Winter’s Come and Gone

Well, not quite, but it’s a cool song and it’ll soon be true.  Here’s my friends Kenny and Amanda Smith doing the song:

We still have some (probably) cold weather ahead but on the whole, it’s been a very mild winter.  We’ve had just a few small snowfalls and we definitely need some more moisture to get started growing grass in ’13.  The forecast isn’t calling for rain but I’ve seen it rain here and not there, so I’m hopeful that we’ll get something.  Just in case, though, we’re reducing our cattle load to 60% of normal operating capacity.  Now, that sounds easy on paper, but that means a 40% reduction in income, too.   I should be able to make that up by working on guitars, but we’re anticipating a lean summer.  But, I’m confident that we’ll be okay.

Christmas came and went and went enjoyed spending it in Santa Fe at my mother’s house.  I’ve otherwise mostly just been working on guitars, working on sermons, and doing what I normally do this time of the year.  One new thing is that I’m going to make an effort to shoot in the State Championship archery rounds, and to prepare for that I’ve been tuning bows and practicing.

We got a new-to-us Harris' hawk right after the NAFA meet back in Thanksgiving and we've been working with him.  He's doing okay but we just don't have any game.  Maybe next year.

I had a nice surprise the other day. I was wanting a drum track to practice electric guitar with and I thought "Garageband!" So, I fired it up on David's former iPad and guess what I found on there? A recording of us jamming. Before he got his little drum set, he played our Ashbory Bass. If you've never seen one of these, they have a very short scale and literally rubber bands for strings. They are super-easy to play.  David started fooling around with it and I could see he had a good sense of rhythm, so I said “Why don’t I show you a chord progression?”  I showed him a simple I-IV-V in G and it didn’t take him long to get it down.  I remember the day he set his iPad down in front of the amp and recorded himself and then played it back thru the amp (using some connectors I'd put together) and then recorded me playing along with him. We did that _once_ and that was the recording I found today.  I edited a rough start out (I was trying to figure out if he had the right number of beats) and added a few more photos of him and threw this little video together.

I also found on Garageband  a recording of him singing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" along with a Garageband keyboard which he presumably played.  What a couple of special finds, huh?

We’re continuing to work through David’s passing.  The hardest part is going to the cemetery.   They called and said that David’s headstone had come in and so we drove out to see it.  It was a little crooked so I reached out to straighten it up.  I was able to touch his casket at the burial but something about touching the headstone just wiped me out.  We came home and I slept for 4 hours.  We’ve been back twice to put plastic flowers back in place and both times I’ve come down with gout which, in me, seems to be stress-related.  However, I continue to be given little “comfort circumstances” and am gaining peace.  Here’s an interesting story...  I’ve been using E-Sword software for years but have never used the reference library downloads.  Well, I moved to a new computer (originally supposed to be Georgia’s but ended up being mine) and in the process of updating everything I re-installed E-Sword and while doing that, I looked over the reference library downloads and found this book:

Have Heart

So, I downloaded and read it.  I was an amazing read.  It’s a story of a pastor whose 18-year old was killed in a car wreck and the things they went thru while dealing with it.  I’ve read quite a few books on death, but this one really hit home. I recommend it highly. 

Well, let’s wrap this up.

Mom and Derek at the gravesite

 

A Fender Esquire that I put together