Mario’s Stuff

Happy Christmas and New Year!

Wishing you all a great Christmas and New Year! Thank you for all your support and enthusiasm for my music during 2009 :-)

Very best wishes

Mario

New Guitar

Marty (Siggery Guitars CEO) sent me a photo of my new guitar’s progress a few days ago, he was working on the transparent black finish at the time:

As you can see from the photo, the finish is looking amazing, it will be even better when it’s coated with glossy nitro lacquer…! Marty has also added the dot inlays to the fingerboard.

When the guitar gets here, we’ll photograph it from all angles and I’ll write a detailed blog entry about it with a video or two of me playing it :-)

Halloween

It’s that time of year again… How time flies… (see below) I can remember writing about last year’s Halloween in the old blog.

Although it’s not officially Halloween just yet, Shawna and I took Skye to the Clark County Museum in Henderson, NV as they’re running Halloween evenings for kids. Skye had a great time, her costume this year was a fairy outfit with wings (she’s obsessed with butterflies - or ‘flurflies’ as she calls them :-).

Skye and her costume

The county museum did a great job; all the kids enjoyed themselves, especially those engrossed in trick or treating on the museum’s ‘Heritage Street’ which contains several old houses that were rescued from old Las Vegas.

They held a costume contest for the kids, so I took Skye up onto the little stage area (above) whilst Shawna took photos. And before you ask; no, I didn’t wear my ‘Jaws’ t-shirt especially for Halloween! I didn’t even think about it until we were there and hoped people didn’t think I was dressed in quite possibly the most cheesy and laziest costume Halloween had ever seen…! :-D

Along the usually peaceful nature trail were several old exhibits including this prison cage (above) and the old faded truck (below).

The corner of Heritage Street at Halloween.

The museum’s old steam train decorated for Halloween.

At the main entrance was this cool display of giant tarantula spiders with heads and skulls…

A few days before we went to the museum, we took Skye to Ethel M’s Cactus Garden for a walk. They’d started to kit out the garden with an October theme (below).

Time…

Sometimes I can’t believe how time flies… I can remember when I was twenty years old and thinking “I wonder where I’ll be/what I’ll be doing when I’m forty?” And here I am twenty years later, asking the same question again, only next time I’ll be sixty…!

I can’t believe how fast Skye has grown. It only seems like a few days ago when I was holding her in one hand at the hospital on the day she was born. And yet here she is now, no longer a baby but a growing toddler who demands mine and Shawna’s attention 24/7! We went to a friend of Skye’s birthday party last week, and I think it was there that I realized how fast she’s grown and how time really does slip us by.

One of my favourite pieces of music of all time (forgive the pun) is Ennio Morricone’s haunting musical pocket watch theme from the Sergio Leone movie ‘For A Few Dollars More’ (1965). In the last scene where Colonel Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef) has the shoot-out with ‘El Indio’ (Gian Maria Volonte), the haunting little melody from ‘El Indio’s’ pocket watch (stolen from Mortimer’s sister) starts to play and is then made even more beautiful when the string arrangement drifts in…

Ennio Morricone’s ‘Musical Pocket Watch’, kindly posted on YouTube by another fan of the theme.

I was as fascinated with this theme when I was four years old as I am now at age forty. Musically, it has a great melody and haunting quality about it, but combined with Leone’s cinematic vision, the scene from which it’s taken from (not shown in the above video) captures timelessness perfectly. (Incidentally, Ennio Morricone is one of my favourite soundtrack composers for his use of melody).

I remember growing up in Spain and seeing vast plains and agave plants, ‘For A Few Dollars More’ was filmed in Spain near Almeria in Andalucia, and the shoot-out scene also shows these simlar plains and plants. The golden Spanish sunlight in the late afternoon illuminates Leone’s canvas, and the scene itself is both melancholic yet intense. I’ve loved this movie since my early childhood, and every time I watch it (two puns!) I realize just how quickly time goes by…

New Guitar!

Marty Siggery, the main luthier at Siggery Guitars has been working hard on my new custom guitar, I’ve attached a photo below to show it’s progress.

The new guitar!

The guitar has an SG body style, and is made of solid mahogany with a very thin Koa veneer for cosmetic purposes (as shown in the image). It has a 24 fret set neck (no binding) with dot inlays, rosewood fingerboard with 16″ radius, jumbo frets and 25″ scale length, two nickel covered humbuckers (Rio Grande pickups), a ‘Barbeque Bucker’ in the bridge and a ‘Buffalobucker’ in the neck, one volume, one push/pull tone with coil tap, 3 way selector switch, jack input on side of body, locking 18:1 tuners, tunomatic bridge and strung through body. It will be sprayed transparent black by Marty at the workshop. I can’t wait… ;-)

NV & CA Wildfires

A couple of weeks ago we had some pretty severe wildfires in the Nevada/California areas. August usually produces wildfires, and this year was no exception. Sadly, several brave firefighters lost their lives struggling to bring the fire to a halt :-( The fires were eventually calmed by the Fire Departments.

The wildfires were in mostly California, but eventually crept into the Nevada border. In the evening, Las Vegas smelled like a bonfire, with the strong smell of burning wood permeating through the warm night air. The following day the roads and sidewalks were covered in a layer of ash, our front patio included.

Mount Charleston, NV

One of our favorite local places is Nevada’s Mount Charleston. When the weather gets really hot here, Mount Charleston is the perfect retreat as the weather is considerably cooler at the top of the mountain than it is in the Vegas valley. Last week was like this as we drove to the mountain and visited it’s lower and upper lodges. The weather in Vegas at the time was 105F, and as we drove higher, the weather was a stormy 56F at the Upper Lodge.

The stormy weather at Mount Charleston.

We first stopped off at the Lower Lodge with the intention of getting coffee and a snack, but the bad weather had caused a power cut, so the snack bar was closed. Skye enjoyed sitting in a carved tree in the lobby though :-D

 

Skye sat in the carved tree at Mt. Charleston’s Lower Lodge.

We made a quick dash back to the truck to get out of the pouring rain, and continued driving up the mountain. Just past Kyle Canyon the storm’s lightening had hit a tree causing it to fall into the road, so I had to get out and push it’s charred remains to the roadside.

When we finally arrived at the Upper Lodge, I was soaking wet and ready for a hot coffee. We shared a pizza and I played with Skye, drawing pictures on a napkin :-)

Me & Skye at Upper Lodge deciding what to order…

Me & Skye drawing.

Funny Pics

We went to a local store Shawna and I affectionately refer to as ‘the ghetto store’ a few days ago, and there in the parking section was this cholo car… I just had to photograph it with my cell phone for the blog :-D

Cholo Car!

In our local Walmart store last night, we saw a clown slowly wandering around the aisles pushing a shopping cart… It reminded me of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead so I took a (blurred) photo discretely with my cell phone :-)

Walmart Clown…!?

Bug Update

We’ve been lucky so far to have not had any further scorpion/spider incidents in or around the house, let’s hope it stays that way…

We’ve had a few of the nicer bugs visit though, a large moth and several Praying Mantis’.

This large moth was approximately 4 inches in length and had a wing span of around 8 inches.

Always alert and other-worldly, this green Praying Mantis spent the night on our front patio. We also get sand colored Mantis’ here in the desert.

Bug Update

A couple of nights ago, I was in the kitchen with Shawna enjoying a glass of wine and chatting. We had the lighting low for ‘mood’ and our dog Indio was fast asleep on the floor between the refrigerator (his temple of worship) and the table where we were sat. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed something scuttling along the kitchen floor, about 8 inches away from Indio, and to my horror (and now exasperation) it was another f@#*!=g scorpion! >:-/ I jumped up, nearly knocking the table and wine everywhere and tried to move Indio away. Because he was asleep, he woke up startled and walked backwards to where the scorpion was and almost stood on it… Seriously, he missed it by millimeters… I grabbed Shawna’s flipflop off her foot and battered it (sounds like a Monty Python-esque sketch), I then realized it was another bark scorpion and very poisonous. Had it stung Indio it could have killed him as the bark scorpion’s sting can be fatal in animals, children and the elderly/infirm.

View of the scorpion from above. (I’ve cleaned up most of the gore from the battering with Photoshop).

This is the view of the damn thing I had from where I was sitting…

Those of you who read the old blog will remember that we’ve had several scorpion encounters in this house, a bark scorpion was in one of the kitchen drawers last year and missed my hand by a hair’s width as I reached in for something. This latest scorpion is now the sixth we’ve encountered in the house and adjacent patio footpath in just twelve months. We have a bug guy (as do most people in Vegas) who comes out to the house and sprays inside and out, but pesticides only remove the food source of scorpions as they’re pretty much indestructible (except when they come up against ball-pane hammers and old flipflops ;-). They’re like the armoured tanks of the insect world!

As if scorpions weren’t bad enough, I photographed a brown recluse spider on our patio wall last month. The brown recluse is also known as the ‘Violin Spider’ as it has a violin shape on it’s head where it’s legs are attached. The brown recluse is one of the most poisonous spiders in America and it’s necrotic bite can result in a huge gaping hole of rotting flesh. Nasty stuff… Some poor people have had to have limbs amputated because of it. The spiders are quite small, about the size of a penny or nickel.

The small but dangerous brown recluse spider

I photographed another spider on the patio wall a few weeks ago (shown below) but  I’m not sure what it is. It looks like a hobo spider, but I think we’re a lttle too South Westerly for the hobo. If anyone can identify it then please let me know here.

The spider I can’t identify

I think we’re getting an unusual amount of spiders and scorpions here in the Southern Las Vegas area as new houses are being built further into the desert right by us and the insects are obviously moving this way. We can’t take any more risks with scorpions in the house with the baby and pets so we’re going to move to another area of Vegas as soon as we can…

Ethel M’s Cactus Garden

One of our favourite places to go for an afternoon stroll with the baby is Ethel M’s Chocolate Factory & Cactus Garden in Henderson. The garden is home to just about every kind of cactus there is, and kids love it as it’s next to Ethel M’s Chocolate Factory. Over the Christmas period, they light the garden up with literally thousands of lights, it looks like a bizarre desert version of Santa’s Grotto. We were there last week as the sun was going down, and I took a couple of photos for the blog with my cell phone.

Part of the Cactus Garden with barrel cacti and agave plants (where tequila comes from ;-)

Backlit cacti near the Chocolate Factory

After the Cactus Garden we went to the local mall, where Skye likes walking for miles whilst waving to everyone :-D

The Nigerian Barrister

We’ve all received the spam/con emails from so-called ‘barristers’, ‘doctors’, members of ‘Royalty’, ‘diplomats’ and even ‘Presidents’, all stemming from Nigeria and the like, but yesterday Shawna recieved the funniest email yet from a Nigerian ’barrister’ claiming to be in London with the hilarious made-up name of Dr. Fred Mike…!!!!!!!!  Can you believe this shit? We laughed all day at this one! These people must read internet pages with lists of English men’s names and then randomly choose two… How else could you come up with Fred Mike!!?? DR Fred Mike from Nigeria!!!! LOL :-D He was of course emailing us to let us know (very thoughtfully) that he had $20 million dollars in a special trust fund in London and just needed $900 of our money urgently to free it up and would of course compensate us “dearly for our kindness”… Hilarious stuff… We’ve decided that we’re going to call our next pet ‘Dr. Fred Mike’ :-D