O Sole Mio

Guess what I've been playing in my piano lesson book? You got it O Sole Mio. A little Somewhere Over the Rainbow as well. It's actually coming back much faster than I thought it would. Of course I'm not playing Chopin or anything but my fingers are moving and I'm remember my theory, which helps a ton when playing the piano I think. Of course I'm still just playing stuff in C, G and F Major. So not very difficult and not many of those black keys mixed in yet. We'll see how things progress.

I've been looking at a couple different composition programs and can't make up my mind between Sibelius or Finale. It looks like Sibelius is more user friendly, but that you can do more with Finale. Of course they also cost about $600. When you see the price pen and paper looks kind of good huh? :)

Have a nice night all.

PS: Larry your puppy is very cute. :)

Oh to have a piano again

I'm so extremely excited. I have been thinking about getting a piano for 6 years now but never really followed through with it because of money or time. Recently though I've found that I really miss playing music and started practicing my violin in ernest again. This of course also resparked my desire to get a piano. So off I went on my search for the perfect piano that would fit my needs and desires. I knew that I wanted to look at digital piano's because it is superb to be able to have a piano accompany you while playing another instrament. Thank god for who ever invented MIDI. So I looked on line and decided that I really liked the Yamaha Clavinova series of digital piano. They look nice, like an acoustic piano, but have the sound of a grand piano. So off I went to the music store to play and hear some of these piano's. For those of you that haven't heard a high quality digital piano recently all I can say is WOW! When I was in my middle teens my grandma gave me a digital keyboard that had maybe 3 octaves and maybe 8 notes of polyphony. It was great and I loved it but let me just say that 10 to 15 years makes a huge difference. These new digitals sound like the real thing. You can hear the harmonics between the strings and everything. It is really amazing. Plus they have the different MIDI voices, such as strings, horns, etc, which don't sound as good as the real thing, but good enough. I looked at a couple different models. First the Clavinova CLP 240 and then the Clavinova CLP 270. After listening to the 270 I choose it. It was superb and you really could tell a difference between the 240 and 270. The 270 has this wonder iAFC sound reproduction technology that actually samples the sound in the room and then incorporates it into the sound so that you get a more full rich sound coming out of the piano. It also had a better speaker system built in which I'm sure helps as well. It also helps that I was able to talk him down from $4895 to $3495.

So now I just need to start practicing again, I haven't played a piano in 12 or 13 years. I'm sure it will come back to quickly though as long as I can still read the bass clef. Since my main instrument is treble clef I don't use bass that often and when you don't use something you tend to forget it. Anyway if you can't tell I'm so super excited!!!

Main Floor Remodel Pic's

Here are the pictures of what everything looks like. I wish I had taken some pictures of what it looked like before...but oh well.

First we have a picture of the living room with the floors refinished but not the new furniture yet.

Another picture of the refinished floors but no furniture yet.


A picture of the dining room with the floors refinished but no furniture yet.


A picture of the living with the new furniture.


Another picture of the living room with the furniture.


A picture of the dining room with the new furniture.

It's Here!! Yeah for Furniture

After a month with an empty dining room and living room, I'm excited to say that the new furniture is here. It was delivered on Wednesday evening and it looks great. Thanks to Jimmae for his help in picking it out. I haven't had a chance to take pictures of it with my camera yet, but I did save the pictures Ethan Allen website so you can see what each piece looks like. So without further aidou (I took french and I still can't spell that word) here they are.

Dining Table


Dining Table Chairs (I got these in Black)

Buffet Table or Console Table depending on your area of the country (This is in the normal wood color not white)

Coffee Table

Nesting Tables

Lamp

And the Piece D'Resistance....Armoire Style Video Cabinet

Refinishing Wood Floors

So my new furniture is in 2 months sooner than I was expecting. Normally this would be exciting news except that I need to refinish the hardwood floors on the main floor before the furniture is delivered. So guess what I did this past weekend. Yup refinish the hardwood floors. First let me just say I am so sore even the bones in my hands hurt. Here is why. I rented the floor sander machine from the home depot on Friday afternoon. I sanded the floors from 7pm until Midnight on Friday. I then got up at 7 on Saturday morning and started sanding again until 6pm. So that is a total of 16 hours of sanding the floors. Normally it wouldn't have taken so long except the person that owned the house before me tried to refnish the dining room floor and made it all wavy so I not only had to sand off the old finish, but flatten out the wavy wood also. So after the sanding I got to vaccum the floor and then get down on my hands and knees and use a tack cloth to get up the fine stuff. Then on to the first coat of polyurethane. After that and feeling like I was going to get high off the fumes I waited 3 hours for it to dry and put on the next coat. Then I went to bed around midnight on Saturday night. Then up again at 7 to abrade the floor with the sander, revaccum, get back down on my hands and knees with a tack cloth and then put on the final coat of polyurethane. Did I mention that I was sore.

Over all the floors look really nice. I haven't taken any pictures yet, but before I move the furniture back on tomorrow night I'll try to get some photo's to post.

Picture of Willow

IMG_4771
Originally uploaded by TimChase01.

Finally got my pictures uploaded to flickr so I thought you all might like to see a picture of Willow. Willow is the only girl puppy from Beebe's litter last year. She is a silly little girl and super sweet.

I'm Back

Sorry I haven't written in a while. I'm back from Boston and will be posting some pictures and what happened shortly. Just trying to get all caught up from being gone for 9 days.