129th day sober. I'd practiced last night while watching "Hypernormalisation", an Adam Curtis documentary, which I'd not watched for a year or two. I'd felt like watching it again but it was more of a heads-up as to how things are decaying than I thought it would be.
The resolution was at 320p, now, "high resolution" for me on YouTube is 420p so it's only just a bit worse, and of course I'm old enough to have grown up watching things on CRT TV's, at times in living black-and-white, but still. And it was only barely "video", the frame rate being a few frames per second, when it was not just stills. The audio track only had a couple of glitches, though, and that's what made it still watchable. Ken Burns discovered this years ago: Have a great sound track, and you can get by fine with still pictures to accompany it.
Honestly, I'm sitting here hoping things will hold together for another 3 years and it's times like these that make me wonder if they indeed will for that long. I got Ebay listings done but of course now the internet is really slow and the power cut out 2X and it takes several minutes each time to get back online each time. And that was during listing only 10 items, so really it was during only about a half-hour's work.
I slept very deeply with weird dreams. Here's another thing that's bugging me: Trumpet playing, due to the sheer exertion of it, has really been tiring me out. It's really quite fatiguing. I know there are plenty of old trumpet players out there but in every case, they had a huge "base" of playing built up before they were out of high school. Would I attempt to learn to surf if I'd never done it before, at my age? I'm sure I'd fail to do anything more reliably than ride on my belly on small, tame, waves.
I've run into this problem before, with archery doing which I actually injured myself and realized that I was not going to go anywhere with it since I wasn't doing it while I was growing, getting my bones and muscles and tendons used to it as they developed.
It wouldn't feel so bad if I thought I was improving, but I'm not sure I am.
I packed a few things I could take to the post office without having to use the bike trailer, and dropped them off at the post office. Of course the chute jammed, so I had to direct the person after me to put her package on the center desk in the post office, on top of a box someone else had left there because it was too big to fit in the chute. She was doubtful so I had to explain that the chute "breaks" all the time and this is what people do.
I stopped at H Mart and did some shopping, spending a bit over $50 or, a bit over $40 after using the remaining gift card I had. I put that on my debit card as I had about $32 in cash on me which was not enough.
I'll have to start cooking at home more and being more careful with my money if I'm going to take a bit of time away from the trumpet but at least now that I don't drink I *can* save quite a bit of my money.
I listen to NPR pretty much exclusively here, and they run news from the BBC and also an interesting program where they talk about some artist or writer and it's something new and interesting each time even if by "new" is meant talking about the novel Crime And Punishment which has been out for quite a while. Tonight it was about a French lady who's apparently quite the novelist and has written a novel called "Man The Living" which they even stock copies of in the NHS library over there in England, but here in the US, the novel simply. does. not. exist. I tried quite a bit to search for it, but, well, the author not only isn't American, she's not even a native speaker of English, but rather is French. I might as well try to find the personal memoirs of the Devil in the Catholic store on one side of the big Catholic church downtown.
You'd think a writer who's made a big enough splash on the world scene to be interviewed for an hour on the BBC would be one the US will admit exists. But nope. Too Un-American. Long ago I corresponded a tiny bit with Greg Palast, a writer who wrote quite a bit for the Guardian, a big paper in the UK. When he came back to the US no one had heard of it. He might as well have written for some small-town weekly tabloid. This is what empires in collapse do; they become a lot more insular.
I really think that shallow 3D mouthpiece was a mistake, but I'd never have found out without getting one and playing it. It's just too shallow for me. The C-series are good, and as I write I have a good old inexpensive Blessing 5C waiting for me down at the Amazon place. I'm pretty glad this series is what I've decided on because 7C-5C-3C are the most common mouthpieces and thus really easy to obtain or replace. I lose too much tone on a 7C to be really happy with one, but I can play it. The 3C I play now, may actually be a bit "advanced" for me, and the 5C pretty much where I'm at now.
No comments:
Post a Comment