Halloween Notes

Halloween at Chez Sweaty is now done and dusted, and I have some observations.

First, I am not an elaborate decorations person, so we don't have things out. If I am not too lazy, I do have a couple of Chinese made dog skeletons that date back from when we rescued greyhounds (over 8 years now).

Alas, we still rescue dogs, and one of them (Lizzie - pictured ab0ve) is a very reactive dog. She has spent her 8 years saving us from the very scary mail lady and the parcel delivery services (UPS, FedEx, DHL, Amazon) by barking loudly and lunging. I've never been able to get her to walk beyond a couple houses from ours, and while she is great with other dogs, she is not so great with people, especially women. If you want to learn more about her, check out my dog's blogs at Greytbros. Still, once she gets to know you, there is so much love she has to give.

Thus, to prevent an endless stream of barking and lunging at the door, I have a ritual. I pull a small table from our back yard out to the walkway, drag out a chair, grab a guitar off the wall, and spend 2 - 3 hours noodling for the kids and their parents.

This year, I did something different. Usually, I pull an acoustic. Way back, since I wasn't playing that often I grabbed the nylon string, somewhat more forgiving on the poor state of calluses. But then one year the strings were dead, and I didn't have enough time to properly change them and stretch them in (IYKYK) so I grabbed the steel string. For 7 years it was all acoustic. But this year, I have a handy, battery powered 30-watt Yamaha THR amplifier that is really convenient, and sounds freakin' awesome. Not only clean, but since Yamaha also owns Line-6, it has some modeling tech in it, so I can instantly switch between a 1980's chorus-y clean to an EVH Brown tone, to a real crunchy metal tone, to a blues honk, to a twangy country/surf rock sound. And all those tones got used.

But that is just the set up. I rarely prepare for this apart from my 60-90 minutes of daily playing. I don't have a playlist, and I don't even think of what to noodle on. I don't have backing tracks on my phone to play to. Of course there are some 12 bar blues, and some Muddy Waters riffs, some Ventures (James Bond theme, pipeline, main riff from Hawaii Five-O), Van Halen, some Classical Gas, the almost mandated Crazy Train and Stairway to Heaven tossed in.

But after 2 hours I get bored (note: the transient kids and their parents were not bored - just me) and I think to myself what are good Halloween songs to at least hint at.

And then it was my most embarrassing moment. Naturally Iron Man from Black Sabbath (why the heck hadn't that come to mind earlier? Must be my dementia setting in) popped into my mind. But I hadn't played it in so long (like seriously, the 1980's) that I had to relearn it from memory. Man, was that a rough 5 minutes to get the chords and the turnarounds right. Paranoid was a lot easier after that, then I moved to Blue Oyster Cult for "Godzilla". No, not the Racer X cover (Paul Gilbert is a monster).

Anyhow, Halloween is over, we had maybe 10 groups and perhaps 15 kids total. I went through only one of the three bags of candy (the rest will go to the office next week).

Next year, I should have my wife take a picture and even some video so I have proof.

Still, it was fun.