The first thing is I've got to fix my sleep. I stayed up all night, packed 17 things, and left here around 8:30 or 9:00 in the morning, took the packages to FedEx and the post office, and had two savory pastries at Paris Baguette and one of their coffees because they had a sign saying you can't bring outside food (in my case it would be a can of coffee) so that got me full but cost about $17.
I rode back here, and didn't actually get to bed until somewhere around noon. I slept a couple of hours, went back to sleep until 4, when I was awakened by my alarm clock.
Shakuhachi rehearsal started at 6:30 so it sounds like I had a lot of time, but it turned out to be just enough time to clean up, call Suzy (Ken's wife) at their house to ask if my ballot had come in the mail yet, and Suzy and I talked quite a bit about how much we hate ol' Diddlin' Don.
Then I had something to eat, and took care of Ebay stuff like messages and so on, and before I knew it I had to leave.
I got there maybe 1-2 minutes before 6:30 which is cutting it a little too close. My new music stand works OK except I need to bring a couple of clips, and I'm going to put a little label on it because there are some other ones that look like it in the group.
The practice went pretty well and we rehearsed how we'll set up our music stands, what we'll play, and how we'll exit and make way for the choir who are then going to do their thing.
The lady running things asked who wants to show up for another practice on Thursday and I said I would, as well as quite a few others, so I'll have one more practice before the big event.
I noticed when playing on this night that if I crowded up more on the mouthpiece, I was getting some really nice tone in the 2nd octave so that's something to work on.
People who teach shakuhachi like Shawn Tairyu Head, talk about breathing exercises all the time and I think they're great for health in general, but frankly a person might, at most, increase their lung capacity maybe 25%, but the difference between a skilled player and a beginner is huge. So it has to be other factors. In r/flute I read one person say, "Beginners use a lot of air". So I'd say it's a matter of becoming more efficient.
I went over to Nijiya afterward and got some stuff but really all I want to do is sleep. So it's to bed at midnight, then wake-up at 8 or 9 in the morning.
The illegal night club seems to be kaput. The police have been coming through very regularly, and I changed the Google flag on the address from "Illegal Night Club 2-5AM Fri-Sun" to "Illegal Night Club CLOSED". I'd originally flagged it because I figured, if the place got more popular it would get "blown up" - over-patronized, and the cops would have to do something. But now I honestly think that flag was bringing in random people and since I'd changed it on Friday night, over the weekend there were almost no randoms.
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