my ukulele progress

I have just been doing little projects waiting for my wife to wake up. I put a new handle on the toilet and fixed the shower curtain rod with some flanges and weather-stripped the kitchen door which is sagging a bit and letting in cool air. I also removed the swamp cooler's vent and inserted some recycled denim to keep the cold air from entering the house from above. I should have done this month's ago as my $160 gas bill will attest.
I did find an egg methodology I like. I put a dozen eggs into the pressure cooker. I turned on the stove and once the cooker is pressurized I let it hiss for exactly one minute (I used a stop watch). Then immediately do a quick release of steam and then chill the eggs in a bowl of cold water. That M.O. made the yolks as I like them: moist and a bit jellied without being runny. I don't know if it is this particular batch of eggs or if it is a by-product of the pressure cooking...but they are rather difficult to peel.
 
I suspect the eggs you used were very fresh. Usually older eggs are easier to peel. At least, that's what I remember. Leave a few for a week or two and prepare them the same way again.
 
David Crosby's death is a bit upsetting for me. I remember that around 1985 or so, I and my peers were off-put by where music was going. So we retreated to the music of our parents. So I was very immersed in the late 60's music. Laurel Canyon was a musical Camelot for me. Since I have been playing my own music, I don't listen to that stuff anymore because of cross-contamination. I mostly listen to desert rock, largely instrumental fuzz-pedaled music that is very different from the Roots music that I play, so that it doesn't influence me. But my heart is with Crosby and Neil Young. So it is sad to hear of him passing.

But I am blessed in other aspects of my musical life. I am the cook around here and my wife put in her order for fish and millet. I had to approach her an hour later and apologize because I became waylaid with a Piedmont eight bar progression and I hadn't made any progress on her supper. She both understood and accepted the excuse. So I don't have it so bad.

I don't know if it is real or just psychological projection, but the house seems stuffy since I sealed up the leaks around the door and 20X20 hole in the ceiling from the swamp cooler vent.
 
I made a steak and I added a velouté sauce. I just threw a handful of fat into a skillet and a handful of garbanzo flour. Then I just added some season water. I know you're supposed to add stock, but come on...if you're not making your own stock, the stock you get from the store is just glorified salt water. So why pay $10 for a carton of salt water. I carmelized a shallot, added some umami powder and asafoetida, put in a little bit of water...and then I added that mixture to the roux and made a sauce for the steak in a few minutes. The sauce actually took longer than the meat since I eat what is tantamount to raw beef.

I have also been doing something that feels weird to me. I am broiling my fish. It just seems so 70's. My oven's broiler is essentially a storage area, but I remember growing up with a lot of broiled meat and I especially remember having to clean that damned broiler pan after my parents made spare ribs. That was a lot of scrubbing. So I believe there's nothing wrong with broiling; it just seems like it is out of fashion.
 
David Crosby's death is a bit upsetting for me.
I discovered CSN and sometimes Y and... anyhow, when in High School (class of 1978) and as I became a DJ. I learned to sing with these bands, plus Joni M and James Taylor.

I re-heard some of these songs last night... and it was 49 Goodbyes that I woke up with.

Just finished If I could only remember my name 5 minutes ago... Weird but... well... weird.

I consider myself a harmony specialist... now I can see where I learned it.

Only "met' Crosby once... at the Big Sur Jade Fest, about 15 years ago. He bought a big pile of jade and was just walking around... getting mobbed. Well, there were only about 200 people there, but still. People wanted him to sign stuff, the usual. He broke away from the scrum and walked right towards me. I said "Cool!" and he said "Cool!" and gave me the walrus grin.

Amazing talent... glad I wasn't ever close friend or collaborator...

One of his kids lives near here in Sonoma. Tours with Jackson Browne and is a go-to touring musician nationally. Ripples continue to spread from from this force of nature, Croz.

Rest peacefully! You did more in one lifetime than most of us could accomplish in two of them.
 
Had fish cakes last night... broiled the fish, then flaked it, and formed into patties after being mixed with cooked quinoa... then baked. Really nice!
 
I went back to baking my fish for one practical reason. My wife finds it very difficult to separate the meat and the skin on broiled fish. I guess it derives from the top heat of broiling versus the surrounding heat of baking. I baked some trout, roasted some rutabagas, and pressure cooked millet. Nothing flashy, but it is a favorite here.

Today I started playing E super lokrian and for some reason the F was really sounding like the root. Instead of fighting it, I played my chords from F: Fm6, A#m7, C7b9, A#7b9, A#7, C7. For the melody I kept within E super lokrian. I don't have much to say on that front because it happened rather quickly and I haven't had time to process it all.

I made a few purchases lately. I bought a serrated chef's knife to serve as my serrated knife replacing the cheap bread knife. I will have to buy a bagel and see if the serrated knife serves as a bread knife before I retire my bread knife. There is a chance that the serrations are too fine to serve as a bread knife.

I was going to buy a book on jazz to read up on some things. However I saw a book that was cheaper entitled Arion's Lyre. It is a study of the connection between Archaic Age poetry and Hellenistic poetry. I know the story of Arion and his lyre and I suppose only time will tell how that story fits into the naming of this book.
 
I have been doing some thinking about how the F, the flat 2, sounds more like home to me when playing the E super lokrian. Perhaps someone with more of a theoretical basis could name the phenomenon but I lack that vocabulary so I can just paraphrase what I observe. I think the E lacks the supporting cast to make it sound like the tonic. The E super lokrian doesn't have a dominant, a B. It has a C (an augmented dominant) and an A# (a flattened dominant). So I hypothesize that the E doesn't have its dominant and subdominant to establish it as the tonic. The F, on the other hand exists in tandem with the C, which is its dominant, as well as an A# (which would enharmonically be called Bb in the key of F). So the F has its dominant and subdominant and that is why it sounds more like home in this key.

But that's all a moot point because I decided to move back to the E Neapolitan.

I drove uptown today to get some supplies. It was windy and the wind chill was noticeable in my windowless jeep. The trees were swaying--which you would expect. But the stop signs were oscillating like bobble-heads. The wind was rather stiff and it was from the east and east winds never betoken good tidings.

Anyway, I bought a lot of big things which cost $170 but will last for a long time. I bought a gas-can sized parcel of olive oil which I hope will last the better part of a year. I also bought a gargantuan can of ghee and a keg of kalamata olives. I also bought some lamb shanks because I had been deriding store-bought stock as little more than salt water. I figured I needed to put my money where my mouth is and get some sources of marrow and add mirapoix and actually make stock.

I also bought two things I do not usually eat: tomatoes and some crusty bread, some ciabattini rolls. I bought them because I am anticipating my serrated chef knife tomorrow. I want to ensure that my new knife can deal with cutting tomatoes and bread to serve as a test of its competence.
 
Something I rarely talk about is my Blueridge tenor guitar. I treat it like a baritone ukulele...for better or worse. Something I love about it is the headstock. I always wanted a Bacon and Day Senorita Guitar and the Blueridge headstock reminds me of a Bacon and Day in its festoonings and in the slenderness of the headstock.

I have custom ukes, but my luthiers were a bit touchy about headstocks. They seemed to have their go-to jigs that they used. I didn't feel that I could push in that regard but I would have loved to receive a thin classic Martin headstock shape.
 
My serrated chef's knife was delivered around 8 p.m. and the UPS person didn't even knock. He just left it lying on the stoop where any homeless person could have stolen it. A bit frustrating. I bought some bread and tomatoes, even though I don't eat those things, just to test out the serrations. I was afraid the scallops would be too fine and it wouldn't serve the most basic of functions of slicing bread and tomatoes. It worked admirably. All my concerns were baseless. I will probably use the knife more for cutting up meat and vegetables.
 
My new paring knife arrived today. So now my arsenal is complete. I have 5 knives, two of which are superfluous. I do have a tomato knife which is a smaller serrated knife and I have a vegetable cleaver which is a cleaver with a thinner blade than a traditional cleaver that you can use to cleave bones. I do appreciate that my serrated and non-serrated chef knives can do everything. However I keep my tomato knife and cleaver because I like them. I sometimes use my tomato knife for non-culinary actions such as cutting the plastic seal around a bottle of sauce and the cleaver is nice because it can scoop what it chops like a spatula. I kind of resent a lot of the expert advice from chefs that I have read that imply or state that our moms were stupid to buy all those knives. They were just influenced by the marketing of the time. It was just the accepted thing to get a block and fill it with a bunch of knives. Nowadays they prevailing paradigm leans more to the pragmatic and minimalistic side.

I am currently pressure cooking some white stock. I took a bunch of lamb shanks and added carrots, celery, and leeks. The pressure cooker gets the job done a lot faster and the only drawback is that you cannot skim. I would never skim anyway, but I know there as fusspots who like to skim to achieve a clear stock. That might be useful if you were going to serve the stock as a stand-alone consommé. However I add my stock to roux or to beans. There's no reason to make the stock more visually appealing.

I have been playing around with 7#9 chords and to be honest I just don't see the benefit. Even if you omit the tonic instead of the dominant, they are still a bit of a stretch and they require a bit of set-up. And I don't really miss them. Obviously they have a sound, but they serve the same purpose as the 7b9 which is super easy to form. It is kind of like the difference between the dim chord and the dim7 chord. You can hear the difference objectively but musically you don't usually lament or regret going with a dim7 instead of a dim. Similarly you can use a b9 versus a #9 and although you can hear the diff, the diff doesn't matter because when you use these, you use them for a certain reason and they operate in the same range although their particulars differ they create the similar dissonant result that you're aiming for.
 
The pressure cooker gets the job done a lot faster and the only drawback is that you cannot skim. I would never skim anyway, but I know there as fusspots who like to skim to achieve a clear stock.
Honestly, I've always achieved a clear enough stock - just let it settle. Plus a lot of the blood proteins stick to the IP, so problem solved!
 
Anyway, I bought a lot of big things which cost $170 but will last for a long time. I bought a gas-can sized parcel of olive oil which I hope will last the better part of a year. I also bought a gargantuan can of ghee and a keg of kalamata olives
Hmmm... so are my admonitions to stock up and have some provisions on hand for a rainy day starting to have some effect?

About 10 years ago, one of my kids started selling Cutco knives. The whole outfit and their MLM sales approach has a strange aroma which turned me off completely - but hey, it's my kid, so of course we bought a few and were gifted a couple.

The one thing Cutco has figured out is how to make a serrated knife that can he sharpened easily. The knives are expensive but very high quality. And the serrated ones are not scalloped like the usual knives, but are an inverted trapezoid cut that mates to a reflected cut sharpening stone. Very easy to sharpen up, which has been done 2X in the 10+ years we have owned them.

The cheese knife is my favorite. Cuts tomatoes 3mm thick no problem... my second choice bagel knife as well...
 
Hmmm... so are my admonitions to stock up and have some provisions on hand for a rainy day starting to have some effect?
I would never disdain your adjurations. Plus, I was at an ethnic market that caters to multi-generational extended families, so all the boxes are big.
Speaking of big, I have chosen not to enter into the discussion of playing with big or small volume because the discussion seemed fraught with danger--the danger of insulting people. Are you a flailing, frailing stummer or do you play with touch? I have been married almost 30 years and I know a trap when I see it. I'll just play what it is in my head and my song will be my implicit answer and my homage to people like Daniel Ward or Samantha Muir (I actually bought one of my ukes based on luthier recommendations from Sam's website).

I did run across a germane quote. Its context is rock and roll and amplified instruments and it was "if you can't move air, then you can't move people."
 
My white stock turned out fine: greasy celery water. 99% of the time celery is like iceberg lettuce--just some ubiquitous, tasteless thing. But celery is the smell of soup. Of course, you don't want to drink 8 ounces of the celery juice as a matutinal health drink, but it is good in dribs and drabs. For example, for breakfast I made a porterhouse steak and eggs and I made a sauce to be poured atop: a spoon of butter and a spoon of garbanzo flour. Then a spoon of white stock to combine it all and a shallot. It is a nice sauce.

The other thing I like to do with stock is make an ad hoc soup that I derived from my reading of Arturo Toscaninni's life. You finely chop up some celery and briefly poach it in butter and then add a grain (the maestro used rice; I use millet). Add stock. It is a great albeit slight soup.
 
Doesn't get much more indecent than this (from wikipedia)
Lovage is an erect, herbaceous, perennial plant growing to 1.8–2.5 m (6–8 ft) tall, with a basal rosette of leaves and stems with further leaves, the flowers being produced in umbels at the top of the stems. The stems and leaves are shiny glabrous green to yellow-green and smell somewhat similar to celery when crushed. The larger basal leaves are up to 70 cm (28 in) long, tripinnate, with broad triangular to rhomboidal, acutely pointed leaflets with a few marginal teeth; the stem leaves are smaller, and less divided with few leaflets. The flowers are yellow to greenish-yellow, 2–3 mm (1⁄16–1⁄8 in) diameter, produced in globose umbels up to 10–15 cm (4–6 in) diameter; flowering is in late spring. The fruit is a dry two-parted schizocarp 4–7 mm (3⁄16–1⁄4 in) long, mature in autumn.

There's a skit, called "Dirty Words," from a comedy group called The Frantics (or 4 on the Floor) from Canada. "Areas is not a dirty word!" "It is if you say it right!" I find that so much from botanical descriptions can be taken that way. If you can't propose indecently on the UU forum, I'm not sure where you can ;)
 
Doesn't get much more indecent than this (from wikipedia)


There's a skit, called "Dirty Words," from a comedy group called The Frantics (or 4 on the Floor) from Canada. "Areas is not a dirty word!" "It is if you say it right!" I find that so much from botanical descriptions can be taken that way. If you can't propose indecently on the UU forum, I'm not sure where you can ;)
So, is it pronounced, "LAH-vazh" or "Lahv-AGE"?
 
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