Guitar to Softball

I've quit guitar for the summer. I've got class Tuesday Thursday and a lab to do. The lab is only open Monday to Thursday, two of those days I have class on and I work all day every day. so that leaves only Monday night and Wednesday night for going to the lab. I've got softball on Monday's now so Wednesday night is going to be lab work night. I know it sounds odd lab work for french class, we mix various compounds and then exclaim 'Mon Dieu' if something bad happens and 'Sacre Bleu' if nothing interesting happens. Next week we'll be playing with mercury so I'm also learning how to say 'I've gone blind!' Anyway it leaves little time for guitar so I've basically swapped guitar for softball but that doesn't mean I don't have summer work to do for guitar.

I know a few scales, a Blues scale, major, and minor scales and I've picked a couple songs to practice. Instead of just knowing bits of a bunch of songs I'm going to learn 3 very well and I've picked songs with cords I'm not overly familiar with so that I get used to them. One song has a bar cord in it too which is very tough, for me anyway. I've also been taught a couple ways of playing the scales I know so it's not super boring for Kate and of course it will improve my hand dexterity. Hopefully by the fall I'll have made some real improvement, if I don't play I'll lose much of the improvements I have made. I do think the summer off will be good, to really get down the stuff I've learned without adding too much new stuff. It's easy to learn a scale or a practice technique but hard to master it in a week so I'll almost be playing catch up this summer.

The songs I've chosen are Knocking on Heaven's Door (it's easy and everyone knows it and it's even easy enough that I can play it on the piano), I Walk the Line (this song has a specific cord structure that will help with some odd 7 cords and with my general musical knowledge, plus it's Cash so it's awesome) and Brian Wilson (it's got an F, the bar cord, and it's very diverse with lots of changes and different cords). So I'll practice those and my scales and hopefully there will be a dramatic improvement over the summer, hopefully I won't have any bad habits. Without a weekly lesson to correct small technical errors it may be tough but I know what I'm doing now so we'll see what happens.

Kate and I missed our first softball game due to us being away Monday but we got an email saying we won 11-6 and our defense was stellar. That bodes very well for us since my defense is pretty good and Kate can handle herself too. Last year I remember a few occasions where I didn't have a problem throwing guys out while I was playing third and Kate first. It's pretty tough to throw a guy out playing third, you really have to whip the ball over to first and Kate caught everyone I threw to her. Except the one that was 5 feet over her head, but I only threw it so poorly because the ball smashed off my index finger. That finger hurt for a couple months after that play. Anyway I'm sure we'll improve the team when we play in our first game next Monday. I do have one concern about the team though, for some reason our team name is "Two Strikes, Yer Out". I'm not really sure what that means, there are three strikes in baseball and this is softball where we get 4 pitches, there are no strikes. I have to suppose that the name is supposed to be witty somehow but I can't quite figure out how. We were the individual team number 2 so maybe they were trying to incorporate the number 2 into our name? But why? Who cares if the number 2 is in our name, unless maybe we had to put 2 in our name, which seems odd to me. Even if we did have to put 2 in our name why not call the team, 'Felt Up on 2nd' (Felts for short) or the 'Two-Two Gang' or even just 'Two Strikes'? 'Two Strikes, Yer Out' makes us sound like we're noobs and don't even know the rules of the game. I'll just go with the flow though, after all what's in a name, would softball smell as sweet or be any less fun were it to go by any other name?

Exercise has also been chopped for the past couple weeks, too cold, too much Calgary, I'm lazy and love Xbox, but we'll get back on it. I'll make myself go for a horrible despicable run this weekend, if it's not too cold.

I guess this time it's the crap I'm gonna do.