So, up, up and up I got. I showered, got dressed, ate some cantaloupe while checking e-mail and Facebook, read the morning news (at least as much as I could take). I read the morning pregnancy blogs and yelled a lot at the dog (who thinks it is her bounden duty to bark at everything that moves past the house).

The day was paved with good intentions. I planned to (not in any certain order): take a painting into the frame shop; go to the bank; the library; church choir practice; take the hound to the dog park; go grocery shopping; make important phone calls to family members, among others; get the rest of the nursery cleaned out and ready to paint tomorrow; and get all the thank you notes written for various baby showers over the past few weeks. Unfortunately, not a lot of that happened.

Psammy and I took off for the dog park about 9:20. With the Yuma traffic, we got there at 9:30, where there was butt-sniffing, barking and rough-housing galore, plus numerous trips to the water bowl to replenish Psammy’s bladder so she could continue to mark territory. She seemed to have unlimited quantities of energy; I did not. But I managed to sit down on the bench for a while after it was vacated and I chilled with the doggies. The temperature was so perfect and the dogs behaved for the most part. However, I have to say this: if you pull a dog’s tail repeatedly (even if you are 75 years old) don’t get upset when the dog snaps at you. Geez! After the second tail-pulling session, I got fed up and Psammy and I left. She seemed tired (but apparently she was just fooling me) and laid down in the truck all the way home (in the front, cause that’s where mommy lets her ride when daddy is not with us).

Home about 10:45ish and I realized I didn’t have a lot of time to get ready for the next big event of the day: Kerry and Rox’s baby shower at noon. I still had to get hostess gifts and thank you cards and I still needed to go to the bank, etc. And I had missed church choir practice since I took Psammy to the bark park. So, chop, chop, I tried to find something to wear, that was cool (I was so hot at this point of the day). Not a lot to choose from since I hadn’t shaved my legs (I can barely see them anyway, but you don’t show up to a party given in your honor with hairy legs, or other hygenic faux pauxs but I have never been a person who looks ‘put together’ so most days I don’t bother), so dresses or shorts were out. And I thought I’d better wear a maternity shirt since it was a party for a pregnant woman. Better try to look pregnant (a side note: I have looked mostly fat throughout my pregnancy, not cute and pregnant; I get a lot of the “Well, you don’t look pregnant” sentiment, as if it is the worst thing in the world to look pregnant. It’s not folks.).

By this time, I was running out of time, so I hastened downtown to do some short errand and ended up at Kerry’s house about 12:05, not too late, but not too early. Lots of good friends came, and it was a blast playing with Sydney. But at this point, having been up for almost 5 hours, I was already exhausted. Big time. I felt like I was wading through syrup for most of the party and food did not help. It is so easy to get tired here toward the end (we are almost at week 37).

But I did make it home for a nap at 3:00, slept until 4:15. Well, moved in and out of sleep for that long anyway. My pelvis was really sore at this point. Sitting was painful, laying down was painful. I couldn’t be on my left side because it felt like my hip joint was rubbing itself to bone (and probably is, given what the knees and ankles look like on X-ray). Now it is 10:29 and I have accomplished very little. Never made it to bank; or choir; or frame shop or grocery store; or get phone calls placed to family and other important stuff. Still no labor bag packed. But we did get the nursery ready for painting, I did get some notes written, the bedding in the back is spinning in the wash and the baby is fed. We get to start all over again tomorrow. Let’s just hope I don’t wake up at 7:30 again.

Oh sure, she has a regular wake/sleep pattern that I know pretty well. She does change it up every couple of days, though, I guess this is normal. I like laughing at her and how she vies for my attention or if I put something on my stomach that she doesn’t like or wants to play with (Wii controller, she likes; tight pants, not so much).With the first baby, it’s hard to know. Everyone has an opinion and everyone says something different. That just goes to show you how unique babies are as individuals even when they aren’t here yet.

And speaking of “getting here,” we hit 34 weeks on Tuesday, so baby is coming soon. A couple in our childbirth class who was a month ahead of us (timewise, anyway) had their baby on Wednesday, a beautiful boy. So, it seems more real as time draws closer. If only the nursery were done. But that’s a weekend project for this weekend (hopefully).

My rear fence is really hurting again.  I don’t expect the older tarp to last the night on the carport.

USGS maps of quakes near us from this afternoon.

Checking the live map now it looks like it’s up to 533.

Oh well, at least distant friends and family can get an idea of what Amy looks like right now.   Full album here.

So here it goes, a bit of background and then the first steps of building my second cigar box guitar:

So first a little background. Back in their first year Make Magazine ran an article on an electric cigar box guitar. It was strung with masons line and used a piezo element for a pickup. I was intrigued. But I can’t play guitar and don’t have an amp. So it was filed away as something for another day. And sure enough a few issues latter Make ran an article on how to make a cheap amp out of a LM386 audio amplifier chip.

It just so happens I have a handfull of LM386’s laying around. Back in High School and friend and I bought a bunch to build small amplifiers to go with some experiments we were doing with building our own sound cards. (Well, not full sound card’s. Just resistor tree DAC’s hung off a parallel port with the computer doing the hard part.) I even knew right where I had the 386’s. A quick trip to Radio Shack for a few little things I didn’t have on hand, and a trip into the garage to find an old surround speaker without it’s twin followed by an evening on the breadboard and with the soldering iron later:

I had an amp!  I also finally came up with a cigar box and decided it was time to build.  I followed the instructions in Make and came up with:

My first cigar box guitar!  It was strung with masons line as the Make article suggested.  I experimented with nails held on with rubber bands for frets like the article used…but found it easier to play fretless.  Not that I could actually play anything.  I also had a heck of a time trying to get it into any kind of tune and within a few days found a number of online cigar box guitar sites and learned just what was possible.  I ended up replacing the twine with actual guitar strings fairly quickly, then modifying the eye bolt tuners to try and get them to hold the tension of the real strings.  But it just wasn’t working well.  Plus the tension of the strings was starting to warp the neck.

So I never really liked it enough to really learn to play it.  A few friends who already knew how to play guitar did manage to crank out some actual music with it though so I knew the potential was there.  And eventually (this past November) I ended up getting some actual tuning machines for it and suddenly it was playable enough I started to get interested in it again.  I even cut up some cotter pins and made frets for it.  The neck was still warping worse and worse but I was actually able to start learning how to play it successfully for the first time.

And about that same time my friend J mentioned he had an empty cigar box if I wanted to try and build another.  It took awhile for us to get together and to finally get my hands on the box, and at first I wasn’t very hyped about it.  It was very plain, in a reddish brown color that didn’t call out to me, and it was built differently than most cigar boxes.  But it was nice thin real wood, and did ring nicely when I knocked it with my knuckles.   Besides I still had 3 tuners left over and was itching to build!  So on the way hope I stopped and picked up some red oak to make a neck, and a smaller piece to make a fingerboard.  The color of the box was starting to give me ideas.  I also looked through every home improvement store in town looking for little brass hinges or other things that might make a nice tail piece to make mounting the strings easier.  I bought a couple hinges but ended up not using any of them.

My first attempt at using real tuners on the first CBG was very rough and I wasn’t 100% happy with how it came out.  There wasn’t enough break over the nut even with the tuners cut in like that, the tuners weren’t positioned very well at all.  But it did give me ideas and inspiration for another idea on how to do the head.  Not wanting to waste the one chunk of oak I had on hand I decided to test my idea on a piece of cheap pine first.

The idea worked.  And the little chunk of pine strung up with strings I didn’t use on an actual guitar ended up being nice for testing how boxes sound, just touch it to them and give it a strum to get a feel for the tone of a box.  I did cut the lower portion just a hair too thin on this test – but since it was just scrap wood anyway that was no big deal.  It was also good practice to get a feel for how to make the necessary cuts and how to do a better job on the piece of oak.  Thanks to that the oak came out very nice when I did finally put it on the saw

I did burn the oak a little on the blade of the table saw, most of it sanded out but some is still visible.  While waiting for the glue on the head joint to dry I worked on the fingerboard.   The first box had an absurdly long scale length since it was meant to be used with the masons line originally and I never got around to shortening it up.  It also had way too much action making it VERY difficult to play without a slide.  So this time I knew I wanted to have lower string action and a shorter scale.  I figured using a fingerboard on top of the neck would help get better break over the nut and bridge while enabling me to set the action up nice and low.  I also planned on using real frets this time so with a separate fingerboard if I messed up I just had to make a new fingerboard and not a whole new neck.

But it’s time for me to start thinking about making dinner, and this is getting to be a fairly long post so I’m going to leave it hanging here until I get a chance to update again.  It probably won’t be tomorrow night (we’ve got brew night) and it probable won’t be for a few days after that since Kieth is supposed to be in town for a few days starting any day now.  But just like I finally got around to starting this story I promise I will get around to continuing it.  I need to finish it up soon too, CBG #3 and #4 are already under construction and I’d rather be talking about them right now.

But it’s the last day of the contest so I’ve got to try one more entry:

How to build a cigar box guitar – Free Plans at www.cigarboxnation.com.

In the meantime rather than post about my own CBG I’ve been building…which I really should do.  I’m going to post about Cigarboxnation so I can try and win a professionally built CBG.  In exchange I promise I’ll come back and post a real writeup about my CBG at some point…and update this software…and install Amy a blog for the upcoming baby.  Oh yeah…I guess I haven’t even mentioned that here lately either.  Facebook…you made me lazy!

Anyway, here’s what finally made me remember my password and post an update:

How to build a cigar box guitar – Free Plans at www.cigarboxnation.com.