We’re done with summer visitors, so I got back to Rocksmith this weekend. Which started off by throwing more Rush at me: YYZ and Red Barchetta this time. And a couple of other songs, too, maybe My Sharona and I Miss You? Pretty tough group; I had a target of 90,000 on most but not all of them. And I hit my target on some and missed it on some, but on the whole I felt like I was doing better than the last time I saw those songs, and I got a little better at them while practicing that day.

Then, that evening, instead of watching Deep Space 9, Miranda was in the mood for playing Rock Band 3. So we did that, for the first time in a while, and it was (of course) super fun! Miranda on vocals, me on (fake) guitar, Liesl on (fake) bass, except that one song in I pulled out the mic stands, and Liesl and I ended up singing along as well. (And doing better than we used to do when playing + singing in that song.) Really glad we did that. And Miranda is a Rush fan, so we ended up continuing that theme, singing another couple of Rush songs.

I can’t remember what I played on Rocksmith on Sunday (I should have written this up then!), but it was back to a noticeably easier level. So I went through the event rather more quickly, and then went through my current standard-ish set of songs.

Good weekend, glad to be getting back in the groove.

We had guests in town last weekend and we will guests them in town next weekend, but this weekend was free, so I made sure to practice guitar both days. And the setlist that Rocksmith gave me on Sunday was unexpectedly interesting: it was Anna Molly, Limelight, Do You Remember, Message in a Bottle, The End of the World, Tom Sawyer, and Play with Fire.

A couple of those were straightforward, but the rest weren’t. I’d been practicing the main arpeggio section in Tom Sawyer for the last month or two, but I hadn’t gone through the song in that time, so it was good timing for me to take another swing. Went well enough, but clearly I have quite a bit more room for improvement in that song; I think I’m going to switch over to practicing the whole thing.

And then I had to deal with Limelight; before I memorized the arpeggio section in Subdivisions, I hadn’t realized just how frequently Rush uses the same idiosyncratic chords and just how much they like Bs, but now I know!

Message in a Bottle was a good sign of my increasing dexterity: I already was able to play the arpeggios at the start, but it had been a stretch in the past. And it was a little bit of a stretch when I first tried the song this time, but not so much even then, and after going through it a couple of times, I was getting to where I could at least see what it would be like to play it comfortably. So my left hand is getting better; more of a surprise was how it felt to go through Play with Fire, my right hand was a lot more confident when jumping to the top three strings. I’m still not able to play that piece as solidly as I’d like (I still can’t even reach 90,000 points on it), but clear signs of improvement.

Nice to see that the practice is paying off.

I didn’t do any building this time: I was exploring the caverns under the new house. Which were huge, and which had been explored before, it was just years ago! I immediately got lost this time; eventually I found my way out, and later I found an exit near the stairs to the house, but I still have a lot of work ahead of me before I understand the whole system.

What few pictures I did take:

An alcove full of mushrooms

Looking up in one of the huge caverns

A waterfall in another of the huge caverns

The first exit I found

Another exit. (I think this is the one closer to the house.)

Dan continued to work on his glass platform above the bay; I’m not sure how much he added, I didn’t get a lot of pictures of that, either.

This is actually a picture I took a month earlier but then lost in iCloud, but it’s pretty so I’ll stick it in here

Glass covering most of the bay

A closeup of the lava under the glass

As is frequently the case, Miranda was the most active of us, but she wasn’t building much: instead, she was exploring the fact that the latest Minecraft update added horses!

A horse!

Horses need a wider door

I get a horse, too. 🙂

Gold horse armor

I’m trying to tame my horse

It is not going so well

Success!

Riding across the snow

A donkey attached to a hitching post

Anvilania…

Miranda still has dogs, too