Trying to Learn Something New

I woke up one day and felt like I needed to do something new.  I wanted to try something creative, fun, and well just ......  different.  The problem was not sure what that new something was.   Now that Graduate school is over and golf is just five, maybe six months out of the year if the weather cooperates, I have a lot of free time.  What to do?  What to do?  One day I got home, went out to get the mail and thumbed through the little booklet for adult night school classes and came across a beginner guitar class.  I thought, hummmm.... it fits the bill, so why not give it a try?  I went out and found a starter Yamaha guitar:

I had one class so far and I like it!  I've been practicing every day to try to build some finger strength, dexterity and try to learn how to properly use this thing....

 

My hope is that by summer I can just sit out on my deck, strum my guitar and be able to play something that sounds similar to a song.  Maybe eventually I can do some good, acoustic tunes as well that I listen to on Pandora.  My goal is not to be in a band or play in front of people.  This is just something I thought would be something fun to learn and help me to understand that music thing that Sharkey can do and tries to explain to me from time to time, while I blink a few times and blankly stare back at her.  One of the other things I found is that there are some cool tech accessories you can get for this guitar thing.  The starter guitar I bought came with this electronic tuner, but it is not that great (rather crappy in fact... and did I tell you I know how to replace a string because I snapped one while trying to tune it with this thing...).  I came across a SNARK chromatic tuner.  It is the bomb!!!  Unlike the electronic tuner, it works off of vibrations, so you clip it to the head of the guitar, play a string and you can zero in on the right tone easily, even with a lot of background noise.  And it was $10...

Who knows, with a few thousand hours of practice, a few sets of strings, and some quality lessons, maybe Sharkey and I can sing "Lucky" together!  =)  

Lucky - Jason Mraz & Colbie Caillat 

Now that would be something!!