Mario’s Stuff

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.