Okay, so why haven’t I written this article for a while? Three reasons I’ll blame it on.

Shhhh. The TR2’s sleeping in the garage right in front of all the stuff we had to bring up from the basement as we get it finished. Hardly any room to really work on it, and since I want to rip the head off and redo the valves that will have to wait for the basement to be completed.

This is my mandolin:

It’s a Breedlove KF Natural, Weber tailpiece, Martin strings and a "Longview" pick. I practice about an hour a day, mostly to drive the varmints away, goodness knows it doesn’t do much for the music – especially when I sing. I have to practice since we perform on a stage and they actually make me sing lead at church much more often that I was used to singing bass in high school.

Needless to say that the hour I spend doing this is usually the hour I’d be spending wrenching on the old TR.

I actually do love to spend time with Alice, Bridgett & Duncan, and since this is going into a busy time of year for Alice, I tend to feed them a lot at night, which means that evenings are filled with feeding, cleaning up, making sure homework is done, bathing, reading bedtime stories, and doing laundry. Not that I’m complaining, it’s truly "daddy work" – just that the time has to come from somewhere.

There, my time to work on TR Noir is limited to looking at it, wondering what else in the engine is wrong. Oh well, plenty of time left before TRA 2004. I figure if I start in March I’ll have it ready to go in time.