great day to go for a walk. it went up from 10 to 20 as i was walking. and the high today is a nice 28. yay . best of all, it seems like the basement is retaining heat well. finally...

got stuck outside the music store (i needed strings) for a half hour before they opened, so i went across the street to the salvation army. i know. but, why not sort through the books while i'm waiting? i was looking specifically for an old text by thomas hobbes, which i think is actually on the banned books list. yes, there's still a banned books list. seriously.

danielle steel. wall to wall. i kid not. i burst out laughing, actually. says a lot about christian repression, doesn't it?

there's a used store down the street with literally everything. snagged my leviathan on the way back for $5.

also, i found a market that sells local tomatoes for a quarter of the cost of the imported mexican ones at the grocery store. happy about that.....

bad news: up to 12 more weeks before i hear back on my border papers. fuckers. i'm missing mt. zion this week and at this rate will probably also miss swans next month. fuck.

i have one more walking trip to make, and then i've got a nice comfy week of reading and recording.

thankfully, my old electro-acoustic seems playable, after all. i can't say for sure until i get some new strings on it, but the intonation problems are not what they were. i'm straining my memory, but i think i put a new nut in it a while back and that may be the difference. i'm also not sure why i seem to have strung a low e in place of a d or a high e in place of a g, but maybe i had some hunch that worked out. for some reason, my usually superb memory is particularly bad over about '06-'09. trauma, maybe. i was also a drone worker in that period (i exaggerate - tech support), maybe it's a function of that. but i just don't remember.

regardless, i need to get some proper strings on it to properly test the intonation. but the notes sound the same across the six strings as far as i could tell with my morning test. there's reason for optimism.

also, it was only warping past the 12th fret, which i can mostly play around. i do tend to get jangly near the top of the neck, but that sound can be faked with an electric. it's the percussive bottom end i'm more attached to. meaning worst case is still workable. i hope.

what happened was that i took it backpacking with me - and this was ten years ago almost to the day - and it came back with a culmination of damage related to extreme temperature and humidity shifts. one day, we're in the mountains where it's damp and rainy, the next day we're on the coast where it's bright and sunny. montreal to winnipeg in 24 hours was another really dramatic shift in humidity. and it was exposed to outside the whole time, pretty much. then it sat without being played for a long time (acoustics are loud. i was in close quarters. simple as that.). when i finally picked it back up, it seemed like it was just flat out warped. i had written it off, but couldn't part with it.

anyways, i'll get some strings in the morning. i think i've got the introduction part down, and managed to keep it to less than five parts. i might add another. i want to sit on that. so, i'm done for the night.

right now, i need to scour through some old books to see whether i actually have a copy of leviathan or not (i don't think so, but i've picked some "classics" up at garage sales for $0.50 and forgotten about them) before i go buy it. i'm ok with reading articles online, but i'm still tied to the flexibility of books for such things as reading on one's back....