Procrastinating

I SHOULD be reading Living on the Future Edge: Windows on Tomorrow  (My textbook that I bought for my free Kindle app that I downloaded for my Mac; purchasing the book cost $9.99 for Kindle, instead of $30 something for paperback.)

I wrote the following this weekend at my Oxbow Writing Project event and thought I'd share it with you.  Enjoy.

 Learning

            There’s so much I want to read and learn.  There are search engines and databases just beckoning my name.  Click me.  Read me.  I want you to know about me.  What I have in front of me is a huge ocean of information.  Where is my floaty? How do I keep from sinking in all that’s available? I many need some sunscreen to keep from getting burned. How do I sort out the truth?  Is there a lie detector I can download for Mozilla Firefox?  Would being a journalist help my case?  I find some friends bobbing along the ocean in my journey.  They too, are reading and learning. What are you reading about today, I ask?  My new friend tells me she learned how to set up a school fusion webpage and she’s moderating the comments her students are blogging for a discussion on their favorite Diary of a Wimpy Kid book.  Another friend I see is researching her medications on line.  She’s fuming to me that she read online that her two new medications shouldn’t be taken together.  (How does she know if the website is accurate, I wonder?)  Another friend I see is reading a Golden Sower on her iPad, tweeting, facebooking, and checking her email all at the same time.  I spot another friend.  He looks stuck in some seaweed.  I swim over to help.  His school issued Dell laptop isn’t talking to his projector.  Try hitting function and F8.  Woo-Hoo!  Now he’s swimming again! We swim together and spot a colleague looking worried.  She says she’s trying to send a document to our principal and his computer can’t convert it from Appleworks.  No worries, we tell her.  Try resaving it as an rtf file.  Can he read it now?  Isn’t it great that we’re all swimming in this information ocean together?  Fishing for information!  All in the same school…

Back to "work."  Stay warm!  Did anyone do a Snow Dance for tomorrow morning?  :)

Echoes of Spring, page 1 AND 2

Yes, I am still working on Echoes of Spring...I have completed the first two pages!  Yeah!  Only two pages, some may ask?  Well, let's just say I've been busy.  Also, please don't expect perfection.  Perfection is NOT my middle name.  I am learning and doing this for FUN!  Hopefully page 3 won't take quite as long.  I keep hoping to meet people who knows a little something about stride piano-get some pointers mainly, and fun discussion.  Alas, I have yet to get to discuss in person something I can't find out from a brief Google search.  So if anyone out there in the blogger ocean has some insight on playing stride piano-give me a holler! 

Echoes of Spring, page 1

Well, this began when Dave started watching a documentary about jazz in New York in the late 1950s. There was a piano player that caught his fancy. He showed the documentary to me, and I got interested, too. The performer was Willie "The Lion" Smith, a stride pianist. While others played faster, Smith's tune, "Echoes of Spring," was beautiful and lyrical as well as being an example of virtuosity.

My birthday is Jan. 27. Dave is always happy when he can come up with a gift he he'll know I'll like. He found note-for-note transcriptions of Smith's piano solos, including Echoes of Spring. He ordered the book as a PDF and it arrived a few hours later.

I've been working on this song for less than 24 hours. Although it is MUCH slower than Smith's version, I think you can hear some of the beauty in the song. I plan to continue to blog the progress I'm making on the song, hoping to speed it up and make it more fluid. Please search YouTube for recordings of Smith playing the song.

How's that for something new to do in 2011?  Heck with losing 20 pounds!  Ha!  Eight pages total, one down, for the record.