serendipitous_lending raze yesterday kelly called me up and asked if i'd be willing to lend him my trumpet for a few weeks. the last time he was over he picked it up, played a little, and said he found it a lot more comfortable to play than a much more expensive horn he gifted to his nephew when he decided his trumpet playing days were far behind him. after having some fun with mine, he got to thinking it might be worthwhile to mess around and see if he could build up his lip again. i was all for doing what i could to help facilitate that. i said the only thing i had going on was a trip to a pawn shop that afternoon to check out a lap steel guitar. "you need a lap steel?" he asked me. and what i read as, "do you really need another guitar?" really meant, "i have one i never use. you can borrow it." so we swapped. he gets to borrow my trumpet, and i get to borrow his silvertone. it's a few frets short of full scale, i think, but it's old and funky, just the way i like my stringed things. 140909 ... epitome of incomprehensibility On the subject of instrument swap in particular, this reminds me of when I was at my aunt's house in August - when my parents came up, they brought with them a... what was it? I think it was called a concertina, a little accordion sort of thing... in exchange for her Celtic harp. She said she never used it and I, in particular, might like it. Celtic harp = uncomplicated harp: small, no pedals, best tuned in C or F (the C and F strings are different colours than the rest). I've yet to actually follow the how-to-play book yet, but I can pick out notes and two-note chords and I'm pretty good with the tuner. 140909 ... raze i'm happy way too much fun making weird semi-country-ish sounds. 140915 ... raze holy hell. how does "having" become "happy"? how, i ask you? howwwwwww… 140915 ... e_o_i Close auditory equivalent, I'm guessing, but I mix up "think" and "thing" when I'm writing faster than I can thing. Or that ukeleles make people happy. 140915 ... e_o_i Grr! Notice the unplanned mistake as well as that planned mistake think; how did I turn a guitar into a ukelele? I'll blame memory for that one. 140915 what's it to you? who go blather from