About Me

NOTE:  
I originally wrote this on June 1st, 2022, as my first post on the new Crewman6/Grace Notes blog.  Since then, I've learned to use "Pages" in Blogger.  This post seemed more appropriate as an in-depth 'about me' page, so it's been deleted as a post, and moved here, as a permanent page.

Why Crewman6 and Grace Notes?

Crewman6 

 Ever since Galaxy Quest played in theaters, it's been an inspiration to me. Crewman 6 was the red-shirt who lived.  He was scripted to be an unimportant character who died to prove the situation was serious (in episode 81).  Yet in the context of the movie, Guy Fleegman became an important member of the team, and a permanent character in the ongoing series.

     In one form or another, Crewman6.com has been my domain for 20+ years.  It's been my tribute to the redshirt who lived.

Grace Notes - Southern Styling on a Digital Piano

     Grace Notes was my labor of love.  A "grace note" is an embellishment to the actual melody note.  It was a signature style for my uncle Freil, who inspired me to play.  It was also a technique Floyd Cramer used a lot.  It's strongly associated with gospel music on piano.  

Grace Notes was my blog, from 2011 and for roughly 10 years. It mostly featured gospel music on piano, in the southern style that my uncle taught me.  

     It started because I was seeing signs of age-related memory loss.  Learning new things is supposed to help the memory, and so is playing an instrument.  So it made sense to do something I love, was reasonably good at, and that would help maintain my memory.

     Literally, it was my most popular blog, but far too labor-intensive.  Also, as time passed my memory continued to decline. At first, it was easy to do a new song every couple of weeks or so.  By the final couple of songs, it was taking months to learn a new song, create and memorize an arrangement, and get a reasonably good, but not perfect, performance on video.  Then Covid hit, and it drastically impacted my memory and comprehension.  I've improved a lot since then, but still have a long way to go.

After ten years of paying Bluehost a ton of money, it was just too expensive to maintain.  If I was lucky, it earned anywhere from .75 cents up to $10 or $12 dollars per month. With memory loss slowing me down, it was just taking too long to learn new music.  I wasn't updating the site, couldn't afford to keep it.  So I cut Bluehost out of my will.  Or, at least, stopped paying them for a site that never made anywhere near as much as it cost.

     Before letting it go... I saved a 'site mirror' of the entire blog, so when the day came, I could recreate it.  But now, half a year later, when it's time to start the grand project, can't find the files.  Searched everywhere, all the hard drives, it's gone.  The other blogs saved just fine, but the most important one was lost.  

     That was a shock, but I still have the videos on Youtube, plus the Midi files and sheet music.  All the critical parts are still there, but I'd have to rewrite a decade's worth of blogging.  It's a mind-boggling amount of work, and I'm honestly struggling with the whole idea.

     In a few short weeks, Monique and I will be semi-retired.  There's a lot of potential future projects spinning in my mind, but the starting point is Grace Notes.  That's the one that hurt most to lose, and the one thing I need to replace in order to move forward.  Still haven't decided if I'm up for it.  There's a lot of work to do, just to bring it back to what it used to be.  And learning new music is still going to take a lot of time.  But it's... calling to me.

     For now, this is just a place-holder.  I'll write if inspiration, mood or need all align, just to keep my hand in.  If the time comes, I'll write an update post and link to it here.

Edit:  The time came, there is an update.  Monique made a miraculous discovery! 
Another Edit:  Finally retired... but still working.