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Saturday, August 20th, 2011 10:04 pm
A few months ago I heard a sound in the Cost Plus store over by the credit union: it was muscial, but not really music, eaxactly: somebody was tinking around on an accordion.  It actually sounded sort of pleasant.  So I wandered over in that direction and found a toy accordion, one octave and two chords in the ket of C, twenty-five dollars! and, like I said, sounding surprisingly pleasant.


Still, I couldn't bring myself to buy it.


But a couple of days ago I did.  I bought me a red-white-and-blue child's toy plastic-and-paper one-octave, two-chord accordion.  And tonight I have been playing it for two and a half hours.  I am still getting the hang  of the mechanics of the thing so I haven't really begun picking out tunes but a little bit -- the first half of "Jambalaya" came out of its own accord, and something else I don't even remember now -- but I can usually pick out a tune by ear if I give it enough time, so that's not a real concern.  I still have to get the scale under control.  The push-pull relationship reverses halfway up the octave for reasons I don't understand (each reed has a push tone and a pull tone, a half-step apart) -- is it to create the place in the octave where there's a half-step between whole notes (I can hardly believe I once took a music theory class -- I have no access to terminology to express myself at the moment, I can only hope that I'm making any sense at all)?  In that case, why aren't there two of those places?


I don't seem to be bothering Frank very much with it.  Of course, he has been shoving earphones in and having at his new games so as to pass the time till he gets back to his darling (she is, actually).



Also: Loch Lomond on a paddle boat, today.

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