Guitar lessons were too boring for me when I was a kid

When I was a young teenager, my parents gave me an acoustic guitar for a birthday gift. I was sure I wanted to learn to play the guitar! And they signed me up for music classes. Unfortunately, the music teacher didn’t seem to appreciate the fact that young teenagers don’t want to spend hours and hours every day learning ONLY to read music and play the “mary had a little lamb” types of songs. Young teenagers ALSO want to learn a few “quick and dirty” songs that they can play fairly quickly. And no one had explained how much it would hurt my fingers to put pressure on the guitar strings when pressing them down on the frets!

So I abandoned the classes fairly quickly – they were boring and my fingers hurt. I wanted no More painful, boring hours of practice alone in my room playing songs I hated! Sometimes people ask me if I wish I had kept at it, and when I hear gifted musicians play, I do find myself wishing I could play that well, too. But, my tolerance level for pain was too low, so the answer to that question is “no.” I’m not a big fan of pain!

Get Along Little Doggie

I love the gags that can be played around the little dachshund dog. Like the meme that goes around Facebook every now and then, of a dachshund puppy in a hot dog roll, like the photo below:

Dacshund hot dog (free clip art)
Dacshund hot dog (free clip art)

And the joke about why did the cowboy adopt a dachsund?

Why did the cowboy (free clip art)
Why did the cowboy (free clip art)

I like looking at pet halloween costumes online and in stores, and I’m always amused by how cute they are, and find myself wishing that my own pets would tolerate wearing something like that. My experience, however, has been that my pets do their best to remove whatever article of clothing I try to put on them! So I’m afraid that for me, it would be an exercise in frustration, and a waste of money to buy the costume for my pets.

You can find your health insurance online

For my dear friends in North Carolina, I wanted to let you know that if you are still desperately looking for health insurance coverage, my good friend Julie found insurance here that took care of her needs. You don’t have to spend much more time looking around and asking all of your friends and family what to do. Thank goodness for the Internet – it certainly is making a lot of things in life a lot easier to accomplish!

Yule Logs

Poking around the cable on demand, I found a cool feature that I did not know about. Comcast has a channel at Christmas that is a video of burning yule logs. They play soft Christmas music in the background and there are no commercials. This was really nice to find – I hope they do it again next year.

Sweet little amp is just perfect

I was just watching a YouTube demonstration of a sweet little fender passport mini is the perfect amp for the musician on the go. Right now it is on sale for under $200, which makes it a perfect Christmas gift! It runs on either AC or DC, and is great for students, street musicians, or anyone that needs a small amp for presentations.

Scrolling Typos

A lot of the TV channels have adopted the scrolling text at the bottom of the screen to make viewers aware of breaking news and alerts.

Years ago, viewers would have to endure complete interruption of their preferred show for a talking head to read the script of breaking news on camera. But now, a lot of the breaking news is just a few words scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

It must be stressful programming in just the right words to scroll across the screen. It’s like having to write headlines as a teaser to get your attention but also to add just enough vital information to give viewers a snapshot of the situation.

At its worst, the scrolling words contain a typo, which broadcasts to the entire world that someone is not smart enough to spell the name correctly or never got enough education to recognize the difference in the meaning of words, such as “sum” versus “some.”

It Is Time to Fall Back – Reset your clocks tonight when you go to bed!

Tonight is the night when Daylight Savings ends. At 2am Sunday morning, the clocks are to be turned back one hour. I always wonder how the television guides (the printed version) handle that time change. At 2am the clocks get set back to 1am, so there are two different 1ams! I wonder how many people get confused by that! I know some folks set their clocks back before they go to bed on Saturday night, and that is what I try to do. Some wait until Sunday morning when they get up. Sometimes that is what I do, too, but usually it is because I might have forgotten the night before to do that!

Bite My Tongue

Why am I so hostile lately? It seems like I can’t find anything nice to say to anyone. I make comments on Facebook and get people all riled up. I send IMs and people just want to argue. I’m scared to send an email to anyone – I’ll probably just get my head bitten off for offending someone.

I’m going to just bite my tongue for a few days until my mood improves. After all, if you can’t say anything nice, you should not say anything at all.

Grazing at Sams Club

I only go shopping at Sams Club about once every two months. I just don’t need or want mega sized quantities of most household goods and foods. But sometimes the savings is big enough to make it worth going and buying 10 times more than what I would get at the local Kroger.

Today I went to Sam’s on my lunch break. I was surprised to find a lot of people giving away free samples of food at the end of every aisle. I ended up dining on large slices of pizza, chicken nuggets, ham and cheese on croissant, and meatballs. I was going to do a drive-thru to pick up my lunch on the way back to work, but I had so much free sample food that I wasn’t hungry.

Baby Shower

My girlfriend Jenny, is expecting a baby next month. She knows she will be having a baby girl. I think it is pretty much standard in maternity care to find out the baby’s gender about 4 months along.

Some of the girls from work want to have a baby shower for her. I was going to buy a gift for her anyway, so if we are going to have a baby shower, I guess I need to get busy and buy that gift for her.