Wood versus music

As I've posted before, I have a (unusually?) long list of major and minor hobbies and interests: music, woodworking, martial arts, gardening, computers, film, and probably a few others that aren't occurring to me right now. (Ah! Collecting good quotes; collecting good online comic strips; photography [mostly just of my family].) Let's add criminology, deviance studies, and statistical and fieldwork-based research methods, as well -- although that's more ''work'' things -- but, ''interests'', none the less.

What I **really** need to do is win the lottery (the >$1 million type -- not the cheezy ''ten thousand bucks'' ones -- can't quit your day job over that!), and dabble. But, that's not really likely.

I occasionally mentally lament my lack of playing music, as late. Partly that's an issue of time (work, plus watching the kids), and partly of space (no good place to keep things accessible and set up).

But, a few days ago, I realized that I've been squeezing blocks of time out of the day to do various, incremental woodworking-type things: I have a few projects, such as an atypical saw horse, and building a pair of stilts for The Girl, that I've been picking away at. And that I **could** play the guitar, instead, in these same segments of time.

Partly, I feel like some of these things are more urgent: e.g. the stilts are for The Girl, whereas playing the guitar is for myself.

But also, it's an issue that although I inherently enjoy the act of playing music, I've tended to do it with songwriting and recording as a goal. Whereas because I don't have my recording gear set up (time + space), my current situation is a bit like (limited analogy alert!) being a novelist whose PC doesn't have a printer, and whose "save" function in the word processor is disabled. While writing [playing] scratches a certain itch, there's also an element of futility to it, as anything good I come up with is transient and mostly lost (although the "doing" **does** lead to an improvement of skills).


So, having recognized this, I'll start playing the guitar more. But, not for a week or two: I feel like I need to get the stilts finished, first.


Yep: that's my little self-insight of the day.


--GG