Four Part Harmony

I’ve been meaning to get a post up the past week or so, but have been having some trouble w/ the “behind the scenes” logistics here at the fourpartharmony blog. Long story short, I had to add all these photos in here by hand as opposed to the kind of fast easy way I usually do it. Hope to get things ironed out here before too long, in the mean time…

We’ve gotten a few new picture taking devices in the past couple of weeks, and as a result we’ve been taking a bunch of pictures. We finally replaced our cell phones, which we originally broke down and bought when Nicki was going into labor with Anna. They were great simple phones and we were a little reluctant to replace them…both of them were hanging by broken hinges. Mine you could peek in and see the electronic innards, Nicki’s speaker was broken so when you called her it sounded like you were talking to someone at the end of a very long hallway. Mine was an excellent beer opener. Anyway, we took a long time to finally break down, but we finally did and so we went out and got ourselves the newest, fanciest, cheapest phones we could get, and they actually have halfway decent little cameras on them. Nicki took the kids to the pumpkin patch a week or so before Halloween, and here’s some of the pictures she took w/ the phone.

See, not bad eh?

That said, we knew we were still in the market for a proper little point and shoot camera for the majority of our photo taking needs. I had been scoping out the options since our last camera died, and finally just decided to go ahead and make up my mind. We decided to ditch the canon powershots, as nice as they were, because they kept breaking on us. We got a Panasonic, and so far we love it. We went on a hike in Tryon to break it in, here’s some of the nicer photos we got that day.

See, pretty nice don’t you think?

We didn’t take a bunch of pictures on Halloween night, but we had a good time. Dawn and Doyle and Kadin came over for dinner and trick-or-treating in the neighborhood. Anna and Kadin are getting to be professionals now, but it was still pretty new to Milo this year. He caught on right away though, and after a couple of houses he knew pretty much what he needed to do. He’d walk right up and knock on the door and then try and hold his own for a good position in front of the candy bowl with the rest of the kids. All the kids seemed to have a very fun night.

Halloween 2009.

We took a walk last weekend down to the new play structure they installed at one of the local elementary schools. We’ve been checking it out for a few weeks, but hadn’t had a chance to get in and play on it yet. The kids had fun, and we got some very sweet photos of the two of them.

Took some pictures of the two instrument projects recently. I don’t work on them too often, but still manage to make some progress.

Anna’s guitar is really starting to come together. The body is all finished and bound. The binding was really touch for some reason. I bent the bindings by hand and they weren’t very cooperative. Got them in though, and they look pretty good. The neck is rough carved. The set (the angle the neck makes where it meets the body) looks pretty good on it. I’m working on the fretboard now. Will need to finish the neck and fretboard, inlay the peghead, drill tuner holes, make bridge, then it will be ready for finishing.

The mandolin has been much slower going, but I’m still making a decent amount of progress. I got the sides bent bent and glued up, got the top and back almost completely carved, and the top joined to the sides. I’m working on the mandolin fretboard alongside the fretboard for Anna’s guitar. I’ve got the neck dovetail cut and roughly shaped, thought he fit is far from perfect. Have been working on that for several weeks. Still need to inlay the peghead and cut tuner holes for the mandolin neck too. Once the neck is finished, I should be able to glue it up and close up the body and start on the binding. It’ll be a while before this one’s done I have a feeling, but I feel pretty good about how it’s coming along.

Finally, some pictures of the rhododendron garden down the street (the “duck pond” as we call it). This was last week.

Well, that’s about what we’ve been up to these past few weeks. Not sure what November has in store for us, but I’ll be sure to keep y’all posted.