Playing Chords by Ear

 

It's been a challenge walking at lunch this summer. Jackson's Landing was closed, but apparently it is now open again, although it's much harder to get to with the bridge closed. The road to Governor's Island is under construction, so there's another close place that's impossible to get to this summer. I've been walking in the shade of the little patch of trees in our neighborhood, but there are two porta-potties there for the boat users, and today as I was walking around in the grass, a truck came to pump out the porta-potties. I didn't want any part of that, so I went to an even more meager patch of shade, but that was too close to the construction of the new restaurant and apartment building where Mariner's Inn had been, so I ended up walking behind my building in a very meager patch of shade. In the construction zone, a dump truck made an unearthly noise every time it dumped out a load of dirt, and then a little Bobcat drove up the pile of dirt, and I kept thinking it might tip right over. Ugh - I'm so glad I don't have to work in construction!

After work, Travalon went to Watertown and saw two trains. Here is the old train depot, which is now a used car showroom.

Here are some photos of graffiti; there's lots of great graffiti in the videos he made, so I'll try to make screenshots tomorrow.

And this is the main building at Maranatha Baptist University.

This evening I went to the big Moldy Jam group at the music club. I had a lot of fun playing fiddle yesterday and almost brought the violin, but instead I brought the mandolin and tried to figure out chords. In some ways it's easier to learn tunes by ear than figure out chords by ear, so this is a worthy skill to work on. One of the owners of the club sat next to me and played guitar, and he's really good at picking out chords, so that helped. And if I felt like it, I could play the tune - the mandolin is versatile like that. We had a new young person come, an employee at the big software firm south of town that so many people work at. The Single B-Boy worked there for years. They might have been the only person besides me who had to get up for work in the morning, since most of the Moldy Jam people are retirement age. I think I've been playing too much, though - my inner elbow hurts, and Dr. Google tells me I have Golf Elbow, which is nothing serious but is a repetition injury, so maybe it's best that I put the instruments down for a day or two and rest.

Travalon just sent me a couple more photos. His new Casey Jones dog arrived in the mail today.

And this is our favorite view at Pheasant Branch.

You can see why we love to go there.

Famous Hat