Monkey-Shines

Okay, I hated to do it but I had to withdraw from class this quarter.  I wasn’t prepared to take this class yet (don’t have a thesis topic), and it was stressing me out too much.  I’ll have to take it in a couple of months, but now is just not a good time.  I knew I should have just taken the quarter off when I couldn’t get that last class I need, but I didn’t want to put off finishing up by another quarter.

The good news is I’m back to gaming a little more.  Well I will be in a few more days.  I have a fair amount of painting and work around the house/farm to do to get ready for a family reunion here in May, but I can playing through my backlog again without stressing out over not doing my school work.  I need to work through some quickly since I can’t be lucky enough to have no “must have” games in the stores forever.

Now if I can just get my drums reassembled and get back to practicing everything will be back to normal.

Sometime last year I decided I should learn to play drums.  I enjoyed the drum portion of Rock Band so much it seemed only natural that I would enjoy playing real drums as well.

Drums are not exactly a cheap hobby.  They can be, but with drums you can only go so cheap without sacrificing quality.  A decent started kit will run closer to $1000 than to $100.  I was in a unique situation that I needed to get electronic drums so I wouldn’t bother the people I live with when I practice, so my prices didn’t vary so much as most starter eKits run around $700 new and there are fewer kits to choose from.

One thing I found early on was that since my are electronic, they can keep track of how many times I have hit the drums.  Since I bought them used, I immediately scoured the book to see how to reset the counter so only my hits would count.

The other day I hit my first milestone.  It doesn’t really mean much other than a measure of how much I practice (not as much as I should, I know), but I hit 1,000,000 drum strokes on Friday.