Monday, November 07, 2011

Still here...

Well, here is Tasmania in Australia for five weeks and already into my second. Didn't even bring my uke with me and didn't think that shelling out A$26 was really worth it for basically three weeks. Not much to say. Enjoying the preaching and fellowshipping with God's own people. Weather is quite nice. When there was a big white ground frost yesterday in Ulster, I was wiping the sweat of my brow in twenty nine degrees heat. I'm not a big fan o' the heat at all. Ground frost and minus temperatures do not bother me in the least.

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Postcard over.

Friday, August 12, 2011

CRIMMOND ON THE UKE

Although I have these set for the ukulele, the same chords might be applicable to other stringed instruments as well. Crimmond is the world famous tune associated with the metric version of Psalm 23 and therefore will go nicely with any Psalm on the common metre. The D7 note can be difficult enough to play. I say: Forget about the purists and use your thumb for the top string and it should be easy enough. Click on the image for an enlargement.


















Monday, August 08, 2011

Uke Burdens are lifted/Calvary

Click to enlarge the picture. Feel free to print it out.




The Ukulear Option

I have described myself elsewhere as a "mandolin learner" which might even appear somewhere on my tombstone unless sanity prevails. IOW: I'm not getting on too well. Too many strings too close together and clumsy fingers. So that too is on hold. However, not one to be beaten (as in "No Surrender") yours truly has got himself a lovely wee Ukulele and has been happily strumming away on its 4 widely spaced strings since the beginning of June. OK, I have no immediate plans to apply to the United Kingdom Ukulele Orchestra yet, but it is a fun instrument which brings a lot of pleasure. And who knows, it might even get my mandolin skills back on track again.

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Using the famous "three chord trick" idea, I have been footerin' about wi' a few gospel hymns. I am unaware of the chords of these being available on the internet. If they are, I obviously am not copying them. I got them the old fashioned way i.e. strumming, humming and writing. I'm planning to put them up on this site as I go along. If the ukulele aint your thing, then dinnae fash yersel' as the Scotsman said. I might even get something else up on these pages too. Things are busy at the moment, but where there's a will, there is always a way.

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See ya around.

Monday, August 01, 2011

How many makeovers can you have?

I started this blog a few years ago when anyone who was anyone had a blog. It has gone through two distinct phases and is about to enter a third.
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First of all, it started as a general sounding board for whatever took my fancy. It contained serious thoughts and not a few humorous ones along with a few cryptic crossword clues that I had come across and some o' the Ulster Scots leid tae just for good measure. Then Twitter and Facebook came along and that part o' life fell into disrepair.

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I then decided to revive it again. This time the content was more serious. Hey! I even dropped the Confederate flag from the decoration at the top :o) I hoped it might prove to be a feeder site for my own Christian website so I gave bitesize examples from the site with a link to the relevant page. Although the website enjoys relative success, yet there was practically no evidence that any traffic came from the blog. So again, decay set in.

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I am very reluctant to let GoodnightSafeHome go. It is like one of those books that escapes every single purge of the library, but still doesn't really get read. It might even make the wrong pile for a while but gets a reprieve because I am a big softie at heart. (But don't push me...)

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So here is the second revamp. Some might even say it is the unkindest cut of all. I want to use it for stuff that probably wouldn't make the grade in the website which I take very seriously. So that I can hide behind the "Forget it! It's my personal blog" excuse.

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This isn't to say that I'll be updating it regularly, although you might just never know...