130th day sober. I practiced last night and .... it went super well. What's changed? I think a big change is my idea of doing long tones on the higher notes. That's changed day and night, where I could do one of the higher notes for a second or two and call it good, and can hold them for long tones now. And finding out little tunes to play that are fun, that use the high notes like playing Saints an octave up.
Another thing is I feel I was letting my lips roll out a bit, which is not good. I watched a video on YouTube about a rolled-in position, and the guy mentioned "free buzzing" which is buzzing the lips without a mouthpiece, which is great for getting the right feel of having the lips rolled in enough, and making a thin stream of air. Long ago I was good at this because I'd do it when I was bored, driving around in my car - yep so long ago it was when I had a car. So I tried it again, was utter crap at it, and gradually got back to making a nice clean buzz. So that's an exercise I'll do daily as it's so easy to do.
I got going at the usual time with a load of stuff for the post office and FedEx, dropped those things off, and got a gyro at the gyro place and 2 yoghurt drinks. After eating the gyro filling I rolled up the bread and checked the usual places for packing stuff - nada - and stopped at Tom's and we drank yoghurt drinks and talked for a while.
I had the beat-up 7C mouthpiece with me so I gave it to Tom. Of course he looked it over and found all kinds of things to nit pick about it, and I said, "Look, you don't have to take it, I just thought you'd want something nicer than what you have, and that won't leave a funny brass taste on your mouth". He agreed it was nicer, and of course he's not been over to Park Avenue Music to buy a 3C of his own.
Mostly we talked about the various crazies and their antics around here. I told him about a curry place called "Curry Up" that seems to, according to Google, be right up the street in this really hinky looking business park. And he told me about a chicken place so new Google doesn't know a thing about it and said he paid almost $20 for a 12-piece so they're "not cheap" but I said that's a pretty good deal. I also told him how, the time his wife was over and we all had gyros, those were the last of the "good" gyros from the gyro place, as something's changed and they're not as tasty and juicy as they were.
So we didn't get into any "deep" subjects but it's just nice to hang out with someone once a week around here. As I've observed, the way San Jose works is, you meet interesting people but you never see them again. At least in Hawaii there's a big emphasis on where you, and the person you meet, fit into the local network because you *will* meet again and will likely see each other with regularity.
I got back here, started some laundry and cleaned the bathroom and vacuumed the office and put some things away and just the usual puttering around then Ken came by and didn't have much of anything to bring as the big/heavy pieces of test equipment he'd just bought, he wants to test at home first before we put them on Ebay. So we sat around and he had iced tea and I had coffee and we just talked about stuff. He showed me how in diagrams of a molecule, how some of the bonds are shown bold and tapered, and some like a dotted line, it's an attempt to show the shape of the molecule, with the bold lines going away from the viewer and the dotted lines coming toward the viewer. That's kind of cool to know I guess.
Ken took off a bit past midnight and I made a curry and ate that and then listed Ebay things and finished the load of laundry and hung that up and between how hot it gets up in the loft and the fan I have blowing on it, it ought to be all dry when I get up.
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