BerthaBlog

…according to this notice I received from the Las Vegas Actionable Award Program, which is completely not a scam and has absolutely never been reported to the Better Business Bureau.

And all I have to do is send back the little form at the bottom, verifying that I haven’t “received any monies.” Oh yeah, and I have to send them a $20 “report-release fee.” Because it turns out LVAAP is not actually running a sweepstakes and has no association with anyone who is, and they tell you so in the fine print. In fact this is a come-on akin to the fake bills you see from Publishers Services Exchange—it’s tricked up to look like something it’s not, so that you’ll send them money thinking they’re someone else. It’s a fine example of how something can be (technically) legal and still be unethical.

Remember, folks:

• If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, and
• if you really won something, you wouldn’t have to pay to get it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go send that advance fee to a nice man in Nigeria who’s splitting his inheritance with me.

Is it a bad sign that I had drum withdrawal after I only had them for a few weeks? We put new carpet in the living room, during which the drums were buried behind heaps of other things in the basement and I couldn’t get to them for over a week.

But now most of the furniture—drums included—have been moved out of the basement. I’m revelling in the vast space available in the living room now (and avoiding the basement, because all the work I did de-crapping the basement over the last few years was completely undone when we moved all the crap from the living room and den down into the space I’d cleared out). The drums, my spouse’s guitars, and our badly-out-of-tune little piano now have a room for themselves, and you can actually walk all the way across it without once turning sideways to get through.

So I’m back to whacking on the drums during the day. My drum instructor has me doing exercises to improve stick control and learn to keep regular time. I practice these during the day when nobody is around, because while they actually involve various left-right patterns with the sticks, they sound like I should be sitting on the kitchen floor whacking on pots with a spoon. Still, I’m getting a little better at whacking on the pots drums; I think I’m more consistent at following the metronome and I’m not flailing my arms around any more. It’s all in the wrist, baby.

And there’s also some exercises I can practice at night, because they involve rhythms with quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes in various permutations, so I almost sound like I’m playing something.