So long, decade

 What's the message I'm supposed to take out of the last ten years? So much pain and suffering... personally spent a few ticks north of 80 percent of it fighting cancer, a battle that will, at best, result in a life-long DMZ situation in there.

I'm still here, though. If you're reading this, you are, too.

Positivity analysis: I don't trade paint with heart attacks when I go to the doctor anymore, I've spent another ten years at the helm of stringed instruments and performed semi-professionally for about 18 months (and even got an actual paid gig one of those nights), I made a car last me for over nine years, I'm another ten years down at work, I've been dragging friends with me to the state fair the whole decade, I made new friends toward the end here, I helped old friends tear down and rebuild a fence, I taught my housemate how to change her oil, I taught a bunch of people at work how to use a new computer system, I've gotten better at food and drink, I've donated to charity as part of a collective effort a few times, I've even made efforts to read Real Actual Books (which represents a significant battle of will against whatever my attention problems are).

I don't have an expectation that 2020 will be better. I don't have any expectation that the 2020s will be better. I know I will be, though.

Cranking out 500 miles

Per the Content Vortex standard metholdology, it's been nearly two fiscal months since the last post, and during that time, I haven't had much in the way of shareable thought. We rounded out the semester, my one employee figured out how to overpower unending nausea, the students aged out of 2019, and - hey look at that - it's the end of a decade.

Current mood: I drank four beers to smooth out the 520 mile trip from Columbia to Clyde. I like driving, but I think an 8.5 hour (10:20 to 7:40? we'll call it that) drive is about as long as I feel like going anymore. I made five stops total, though I'd call the initial gas-up the departure point, since it was less than 15 minutes into the trip. I did two legs with stop intervals over two hours, and that felt about right*. I think I covered one and a half episodes of Knowledge Fight, during which point Dan finally lost his mind about Alex's bad-faith arguments, and I also covered the two-part 'history of adoption' episode of Behind the Bastards, in which one of the most evil people in the last 200 years was described at me. It's an interesting contrast with some of the work I end up doing now, on trying to fund stable care for youths who actually need it, versus the outright theft of children that got the modern concept of adoption off the ground starting in the 1920s.

Anyway, I'm not really in as much pain as I'd think, considering. I'm glad I have a more comfortable car than I did two years ago; while I value all 170,000-plus miles I spent in my Sentra, not operating a clutch constantly, combined with more generous factory spring rates and suspension damping for a somewhat heavier chassis makes all the difference in the world for longer trips. The dope sound system in the car helps, too, which doesn't matter much for vocal reproduction as it does the necessary couple hours of music to avoid going insane from just nonstop human voice for an entire day.**

Once arrived, I got a little decompressed, slammed down my Blackstar Fly amp, played about 15 minutes of bass to help recenter, and then cracked open the brews. Western North Carolina has a robust brewing scene, although the beers I drank tonight came from New Belgium, which only has a brewery in Asheville, and from Southern Pines brewing, which is over by Fayetteville. Tomorrow starts the local stuff, but either way, I never really appreciated how a cold one or few helps to just completely lop the edge off a day of sitting still and paying attention.

A quick note on I-81: Sunday before Christmas isn't a bad day to drive. The trucks are off the road, so the clumps that form are moving at, say, 62-65 instead of 57-60. Cruise control at 72 is perfect for pretty much the whole of Virginia, and the brief portion in Tennessee is barely traveled, at least as far as I-26. I-26, however, was where the rain and fog kicked up. While I'm thankful I have the early formative experiences of driving Oregon 42 back and forth in nonstop rain in mid-40s temperatures in cars that handle poorly, it only gets me so far relative to the delights of other people not being comfortable in the conditions, and it does nothing at all to address the fact that western North Carolina must be some kind of big-L Libertarian paradise that doesn't value painting new lines on its state- and county-maintained roads.

*When last my dad and I drove from Phoenix to Sandy, we shot through over 210 miles without stopping, might have been the whole 270 of that fuel interval. My family is 'bad' at car trips.

**This is DECIDEDLY a 'me' problem.

Fretting out, part two

Having let the neck settle overnight and then readjusting for straightness in the bendable part, it's now become clear what exactly that little wink in the fingerboard reflection corresponds to: a low spot from about 10, maybe 10 and a half, up through 18. This manifests itself like rising tongue, as the guitar plays fine up to about the 12th fret position, but I suppose is technically different enough to justify going back and correcting my assessment.

11" radius block is on the way, and I have the rest of my chalk and sandpaper ready to go!

Fretting out on a fretless

One of my basses, an Ernie Ball Music Man Stingray 5, has [edit: what looked like] a problem with rising tongue, which is a kick up at the end of the fretboard, that can't be dealt with by setup alone. By way of measurement, if I have my strings set to say 6/64" at the 12th fret, the height at the end of the neck swings down to 5/64" as the fingerboard ramps up away from the neck joint. I don't know why this has happened, but it's probably been this way since the instrument entered my orbit 15 years ago. Prior to 2017, the action was unreasonably high, as the instrument needed a shim and I didn't know enough about guitar setup to know that's what I needed to put in there. Once the neck was shimmed properly and could be set to human-playable (read: sub 10/64") string heights, the buzz set in.

So, I've set to work on trying to solve this finally. First note: despite my optimism, ordering a 12" radius sanding block does not impact the reality that all modern Ernie Ball Music Man StingRay instruments have an 11" radius. The StingRay Classic and Old Smoothie instruments are 7.5", but no amount of optimism will make the 12" radius gauge match the fingerboard because it's not right. Once I had the 11" block on order from stewmac, it was time to tear the thing apart and set the neck to level to prep for sanding. An interesting question arises: how does one determine whether or not a neck is straight if you know part of the fingerboard is not? Normally, you'd use a straightedge down the whole length of the board, but if I do that, I either get backbow everywhere except fret 2 and 21, or I get too much relief the whole length of the neck. The solution is to use the slotted straightedge from Neck Check, as it's not long enough to touch both ends of the board simultaneously. You don't expect any curvature to happen on the heel, so you wouldn't normally need to check that part of the neck for truss-rod-correctable straightness.

Here's where I had a moment of inspiration.

Question: how do I then know, for sure, what I'm looking for?

Answer: if the neck is straight, and I line up a straight line feature of my house and look at it in reflection down the fingerboard, a straight neck will show me a straight line reflection fading out of focus the closer it got to me. A curved neck would, instead, show me a curved line and then no reflection.

Here's what I see when I look at mine, sort of kind of, as it's hard to line up a phone camera with the centerline of something and hold both still enough for pictures:

filename: "goobered fretboard.jpg"

So that little wink off to the left shows where I need to do my work here. The line is straight from the nut up to that point, and that point to the end is where the fretting-out buzz occurs. I'm excited, after all these years, to have a fretless bass that will play right. I had a fretless Jazz Bass I got in 2001 or 2002 that I took home with me on winter break once; I sold it in 2005 to fund the second in a series of bad decisions I was talked into by friends, and that is a disappointment I occasionally find myself feeling when I realize I'm missing out on a mystic ice blue or ice blue metallic Jazz Bass in my life, but I think having my StingRay in good, playable working order will more or less completely fix that. I'll still find myself wishing I had access to something in ice blue metallic, but I already find myself wishing I had instruments in nearly every color I've ever seen, so at least that wouldn't be anything new. Someday, they'll sell me a blue bass with a matching headstock... or a green Mustang bass with maple fingerboard.

Anyway, that's where I stand right now - I'm going to hit it with grits 220, 320, 400, and 800 and see what the finish looks like at that point, and if it's shiny enough, if the kink is gone. If it needs more, I have 1000, 1500, and 2000 ready to go. Update coming once the block is here and sanding starts!

Oh good, a bass

I brought a bass guitar and amplifier to work today to 'round out' the collection of things that let me pursue an arts while I work for a college of arts (and humanities). The bass I picked is special to me; while I would make the argument that all of my basses have a place in my heart, this one is my brother's, and I helped pick it out for him and would send it back having been well cared for and set up if he ever wanted to pick it back up. It plays well; it's effectively an off-brand precision bass copy, but it happens to have been reasonably well made, with no fret sprout or sharp hardware, with its only real failing being that the wood behind the sunburst finish isn't the world's most interesting piece. In my estimation, its only other weakness is that it's a precision bass, and so the neck is wider than is comfortable for my tiny hands. As I've been spending time with my short-scale StingRay bass, though, the width is a bit less of a challenge than I might otherwise have been willing to tolerate.*

I had about 15 minutes at the end of the day today where I had time for music, and I got the bass set up and played a bit. I can tell you for sure now that I am a bassist and not a guitarist. I love the Mustang guitars; the short scale and small body make them just friendly to play, but I never had much of a taste for melodies due to my early exposure to third-chair clarinet, and easily settled into a better understanding of harmonies (due to same) and bass lines once I moved to bass clarinet (and, later, baritone saxophone). That, combined with the now 19+ years of experience playing bass guitars, and the instrument is just more comfortable in my mind than guitar. I love the fact that I get to have both in my office, but, where bringing in the guitar previously brought me a feeling of relief, having the bass present feels right.

* - A brief rundown on bass proclivities: my first bass was an Epiphone Rock Bass, from sometime after the batwing headstock debuted. I don't remember its neck profile, but when I bought it, I knew so little about the subject that I tuned it by ear to D-standard because I matched the low string to the lowest note on Rage Against the Machine's self-titled album. Once I figured out that there was a real standard tuning, I quickly determined that the poor instrument's truss rod didn't seem to work... it's possible I was also so convinced by Bass Player Magazine that tweaking the truss rod would break the instrument, though, that I never really tried very hard. Either way, it played like a bow and arrow. I ended up falling in love with a five-string Spector NS-2000 bass the next summer, which was my instrument for something like three and a half years. Even though the scale was longer (35" versus 34"), the narrower string spacing meant that most of the music I wanted to play was easier... fewer runs on single strings, more intervals to cover between strings, so reaching from say C to D# was something my short miserable pinky could actually help with. Since that came so early in my journey, I got used to the tighter spacing such that for a few years, I actually couldn't play a standard Fender Precision neck without getting tired immediately... 1.75" versus the Jazz width of 1.5" was somehow too much of a difference for me. I have two five-string basses, one a StingRay 5 and one a Warwick Corvette. The StingRay sits at fitting 5 strings in 43mm width, the Corvette 5 in 45mm, and a Jazz bass does 4 in 38mm with a Precision at 4 in 43. Both of my fives are more adjacent by a wide margin to the J width, so since I spent the first 14 years of playing with narrow necks, narrow necks will always feel more correct, especially in light of my biological failings. Fortunately, practice can at least sort of help me deal with it.

Booze rumination: sheets

As I get in bed and think to myself, "wow, I love getting into a bed with cool sheets, it feels great," I also find myself wondering at what point it crosses from cool to cold... During the winter months, cold sheets are the greatest torture of getting into bed, one alleviated only by time and contact, unmitigated by the softest and fluffiest of blankets atop the icy torture. I could just sleep in blankets, I suppose, but I think that would be too warm. Maybe it's worth trying; Target can sell me a second Warm Fluffy Blanket*, but whatever.

Pictured: the Author, from wikipedia, via a CC 3.0 attribution to Samuel Blanc

I run warm. Traditionally, it's been my strongest asset: not most important, as I think I'm better at listening than being warm, and I'm pretty sure I'm better at playing bass guitar than surviving a snowstorm. Once fall strikes and evenings in the low 40s become the norm, though, my sleep definitely gets better as I'm no longer fighting the disruptive sensation of airflow on my shoulders or feet. Ever since I got my ferritin levels under control, though, I've had a little less tolerance for cold. As a result, I have a little bit of fear that this winter will represent a significant challenge in sliding into bed... I won't have the sensation that I will warm up quickly, and feeling the cold sheets will be more of a psychological burden than in years past. I guess keep an eye on this space to see how things go, but I'm worried I may be slated for incorporating an electric blanket into my daily routine, in the same way that I had to bring in a humidifier for the dry January and February air, and a small fan for the July and August heat.

This is also probably due to the fact that I grew up in coastal Oregon, where the warmest we ever expected it to get in the summer might have been 75 (average high 65.4), and the coldest it'd get in the winter was maybe 37 (average about 40). We had between 10 and 15 degrees of spread between average high and low, too, so it was just kind of "chilly" from October through March or April.

* - I can't remember if the blanket was actually called Warm Fluffy Blanket or Warm Fuzzy Blanket. It's possible it wasn't either, but if that's the case, the name was definitely almost as ridiculous.

Elevated Mood, or: My Car Won't Start and I Have A Bass To Put In C Standard

I had an episode today that sort of affirmed I'm not in direct control of how my brain processes the things that happen to me, and it came about as a byproduct of having something profoundly annoying and inconvenient happen to me, further inconveniencing a friend, and costing a small pile of money.

I was on campus a few minutes past when my coworkers all left. I had a few text messages to send and a voicemail to delete (thanks "Student Loan Services," I thought we were done with that scam), and by the time I got around to trying to start my car, it was about 7 or 8 minutes after everyone else left. Press button, nada. Just relay clicking behind the instrument panel and occasional odd chunking sounds from under the hood responded to my efforts. I tried shutting down as much extraneous stuff in the car as possible, but no dice. The hard start I had this morning was the battery chooching its last. Brief aside: the date code on Ford Motorcraft batteries is a two-character stamping on the side of the lid. Mine came in characters two and three and was J2, which correspnds to October 2012; I believe this was original to the car, but I don't know for sure. The car is a 2013 and I've seen one other stamp that indicated an October assembly timeframe, so it tracks that the battery was nearly seven entire years old and was probably the reason I wasn't able to listen to music for more than three minutes after killing the engine.

I got someone to come back to school by instead suggesting I call our campus transportation folks and making them come jump my car, so I had one thing go right that I'll feel bad about for a couple weeks. Even after about a minute of being attached to his car, mine did not want to start and only succeeded after two or three rapid-succession tries. Okay, great, car running, drive up to Autozone, die of old age waiting for the two guys in front of me to figure out their stuff and have one of the staff members help me out, get the battery out to the car and we find out that I only half remember how to take the battery box apart. The employee joins me and we puzzle over it for a while and finally accidentally pop the rest of the battery cover off the back half of the box and get the thing removed. I start working on disconnecting it while he helps someone with a less stupidly-designed vehicle... this required me to use needle nose pliers to wedge the negative terminal off the old battery, freeing it from probably a couple years of leak-induced corrosion and leaving that wonderful blue buildup all over everything. I checked out my parts tub looking for a battery brush and found not only that, but also an unused package of the little felt anti-corrosion rings. A few bucks later, I had a can of battery cleaner, too, and did my best to wipe everything down and clear as much garbage as possible, and a few moments later, we had the new battery in and the car up and running. A quick jaunt across to the Wawa and I was gassed up and finally ready to go home, about 90 minutes after I was released from work.

Down in excess of $180 and over an hour of my life to a stupid problem that someone at the dealership should have tested for last year before I bought the car, I would normally have been irritated beyond words... Instead, I found myself in the best mood I've been in for years. I felt like I was on top of the world, having diagnosed a failure and performed most of the replacement work myself. Additionally, hey: half day, got stuff to do, gonna get caught up on stuff, et cetera et cetera.

So the rest of my day consisted of: set up for an oil change, talk to the neighbor who's moving back down here to get out of construction and start driving for UPS, do my oil change, clean up after same, pull the trash can around back, talk to my other neighbor, drive off to recycle my oil, come home (now 4:30, when I'd normally get off work), empty the dishwasher and put my stuff from last night into the dishwasher (thing needs time to dry, ran it late last night), go downstairs and start work converting my Ibanez SRMD200 to C-standard tuning. I hemmed and hawed over which bass would be better for the job - the SR Mezzo or my Squier short-scale Jaguar Bass - while I waited for the strings to come. Some of this was general indecisiveness, as I feel the SR Mezzo sounds less inspiring than the Jaguar, but I also needed to know which instrument the strings were going to fit before I filed the nut slots to accommodate the thicker strings. I went with a short-scale DR five-string set (SNMR5-45, helpfully stocked by Fret Nation for those playing at home) with the intent to go .065-.125 for C standard on a 32" scale. This should have been somewhere between 32" E standard tension and 34" B standard tension, but I don't know for sure because I don't know the mass per length of the DR strings and also don't care (it's more of a theoretical nicety than anything that makes a real difference, as long as it's not hilariously high tension). The strings came, they were going to work on the Ibanez, so I picked it as it has the easier nut to replace if I want to go back. The slots were filed pretty generously from the factory, with the lowest string being .115, so the filing was short work and the strings went on quickly and I got it up to pitch. It needed about a fifth of a turn on the truss rod, that was it. Two of the strings were a tiny bit flat on intonation, but no other playability setup needed to take place. I dropped the action a bit because I don't think I ever set the neck back correctly after moving the instrument from Eb standard to E standard, so that helped make it even better, and as far as I can tell, no issues with tension and floppiness or anything. I say that coming from a now dedicated short-scale player, with three 30" scale instruments and one 32". I can tell there's a difference if I think about it, but they feel natural to me like a 34" does... I don't care what it feels like to fret and pluck, just how it sounds and whether it makes me want to do the work of playing it. Anyway, it sounds pretty good... I don't think I'm super sold on the strings I picked, but it looks like the only answer for getting a .040 and .060 on the top two strings with a .105 and .125 on the bottom is to merge two sets (expensive) or hope someone can sell me a custom gauge set. Key is compatibility with the medium scale instrument, as winding length is important - I need the taper to happen before the tuning post if I'm using a .125 or .130. After playing the instrument in its new tuning for a while, I had dinner, I watched a brief moment of a football game I didn't care about, and then I went back downstairs to play some more on that and on the short-scale StingRay.

It's been a busy evening, an even busier day. I'm kind of exhausted but my brain hasn't shut down yet - my mind is still racing, still on that elevated mood trip. I was hoping I could have a beer to help settle that, but the one I grabbed was, while being labeled a blond ale, hopped like an IPA. It was the most disappointing thing I've ever had to drink. And so, prescription pharmaceuticals to the rescue, I guess... I don't like that all that much, but considering it's been written for me specifically to make my brain stop so I can sleep, I'll take it.

Oh and if you're worried about it - I have blue light filters on all my electronic devices. As soon as I'm done yammering here, I'll be closing this and moving on to audio-based shutdown procedure.

So that's been a lot of words that I don't think I initially set out to type. I'm glad I've cycled out of depression and am feeling better about the world, but I really have to get a handle on this million miles an hour thing from the hypomanic phases. Maybe I should build and sell some amplifiers, but that takes a lot of setup work. Still should be pretty worth it at this point... I don't think I'd have to relearn the whole trade.