Today's rambling: The bigger the better...in everything
Written on Sunday, Jun. 09, 2002 at 11:10 p.m.
while feeling a bit

I kept myself from sleeping in horribly late, and actually got up the first time I awoke...which was about 11:30. Sure, that's late for most people, but I'm a late sleeper. 11:30 is early for me. Anyway, I forced myself out of bed, and with an unusual amount of cheer (mornings are not my strong suit), plopped down in our bamboo chair across from Mom. She laughed at me (hey, who DOESN'T look like crap when they first wake up?), and then I asked her, "Can we go to Radio Shack today?"

You see, I wanted their $199 piano keyboard very badly. Thankfully, Mom agreed to go.

But the keyboard at Radio Shack turned out not to be exactly what I wanted. At all. There were no demo songs on it (I didn't even know that was legal, hehe), and basically it's neatest feature was that you could hook it up to your computer. But very few keyboards DON'T hook up to the computer. This keyboard was definitely meant for the amateur composer (something which I have no talent for).

So we went to Best Buy instead. And they had a Casio keyboard there that was $183 or something like that...The keys lit up to show you how to play songs, and they had some kinda spifty songs on their like the Star Wars theme and -- I know Lola will love this one -- Livin' La Vida Loca. ;) It's only bad part was that it didn't have an LCD panel on it, and I really wanted one of those. Fortunately, the Yamaha sitting right next to it had an LCD panel.

Unfortunately, it didn't have very many interesting songs on it...and it was $283.

I stood there in the aisle deliberating and putting myself into a terrible mood because I just wanted both keyboards to suddenly mesh together and give me the Super Portable Keyboard with all the cool songs plus an LCD display (the light-up keys on the Casio I could do without...the Yamaha had a light-up system too). Obviously, that didn't happen. Two young male employees came by and asked if we needed help, but I firmly told them that we were just looking. Thankfully, the first guy seemed to get the hint (for the most part), but the second guy didn't seem to want to leave. He did, though, after telling us what the first guy had already told us (that the Yamaha didn't have a power adapter included...that was another $14).

Anyway, after much consideration....Iwentforthemoreexpensiveone. *hangs head in shame* I'm not exactly sure why! I just liked that one better! And it talks to me. Actually, that's sort of a freaky feature; if I leave it alone for a few minutes, it says, "Excuse me! Wanna play?" Which is mildly disturbing.

I figured the first song that I would attempt to learn would be Fur Elise, but instead I decided to try my hand at the Peanuts song (Linus & Lucy, it's called? Something like that...). I've got the righthand part down fine (not that that's very hard), and I'm pretty close to getting the lefthand part memorized. How long is it going to take me to put the two together? *chuckles* I'm just positive it won't be possible for me. My coordination is less than stellar.

I taught myself a small part from The Moody Blues' "Tuesday Afternoon" ("I'm looking at myself/Reflections of my mind"...to "Tuuuesdaayyy aaaaaaafternoooooon", hehe)...and I'm trying to teach myself the Star Wars song, since there's no demo version. It's not a very hard tune, but it's still sort of hard to do without a demo thingy to go by, as I don't have the tune completely memorized or anything!

Since I can't read sheet music, I always used to teach myself little ditties by humming the notes and then attempting to find the right key to match. That's how I taught myself that small part of 'Tuesday Afternoon', hehe...Oo, I had 'Ride My Seesaw' at one point, too, but I only practiced that one once or twice so I doubt I could repeat it now. I did a little part of 'Habanera'...Not that any of you care, LOL! I'll shut up now.

I wonder if I should name my keyboard, too... ;) It has to be a female name, since the voice is female, hehe!

Last night, I went ahead and bought "Days Of Future Passed" from borders.com. And I saved 2% of that purchase toward my upromise account, yay! Now if only all that stuff I'd bought at the grocery store would have been counted...

I also bought an out-of-print book by Rosamond du Jardin (a teenage fiction author from back in the 50's). Mom had some of those books, but most of them were in series and we only had one of each series! So now I'm on a search to find the rest of them. Unfortunately, most of them are well out of my price range (one that I saw last night was over $400!!!). But I did manage to find one of the books I was looking for, for only $19! It's an ex-library copy, so it'll have the card pockets and all those other marks from being well-used, but all of Mom's books were ex-library copies, so I don't really care. I don't plan on shelving them and showing them off, anyway; I'm going to be reading them!

And now tomorrow, I have to go back to work. Blech. Not only do I just not feel like going back to that same old routine, I'm not looking forward to seeing Geoff, hehe...I can't really get angry at him, though, as it was my fault my hopes were up in the first place. Still...well, nevermind. I didn't even go into what happened here, so I'm not going to delve into my feelings about the situation!

I hope the dryer finishes soon...I'd like to get out my pajamas and go to bed! Waking up early has me tired! ;)