Nice way to start the day - hope it lasts. Guy walks in. Sheepishly asks for the music to Yellow Rose of Texas. Oh, for E flat Alto sax. Oh, and it's gotta' have the sax solo part. Oh, and he absolutely has to have it today. Hang on a second. I shuffle around my new bookshelves for a second. Yup. Got it right here. Yellow Rose for alto sax - both solo and duet. He was dumbfounded and pledged his future business to me. Next customer eyeballs the mariachi accordion in Mexican flag colors. He's gotta' have it. But no money today. Please hold on to it until mañana, ok? Ok...

The barge that took out a chunk of I-40 the other day apparently has a history of steering problems. They're busy digging the maintenance records out of the archives. Huh? They could've mounted the steering wheel backwards. The captain has stated that he was unconscious. Nobody's bothered to look into why the heck he was passed out at the wheel. It was an equipment failure. This smells like a payoff.

The Stennis (an aircraft carrier) returns and it is reported that planes from this carrier dropped 275,000 lbs. of munitions on Afghanistan. One carrier. That's 130 some-odd kilotons. 4-5 times Hiroshima. One carrier. We've got what 3 or 4 over there? That's a friggin' lot of explosives. Course I guess we needed a bunch of them daisy cutters.

I'm still exploring this phenomenom of intermittent perfect pitch. In the meantime I'm learning to adapt and adjust. I know when I've got it and when I don't. So I try and use it to advantage. That's when I walk around and tune all the instruments. Even the ones at home. That way the next time I pick up a guitar it will be right in tune - no matter that my brain might not be. It helps. Even when my brain is a little off as long as I don't touch the tuning pegs it still sounds pretty good.

While on that subject - the 3/4 size acoustics I got in from my favorite guitar maker are horribly off. I can find a set of strings that will make it sound not quite so horrible, but why bother. I'll sell 'em for what they cost me. 29.95. That's right, a brand new acoustic guitar. They're really pretty nice except for the fact that you gotta' play all your chords in the first couple of frets because it's out of tune if you move your fingers anywhere else. But every silver lining has a cloud and vice versa. Grunge rockers now have kids that are oh - five and six years old. Just old enough for a 3/4 guitar. It'll sound just fine to the old man...