Brrrr...

It dipped above freezing for the first time in about a week today. It's been really weird weather for Oregon - dry, sunny, and frigid. We had a low in the single digits this week, which just doesn't happen. Although it's now a comparatively balmy 31 degrees the first rain moved in this afternoon, which has apparently made the roads a bit icy.

Q and I chose to hunker down at home for the evening. I turned on the fireplace and was practicing with my guitar. My students are going to prepare a version of One Day by Matisyahu (minus the beatboxing) this spring. They've been asking to do a "modern" song and I finally found one that would sound good acoustically with our limited resources and have appropriate content. One student will play guitar, another piano, another some kind of percussion and everybody will sing. It should be great. It did mean that I spent a couple of hours finding tab online and creating a piano part from the Youtube video the other night though. I've spent the last few days learning words and getting the chord progression firmly fixed in my head. I'm very excited.

I also found the chords for Loreena McKennitt's Highwayman with a note that the author had arranged it using Travis fingerpicking technique. Awesome internet - I searched for it, got a Youtube tutorial on the style and am on my way to adding a new fingerpicking song to my repertoire. I would love to get the new song down enough to play/sing it for my students since it's such great classic poetry, they're love music and stories so much, and we've been studying metaphor, simile, etc. in our writing main lesson block.

I don't know if House of the Rising Sun counts as fingerpicking but everything else I've been doing is strumming with the occasional mix-up of rhythm or a simple bass addition. I can only imagine how people who have learned how to play guitar properly will cringe at me if I ever get good enough to play in front of someone besides the cats, Q, and my students (who know I'm teaching myself and am not very good but think it's cool I'm trying).

I've been having trouble posting lately because when I'm not working on orders (nothing new or exciting) I've been making Christmas gifts, which can't get posted until after the 25th. I'll have to have post-Christmas show and tell post!

Yay, it's the weekend!