Jen Plays Ukulele

So here we are, the penultimate day of August, and like I mentioned in yesterday's post, it's also a Mercury retrograde and today is a blue moon. Lots of astrological stuff going on, and truthfully, I just feel wrung out. Today I decided to give myself and my mind a break and spent most of the day playing ukulele.  I remember back when I was the online editor over at Beading Daily, I used to do a feature called Worktable Wednesday where I would show pics of what I was working on and talk a little bit about the projects and the beads and components I was using.  While I can't show you pictures of the music I'm working on (ha!), I can talk a little bit about it and maybe put up a video or two here and on my YouTube channel.  But until I can get around to that, here's what I'm working on... ******************************************************* Last year, I discovered this wonderful musician and composer, Choan Galvez , from Spain. He has a sweet little website ca...

 Sooooo... I'm gonna go all woo woo on ya for a minute here. (Just a minute? Maybe longer.) Anyway... Before I start, I'm gonna come right out and let ya know that I know just enough about astrology to be dangerous. Years ago when I did my Ayurvedic training, Vedic astrology was probably the most difficult thing for me to learn. And that's even with the fancy schmancy computer programs we used to do the calculations and generate charts for patients.  But Mercury retrograde seems to have become more of a thing in pop culture, and more people are starting to notice when it rolls around a few times each year. Some people just FREAK THE EFF OUT when Mercury retrograde rolls around, but honestly, it's nothing to worry about. (Especially if you don't believe in astrology, but yeah, whatev.) Anyway... What is Mercury retrograde? We all know that our planets revolve around the sun in somewhat-circular paths called orbits. And each planet revolves at a different rate of spee...

 I have no idea what I want to write about today, I just know that I want to write, so here we go. We started this morning by wrangling our roo, Zelda, so we could give him his morning antibiotics and a foot bath. Zelda has had a bad case of what's called bumblefoot, basically an infection in his foot, and it took a while before we could catch him to treat it. We've been giving him antibiotics for almost 3 weeks now (had to learn how to give a rooster a pill, thanks, YouTube), and we've been soaking his affected foot for a couple of weeks. Still a long way to go, and he might never be able to walk "normally" again, but he seems to be improving based on the level of side-eye we got this morning and the fact that he's clucking furiously at the indignity of being hauled out of the coop twice a day to be pilled and soaked.  I'll be attending the second part of the JHUI workshop on imposter syndrome this afternoon, and holy moly, I don't want to say too muc...

 My journey into songwriting on the ukulele started like this:  It was March of 2021, a year into the pandemic. My son was doing remote school that morning, and while he was in his morning classes online, I was doing my morning yoga practice. Just as I had finished changing out of my yoga clothes and into my jeans, I heard someone knocking at our back door. It was our neighbor from down the hill, and he said, "Can you come get your ducks out of my yard?" I looked at him blankly. Ducks? "What ducks?" "Those ducks." He points to his clothes drying tree, and sure enough, there are about half a dozen huge Pekin ducks milling around eating up birdseed.  "We don't have ducks," I said.  Then it dawned on me. Our neighbors up the hill on the other side of our house DID have ducks. THOSE were the ducks.  I laughed. "Shit, those ducks belong to the people up the hill!"  We watched as they tried to make a break for the road, and then decided t...

 I have tried so many times to write about this particular phenomenon, and I'm going to try it again: imposter syndrome. That gnawing feeling that comes up and makes you think that you're really not as good as anyone else, that you're worse than everyone else, and that you're really just faking it and living with the paralyzing fear that at some point, someone is going to call you out on your bullshit. Ugh. But what does this have to do with playing the ukulele? As it turns out, EVERYFUCKINGTHING. ************************************************************* One of the things that I have always loved to do is teach. Whether I'm teaching beadwork and jewelry making or how to read Tarot cards or yoga or Reiki or (now) ukulele, I have always loved sharing what I've learned with other people who are interested in the same thing.  I have this philosophy about teaching and learning where I stand by the idea that anybody should be allowed to learn anything they want to...

 Today, August 23, is recognized as the day that the Portugeuse ship, the SS Ravenscrag, arrived in Honolulu, Hawaii with woodworkers and cabinet makeres Manuel Nunes, Augusto Dias, and Espirito Santo. There are many versions of the story out there, but they all go something like this: these wood workers from Portugal brought with them some of the traditional Portugeuse stringed instruments like the machete, cavaquinho, and timple, and they delighted the Native Hawaiians with their nightly street concerts. Somewhere along the line, these cabinet makers removed a string and kept the re-entrant tuning style, and TA-DA!, the ukulele was born. Of course, it wasn't called the ukulele, not at first. Again, the original story may have been lost to time, but the legend goes that this new sweet little instrument was warmly embraced by King "David" Kalakaua, and was soon to be found at every Hawaiian royal event including dinners and art performances. It was reportedly named after ...

 Starting in 2018, I was able to make a decent living making and selling jewelry. Then in the autumn of 2019, I got zapped with a trio of really awful health problems all at the same time and my entire life just fell apart for a few months. And then we all know what happened in the first few months of 2020 - when the pandemic hit and everything changed, literally overnight.  I won't go into all the philosophical musings I've had about the early days of the pandemic in this blog, but I will say that it was actually a decent time for someone trying to sell jewelry online and do online classes. I was able to make some decent money because most people were at home, looking at their phones or their computers to ward off the existential dread of boredom. But then things changed, and online sales all about evaporated as everyone rushed to "get back to normal".  So I started looking for some kind of stable income again, hopeful that I'd be able to find a job.  I didn'...

 Or anyway, at least blogging about playing the ukulele... I had a moment today as I was doing the dishes while my lunch warmed up. I remember back in the day when I was blogging about beads, it was like EVERYBODY was blogging. There were blogs everywhere, and people actually read them, subscribed to them, etc.  The last few years since I started this blog have been a struggle. I'm just gonna come clean and say it: I've been dealing with some pretty debilitating health issues that no one can seem to figure out (they just run more tests and say EVERYTHING CAME BACK NORMAL ISN'T THAT GREAT? and send me on my way), and I've been trying to find a job (which is a whole other blog right there), and otherwise just trying to find a way to make some money in his late unregulated capitalist hellscape we call the U.S.  But in between, I've been doing things like writing songs and making jewelry and learning new things on the uke, thanks to some help from some amazing online te...