Early Morning Rain

Well a trip to Penrith today , and hope the weather turns out better that it is looking now. Yesterday was like that a deluge during the night followed by early morning rain and then by home time blue skies. Check out my Instagram feed here . Hope the light will be good enough to take some photographs and I'm takeing both my cameras and my iPad just in case I get the opportunity for some good shots.

I will be traveling along the route of the River Tyne from Newcastle parallel to Hadrians Wall , which I helped light up in 2010. Check the link above and you will find some video . One thing about taking photographs and videos is that you never actually appear in them , although then again I could not afford to keep replacing the broken lenses, I think I've only seen a handful of acceptable photographs of me and the current profile pic is over five years old , so need to replace that soon .

Anyway , I know today will brighten up , there are lots of good things happening , and I will see some wonderful scenery, but will leave you with the excellent Gordon Lightfoot song eponymous with this post:

More Rain

Last night at 2am I was woken up by a huge downpour. The upside is that I don't have to water the garden , but as my contact lenses settled in my eyes , focusing slowly on a magazine ensuring the right lens in the right eye, I could still hear the rain coming down , admittedly not as bad during the night. I had been tempted to video it as deep rivulets streamed down the road outside, but decided not to (it was 2am).
Hopefully the trains will still be running on time and the tracks haven't been washed away. We shall see. Not sure if the song is appropriate as it's now after the deluge, but there's still a lot of rain in the sky , so who knows I may be boating home and it's and excuse to play the wonderful Jackson Browne. 

Oh I managed to export a picture from Artrage, amazing how an unconnected event can stimulate the mind into working out how to do things. It's definitely not intuitive , but that's down to Apple's super intuitive interface. Thing is generally iPads are mostly for looking not doing , but I can actually start working on pictures in Artrage. It's very primitive but this is the first one I've done , mainly to test that I can actually get stuff out  of it!

Tara

Blank Canvas and Saltires

It's funny when you want to really do something but every time you try , it just doesn't work out. I'm working with a program called Artrage and am amazed how counter intuitive the software is. Basically I what to draw a picture , and it gets part of the way the screws up my picture. I'm having similar problems with Garageband. Have my first completed piece but it won't export to iTunes, I've just removed all the music and it still seems to hang.

 Having said that the pict, is getting better each time so, who knows it may turn out OK in the end.

The thing this calls to mind Robert The Bruce and the spider which  I thought was immortalised in a poem by Robert Burns . I must have been imagining it . So we'll just go for this Eddi Reader singing "Ae Fond Kiss" , and why not:

Three fingers , Left Hand and a real Bass Guitarist

The little finger is slowly improving , I think , but still waiting to see a neurologist. The muscle wastage is visible , and not sure what that will mean in the future, I've been playing about with Garageband on the iPad and still trying to extricate my first (very basic) composition out of it. Each time it just stops working but it's great to play with . Anyway, I'm still having difficulty with guitar , though I've taught myself a rudimentary "Smokestack Lightnin'" m but still trying .

So I thought I'd maybe try the Tanglewood . I still can only use three fingers, but thought I'd try a bit of bass improvisation . Just recorded this too iPad so not trying to impress anybody , but it's ages since I even held a bass and so just did a little two minute improvisation , on quiet so not to annoy the neighbours too much. Stanley Clarke it is not!

I'm happy with the first try as nothing was planned and only just decided to do it now. So it's just a progress report and the hand is doing OK!!

Here's some real bass playing !!

Impatience and Doctor Who

Why is it that people can't wait for anything these days. I'm made up that we have Peter Capaldi as the new Doctor , but couldn't they have kept it under wraps until the next generation. I've loved Peter Capaldi  from his role in the funnily atrocious Lair Of The White Worm , a Ken Russel excess fest full of single entendres , then Local Hero , and his probably crowning character as the swearily inventive spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It.
So we now know robbing Matt Smith's exit of a huge chuck of suspense. If I were to choose some music to play it could be the Theme from Local Hero but instead I'm going to post Brian Eno#s "This" where the word this is repeated as the rhythm to the song. Has no bearing to what I'm talking about but I dont really care,

Heat and Silence

This is going to be a very short post, but it's August now and trying to think of something to say. The weather is still hot , and there was a bit of rain today. That's about it. Somewhere down this blog there is an exercise that I carried out in Craster to write two thousand words with no planning whatsoever and it turned into an essay on the difficulties of trying to write two thousand words.

Anyway was talking with someone yesterday about how you can integrate silence into talking to enable things to sink in to a potential audience. almost all of us have filler words because we are uncomfortable with silence. Once these are pointed out you can eradicate them , because we tend to take our own behavior as the norm. So when we repetitively reuse a phrase it dilutes the meaning.

So that's

Fighting With My Left Hand III

Cm Successfully Held down for first time in about four months

I've just managed to play a Cm chord . It used to be easy but using my little finger on my left hand has been awkward since the incident. This is a huge step forward . I'm managing with the other three fingers , but losing that later use of all the fingers of your hand makes certain tasks a little difficult.

I'm waiting for an appointment with a neurologist , and two doctors have remarked that there is obvious muscle wastage , usually attributed to results of a trapped nerve , which is better that the initial potential diagnosis. Obviously there's still a long way to go and I keep trying to do other things with my left hand and think "Did I ever do that with my left hand?".

Anyway despite the downpour last night wondering whether to attempt to mow the lawn and make some more newspaper logs.