April Showers, and a Few Flowers -- But Two Weeks Late!

Trees are finally greening out here, 2 weeks late.

As I write this, I have my window open. It is almost 8 p.m., and the sky is still light out. The past four to five days we've finally seen some Spring weather here in the Seattle area -- temperatures reaching 60 degrees F (around 12C), and the nights haven't been freezing for the past five nights in a row, which seems miraculous, in that just over a week and a half ago it just hit freezing (32F / 0C).

The hills around my little corner of Washington have just begun to turn a light green, and after what seems to be interminable cold, it's finally feeling like Spring.

A look down the highway, the light green of fresh leaves, and 15C / 60 degree temperatures feeling like Spring finally.\

While I was out on my bicycle and taking a few pics with the Nikon L32, a helicopter flew over a nearby hill. The electronic telephoto enhancement on the Nikon sometimes works really well for shots like this.

I have yet to get my corona shot, that is something I hope to do in a couple weeks. Things are opening up in my state a little -- which means the traffic on the roads is back. There still aren't many jet airliners in the sky, though, so at night it's a lot quieter at times than it was pre-pandemic.

Work has continued, fiction writing has halted, and I've been wrestling with two of my electric guitars, trying to make them better for slide playing -- which means you're jacking up the string tension, but not to the point where strings are popping. I increment up the bridge saddles, a thousandth of an inch at a time, play a little, let the guitar sit, try it again.... Closer and closer to 'perfect'.

A 110 year-old Trestle and green trees.

One of my guitars, my Ibanez Gio GRX40, is really good on slide. Being a longer scale length, the distances between the notes is greater, so you have less chance of overshooting a note with the slide. The Powersound humbucker also sounds very good with slide, much better than it does if you fret single notes.

And the saddles on the bridge go up, up, up -- by the thousandths of an inch.

Three Tremolo springs (instead of five, which is probably preferable) -- not exactly ideal for maximum tuning stability, but it's the way the guitar was delivered from the factory, and I don't feel like messing with it now. 

The tuners on my Ibby, however, need to be replaced -- mainly the top two. They work, but they do not have a positive feel, and when you're playing in Open G and trying to get the chords to sound totally balanced, you need more 'feel' from the tuners than I've been getting. So it's time to get out the tiny drill and the wood putty (to fill the previous tuners' holes in the headstock).

I've changed out tuners three times previous (once on my Daimaru Jaguar copy, and twice on my Lotus L520 Les Paul copy), so it's not something I haven't done before, but drilling into one of my guitars isn't something I really look forwards to.

The Cedar River at dusk. The river is low for this time of year, when it is usually two to three feet higher and really flowing fast.

All that said, I'm still working on a radio article (on the Grundig G2, a lesser known Grundig that came out in the 2010's and didn't sell well), an article on Shortwave radio, and a third article which is devoted to slide guitar.

Until then, I hope these photos will suffice.

Peace out to all of my readers, here in the U.S. and all over the world.

C.C., 4-22-2021