Doppleganger and Practice

Sunday, there was some guy at this restaurant that SiL, Bro, Mom, Z'ster, and Limo all thought looked like me. Sad thing is, I thought he looked like a slob. Perhaps it's time I get that makeover.

On the uke front. I have discovered a way to increase my practice time by a half-hour a day. On my way home, I bought a music stand on sale and took it to school with me Monday morning. As my fans know, I usually stand outside my classroom playing the songs I know while the kids come in the classroom. Now, I set songs that I am trying to learn on the music stand and practice them between classes for about 5 minutes at a time. I can get through the chord progressions twice in that amount of time. This will be great for those more complicated songs that I keep putting off. I tend to stick within a certain range, which means that I stay within the same four or five chords much of the time as far as song selection goes. So this is good.

By the time school was out today, I practically had Over the Rainbow nailed. Still have a couple of difficult chords changes to overcome, but I should have it by tomorrow.

Learned some new techniques at the Cerritos Uke Fest over the weekend. Went to a workshop run by Lil Rev and another by Cool Hand Uke. Cool Hand Uke was god, but digressed a lot with personal anecdotes. But he did have me playing Jamaica Farewell(easy) and Ain't She Sweet? (moderately difficult) by the end of the session.

Lil Rev is a uke player (and multi-instrumentalist) that I admire. I admire even more that he seems to be a dedicated roving folk musician. A good teacher too. Had us doing some interesting strums. Taught us how to do Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits also. Not too hard, but I never thought about it before.

Spent Sunday reading a book that I have been teaching for a week. I had read it many years ago and thought I knew it very well, until I tried leading a discussion on it and realized it was time for a re-read.

Mostly a productive weekend.