New Guitar, Halloween & Time…
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…