2013-07-19

Appleton Neckbreaker

I finally managed to snag one of Tiki Farm's creations for Appleton Estates. There have been a few of these over the years and you'll occasionally see one on eBay. This particular design is by lowbrow artist Von Franco.


All 100 of these sold out in 6-7 minutes from what I could tell.  I got #20.

2013-07-08

Hulala Time

I was looking for something new to play that wasn't electronic and didn't have a ton of knobs to mess with. I listen to exotica and Hawaiian music a good bit so why not a ukulele?

I've done some online research on and off for a while and finally narrowed things down to a concert size ukulele in the $100 range (Will I ever figure it out? Will I stick with it? I really don't want to spend more.). I did some poking around to find somewhere local to deal with as I didn't want to just order something mail order and get something that's out of whack, unplayable, and me too confused to understand that it was the problem instead of me. Lo and behold I discovered Mike at Uke Republic over in Austell and ended up with a Hulala Ocean Dance series concert ukulele.




It's got hula dancers on it. Could I ask for more? (Well actually a tiki would have been better and there are ones out there with tikis on them but they either didn't get very good reviews, were custom jobs, or simply out of my price range.

I also picked up a little clip-on chromatic tuner so I retune it every time the G string goes flat... which right now is about every time you aren't looking at it. Hoping that settles down a bit as the strings stretch out a bit.

I learned two chords tonight. C and F. I played some other ones but those didn't graduate to "learned" yet. This whole chord fingering thing is unnatural and weird. It's going to take some adjustment.


2013-07-05

Hot Crossed Orchids

This morning I hit some Antique'n'Flea's over in Larryville that I don't get to very often and found a couple of nice Orchids of Hawaii "crossed arm" tiki mugs in green


Ooga Mooga shows some in yellow and says Otagari makes the same one in green. These have Orchids of Hawaii stickers though.

I really like their open-eyed and defiant stature.