kwollity

photo credit: fredericknoronha

Last month I posted how I decided to take on a series of small 1 month challenges. I’ve decided to do a monthly recap of each challenge to reflect on how it went, and to look ahead at the next month’s challenge.

For August my challenge was to play the guitar for 15 minutes every day.

A number of years back I got a guitar for Christmas, took a handful of lessons and learned a few riffs. But, since my son was born the guitar has been sitting under the bed. I’ve wanted to learn to play for a while (its also a bucket list item) so this seemed like a good challenge.

At first everything was going great. I was getting the calluses on my fingers back, and slowly remembering how to pick a few of the old songs I knew (or portions of songs). My son also took a great interest in the guitar, and I discovered something awesome. I could now play children’s songs like Old McDonald’s Farm and not feel like a total dork. Instead of playing kids songs because they are my skill level, I could now justify (in my own head) that I was playing kids songs for my kid.

12 days into the month, however, my son got his hands on my guitar while I was at work and tightened a few strings. That night as I strummed the first chord the bottom string snapped from the pressure.

Being a total newb, I don’t know how to replace strings, and upon trying to do so on my own, managed to make all the strings vibrate off the first fret (don’t ask how) and also snap the replacement string.

So I waited a few weeks until my girlfriend’s Dad was able to come over and kindly fix it up.

And that’s where I am…. The challenge was kind of a bust, but it worked to rekindle my desire to learn guitar. I’m going to make more of an effort to play (even if its the Itsy Bitsy Spider for my son).

September’s challenge:

Since I just spent the last few days moving and still need to unpack, and I’ll also be in PEI for a week, I decided to make this month’s challenge the easiest from my list; learn a new word every day.

My phone has a Dictionary.com widget that nicely displays a ‘word of the day’. This one will be kind of boring relative to the other challenges, but I’m already having fun with it. My stepmother was talking about how fast the lettuce in her backyard grows and I was able to say ‘oh, so it doesn’t take long to braird‘?