Daily Archives: October 13, 2019
Stille Nacht . . .
I spent most of the day trying to fix a problem I may have caused. But if I did, I’m not sure how.
Which also means I don’t yet know how to fix it.
I have a friend’s HP Envy 360 15m-cn0011dx laptop so I could upgrade the SSD from 256GB to 1TB, and the RAM from 8GB to 16GB. But along the way as I was removing the battery, one of the very, very tiny screws, only slightly larger than the ones in eyeglass frames, dropped off the end of my magnetic screwdriver and fell down into the computer underneath the touchpad circuit board.
So, no problem, right? I’ll just remove the circuit, retrieve the screw, and put it all back together, right?
Then I snapped in the new 8GB RAM stick, and put it all back together, and booted it up. I only make one change at a time, so it’s easier to troubleshoot if there’s a problem.
So after I booted into the BIOS to updated for the new RAM, I let it go on into Win10 with no problem. Until I tried to use the touchpad.
The cursor moved just fine, but the left and right click areas didn’t respond at all. So I took it back apart, removed the touchpad board, cleaned everything, and tried it again. And again no luck.
So that’s where I’m at right now. I guess I’m got some Googling to do.
I mentioned in last night’s blog that I really enjoyed Dennis Ivey’s rendition of ‘Old Rugged Cross’, and I told Jan as we were driving home that it really hit me because ORC was one of the two songs I played and sang the very first time I ever performed in public.
It was Christmas time, 1963, I had just turned 15, and I had somehow been roped into narrating the Christmas Story play at our church in Athens, AL. As I told the story, of the Manger, the Three Wise Men, the Angels, and the Shepherds, a bunch of young kids were acting out the story in front of me. One of the Shepherds even had a live sheep on a leash, who immediately crapped on the floor.
The Sheep, not the Shepherd.
Anyway, I had asked the Minister if I could also perform a couple of hymns afterwards. He just asked if I needed the organist and I said no.
At the end of the pageant, I pulled out my trusty Sears acoustic guitar from under the podium,and after a shaky start, (my $24.99 guitar never was very good at holding tune for very long) I first played and sang Stille Nacht in the original German, and then again as Silent Night in English. I was taking German in the 10th grade and we had to learn it for class.
Silent Night was originally written in German and first played in an Austrian church for Christmas Eve midnight mass on December 24th, 1818. it was written for the guitar because the church’s organ had been damaged by a recent flood.
So it made sense to do it on guitar in a church again.
I finished up with one of my two favorite hymns, ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ (the other one is ‘In The Garden’), kind of covering from the beginning of the Christmas Story to the very end of the story.
I got a lot of compliments afterwards, from parishioners who didn’t know I could play and sing, and especially from my surprised parents, who knew I could sing, but didn’t know I could play the guitar, since I had practiced in secret.
And it all worked out great, since I ended up getting a new Fender Stratocaster Sunburst for Christmas.
I really wish I had kept it, because though I thought it was expensive at the time (about $300 if I remember correctly), it would be worth $10,000+ by now.
Yikes!
Thought For The Day:
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” – George Orwell.
dfdd
