baffled's blog

A few days ago I mentioned that I had come across a video by a musician named Jonny May that broke all songs or most of them, down into just eight different types. Here is my synopsis of the video. There is a link to the site at the bottom of this article.

There are eight chord progressions which make up 99% of all jazz standards.

The turn around progression, the cycle of fifths chord progression, the extended turn around, the minor turn around, the sentimental progression, the Misty progression, the chromatic walk-up progression and the blues progression.

The turn around progression.

Used on I Got Rhythm, The Way you Look Tonight, Heart and Soul and a lot more.

key of C: 1 C Major 7, 6 A minor 7, 2 D minor 7, 5 G 7.

1 6 2 5

The cycle of fifths progression.

used on: Fly me to the Moon, Autumn Leaves, All the Things you are.

Key of C: 6 A minor 7, 2 D minor 7, 5 G 7, 1 C Major 7, 4 F Major 7, 7 B minor 7 flat 5, 3 E dominate 7

The circle of fifths: 6m7 2m7 5-7 1M7 4M7 7 3-7

6 2 5 1 4 7 3

Extended Turn Around Chord Progression

used in: They Can't Take that Away from Me, Teach me Tonight, The More I See you,....

Key of C: 1 CM7, 4 FM7/D7, 3 Em7, 6 Am7/D7,2 Dm7, 5 G7, 1 CM7.

The slash denotes either a minor/Major 7 or the dominant 7 depending on the melody.

1 4 3 6 2 5 1

The minor turn around progression

used in: You Don't Know What Love is, Softly as in a Morning Sun Rise, Lullaby of Birdland.

key of C minor: 1 Cm7, 6 Am7b5, 2 dm7b5, 5 G7

The b5 indicates flat 5 so A minor 7 flat 5, Am7b5.

1 6 2 5

The Sentimental Chord Progression.

used on: My Funny Valentine, Blue Skies, It Don't Mean a Thing.

Key of C minor: 1 Cm, Cm/7, Cm/b7, Cm/6

Probably more appropriately written: 1m, 1m/7, 1m/b7, 1m/6

The Misty Chord Progression.

used on: Misty, The Nearness of You, Ode to Joy...

key of C: 1 CM7, 5 Gm7, 1 C7, 4 FM7

Think of this as starting in C on the first chord and then moving to the F Major scale to play 2-5-1 or Gm7, C7, Fm7

The chromatic Walk Up Progression.

used on: Ain't Misbehavin', Makin' Whoopee, It's only a Paper Moon...

Key of C: 1 C6, 1 C#dim7, 2 Dm7, 2 D#dim7

1M7, 1#dim7, 2m7, 2#dim7

This progression is often mixed with other progressions

The Blues Progression.

used on: St. Louis Blues, C Jam Blues, Route 66...

Key of C: 1 C7, 4 F7, 1 C7, 1 C7, 4 F7, 4 F7, 1 C7, 1 C7, 5 G7, 4 F7, 1 C7, 5 G7

1 4 1 1 4 4 1 1 5 4 1 5

Think of these in sections of four chords 1 4 1 1 etc.

This is the essence of the Piano with Jonny video.

The weather was sunny but windy so you couldn't stay out long in it, or get blown down. Today appears to be more rainy and slightly cooler. I haven't spent much time out back yet today.

My walk yesterday was disappointing, in the ten minute range but I've done slightly better this morning. I managed 18 minutes before I caved. I do appear to go longer and then shorter but not much new in the extended time period. I am thinking this Chinese Pop station I am listening to must be some sort of playlist which starts anew each Time I run it. The tunes appear to be about the same and in the same order basically. It makes them familiar but kind of monotonous.

We finished the Fenrir book when we got home from the kids last night. It didn't turn out to badly but there was a distinct hook for a sequel in the future. I'm not sure it was good enough to read a sequel but maybe after some time goes past it'd be more acceptable. It was never what I'd call a great book and definitely not hard to put aside for other things.

I did move on to the next tutorial in Jimmy Bruno's guitar institute course but it was kind of disappointing. He basically said now that you have those four positions you should do them all again in F, Bb, Eb, Gb etc. I don't know what I was expecting and I'll of course go on to accomplish those but I hoped for something a bit more novel. Oh well!

They are trying to settle back in and introduce Joe to his brother. Buzz said something about us going out to see the new baby tomorrow.

It's been a beautiful day, sunny and mild although the air was cooler than I expected it to be. We sat out for an hour or so before the breeze chased us back inside.

Last night I worked on the chords Jimmy Bruno was recommending as the intro to his guitar institute course. It was basically C7 in four positions up and down the neck switching between the 6th string and 1st for each chord. I guess I can go on to the next tutorial now! I'm trying to not jump ahead.

We've been reading a book I think I mentioned in an earlier entry called Fenrir by Eric Flint and Ryk Spoor. It's not a bad read but not one that grabs you and won't let you go till the finish. It's a nice way to spend a quiet afternoon however.

Well, I slipped a minute or so on my daily walk. I gave up at 19 minutes. I did switch to a more listenable Chinese pop station but I believe it is the one I was complaining about last week with the tunes that are only like three minutes each. Still, it was better than the techno I was listening to yesterday.

A lot of things were scheduled to happen this weekend with it being a holiday weekend. None of it is happening though because of the ways things have worked out. The other grandparents have Joe but there's no gathering or dinner that I'm aware of going on.

The temperatures are warm here today, about 19C and certainly windy. It is supposed to rain but there wasn't any the last time I was out there. There was actually a small amount of sun earlier when I went out to check.

No real news on the music this week. I did listen to Neil Hogan's weekly On the Beat podcast. It was mostly him talking about his new finger-style version of Itchy-Goo Park by the Small Faces. I guess they have a spring Totally Guitars gathering going on next weekend. I haven't done anymore with the Jimmy Bruno course, I still need to work through the C dominant 7th chords up and down the neck, he spoke of in his chord introduction.

The walk today lasted for a solid 21 minutes. I did find a different channel to listen to but it isn't very good either. A lot of techno but not very melodic techno, so it was boring to listen through while walking. I couldn't even count the pieces, they just sort of flowed into each other.

I have been slowly, very slowly, working through Jimmy Bruno's Guitar Institute of Technology jazz guitar course. His first video was straight forward and informative but this extended course is much more visual so not nearly as useful as the first. That's the main reason it's slow going. It'll be interesting to see how long it will keep my attention. He is a hell of a guitarist though.

It was beautiful and sunny here this morning. It turned into a light shower with some thunder later around noon or so. It only lasted a couple hours and then it was back to sun and temperatures in the low teens. It was a good place to sit and rest after my walk this morning.

Believe it or not, I walked for 24 minutes this morning. It was six songs worth but my channel got changed somehow and I had to listen to this stupid Chinese DJ talk over most of the music. I definitely need to find my regular station before I walk again.

So, my wife, grandma, is home. Subs were purchased for dinner and we are now relaxing waiting for the phone call to announce the new grand-kid.

I have been studying Chinese, but it doesn't seem any more than usual. Music as well. I found a really cool podcast or video categorizing most standards into only eight different chord progressions. I am going, after this, to go write down each progression and the various tunes it relates to and see if I can add even more to each as an exercise. It's one of those things that makes so much sense once somebody points it out to you. Maybe I'll summarize them here in a future post.

There was a good repeat episode on the "You can Learn Chinese" podcast this morning. They were talking about how important reading is to learning the language and how important it is to read very simple things thoroughly and extensively. Reading Chinese to me is very difficult because nothing I know of can represent Chinese characters in a fashion which is usable to me. The only thing I've found that even comes close is emacs which represents each character in Unicode. I have to admit I have a tough time remembering the values and relating it to a character but it is doable. So for example the word 'you' is 我.I suppose once learned it will certainly be understandable.

I lost ground walking this morning. I only managed 16 minutes after two days of 20 minutes. Oh well, I shouldn't be surprised. Maybe the novelty of my new station is wearing off! 'grin'

The whole thing started with an interview I was listening to this morning from Jazz Guitar Today with Frank Vignola and Jimmy Bruno. It was a really interesting interview talking about Bruno's retirement and plans. I really enjoy Vignola, so anytime I get to hear him I enjoy it. They were discussing how they met, who've they've played with and their various illnesses over the years. I thought Bruno was older than 70, hell, he's younger than I am.

We got about half way through Dave Freer's Storm Dragon book last evening. It's a lot of fun. His twist on the whole dragon theme is kind of refreshing.

We are back to dark and dreary for weather today. I think the high is suppose to be 5C with rain and snow to make things fun. It was raining earlier so I suspect it isn't a good day for going out and sitting on the swing. 'snort'

Hey! It was another 20, really 21, minute walk on the elliptical. It took six tunes to manage the feat. I'm reluctant to say anything but I may be getting back in the walking saddle again. By the time I finished I was exhausted and out of breath but I didn't feel like I was going to die.

Oh, today's dad joke was: "What do you call a bear with no teeth? Gummy Bear!

Dave Freer's new book Storm Dragon is out as of last Friday. I just received it this morning but haven't had time to look at it yet. I've been waiting ever since he started teasing us about it in his weekly column on the Mad Genius Club website. The site is dedicated to authors, aspiring and otherwise.

It's another beautiful day so far. The air is quite cool but the sun makes it worth putting up with the breeze and cold. I sat out and recovered from my daily walk on the elliptical and listened to the most recent Fretboard Journal podcast. Where Jason Verlinde was interviewing a dulcimer maker named Joellen Lapidus. I eventually had to come in because the sun was getting a bit to intense.

Today's walk on my elliptical saw me reach right up to 20 minutes. I new changing the pop Chinese radio station would pay-off! I was very glad to manage the end of the fourth song! They weren't five minute songs either, there were a couple of ads in there as well as a partial tune I came in on the middle of when I was just starting.

I spent most of yesterday searching for and looking over books on common lisp. I have a bunch already but am always looking out for new approaches and more up-to-date material. I see that Mark Watson updated Loving Common Lisp in January. I still think Peter Norvig does the best job I've seen so far explaining lisp in Paradigms in Artificial Intelligence Programming. I think I'm procrastinating, my goal is to write Raschka's LLMs from Scratch into common lisp. It's basically just a learning project to get better in lisp.

My wife left me on my own yesterday to go out to the theatre. My big goal was to take appetizers out of the freezer and pop them in the oven. Damned if I could remember how to operate the oven! 'sheepish grimace' I just pushed almost random buttons until it went click indicating operation. Anyway, they came out fine in the end.

I didn't walk on the elliptical today, instead, my wife recommended going out for a walk in the sun. I forgot to look at the time when we left, so I don't know how long we walked but somewhere around twelve or fifteen minutes. It wasn't nearly as vigorous as the elliptical but it stretched my calf muscles a lot more. They were pretty sore by the time we got home.

Today is my grandson's birthday so we had his family and my oldest over for dinner last night. We had a very pleasant visit and Joe loved all his presents. I think he got more from us last night than he got at Xmas time. It seemed that way anyhow. He certainly likes to be read to. He's also funny because he doesn't really appear to like sweets in the shape of cookies or cakes. His dad had to eat his birthday cupcake for him. Not that was a hardship for dear ol' dad!

My wife and I listened to the debate on whether LLMs have understanding or not, posted by the Computer History Museum. I was surprised; I thought it was a very good debate. It gave me a lot to think about. Everyone was saying that they didn't like the term Artificial Intelligence but everyone uses it. I think from now on I'll refer to it as machine intelligence to de-stress the term.

I managed fifteen minutes on my elliptical today. That's down two minutes from yesterday but I didn't wish to push it. Yesterday surprised me and I don't think I'm quite ready to start out doing myself on each session. I definitely like the new Chinese pop station better than the previous, mostly because it's an actual radio station with adverts and commentators. Not that I like ads.

So yesterday, in the exciting world of installing emacs applications, I was struggling with two apps. I resolved the greader issue and so am still scratching my head over the empv.el package. Still, it makes me happy that my book reading problem is fixed and my wife and I can read again. BTW, we are currently reading Fenrir EARC by Eric Flint & Ryk Spoor. We are also listening to a debate held by the IEEE Spectrum on whether large language models understand what they are writing. A completely different topic for a completely different post.

I not only surpassed my walking score of yesterday at eight minutes to move up to 17 minutes today. I contribute it to changing to a different Chinese pop station and thus changing up my listening experience. Doesn't matter that I changed to the new station yesterday, that's my story and I'm stickin' with it!

Last night I sifted websites looking for meal replacement bars. There appears to be millions of them but the large number of them are just wanting to sell these meal bars. They say things like "the top 19 meal replacement bars" and then have each one they are discussing winning or most recommended in various categories such as high-energy, athletic-prowess weight-loss etc, etc. I am interested in vitamin and mineral count and how well they absorb by your body. Of course, they have to be vegan because I am. Another story for another post. Anyway, I've narrowed the selection to about four bars but only three that I have any real interest in. I have a hunch that the top one on my list won't be available in my local grocery store.

Greader is an emacs elisp program which goes through a text file and feeds it to a speech synthesizer a sentence at a time. I like to open a book and then just start greader and let it read until I'm ready to have it stop. You use the space-bar to start and stop it so it's reasonably simple to get started. I didn't realize the new version was fucked until I tried starting a new book my wife and I wanted to listen to during dinner last evening. We tend to do that a lot. I don't know how long it'll take me to fix it but I spent an hour or two on it last evening with no joy so far.

Empv is another emacs program which provides an interface to online radio stations, hence got me started, and YouTube videos to listen to and/or watch. It also allows one to listen to music on your computer like many other music database programs. I have the disk based playing of music working but the radio and YouTube I do not. I'm not very good at looking through elisp code yet so these are way over my pay-grade at this juncture. I think the problem with listening to vids is the invidious proxy server you go through to anonymize connections to YouTube.

I have managed to do my walking exercises but fell off the wagon for a couple days. I was back up to 14 minutes yesterday. I need to find a better Chinese pop music station because the one I'm using is playing songs that are only three minutes or so long. I can't count higher than four so, going on counting by tunes is stressing me because fifteen minutes at three minutes a piece means I have to count to five and to go beyond that means I'm in big trouble! 'snort'

So today is guitar day, which means I won't get back to the debugging until this afternoon or later. And of course, now that I'm there, I had to do a bunch of edits.

I once again got distracted by another tangent which consumed my attention. My wife was playing with her podcast reader yesterday and I started wondering about an internet radio application for text console mode in linux. There were quite a few available for 'X' but nothing available for the console. I did finally find a package called python3-radios but is not really an application but a sample bit of code to show how the library can be used to find and fetch streams in interesting ways. The problem is that it's only a skeleton to make a point with no instructions or supporting code. I've spent a few hours last evening and most of today figuring out how the various flags work and scratching together some sample code. I still have a long way to go but I can at least find and play streams in various languages now.

My exercising fell off the wagon this morning and I only managed eight minutes before needing to stop. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

I never got back to reading my Graham financial statements book either. I did get my wife's new pieces for her choir just now however. It was sunny this morning but got cold again so there wasn't sitting outside today. I did get in a few guitar and Chinese podcasts this morning before the day really got started. I have this habit of sitting and waking up in the morning before I make coffee, just to give my head time to start working. That's when I do most of my podcast listening. I think I slept in this morning as well. I may have stayed up late last night fiddling with the python radio stuff.

I had a tough evening last night. It seems, from my body's perspective, eating a few nuts is fine but eating a whole handful is right out! So I spent a lot of time in the washroom interrupting our reading of Diviner's Bow. More than that I don't think I'll expand upon! 'grin'

I did manage fifteen minutes on the elliptical today. I somehow chose a radio station wish was playing African music which made my walking very tedious. They were mostly fairly short pieces and seemed to all consist of tunes with only two chords and a lot of repetitiveness. I like music that distracts me which this didn't and so was painful. Nevertheless, I did get 15 minutes in.

I suspect we'll finish Diviner's Bow today. I'm also going back to Building Large Language Models from Scratch too. And, finding the right chapter in the Graham book to go through with a fine toothed comb.

Mark and I didn't really work on very many new pieces although we did a lot of them we haven't done for a bit. It's always nice to refresh ones memory of tunes. I did get a good chance to extend a bit with my noodling. As usual my singing was somewhere out in left field. I really do need to work on that by myself because as often as not I remember the lyrics in the wrong order or totally forget them. See, I'd much rather just play rather than singing.

I did make fifteen minutes again on the elliptical. Just barely made it. Took me a while before I could walk again however.

I'm almost finished with the Graham book; I think I have two chapters left. I think we're just past the halfway mark in Diviner's Bow also. I need to get back to my other reads too.

I woke up this morning at 4:20 from a full bladder and couldn't get back to sleep. I finally got out of the sack at around five, giving it up as a not going to happen on the sleep front. Sometimes I wake and lay in bed day-dreaming for hours before either getting up or finally falling back to sleep. Typically, if I start thinking of chord inversions and combinations I'm lost! That tends to be a rabbit's hole I can't escape from until I'm up and about. It was D-minor seventh chords the night before last. Go figure! So, I caught up on a bunch of guitar podcasts and shiners pods. I finally made coffee about 7:30 because Mac wanted to be up and ready to go out with her friend for nine.

The weather folks say it's going to be a nice sunny day with a high of 13C, so it'll be pleasant for sitting out on the deck. My only quandary is whether to have my shower first or take today's walk on the elliptical. I suppose it makes more sense to walk and then have the shower!

Yesterday was quite a water-shed day. We had thunder storms and pissing rain pretty much the entire day. My office has two windows but one of them contains an air conditioning unit. The unit doesn't obscure the whole space so the remainder is filled with Styrofoam and duct tape. The rain was a lot of sleet and snow which made a fair amount of racket on the window and Styrofoam. This isn't what you'd call a very weather proof arrangement and so gusts of air seeps in too. At one point during the winter the weather blew the filling in and I had to get someone to come over and reseal with more foam and tape. It tends to get chilly at some points and so I have a small heating unit to help keep the winter out or at least at bay. Now isn't that an interesting phrase. So, weather happens!

The walk on the elliptical yesterday lasted an entire fifteen minutes. I listen to Asian pop music while walking and use songs to keep track of my progress, so yesterday was a almost four song activity. It's funny how different genres songs are different typical lengths. The Asian pop tunes are usually about four minutes each and Celtic or Scottish pieces are five minutes each on average. It's a weird way to track time but I've found that if I don't use something, the time drags and I have a really tough time getting through the tedium.

Yesterday turned out to be a day of many tasks? As I mentioned a few days ago I started rereading Ben Graham's book The Intelligent Investor. I have read up to chapter 16 in his original 1972 version and have somewhat secondarily been reading sections in an updated version from 2003 which intersperses commentary that is supposed to justify putting out another version, which mostly just muddies up what Graham said in his last rendition. The commentary states things in a much more confusing and convoluted manner that's disappointing. I'm glad I didn't pay for it because it isn't worth whatever they charged for the work.

We started rereading Diviner's Bow last evening and got through about an hour and a half in and around mac's choir practice session. It is always nice to hear audio versions of what one has read in a text version. My synth says Tekelia's name completely different than the audio rendering of her name. You also tend to hear the book differently in audio rather than text.

I also spent a chunk of time listening to my YouTube subscriptions of Chinese-Pod and guitar folks I follow like David Hamburger etc. It all combines to eat up a day quicker than one would think. The Graham book eats a lot of time checking references and looking up stock analysis I follow with Simply Wall street.

So I almost made myself just another April fool but was saved by checking.

It's a beautiful sunny day today other than the fact that it's pretty cold. I went out on the deck to bask in the sun but didn't last long. It was to cool to stay and enjoy it for very long.

I have managed twelve minutes for the third day in a row on my elliptical machine. It still isn't easy but the first two days I thought I was going to die. Today I just wished I would! 'grin' It's hard to believe that just five years ago I daily walked a bit over an hour and only felt sweaty. I don't think I'll push to get back to that but at least a half hour would be nice.

So, I lived through exercise and I now have a new book to reread because I've already read it, just not in audio.

Oh, I'll go back to complaint mode, orca in 'X' was misbehaving big time on the audible site. It kept getting stuck at book headings and would let me review past them I had to reload orca repeatedly to get past each new entry. It was frustrating enough that I didn't bother trying to go through all Lee and Miller's books to see if we have them all in audio. I know we don't have Ribbon Dance in audio but although it was listed I couldn't find an add to cart button. Oh well, maybe next time it'll work better.

So I sit here listening to the crows generating a ruckus outside my office window and the traffic on the streets of London Ontario heading off to who knows where but probably their jobs or school. It's funny to me how much more traffic there is on our street then there used to be. There was a time when a few vehicles a day was a lot and now it's almost constant sounds of cars and trucks going past. What a difference almost 40 years makes! 'snort'

The whole nature of the neighbourhood has changed since we first moved in. There used to be an island just next to the house where Fox av. ended into Trott Dr. Then in '94 the city determined to replace the sewage lines and put in curbs and they removed our traffic circle. Quite the joke considering there was no traffic. Anyway, they extended our frontage and our driveway and took away the island. It's hard to believe that was over 30 years ago. So, I guess the old adage, "if you remove it, they will come," 'smirk' turned out to be true!

Well hell, there I've gone and written nothing and look what turned up. I suppose I'll continue the story or meanderings anon.

Now that I built it, can I, should I, continuously blog? Even when I don't really have anything to say? Or maybe, I have things to say but I'm not sure anyone other than myself want to read them? At las, I'l probably never know the answers to those thoughts.

I am reading a few books currently, Murray Sinclair's autobiography "Who We Are - Four Questions For a Life and a Nation?" with my wife. The emacs basic lisp tutorial, which I've read before. And, Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) by Sebastian Raschka., which I'm really enjoying. Now, I am thinking of starting yet another, or maybe I should say, restart, The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. I was thinking about it last night while laying in bed waiting to sleep that I'd started it but never really finished it and certainly not studdied it. I have a couple of versions of the book in text and audio and even one on my e-reader from NLS to choose between.

Reading is one of those things that I just do all the time. I often just sit and read, and other times I just sample things between other activities I have on the go. It always seems that there are more interesting books to read than there is time to do them.

Looking back on this list I realized there are no fiction titles in there. Let me assure everyone I read a lot of fiction, but mostly sci-fi and fantasy. I just don't have anything on the go currently. I note that Sharon Lee posts her read-books list everytime she finishes a book, I wonder if I should do that?

Studdying Mandarin or Chinese is an activity I have been practicing for a few years. I am nowhere near being able to understand basic conversations but I do work on it daily. I use materials from a load of different sources. Chinesepod seems to be the most regular, Chill Chat is another podcast as well as You Can Learn Chinese. I've gone through the Paul Noble basic and advanced course a couple times each as well as the Michel Thomas courses. I enjoy doing them but I'm missing something because so far I have not managed simple conversational proficiency. I want to find someone to practice with but haven't found anybody yet.

Another vague thought is whether or not I should post my excersizing activities or regime? It might help me be more consistent doing those exercises. I'm not sure why anybody else would be interested in them but then why would anybody be interested in any of my activities. So, either I do them for myself or I don't do them at all, but then why bother getting a blogging and commenting system up and running at all? Boy, talk about insecurities.

That person or those people made major changes to the mps-youtube code base and renamed it yewtube. It is still kept under the github tree as mps-youtube however.

I have been happily using it for a year or so until an upgrade of software on my system broke it big time. I have spent the past few days debugging the program with very little progress. I noticed however that when leaving the program it told me a newer version was available, 2.12.1. The problem was that just using pipx wasn't grabbing the latest greatest version. Sifting through documentation however gave me some options which finally worked to get the newest version which also happily fixed my blowing up package problem.

If you like text console mode in linux and also like to watch/listen to youtube videos this is a great package. You can install the most current version with:

pipx install --force git+https://github.com/mps-youtube/yewtube.git

The --force flag isn't required unless you already have it's predecessor installed. There are other dependencies it relies on but I think those will get installed auto-magically.

This package is written in python3 and modern python likes to squirrel away packages and programs into virtual environments. Thus pipx will install packages into your own code tree allowing them to not only be isolated but run as your user id.

What they ended up coming home with was simple fare, hamburgers and fries. They also brought me a drink which turned out to be root beer. Now I very rarely drink soft drinks and when I do it is almost always root beer. I hadn't had it for quite a long time though so it was a refreshing surprise. Well, that was until I'm about halfway through it, and by then I'm wishing I hadn't had it because it's filling and too sweet. I pretty much only drink water and in the morning black coffee. So I was reflecting on my childhood when we drank root beer and something called birch beer. Then I wondered what they were made of, because it never occurred to me before.

After dinner I decided to ask deepseek-r1 what root beer was made of and had a frustrating conversation where it told me root beer is made from solid carbon dioxide dissolved in water with carbonation added. That sounded really weird to me because I couldn't figure out where the taste would come from. It insisted it was correct and knew where-of it spoke.

I decided to look further afield and found that root beer is made mostly from sassafras root and other herbs and spices added. The articles I read talked about many different types and recipes for making it. Many of them sounded quite intriguing. I believe I may go down the root beer rabbit hole in the future to try various brands and recipes to see how they differ.

Needless to say, deepseek-r1 was totally out to lunch and maybe even further.

It turned out I had two cavities, one on the bottom of each side of my mouth. The wisdom tooth on the right was the one I underestimated! Anyway, I did survive but it's still sensitive the following morning.

Today is guitar day as I think of it. My buddies are coming over to jam for a few hours. We mostly do old pop and folk songs like Mr. Bojangles, The Piano Man, Wagon Wheel and the like. We also throw in a few self written pieces written by one or of another of us.

There are typically four or five of us and we don't all play guitar. One of us plays fiddle although he grew up thinking of it as a violin. We are all north of fifty and most of us north of 70 so our voices aren't the strongest. Well mine certainly isn't! 'snort'

It's my favourite day of the week.

Today is sort the end of an era with her though. She is retiring in a few months so hopefully today will be the last day of our relationship! Professional anyway. She is also the mother of a couple of blind children so I do know her as a friend and parent as well. The children are all grown and we spend time with them separately also because they were my wifes students. We get together a couple times a year to have fun and visit.

What I will do for a dentist in the future is unclear. I hate to go to someone new that I don't know but I guess it's inevitable. Maybe my teeth will quit needing care! Not likely.

Cavities are very anxiety producing!

Yesterday was my daughter-in-law's birthday, so we all gather at their place for a nice nacho dinner with family and friends. They even managed to provide a vegan option for me. It is weird being the only vegan in the family but often others also like the veggie option so they tolerate me.

My daughter-in-law, Terri's son plays in a native drum band and it was the first time I've really listened to one closely. I've known many folks over the years that play in drum circles and the like but that was the first time I actually heard a specific band. It was quite interesting. The songs take some getting used to because they don't have the same kind of melodies as I think of in songs. They do have melodies just not western music styles. I could get quite used to hearing and even liking them with repetition. The bands can be anywhere from four to 15 people which is weird when the only instrumentation is drum and shakers.

He was in a nursing home, a place they place people that are just waiting to pass away. His ordeal had started five months earlier as a result of bad doctoring and decisions incorrectly taken. It was just one occurrence out of a long line of situations that has led me to my mistrust in the medical community. Of course, there have been many good results from them as well but somehow it's the bad ones that form my overall concept of the profession.

It's a day which reminds me of all the many friends and lovers which I have lost over the years. So I guess it's my day of rememberance. So thanks dad and mom and bro! I miss you and still love you all very much.

I set the path to the blosxom directory tree to be common/docs/blosxom in some places and common/blosxom in others. I did a lot of poking and proding and looking at code before I finally figured it out.

Comments appear to be working. Double newlines in these txt files are not getting automagically converted to new paragraphs. I think I may look into that next.

I think I'll see how this works for a while first though.