Jumping Into Alfred, Part Two

I finished Alfred, Year One last night and began on the first two pieces in the Year Two book forthwith. I'm still polishing my mojos on The Entertainer and probably will be for some time. I found some insider tips online from some hardcore boogie-woogie boys on how to spiff up your Ragtime playing and I'm trying to integrate them into the pachydermal lumbering I call keyboard playing.

I feel as if I should celebrate. But nobody in my household really cares, so it would be a party of one. Wife's response was that it was about time i finished--it actually isn't real years, whatever that means. My research on line is that it sometimes takes people with no prior musical experience who do this as a hobby at least a year and often eighteen months to work through this book. Of course wife works in Critical Care at the hospital and deals with more important things than piano playing. My cat says, "carry on." I think my cat just likes to lay under the piano and listen, no matter what I play. She's an uncritical audience. My betta--Siamese Fighting Fish-- who is going on two years old and is apparently immortal, prefers the Russian composers such as Borodin and Mussorgsky. They appeal to his martial spirit.

So my transition to the symbolic Second Year occurs silently and without fanfare. However, I think I'll hold my own ruckus right here in the shadowy corridors of my own secret thoughs: