Beggars Can't Be Choosers

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This was a nice morning to take a shower and go outside in the warm sunlight to dry off. Since I have no sex life and I'm not around other human beings so much it doesn't matter whether I take frequent showers or not. Basically, I showered today in order to shave while doing it. I haven't shaved for maybe as much as two years.

Cutting my own hair is a no-brainer because I cut my own hair with a buzz cut style. I started buying cheap shears when they're on sale, use them until they get dull, and replace them with other cheap shears. Its the American way. It's cheaper to buy new ones than pay to sharpen the old ones. I have no skill at all at sharpening anything. I just don't have the knack for it.

I first found out I was a lousy sharpener in my first enlistment in the Navy. I got thrown out of the electronic school I was attending, and due to that I got assigned to a tincan destroyer as a bosun's mate. There I was expected to learn to tie all the knots the bosuns used to tie, and keep a sharp knife with a bowline blade for untangling knots.

There were certain people who did understand how to sharpen knife keen enough to shave with, but I wasn't one of them. I seem to drive the people whose job it was to instruct me crazy. I wasn't not doing it to get over either. Even today I need sharp knives, and if I could do it I might carve wood as a hobby. No dice, man.

It amazes me to keep discovering how long I've had this rheumatoid arthritis going on in varied ways, and that a lot of little health problems I thought was due to something else was really an aspect of RA. In the case at hand it's psoriasis. I have it on my toes. Same toes every time it pops up. It comes and goes as it will.

Just this morning I realized that the problems I've had with my lips is probably psoriasis. It happens right in the center of them. It seems to be the dividing point of the nerves of my face. Its easy to think about because of when I go to the dentist to get a tooth filled, and the anesthesia he injects only affects the gums on one side.

When it gets to the middle of my jaw it stops. If he's working with the other side it numbs my gums and jaws right up to the center front, and then it stops. It's right at that center point that the psoriasis shows up. Sometimes it's on the lower lip, and other times, like now, its on the upper lip, but like on my toes, it's the exact same spot each attach, and there is nothing i can do except wait for it to go away.

Since it comes and goes like an attack, and there is nothing available to heal it or make it retreat, at least I know my options or rather the lack of them, and stop buying expensive creams to see if they might work better than the last expensive antidote I tried. I don't know what it looks like, but in a month or so I'll have a better chance to see it.

My upcoming appointment with the eye surgeon at the VA Hospital is getting closer. Nothing will happen on that first appointment as far as I know, but after he takes a look and sees what he thinks can be done for me I'll have a better idea. I'm hoping to have at least one eye done by Christmas, but that's not up to me to decide. Beggars can't be choosers.

Electric violins have been on my mind lately. I decided to Google up "electric violins" and the results page showed a link to a site that calls itself The Electric Violin Store, and it's located near the VA Hospital up in Durham where I go to the RA clinic.

I clicked in to their web site and after I watched the video they provided that was mostly about how to find their Durham location, I began looking at their products. The only electric violins I've ever known about, and I've never seen one in person, have been pictures of a Yamaha practice violin from years ago.

http://www.electricviolinshop.com/

The market for electric violins seems to have expanded a lot. The reason the Yamaha "practice violin" intrigued me was that it's not made of wood, and had none of the problems wooden violins have with humidity. The price of that first one I saw was over $500, so I knew they weren't cheap.

After looking at all the various brands and individual electric violin makers on this web site, I realized that $500 was damn cheap. There were only two on the whole site that were under a $1000, and most of them were more expensive than $2-3,000. Wow! Too rich for my blood.

After I saw a demo on YouTube of a guy playing an electric fiddle I started watching other people play them. The videos were all shot on the street of guys playing them for tips. The quality of the sound of the videos was horrible, but distinct enough for me to realize I probably wouldn't wanna do that.

As you might figure, electric violins are really digital violins, and digitally they do stuff besides allow the player to just play violin. They're a lot like my digital piano that has a drum machine and all sorts of instruments you can select to play by merely pushing a button or a combination of buttons and you can sound like a full 64-piece orchestra.

I don't mean to be uppity about it, but playing digital instruments is just tacky. Part of being audience to an accomplished musician playing a fine acoustic instrument if knowing how much practice and dedication it takes for the artist to do what they're doing to entertain me. With digital instruments its difficult to ignore that what I'm hearing is most likely the work of a computer programmer than a musician, and I feel duped. No blame. '-)

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