Personal Log 6.18.22

It's been a long day [or couple of weeks, depending on how far you go back] & I'm tired, I mean really tired. It's past midnight & I have to be up at sunrise to get some yard work done for the elderly widow woman next door to my folks. I'm a firm believer in what the Bible says when it says “take care of the orphans & the widows”. Come to think of it, there's a large number of widows in my fellowship & sometimes I wonder if we take for granted that their needs are met, whether those needs take the form of housework, plumbing, electrical, automotive, yard work/landscaping/mowing, gutters, etc; between all the men in our fellowship, all the needs of all the people (men, women & children) should be well taken care of, “should be”… 

It's been a rough week for my mom, she had some heart trouble for a couple of days & I'll be honest, it gets a little scary when that happens, but we believe & trust in God that she is healed, we keep speaking that over her & today she looked & felt pretty good. At times, she does get discouraged about her health but let's honest, we all get a little discouraged about different things. She turns 80 this Sunday & my brothers are all in town to host a birthday shindig for her. I'm very grateful to still have her around & everyday, it seems I'm learning something new. Today I learned how to make a very easy alfredo sauce, she just whipped it up & showed me step-by-step how to do it.

In whatever spare time I have (usually between 10 pm – 2 am) I've been putting the finishing touches on my acoustic vignettes EP & instrumental rock CD, laying down tracks for a worship CD & now looking at recording some Christmas songs w/ some original arrangements. When I'm this tired I make a lot of mistakes so I have to go kinda slow…

On top of all that, I've been writing some Classic TV Bible Studies; as some of you know I've written a few Mayberry Bible Studies (based off of The Andy Griffith Show) but these newer ones are from Father Knows Best, Hazel, Leave It To Beaver, Gilligan's Island & believe it or not, the Brady Bunch. 'Not sure why I'm writing all these but there must be a reason.

Lastly, I finally bought a mandolin. 'Been wanting to for a couple of years & now just seemed like the right time. I had to work a lot of odd jobs to pay for it, but I got it. I feel it needs to be taken to Guitar Center (or somewhere local perhaps) and properly setup w/ the string height, intonation, etc, but it's not bad as-is. The learning curve was very small & I picked up on the tuning & chords fairly easily. So, 6 minutes later I'm playing all kinds of songs (or trying to) but for some reason, I don't remember the frets being so small & close together & I also don't recall it being so “jangly”.

The standard tuning for a mandolin is G D A E & that high E is something else! Maybe it was my tiredness but I wasn't really in the mood for “jangly” so I did a quick search on alternate tunings & a few people use G D A D, which is simply lowering the E one step. Boy, that did it. The mandolin gave off this cool, earthy sound/tone that seemed to open it up. 

My friend Matt has his acoustic tuned to D A D G A D, which again makes his guitar sound much more open & beautiful. Sometimes I'll use what's called a Double-Drop D tuning on my acoustic, which is simple lowering the low & high E's down one step to D, resulting in D A D G B D, it's just beautiful sounding so I simply transferred that to mandolin. Now I'm playing it somewhat like a bass guitar, in many cases just using one finger for my chords/chord voicings (instead of 1-3-5 playing 1-3, 1-5 or 3-5). 

Anyway, that was the high point of the last couple of weeks. I can barely keep my eyes open so I'll close but I am a little encouraged that the music projects will soon be forthcoming, this year!