Waking up in style

A couple of days ago (and I do mean a couple) I decided to order a VOCO clock and today I came home to find it waiting for me here. (Well done guys, two days to deliver from the UK to Portugal is really not too shabby!)

So from now on I’ll be waking up every day like a Lord. My mornings can only get better now.

How to waste a perfectly good instrument lesson

Mental note: don’t ever, ever go to the sax lesson (or any other instrument’s lesson for that matter) without having practiced a least a bit previously.

It is such a waste of both time and money!

It’s been really hard to find the time to practice, that’s for sure, but last night’s lesson was a (not so) gentle reminder of something I learned a long time ago about going to the lesson unprepared.

Actually, now that I think about it, I’ve been through this time and again since I was pretty young. I’ve “learned” this with the flute lessons, the guitar lessons, choir practice, piano lessons and now I’m doing it again with the saxophone lessons.

Maybe I’m just a bit thick… … Naah, I guess I’m just an optimist at heart!

Anyway, this trend is likely to keep up until, at the very least, the middle of June and then in late July the school will close for the summer hollyday.
Which just means, of course, that when it opens up again in middle September I’ll be in tip-top shape, with loads of practice under my belt and I’ll blow the teacher away (no pun intended) on the first lesson.
Only to be given such radically new material that I’m going to go back to n00b status just like that.

Oh well, such is the way of music learning.

20070503

Time flies by and I barely notice it…

I’ve been really distracted from pretty much anything else with all the preparations for the move. All the process of selling my house, buying the new one, getting the estimates from a number of sources for all the work I want to get done on the new apartment, picking out and buying new furniture… Like I said, time goes by in a blur.

And the money too, of course. Furniture, appliances and so on can be pretty expensive, but the estimates I’ve been getting for the renovations in the apartment are nothing short of barbaric. Much as I’d like to do it, I don’t really see a way to go with a “do it all” company and get a single contractor and I’m now steadying myself to start to go after painters, carpenters, etc myself. What fun that will turn out to be…
Why must the big contractors be so damned expensive? I guess I’m seing an opportunity here: if someone would like to step in this field and just provide the simple service of having the connections with all the construction people (and derivatives thereof) and then coordinate all of them and make sure things get done on time without taking a fortune to do so I for one would sure appreciate it.
I mean seriously, I’m talking roughly 100% to 130% above the price for all the smaller workers/contracted put together!

Still, the new home is likely to be really great once it is all fixed up and the time is nearly here.

Other than that I haven’t been focused on much anything, my sax practicing is getting by the wayside as I spend more time boxing stuff up for the move and making plans for all the furniture I will get and juggling the budget to get everything I’d like to (which is already an impossibility, of course).

The only thing that I still manage to get done is to attend some concerts once in a while (a man must have priorities after all) and last week I went to the final show of the Scissor Sisters’ European tour. What a show, great fun indeed!

Anyway, as I tend to forget to write about the concerts I attend nowadays (and will probably continue to do so, especially right after the move when I’ll be a while without connectivity at home), I should point out that I’ve been trying out last.fm for a while now and I do try and keep a record of the gigs I attend there, so if you’re at all curious you can check that out.

And while I’m on the subject of on-line services, what I do sometimes use as an off-the-cuff type of thing is twitter. Who’d have guessed that I’d ever adhere to such a thing, me the great sceptic of all of these web 2.0 social-mumbo-jumbo… I guess it was the off-line (as in mobile phone) integration that got me hooked on this one. But I still do have to turn it off sometimes as some of my friends tend to get way overboard with it from time to time… :-)

And that’s about all the babbling I have time for now so ta-ta!