Things are progressing nicely these days. We\u2019ve settled into a good routine with the new school year. It\u2019s a whole different bag now with the kids being older. Looks like Jeannie and I made it thru the baby and little kid phase, and now we have a bit of a breather before the teenage thing starts. Everyone has been telling me how difficult middle school can be, but to me it\u2019s great. I can leave the kids home alone for a few hours, or have them go with their friends and not worry about it. I can pick the kids up from school on the days I work at home, and they do their homework and make dinner. We\u2019ve started checking out high schools for Lizzy the last few weekends. Sort of a mind-blowing experience. How the time flies!<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been working alot on music. In alternation to practicing piano for the rock thing with Blick, I\u2019ve been playing tenor sax every other day for a good hour or more, getting back into shape for the show tunes show. It\u2019s going quite well and feels good, however working the music out is not that easy. I\u2019ve been working off of recordings, but we\u2019re doing different arrangements in different keys. I finally got the charts to most of the songs on Friday, and some are more detailed than others. Hopefully it\u2019ll all come together when there\u2019s a rehearsal.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Michelle has been good at getting me to spend quality time with her lately, mainly by figuring out what I like to do and then asking to do it with me. Michelle and Lizzy have also been getting into chess again lately and I\u2019ve been playing again too. I guess they\u2019ve been playing at school, and they\u2019ve been playing each other at home too. I\u2019m still giving them lots of pointers about tactics. They\u2019re both good enough now that they have a sense of strategy, and can beat me now and then if I\u2019m not paying enough attention and make a careless mistakes. Good fun.<\/p>\n
A couple weeks ago Michelle had me sit down and work out a piano accompaniment for a song she wrote called \u201cNow and Forever\u201d. She wrote it for Jeannie, just a lyric and melody, and it\u2019s very sweet. The song is basically a ballad, and I gave it some structure and cool jazz chords. Last weekend we recorded a demo, just piano and vocals. I\u2019m tempted to mix it down and share it, but I think I\u2019ll wait. My thing now is to really play the song rather than using proTools as a word processor for audio, so I\u2019m just gonna put together the real version and let you hear it when its ready. I\u2019m going to build it around a live performance on the piano, which means playing rubato over a click track. I\u2019ll probably program tempo changes in to the click track, practice along and adjust it until it feels right. This means Michelle will have to sing all the vocals over again, but that\u2019s okay. I\u2019ll round out the arrangement with drums and bass, and Michelle asked Lizzy to do a flute solo.<\/p>\n
Now the man point of this post: Michelle said to me the other day \u201cRemember when you used to play Dungeons and Dragons?\u201d I\u2019m amazed she remembers this because we stopped maybe two or three years ago. We used to play on Friday nights, ostensibly after the kids were in bed, with a party of friends on Long Island and in Carolina. We would use our computers to run an audio conference and have software for maps and dice. The campaign eventually died when the DM and half the players got turned on to Warcraft.<\/p>\n
Anyway, Michelle asked me to teach her how to play D&D. Lizzy and Jeannie are on board too. So I dusted off my old dice and books. The girls both want to be witches. Jeannie is going to be a rogue with a heart of gold. I\u2019m DMing, so I\u2019m putting together a world for them. I haven\u2019t DM\u2019d since middle school, but I have a lot of good ideas for a scenario and specific things for this campaign and these characters. I\u2019ve been having fun working out the backstory and settings. The first module will be Keep on the Borderlands. This is a very old module I know, but one of the few I have around. Friday we rolled up our characters, but we still need to complete their skills, spells and starting equipment. And I need to flesh out some NPC\u2019s. Still it was good fun. Next week the adventure begins in earnest. Watch this space for future updates.<\/p>\n
Lastly, the kids have been clamoring to go apple picking and pumpkin picking this fall. Michelle even used it as a topic for a paper at school. We\u2019ve been so busy it\u2019s been hard to make the time. But today was the day, and we had a blast. Best of all we up with met Martin, Kathleen and Charlie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Things are progressing nicely these days. We\u2019ve settled into a good routine with the new school year. It\u2019s a whole different bag now with the kids being older. Looks like Jeannie and I made it thru the baby and little kid phase, and now we have a bit of a breather before the teenage thing … Continue reading “The Saga Begins”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,11,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dd","category-general","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1655\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}