Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

First, an irrelevant aside: another "Switch" parody -- "I'm Steve, and I'm a supervillain..." (Thanks to speaker2animals for the URL.)

Hmm. Saturday sort of didn't happen. I woke up -- not feeling great, but not feeling terrible -- and figured I'd take care of my plans for the day. Next thing I know, I'm nodding off again only a couple of hours later, and don't wake up until 16:00. In and out of drowsy mode since. Nastybad headache, but I don't think this one is a migraine. I think it's just a combination of wonky sleep and allergies. Whee. Anyhow, I spent a little while checking email and then grabbed a small bit of food ('cause I still thought I was going to be heading to Bowie later, and Mom usually feeds me), and went to set the VCRs to record the shows I wanted ... and never made it back out of the bedroom again until now. Oh, add hunger to the probable causes of the headache. Only just starting to notice my stomach, but all I've eaten was the aforementioned snack. Whoops. Did not plan it that way. The one good thing was that I was in the room to notice that hockey was on instead of the musical I wanted to tape, thus saving me three hours of tape.

Hmm. Better stop typing and eat or drink something. Be right back.

Oh bother. I just tripped and fell up the stairs. No injury, but I spilled stuff. Just an annoyance.

Anywho, I probably should've given up a lot earlier and just grabbed another snack and gone back to sleep, but as usual, I got less done by trying to hard -- kept telling myself I had to get up and get moving, until it was too late to do anything and I was that more more tired. Sort of drifted in and out a bit, feeling restless (and sweaty -- either it was a warmer day than I realized today, or maybe I was sick and didn't realize it). Spent some time paying half attention to the telly and half attention to playing mandolin. (To restless to really focus.) Because I was thinking of a comment hobbitblue made recently about tremolo, and my own realization that I seldom use tremolo on the mandolin, I deliberately picked pieces slow enough to do that on. (A Scottish air, a 13th C. lament, and a Flash Girls tune.) But when I got distracted again, my fingers fell into hornpipes. Then I veered off into reels and jigs, partly because I'm still trying to figure out whether a reel I wrote (with help from Mike), "Deer in the Headlights", is finished yet. Then I picked up the guitar for a spell, and played that distractedly as well. Typing this is the most focussed I've been all day.

The mandolin I was playing is a Harmony with an electric pickup in it. The soundboard is extra heavy -- to reduce feedback, I suppose -- which means it's a bit soft for playing unplugged and hasn't got much sustain. That is, it's nowhere near as quiet as a solidbody would be, but I might have trouble making it heard outdoors without amplification; and the sustain is only a tiny bit worse than most cheap mandoins, but most cheap mandolins have almost no sustain anyhow. If it were only my "so I can plug in" mandolin, I wouldn't mind these characteristics so much, but my nice Goya mandolin pulled itself to pieces some time ago (uh, a year or two or three, I think), so whenever I pick up the Harmony, it's hard not to compare it to how nice the Goya was. Losing the Goya (I've still got it, but it's not cost-effective to repair) discouraged me from playing mandolin at all for a while, until I was able to pick up the Harmony without cringing. (Really, it's not that bad; it's just that the Goya was that nice.) At some point I've got to get the Harmony re-fretted though, 'cause I can't play a G# on the 3rd course. (One string will sound the A while the other sounds the G#.)

The Goya, in addition to being seductively easy to finger (and my pinky always just landed right where it needed to when I reached for that B at the 7th fret, so sweet, so easy), also had unusual sustain for a mandolin. So part of the reason I've used tremolo on the mandolin so little is that I mostly play quick dance tunes, and part of the reason is that when I was playing the Goya, even moderately paced tunes didn't need tremolo to sustain the notes. (Not that it would be mistaken for a guitar, sustain-wise, but it didn't immediately fade to silence on anything longer than a quarter-note, y'know?) To get to where I actually needed tremolo other than as an ornament on the Goya, I had to be playing something really slow. Fortunately, my right wrist still simply does the tremolo thing smoothly on command without my having to think about it. Unfortunately, I need a wee bit of practice jumping from one pair of strings to another smoothly in the middle of a sustained tremolo passage.

But hey, I found out how easily I can switch between an even tremolo where both the downstroke and the upstroke hit both strings, and an asymmetric tremolo where the upstroke only hits one string. (Is there a formal name for that technique?) Not sure how audible that'll be to anyone but me, but maybe I'll plug it into the mixer and record some samples so I can listen while I'm not playing...

Then again, it's been so long since I've played mandolin in front of anybody. In The Homespun Ceilidh Band I'm on guitars full-time; and in Thrir Venstri Foetr, either we're understaffed and I'm needed on guitar, recorder, or percussion, or Maugorn is there and it makes more sense for him to play mandolin parts than for me to. I have this vague feeling that I ought to do something about that, but "figure out what I need to do" is going to have to get appended to the end of my already too-long to-do list.

And one more unrelated bit, to bookend the entry -- I just ran across a new, cool word. (Dunno how new it is, but I don't recall seeing it before.) "Outcrufting" Worth adding to my vocabulary. (On the one hand, there are perfectly useful words and phrases for that. On the other hand, the great thing about having so many options for English word-choices is the ability to choose just the exact nuance and mood for the situation. Linguistically, throwing together a word like "outcrufting", even if it weren't for the "cruft" root, strikes me as a particularly Hackish-dialect thing to do, partly for wanting the nuance in conveys in the first place. Or maybe I'm just overthinking it.)

(Closing grumble ... my PPP connection is up -- in fact, I just killed it and restored it to make sure it wasn't wedged funny or something -- but I can't get packets past my ISP's machine on the other end of the phone line and out into the rest of the Internet. Oh wait, I can ping the shell users machine at my ISP but not traceroute to it. Odd. Depending on whether I can hit LiveJournal or not right now, this might not get posted until a while after I've finished writing it.)