Keeping practice up

 I got my practice in last night and am up to pages 20-21. Do I have faint memories now of learning "The Stoat" on page 21, years ago? It's weird as hell. I know I had a flute and was out playing the thing and making some money, about the same as I did on trumpet in those days. But I honestly have no memory of what songs I played or how far I got in this same book back then. I can only blame it on drinking, and wonder what else I can't remember. 

In any case, I've found a guy on YouTube who seems to have recorded all the exercises in the book, and while he's not a great player he's still better to listen to than those recordings done by a computer or something. 

My main problem is the flute moving around in my hands. I don't remember this being a problem but as mentioned above, there's a lot I don't remember. I do remember eventually feeling quite secure. But there's a caveat - I was playing a student flute, the aim of which is to enable the student to make a sound and have that sound be in tune. The intermediate flute I'm playing now is capable of a "bigger" tone but I think takes being more exact about where the lips are placed in relation to the embouchure hole. Lots of practice is the only cure I can think of for this kind of thing. 

So I did a bit more than an hour last night, featuring, on almost all of the exercises, my new habit of playing them both as written and an octave up. "Making a racket" as both James Galway and my dad would put it. Playing an octave up is fun because I can get good and loud. 

It was 95 degrees inside and a relatively cool 85 or so inside. I woke up around 5, and got going for downtown. The plan was to go to Dai Thanh where I'd get a few things and a Chinese donut, which I'd eat in the park then go to Walmart and get some things. But on my way between Japantown and downtown, I found a "HEPA" air filter left out on the curb that looked like new - it still had the clear plastic over the control panel. And it fit in a Whole Foods bag so I bagged it up and went on with this thing hanging off of one handlebar. 

Now I had a bit of a load, and changed plans. I went to Dai Thanh and got more things than originally planned, like a can of coffee and a bag of frozen shrimp in addition to the little cans of coconut milk I'd originally planned to get. So now, no Walmart, as I wanted to get the shrimp home before they defrosted much. 

I took a little loop around downtown just to see how things are going. Mama Kin, which is what Cafe Stritch is being called now, was utterly dead. There was supposed to be something going on but it was open with no one in there, someone mopping the floor, 80s radio playing, and two gals eating bowls of something out front. 

There was some kind of music thing going on in the main park, the kind of thing that you have to buy tickets to, and that's about all that was going on. And I stopped at a garage sale and bought copies of Saving Private Ryan and "True Stories" by that Talking Heads guy, for $3. Japantown was really dead too - there used to be things like car shows but except for one sushi place it was all closed. 

I got back in here, divided the shrimp into three bags and put it into the freezer, and settled down and went through the bag of Da Heo brand pork rinds I'd bought at Dai Thanh.