Vacations

We never did the "family vacation" thing when I was a kid. I alway assumed it was because my parents family lived across the state from us, so when we had time off, we went to see family. Now I'm married with kids, most of my family is gone, and my wifes family lives in the same town we do. There's no excuse to avoid the vacation thing.

A blogg or web site somewhere describes our last vacation when we journeyed to Galveston, Texas. If you missed it, suffice to say it sucked. The beaches all had swim warnings, it rained daily, the rain was almost as bad IN OUR ROOM as outside, except outside it dried out faster!

A few years after that, I managed to avoided vacations because we had a houseboat. Every weekend we were at the boat and if there was a week to kill we could spend it at the lake. We sold the boat and that excuse is gone.

This year, I once again was forced into a vacation. Since money was tight, and the cost of gas through the roof, we journeyed from St. Charles to Branson, Missouri. Branson is where all the has been country tainted acts have ended up. For some reason totally beyond me Dolly Parton, Jim Stafford, Andy Williams, even Roy Rogers and Dale Evans have ended up having a theater here (interesting since I'm pretty sure some of the folks are dead) as well as acts I've never heard of like the "Baldknobbers", and acts tried to cash in on famous acts like Jackson Cash and his tribute to the Man in Black, and the Presley Review, The boys from Liverpool, etc.

Our trips to grandmas were 14-16 hours drive time one way. Once dad fired up the car, there were stops for gas and burger to eat in the car. If we were lucky we stopped for Bar-Be-Cue which meant we stopped at a rest area to eat. Branson was a little over 4 hours away per mapquest. With stops it took us almost 6 hours. A big chunk of the was to the dulcet sound of kids screaming, squabbling, and fighting.

Even after the short drive, everyone was too tired and crabby to use any of the tickets we had bought for friday night. Saturday morning, we went to breakfast. Both kids decided they didn't like ANYTHING on the free breakfast buffet, so the whining/squabbling/fighting started early.

After eating, we started our journey (along with everyone else in Branson) to Silver Dollar City. Before we even got there I decided that I HAD to make a blog entry if for no other reason than to remind myself to NEVER TAKE ANOTHER FAMILY VACATION. Before we are there the kids are crying saying they want to go home, hitting each other and the previously mentioned whining/squabbling/fighting. We get there and it is HOT, with temperatures in the 90's. To the best of my knowledge, there are 2 water fountains in all of Silver Dollar City, but every place is happy to sell you a bottle of water at $2.50 each.

Between the shops being air conditioned, the kids still whining and moping, mom not being able to walk well and just the generally malaise of the family vacation, we left our hotel at around 10AM, were at the park until 5PM, and we rode one ride. But there were at least a dozen fights, countless whining, one incident where Anh tried out her shoplifting skills, and everyone sick from the heat by the time we left (Kay refuses to drink water, and the kids mimick her, so between the three of them they drank less than one bottle of water.

Eventually we get back to the hotel so the kids can again squabble, this time over the PSP and DS Lite.

Obviously, I had fun. So much that I swear that this is our LAST family vacation!! And I haven't even mentioned the hassles getting ready to go (finding someone to keep all the dogs! ) and the fact that one of the dogs bit my mother in law when she was nice enough to watch the for us.

No more! Next year I'll burn my vacation time on hangovers and babysitting!

More on guitar

I still like the guitar, but there are a couple issues I thought I shoud mention...

FIRST PROBLEM
A string broke. OK I know that is no big deal, but I wasn't doing anything at the time to make it break. On examination I found a burr on the bridgeunder where the string broke. This is fairly easy fix and one I've done before. A couple light passes with a small file and I'm ready for new strings. This does appear to be an issue with Epiphone guitars though. I've only had one previous Epiphone and it had an identical problem.

SECOND ISSUE
There is a switch to switsh from neck pick-up, to bridge pick-up to both. The center position (both pick-ups) works intermittently if at all. I figured that was an easy fix and called guitar center to see if they had the switch. When I explained the problem, the guy on the phone said they' just order me a new guitar! (The one I bought was the only one still at the store and was the demo. I'll admit buying the demo kind of bothers me, I like NEW, but the demo you know the sound before you buy)

I don't have new one yet so Guitar Center may screw me around, but so far I'm hopefull.

THIRD ISSUE
This may be a non-issue, but I figured I'd mention it... On surfing the net trying to find more info about my specific model (Epiphone DOT Deluxe VS) I stumbled across how the pickfups are supossed to be set. Assuming the article was right, the pick ups are way to low. Also the posts are not adjusted even closde to the way they should be.

Since it looks like this instrument is going to be replaced anyway, I'll probably play with it myself and see if I even hear a difference. If I screw it up on this guitar and mess up the sound, I'll take the replacement to a luthier.

NEW TOY!!

Not a great picture, but better than nothing. It wasn't expensive for a guitar, only $400, but I needed an amp and stuff also so it was all I could afford. Plays nice as far as I can tell and it does have a nice sound. I think I might need to work on the intonation a bit, or I could bite the bullet and take to a luthier, but I think it' good enough for now.

Test post

I tried to attach a picture.