blues Archives

Sunday Morning – Garagedoor

Door number 1?

It’s amusing that the WordPress Discover Challenge focuses on the story behind a door, as that has been my story this weekend 🙂 One of our garage door openers decided to fail on opening with a horrible ratcheting noise that indicates that the trolley is skipping on the screwdrive system. Looking for a replacement part resulted in finding that it would have to be ordered directly from the manufacturer, so, as my wife parks her car in that bay, I decided to undertake the replace and upgrade strategy.

As this is not something that I do every day, it does take a little more time to disassemble the old garage door opener system and at this point, I’m pretty close to having the new one in place, which is the job for this morning. It’s a matter of creating the motor attachment to the ceiling and wiring the controls to get it up and running; 2 hours or so.

This brings me back to this door from a year ago on the side of a barn near the Herring Era Museum in Siglufjörður, Iceland. Behind this door lies a rich history of people working to achieve their dreams in the rough North Atlantic waters. Hard dangerous work with lots of interesting stories.

Once I am done with the door, I’ll spend a bit of time on the yard and then it’s on to pulling together the list of images for the exhibit that opens on August 1st. I will share the final decisions with you, as it will have your input as part of it.

Hopefully that will leave some time for music, because there’s a little blues song that I want to do some more work on… Blue Jeans Blues by ZZ Top:

Have a wonderful Sunday!

Sunday Morning – Killing the Blues

Mother’s Day edition!

Of course, the most important thing to do today is to give my mother a call to wish her a happy Mother’s Day. As we live on different continents, the phone is our main method of contact and it’s great to have our chats.

As the Premier League season is well under control and the sun looks to be breaking through for a while, this may be a great day to reconnect with jogging, as my right knee feels up to the test and I’m ready!! Then a bit of yard work, if the weather holds up.

One of the rather cool things that happened over the past week, is that I was offered the opportunity to do a small exhibit of my photography at my place of employment; as we’re updating the art work and photography that hangs in the building, one of the ideas was to provide a space for employee art exhibits/contests in the cafeteria, where we have unused wallspace. So I was volunteered to kick things off, which is exciting. I’m thinking that abstract might be the way to go for this.

The other item that has me excited is a guitar workshop that I’m attended once a week for the next six weeks. As I’m looking to pick up some fresh skills and improve my still very rudimentary capabilities, I was pleasantly surprised by the approach in the first session. Adding new strumming skills right away and working on a song that is new to me: KIlling the Blues a song written by Rowland Salley.

So you know what I’ll be working on!

Hope you have a wonderful day!

Sunday Morning – Old Love

Relaxed and inspiring

Sunday’s are a great time to start the day off in a relaxed manner; set aside some time to watch a Premier League game, listen to some music, have breakfast, it’s all without any sense of rush.

As you saw a bit of the landscape of Skye earlier this week, I thought another vista might be welcome. This island is just amazing and these landscape images are only a beginning of a much larger set that I have to capture some fine year. It’s amazing to see how the view changes, as clouds move to cast shadows in different locations. You can probably understand why I love these old (geological) formations.

As some of you may be aware, I’m also learning how to play guitar, which is a slow process that is highly rewarding in engaging the brain in a different manner and a great way to unwind from a day in the high technology world. As I very much enjoy the blues, its expressive capabilities seemingly boundless, Eric Clapton is certainly among my all-time favorites.

That’s why this morning, I’m spending a little extra time listening to Old Love, a song from the Journeyman album. This song was written by Eric and Robert Cray, inspired by Eric’s recent divorce from Pattie Boyd (the muse for Something, Layla and Wonderful Tonight); you can hear the pain in this song from the difficulty of letting go. I’m adding this to my study list to see how well I can learn to play this.

Here’s Eric Clapton’s Old Love from his 24 nights at the Royal Alber Hall in 1990: