Goldmines …

… and nuggets, they do produce

I have been leaning heavily of late towards dusting off my textbooks from my years at college and proceeding to refresh myself on my lessons of academia. Having kept everything from Basic Musicianship and my partially-completed Bachelor’s degree, I have all the materials at my fingertips, including the listening materials from History, in the forms of 17 CD’s and 2 text books. (I do not have my course outlines, but with all the materials, I can pace myself through the books and absorb possibly more than I did under the syllibi of those who instructed me)

So what, pray tell, are the ‘goldmines’? Well! first off, I found a website that allows for .PDF generation of verious types of specialty papers, including music notation (http://www.incompetech.com/beta/plainGraphPaper/). At the cost of staff paper, and the lack of a local music store, I can print off my notation paper ad nauseum, simply by generating a page, saving it, and commanding my printer to work when I need … how I wish I’d had this at college, perhaps I wouldn’t have had to design my own in MS WORD to keep from being gouged 10 cents a page at the bookstore.

With this in hand, and the ability to use it to also generate my own loose-leaf paper, I am fully armed to take all the notes I need from my theory and history texts.

This covers the academic warriors, but my aural skills are also very rusty, to the point that Ms. SightSing would be very disappointed to see the results … I used to do so well without even practicing between exams … fortunately for me, I found (thanks to a wonderful article in FluteTalk, which I will be perusing for the other resources there), an online theory site (http://www.musictheory.net/), which outlines basic lessons of triads, intervals, and other gems, and has aural testing studies, allowing for intervals and chords in both melodic and harmonic structures … Along with my copy of noteworthy composer, in which I can input any passage of music and hear it played back, and the metronome widget I found for a wonderful little program called Konfabulator (now owned by Yahoo), I am pretty much set to re-sharpen my musical mind.

With 4 days off at a time, and staying up all night without the ability to make noise (cannot wake up the 5:45 am-rising bus driver), music education seems a perfect fit … all it will take is time, and seeing Shivers so doggedly pursue her passion for Mahler, I am inspired (Thanks Shivers).

Finally, the last "Goldmine" of the day comes from Zeke, at Linsner.com …

Shortly after my beginnings with Rose, I ventured to a comic shop on Granville Street with a fellow student, whom I shall dub BabyBunny (for lack of originality, she used this on ICQ). Describing to her a comic image of a lady with 3 tears on her cheek and fiery red hair (Dawn, for those familiar), BabyBunny pointed to the wall of the shop, where I had not yet looked, and said "like that one?"

I did not explain its importance to BabyBunny, only that I’d enjoyed the work of Linsner for several years … the image on the poster was that of the tag that Rose wore the first day I’d ever spoken to her online, long before any of what happened with Jackie (it’s all in this diary, but I’d rather not recall it) … before she became such an important part of my life.

Sadly, a couple months ago, the back of my new office chair was higher than I’d anticipated, and it ripped a large portion from the bottom of the poster. I scoured many online poster sites, eBay, and every comic shop I have been in, even checking the online store at Linsner.com to see if I might be able to replace it. With no luck, I was sure it was a dead end, as it has easily been 10 years since the poster was printed.

Going through some of the forum posts on Linsner.com , I found it said that if there is a Dawn collectable around, Zeke would be the one to identify it or find a copy. With nothing to lose, I posted a picture of the image, and one of another poster from the series so that Zeke could identify the specific bordering of the poster … he knew it instantly, and found one, mint in roll, within Linsner.com’s old stock … payment will soon be sent, and it will be framed before anything can happen to damage it again.