Staycation

One of the things that I love about Corporate Chaplains of America, the company through which I chaplain, is that they know that there is a lot of burnout among chaplains and therefore they give/force us to take a good amount of vacation. I have 4 work weeks worth of vacation, which is amazingly generous. I have to take off one week each quarter, otherwise I get a bit of a talking to.

This past week was the last chance I had to take my last week of vacation for 2018. So I stayed home and got some work done. In fact, I’m not evening preaching tomorrow (Conor H is and you should come to Tapestry and hear/support him) so I didn’t even have to work on a message this week). Here’s what I accomplished this week.

Bookcases

In our attempt to continue shaping our home into what we want it to be we are adding built in bookcases to our Library (I am trying to stop calling it the Living Room because I hate the term – it derives from our fear of death, our Living Rooms used to be called Parlors until the funeral industry developed and began referring to their rooms as funeral parlors, because the home parlor was where the body was displayed, and so we picked a name that was the exact opposite of the name for the room where we displayed our dead loved ones. ARGH. Fear of death dominates so much of what is done, so we won’t have a Living Room, but a Library). We’ve had quite a few books in storage that we want to put out and it is our firm belief that you can never have too many books in a room. Therefore, we are building bookcases from floor to ceiling. This is phase one. Once they are painted and books are displayed we will consider phase 2, which will involve building cases up to the ceiling that incline with it. That’s a project for later.

Guitars

A while back Adam was going to sell the first guitar that was actually his, an Epiphone Les Paul Special II, and I decided why not buy it from him and upgrade it. An Epiphone Les Paul Special II is not a great guitar. They are cheap models meant for people who want something decent enough to learn on, but don’t want to spend a ton of money on a guitar yet. Sill often they have a good neck and body, which this one did, therefore, with a little work they can often become very decent little guitars. I basically followed this blog post and did the same basic thing to mine.

It sounds pretty good now. I knew this had worked out pretty well when the luthier who put the tuners in said “This thing plays like butter. You’ve got yourself a pretty good little guitar there now.”

Since I did all this to Adam’s old guitar, and I realized that I enjoyed it, I decided to do the same things to my old Squier Stratocaster. Again this isn’t an expensive guitar but with the right setup it can sound pretty decent. I already had non-stock pickups in it (Dimarzio Virtual Vintage pickups) but I never changed the wiring, switch, and pots in it. So this time I shielded the body cavities with copper tape, put in new premium wiring, 5-way switch, and pots, replaced the pickgaurd with something slightly more fun, and replaced the string saddles. I like the D’Addario auto-trim tuners so much that I am going to put them on the Squier too eventually. That will probably be next month.

BTW I liked the look of one bold sticker on the LP Special and now need o decide if I want to put one bold sticker on the Strat too. If you have a suggestion for a good looking, and possibly fun, sticker for the Strat I would love to hear it.

All it all it was a pretty successful week off. I love time off.

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