We took the kids out last night.  I had to miss band practice, but it’s worth it for quality kid time, even though I feel bad about missing band practice.  We got home at a little before 10:00 and I was exhausted.  Completely out of gas.  I took a minute to make myself lunch for work today and then went to bed.

The numbers were okay.  SleepWatch tried to tell me that I was asleep from 7:45 to 9:30.  Nope.  I was not asleep and I have witnesses to prove it.  I was able to delete that entry from the stats.  It also had me asleep from 10:45 to 4:35 with one 10+ minute wake up in between.  That’s pretty accurate.

It still came up under six hours for my total sleep.  I would really like to start getting that total up over six, I tells you.  Six hours of sleep is beginning to feel like an unattainable goal.  Even when I go to bed early, I still wake up five hours and 45 minutes later.  It’s getting annoying.

I need to figure out how to travel with my shiny new CPAP machine.  It came in a nice case that doesn’t have space for the mask or the hose.  I don’t know if I will be able to fit it all into a carry on bag or not, but that’s the goal right now.  I’m also going to have to bring a bottle of distilled water.  I highly doubt I’ll be able to buy one of those at the hotel.  Disney thinks of pretty much everything, but I don’t think they’ll think of that.  Water will need to go into my checked bag.  No biggie.

Our vacation is so close that it’s becoming difficult to think about anything else.  Must… stay… focused…

I just had a thought about my CPAP mask.  Is it possible that the failure to hold the seal against my face is due to me missing some back teeth?  Maybe I move my head in the wrong way and my cheek pulls in around a missing tooth and it creates a little gap between my cheek and the mask?

I wonder.

I just scared the crap out of myself.

I have all this fun guitar gear but when push comes to shove I really don’t know how any of it really works.  I plug it in, I play through it, rock and roll all night.  But what if something goes wrong with one of these toys?  I have no idea how to fix it.  That’s why I never do anything to disturb the apple cart.

Earlier today I did something that might have disturbed the apple cart.

My amp is a combo.  That means the amplifier and the speaker are included in the same box.  In my case there is a cable with a quarter inch jack that connects the speaker to the amplifier.  In some cases the two are connected with solder.  Not in my case though.

Out of fear of screwing something up, I have never ever touched the cable that connects the speak to the amp.  Never.  What if I fiddled with the plug and then it stopped working?  Nope, not touching it.

I have an attenuator now though.  That changes everything.  To use it, you have to place it into the signal path between the amplifier and the speaker.  That means, I have to unplug the speaker and plug it into the box, then run another speaker cable from the box to the amp.  Never having touched that plug before I didn’t know if there was enough slack on the cable to reach the top of the cabinet.

There is.

I know this because I just unplugged the speaker from the amp and checked the length of the cable.  When I pulled out that plug, my heart literally stopped for a second.  Yikes, that scared the hell out of me.  I was already planning on hitting a Guitar Center today to pick up a mic, so now I have to grab another speaker cable too.  Then I will be in business.  Granted, I will be terrified every time I hook this little guy up, but that’s just because I am a wimp.

But first… episode one of the new season of Stranger Things.  Let the creepy commence.

My first toe dipped into the vast sea of amplifier attenuation.

The SleepWatch app on my phone told me I was asleep at 11:00 last night.  In truth though, at 11:00 I went from watching TV with my step son to sitting in the office on my computer, listening to Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow pondering the eternal question of how could Graham Bonnet have been soooooo effin’ amazing on the Down to Earth album and then soooooo terrible on stage and couldn’t Ritchie have figured out a way to keep Bonnet around for studio records and then bring someone else in for live shows?  He was soooooooooo good on that record and yet his replacement was just bad in the studio and on stage.  Questions for the ages, you know?

Really I was just waiting for Bellana to come home.  She walked in the door at midnight, and at that point I went to bed and sat up reading on my iPad for a while.  When I couldn’t keep my eyes open I hooked up the machine and went to sleep.  I checked my watch as I was laying down and it said 12:40.

And yet my watch says I was asleep at 11:00.

Not even close, guys.  Not even remotely close.

The good news is I only took my mask off a couple of times.  I was only in bed for about six hours, but the mask stuck pretty well for most of that time.

In closing, here’s a little Rainbow with Graham Bonnet.  He was sooooooooo good on this album.

and then….

That’s actually not as bad as some of the tapes I’ve heard.  I just wish Ritchie’s tech could have figured out whatever was wrong.  He tends to get pissy when his equipment acts up.  Also… umm… mixing engineer?  There are five guys on stage, not one.  M’kay?  Thanks.

If you thought I was playing as any character other than the red head, you thought wrong.

Yesterday was the 4th of July.  I once read that back around the time of the Centennial, 1876, it was common for people to celebrate Independence by picking fights with their unliked neighbors by calling them British.  They also used to celebrate the fact that they themselves were not British.  Ever since reading that story (wherever it was that I read it) I have felt the need to celebrate Independence Day by saying, “hooray, we’re not British!”  I think everyone who has heard it is plenty sick of hearing it, yet I still do it.  So….

Hooray, we’re not British!

All four of us were home for the whole day yesterday.  We did some serious flaking in the morning and early afternoon.  It was nice to just be home together without running around like nuts for whatever reason.  For dinner we had a cookout.  Jen prepped everything and cooked almost everything, but I cooked the steaks (yay, I helped!) on the grill.  Jen picked up some really good stuff at McKinnon’s in Salem.  It was sooo good.  After dinner we piled into the family truckster and headed north to Dover, NH.  Why?  Because we wanted fireworks and all the towns near us seemed to have had their fireworks on the 3rd.  We got lost wandering around the town a little bit and eventually ended up in front of a bandstand watching a military band play funk tunes.  Weird, but good.  Then we swung around to the other side of the bandstand where there was a nice little park and watched the fireworks.  Perfect.

Since Dover is far away (about an hour) from home, and because fireworks require darkness, and because it’s Summer (thank goodness, it’s finally here) and it stays light out until almost 9:00, we didn’t get home until really late.  I am the only one who needed to get up this morning so I dove straight to bed.  I plugged my face into my CPAP machine and was asleep by quarter to midnight.  I woke up at 6:00.  There were three wake ups and my Apple Watch caught them all.  I got a little less than six hours of sleep total, with four being deep sleep.  That’s about the same as most nights.  The good news is I only had to take my mask off twice.  Progress.  Also, I didn’t snore at all.  I cannot overstate how glorious that is.

The 50/90 songwriting challenge kicked off yesterday as well (fiftyninety.fawmers.org) and I was able to sneak in a little work.  There are three ideas underway.  None of them are terribly inspiring.  One will probably be a strummy acoustic 12-string thingie.  Another is in 7/8 with a little electric piano part.  Nothing special.  I hope to make more progress tonight.

I hope you enjoyed your 4th of July (where applicable), and I hope you got a good night’s sleep (where applicable), and I hope you spend the next couple of months writing music (where applicable).

And in closing… Hooray, we’re not British (where applicable)!