Jen Plays Ukulele

 Oh, my. What a shitshow the last few weeks have been. I lost an entire week, it seems, to some crappy symptoms that landed me in the ER on a Friday night, and the entire ER was full up, so they had to stick me on a guerny in the hallway surrounded by portable drapes. That was terrifying enough, and I'm grateful that I have a wonderful herbalist who has been working with me for the last few months, so hopefully no more of that shit.  *************************************************************** It's been a while since I've gone on a good rant, and this morning's rant is going to be about AI and social media and marketing in general. I think I may have written a bit about AI before on this blog, but today, it really needs to be said that AI is more harmful than helpful to humanity. At least, I think it's more harmful than helpful.  My social media feed has been flooded with these dreamy images of things like colorful baby peacocks and unattainable lifestyle/home sc

 Hooooooly moly, it's the last Monday of February and how the fuck did we get here? March starts this week, but the weather up here already feels like April or May. We've had a hell of a weird winter - a couple of snowstorms, but nothing like it used to be. We had a flood the week before Christmas with warm temperatures and rain washing out all the snow in the mountains, and the snowpack never really recovered. No ice fishing this winter, either, because it hasn't been cold enough for long enough to really build up a decent layer of ice in most places. By the end of this week, temperatures are predicted to be in the high 50s and possibly the low 60s - which, in an ecosystem that relies on snow and long cold winters, is not a good thing.  Last night, I was reading more in the new book, Walking Through Darkness, by Sandra Ingerman and Llyn Roberts, two shamanic teachers that I greatly admire. Sandra wrote a chapter called "Earth" where she talks about what's hap

 As I was stuffing wood in our stove this morning, I was trying to remember if I had done a Monday Musings post last week. I keep thinking it's further along in the month than it actually is, maybe because this month already feels like it's lasted a year?  I'm on day 7 of 10 of taking daily progesterone to help with some of these awful and debilitating perimenopause symptoms, and the side effects of the progesterone are definitely starting to kick in this morning. I was reading the first chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer this morning and just SOBBING into my oatmeal. Last year, my ob/gyn said that getting to the post-menopause stage would be "a blessing" for me, and I can't agree more right now.  So since today might be a zero for me, I'm cuddling up with a couple of good books and a uke and I'll see if I can get a couple of new wire wraps made. Depending on how bad the brain fog gets as I go about the day, I'll try to brainstor

Here we are, nearly the end of January. I know I've been promising more ukulele content and posts here, but the last few weeks have been a whirlwind of visiting with my nieces who live on the other side of the country and celebrating my son's 16th birthday and getting sick with something really nasty that may or may not have been Covid.  The visit wiht my nieces was just what I needed, although I was a little freaked out to see my older niece, who is 22, drinking a beer one night after dinner. In my head, she's still seven years old, holding Colden on her lap and talking about her friends from school.  Right after they went back to Reno, I started in with some sniffles, and I didn't think anything about it, until I woke up one morning with that same burning sensation in my chest that I had when I had Covid in the autumn of 2022. It was the same damn sensation, but slightly more intense, but none of the home Covid tests I took came up positive. (To be fair, none of the h

 Oh, my, another blog coming at you late in the day. I don't even know if anyone is actually reading these, but I'm still gonna write 'em. It's good practice for me to get these things out of my head and into the ether-world, right? Anyway.  While much of the country is in a deep freeze right now, we're still in the relatively balmy mid-20s here in the northern Adirondacks. Later this week is a different story - we're expecting night time lows below zero, but not much below zero. And while sub-zero temperatures are totally normal for this part of New York at this time of year, they're not nearly as low as they were 20 years ago. Yes, the climate is shifting. And yes, it worries me every time I see a weather forecast.  ********************************************************** Today is a day off from school for my son, and it's also his birthday. We went out for sushi last night with one of his friends, and drove home in a mini-blizzard that threatened to

 Well, hello there, 2024! Part of my goals for the coming year is to learn how to play my chords all the way up the neck of the ukulele. Why? Well, back at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, I was watching a lot of ukulele videos on YouTube, and I saw a video of the amazing Taimane Gardner playing some kind of medley of incredible songs going aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall the way up the neck of that uke of hers. Someone in the comments quipped, "Taimane paid for the whole uke, she gonna use the whole uke," and I knew right then that I wanted to master the fretboard of the ukulele.  But being a ukulele noob, it was hard for me to find the info I wanted. I stumbled across bits and bobs here and there, but nothing that would really show me how to play chords up the neck of the ukulele. I did find one website that would show you all the different positions of the chords if you typed them into their internal search engine, but it seemed like a major PITA to do that for every chord I wa