been checking out Craigslist for months. I wanted to wait until Holly and family were in their own home and I had more room but I had been to see several but had not made any decision. Last Friday this beautiful and fairly new organ was posted and I called right away and then after work in the morning I went and saw and bought it. It is a Roland AT80R Atelier it has a fantastic range of sounds/musical instruments and since the lower keyboard is a 76 note keyboard you can set it for piano, set initial touch and since it even has a sustain pedal you can play most piano pieces on it too. It is electronic so I can wear headphones and practice anytime I want without bothering Marvin or his TV watching. There are several You-tube videos of people playing fantastic arrangements which sound like a whole orchestra playing. I won't be doing that anytime soon, it is rather overwhelming but it's going to be fun. It has a floppy disk so you can record your compositions, a microphone so you can sing along and can be connected to other Midi devices or a computer if you know how to do that sort of thing. This is not the "church" organ I was looking for but I think it will do and I will enjoy it.

I also finally recieved my replacement computer. After trying to give me a downgraded basic computer as a replacement, they came through with another Acer with 640gb harddrive so it is a bit better than my orginal 500gb one. So now I just need to get everything reloaded and up and running.

I reloaded the Zune software Friday and then Saturday -which, (for those of you who don't know) is the mother of all yardsale weekends here in Phoenix. I stopped at one close to work where the man worked in the music industry and was selling a box of CD's for a dollar many had not even been open. I was able to find 20+ most of which were ones I had previously downloaded from Zune (but don't own) so was excited about owning. (Neko Case, Adele, Oren Lavie, Sting, Yael Naim, Five for Fighting, Enya, Indigo girls, Great Lake Swimmers and more. So I had fun ripping them to my computer but I was interrupted before syncing to my Zune by the smell of smoke! So I'll probably do that next when I am done with this post.

I have to work again tonight so I think I'll sign off today and will try and post again this week. Love you all.

GIve a man a blow torch......

This is a cautionary tale. If you give your man an incinderary device he will not use is "as directed" While the weed burner Marvin begged for over a month to recieve advises "there is no need to actually set the weed on fire but just to steam it and it will die. Marvin believes in a scorched earth policy. after steaming the weeds and overgrown patches of grass last week. He had to make sure they were dead by going over them again in the middle of the week, and then to reach his final scorched earth policy, he went out again Saturday morning to give everything another blast and in the process set the house on fire!! He did not notice it immediately, it was only hours later when I kept insisting that I smelled something burning did we discover that a corner post of the house was smoldering. We managed to get it all out but I worried for a long time about reports of a fire smoldering for days before breaking out in actual fire. I even got up twice during the night to check for smoke or warmness on the wall. I'm not sure whether the post will need to be replaced or if it is still intact enough to maintain its integrity, but I'll have Brian check it out when he gets back from his weekend fishing in Yuma.