Simply Piano has made me into a Disney Princess

Much to my surprise, I’m still doing my piano practice every day. I’m using the Simply Piano app which works very well for me. Up until recently I was able to coast a bit, what with being made to play the piano when I was much younger. But now I’m learning stuff that is properly new to me and making a tiny bit of progress every day.

Anyhoo, Simply Piano has got hold of the rights to a bunch of Disney tunes for me to practice which has been great fun. The way they arrange the exercises it sounds like you’re part of a performance with singers and full accompaniment (although I’m always a bit sorry for the person who has to sing along with my playing). Good playing gets you stars for each piece. Eighteen stars and you’re a performing princess. Twenty four stars (a perfect performance in everything) and you get to be a prince. Not sure if I’m going to make it, but I’m enjoying trying.

Burnby Hall Pictures

It’s a nice day. Why not go to Burnby Hall and take some pictures. Why not indeed.

Potting shed. With pots.

Shed Built

I think that the true reason for the existence of the internet is so that you can share pictures of your shed. Here’s mine. I didn’t build it. Neil came round and in the space of a couple of hours managed to do well what it would have taken me a day to do badly.

Writing Code for Fun

I’ve had a really splendid day writing code. I’ve got loads of video games and other stuff to play with, but I’ve ignored all of them in favour of making some Circuit Python. With occasional stops for tea breaks of course.

Frequent tipper

Took a bunch of stuff to the tip again today. I wonder if council tips have “frequent tipper” schemes. If so, I’d probably be up for a silver award.

Achievement Unlocked: We now own a shed

Actually we don’t own a shed as such just yet. Rather, we’ve got a collection of pieces of wood which one day (hopefully sooner rather than later) will be fixed together to form a shed-type building. The pieces arrived this morning at 6:45 am. At 6:55 it started to rain for the first time in a while. So I was out in the wet before breakfast trying to cover over the really big bits of wood so that they would remain dry enough for painting.

Fortunately I seemed to manage it and later on in the day when the rain had stopped and the sun came out I was able to give all the woodwork two coats of hopefully waterproof paint.

Butterflies

A week or so we were wondering where all the butterflies have got to this year. It seems that they have just turned up..

VOIP phone

The chap from Kingston Communications came along today to fix our broken phone. Except that he didn’t fix it, he changed us over to “voice over internet”. This was actually a very sensible move. There’s not a lot of point spending time and effort mending a connection to something that will be torn down in a few years anyway.

Now our fibre optic connection is also our phone connection. The dial tone is the same and everything works as before. This means we can continue to receive the spam calls that make up most of our landline use.

The only snag that I can see is that if the mains power goes off our phone connection goes too. However, we all have mobile phones, so in that situation we can use those instead to ring someone and ask “Our power’s gone off, has yours too?”.

Haircut

Had my hair cut today. Despite my ongoing efforts to try and keep the “lockdown crazy” style in fashion I eventually decided that I had to have something done just so that I could see out.

Broken phone

We hardly ever use our land-line telephone. Most of the calls that we get are of robotic voices telling us that our Amazon account is about to explode or we owe a bunch of income tax. However, we’ve stopped getting even those calls now, as the wire to the phone seems to have snapped somewhere. The good news is that the Kingston Communications folks are great to deal with and someone will be coming out later this week to take a look.

Subscription superpower

Jack Reacher, the rough tough star of 100 books and a couple of films, has an “internal clock” which is perfectly synchronised with real time. I’ve got something broadly similar, but mine works with online subscriptions. Today my “subscription sense” told me that it would soon be time to renew the subscription for my blog hosting. I was right, it’s tomorrow.

Another Day at Harlow Carr with a "fat rascal"

Spent another day at Harlow Carr, rapidly becoming on of my favourite places. And not just because you can buy a “fat rascal” from Betty’s on site.

Bought a shed

Bought a shed today. I seem to have reached the age where I find this rather exciting.

Piano playing vs typing

As I was doing my piano practice today (yes - it’s a thing) I was wishing that I could play the piano as well as I can type. Then it occurred to me that actually my typing, although fairly fast, is actually a bit rubbish. I frequently hit the wrong keys and the must used key on my keyboard is probably delete. With a document you can’t tell how many times the words have been retyped, whereas with a piece of music it is immediately obvious when you’ve played the wrong note (or no note). Piano players have to be right first time every time, which has raised them to a new level of respect in my book. And made me decide to perhaps type a bit more slowly and focus on getting all the letters right….

Dumb Smart Meters

The primary aim of Smart Meters, it seems to me, is to make it harder to take a reading when the energy company who installed the smart meter goes bust and its successor is unable to read it automatically.

A clue: you usually seem to have to press the 9 key to get the thing to show you the number you need to type into the web page..

Dominion winner

Busy day today. Went to Leeds and sprinted round Ikea wearing a mask. Then came back and played some Dominion Online. And won. Perhaps I play the game better when exhausted.

Temple Newsam

While we’re on the subject of where to take four-year olds who like running around, I can recommend Temple Newsam near Leeds. It has some lovely wide open spaces, a coffee shop which is excellent and a farm which is much bigger than you expected. Great place to visit.

The return of Piano Practice

Music lessons were one of the less fun parts of growing up for me. For a while I was learning the violin (mainly so that when I took the violin case into school I could pretend to be a Chicago gangster). But then I got bored with that. And, once that my friends discovered that all I had in the case was a violin, and not a sub-machine gun, they got bored with it too. I got out of that practice regime by the neat trick of being really bad at it. Truly, I put the vile into violin. After complaints from the neighbours in the next town I gave that up and returned to what was supposed to be my first love, the piano. A substantial part of my childhood was spent hoping that mum and dad wouldn’t remember that I hadn’t done my practice that day.

Anyhoo, as things do, piano practice has now returned to my life. This time I’m using the Simply Piano app to keep track of my efforts and I must admit that I’m rather enjoying it. I’ve connected the iPad to my new piano and so it can tell what keys I’ve pressed and track my progress. The app has lots of content, including versions of tunes I quite like. It runs on subscription, but it is much cheaper than proper lessons.

The nice thing about learning an instrument (which of course completely passed me by when I was younger) is that when you are practicing you really can’t think of anything else. You are too busy focusing on why your hands won’t do what you want them to. So if you want to escape from the worries of the world for a while you can just go in there and do battle with something that you can’t play yet but would like to. Today I had a go at playing Beethoven. Beethoven won, but I’ll be back for another go tomorrow.

Tax Paid

Paid the second half of my Income Tax Self Assessment thingy today. At least if you are paying tax it means that you’ve earned something I suppose.

Making Hauga

We are in the final phase of our domestic renovations; assembling new furniture. We’ve gone for some Hagua units from Ikea. I quite like assembling Ikea furniture. I’ve not done it for a while and they’ve found a way to make it even simpler and quicker now. Panels just slot together and the huge number of little nails that you used to have to use to put the back on have been replaced with a few push-fit plastic things.

Ikea seem to have minimised furniture to make it cheaper in the same way that aircraft designers minimise planes to reduce weigh. There was nothing in the kit that didn’t absolutely need to be there.