“Practice, practice, practice!”
I know of no other substitute for learning. Here are my records of another week.
Media Logs
Vlog
Audio Logs
Github Study Respository
Link to my Github repository containing music notes.
General Session Records
| Date Session | Duration (Minutes) | Public Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2025-08-04 | 162 | Experimenting with lower voice range. |
| 2025-08-04 | 90 | Lost voice from yesterday. Resting voice. Working on Singing for the Stars transcription and Lilli Lehman. |
| 2025-08-05 | 60 | Lost voice from yesterday. Only 20 min singing, light work. Resting voice. Working on Singing for the Stars transcription and Lilli Lehman. |
| 2025-08-06 | 60 | 30 min of Berklee Vocal Technique. Lilli Lehman. |
| 2025-08-07 | 75 | Berklee Vocal Technique. Reading Lilli Lehman. |
| 2025-08-08 | 84 | Berklee Vocal Technique. Lilli Lehman. |
| 2025-08-09 | 88 | Berklee Vocal Technique. Lilli Lehman. |
Memories to Share
With the summer ending on Thursday of this last week, I was rushing to finish my last home repairs before the school year began. My home was reasonably well organized and I was feeling ready to start the school year fresh and excited to meet all my new coworkers.
One of the primary repairs was the plumbing for both my kitchen and bathroom sinks. These two faucets had leaks coming from the faucet itself as well as the waterlines leading up to them. Also, the plastic sink stopper in the bathroom sink was broken.
In every home I’ve occupied over the last ten years I’ve had to repair the plumbing. Each time, I attempted to fix the plumbing myself first, failed — sometimes spectacularly — and wound up paying the expense of having a professional redo my work.
My budget was extremely slim I was determined not to call a plumber this time.
Over the last two days of summer, I carefully extracted both faucets and replaced them with modern faucets, fresh off the shelf from Home Depot. I made sure to use plumbing tape on the joints and I also spread that blue plumber’s goop everywhere I thought was appropriate.
The faucets turned on beautifully, the waterlines seemed to be correctly connected, and there were no leaks. The kitchen faucet itself was completely done — I might even call it my first success. The bathroom faucet was also nearly complete, save for the replacement of the broken sink stopper.
A quick note about the anatomy of the pipes leading away from the sink. If you look under your sink, you’ll see that the pipe drops straight down, then curves back up a few inches before leveling out and leading away in a horizontal direction. The curved portion of the pipe is called a “p-trap.”
The purpose of the p-trap is to hold a little puddle of water at the bottom of the pipe; the air from the smelly interior of the pipes can’t pass this little puddle of water, and this keeps your house from smelling like a septic system.
As I was in the process of detaching the fittings for the broken sink stopper, I dropped a large broken piece of plastic. It tumbled down the pipes and wedged itself deep inside this curved p-trap.
This meant that although my sink was working, the pipes were blocked with plastic and would continue to clog with every thread of human hair or anything else that made itself way down the sink.
I tried everything I could think of to get that broken piece of plastic out — using screwdrivers as tongs, for example — but nothing worked.
About six hours later, the piping of the entire sink was ripped out of the wall socket entirely and sitting in my shopping cart at Home Depot. I was walking down the isles, grabbing whatever large tools and wrenches off the shelf that I could find to pry the stubborn thirty-year old pipes apart so that I could get that broken piece of plastic out.
Of course, once it did come out and I went to put everything back together, I found that something in my setup had shifted and the pipes no longer aligned with the wall.
The daylight was gone and the night before my first day of work was already at hand. I was feeling hurried. I first tried to force all the pipes to fit together, lifting up the weight of the sink on my shoulder until all the aluminum and plastic pipes would connect, and then letting the sink slide back into place.
This worked, technically speaking, but it looked like a disaster waiting to happen. The pipe leading into the plastic septic socket in the wall was under so much pressure, the socket itself was bent out of shape.
At one a.m. on the morning of my first day of work I was laying in bed wide awake. The stress of the pipes was adding to the stress of my mind.
Realizing that I was probably setting myself up for a worse situation, I finally stood up out of bed, grabbed one of the many tools that lay strewn about my floor and unhooked nearly every plumbing connection under my sink that I could see.
The pipes relaxed sagged into their normal shape, the loose joints let loose the smell of grey-water septic, and I plopped back into bed. The smell didn’t bother me a bit and immediately fell asleep.
For the first two days of work this school year, I have prepared myself for the day by shaving in my amazing new kitchen sink. My bathroom is in shambles, but I have not yet called a plumber, and I haven’t given up yet. It’s Saturday night, and I’m going to go give that bathroom sink another try.
Artificial Intelligence Transparency Report
No artificial intelligence was used for the writing or performing portion of this blog post.
I used Google’s Gemini AI to help me write a sql script to export my database records of my practice sessions into a .csv format, and convert that table into the above HTML table, as seen above.
How You Can Help
I need your help to become established as a teacher and storyteller.
Here is a link to a blog post that describes how a supportive reader can help me in my quest.
In short, you can…
Buy a copy of my children’s novella, Westly: A Spider’s Tale
Like, comment and share