Meet the New Lady

{So far, Mr. A is winning: I’m pretty sure “Di-hards” is my favourite suggestion regarding club names to make us sound more cool. (Well, he suggested it along with “fans”, but I’m just not sure I pull that off.) To me, you’re di-hards because you rock no matter what. You’re here for the funny stuff and the sad stuff, whether we’re discussing poop or politics. You inspire me every time I write. If you weren’t here, I wouldn’t be either.

What do you think? Are y’all down with your new monicker? Because the polls are still open – if you have more suggestions, feel free…}

Okay, back to business. Would you like to meet my new friend? Here she is.

In my mind, I call her Lady, in honour of the yoga ladies. She is damn gorgeous.

Here’s how we came to be together.

Sometime in early 2007, Dilovely heard this guy play this song on CBC Radio 2, and promptly fell for both (you may remember it from the Pick-Me-Up Playlist)

 

Seriously. They could not be more adorable, right? As soon as she could, Di procured the album and fell in love with the rest of it too. (In fact, she had to procure the album twice over because it was an old-fashioned CD – not available on iTunes at the time – and it got snagged at the belly dance show where she shimmied her booty off to that very song. Yeah, yeah, shoulda backed it up.)

Fast-forward to Christmas, 2011. Darling Hubbibi, knowing his Dilovely has a thing for that ukulele guy, jokingly makes her a present of a ukulele… from Chapters. She is inordinately thrilled – speechless, in fact – when she opens it. She realizes it is the perfect gift: the least daunting of the instruments she would love to learn.

Dilovely muckles onto it and learns the first five chords (C, G7, D7, F, and A, if you’re wondering) from Play Ukulele Today!, the Hal Leonard guidebook that came with the uke.

Unfortunately for her, she has an acute sense of tuning, and her ukulele does not. She cannot figure out how, when the instrument is tuned to perfection, the chords can be out-of-tune with themselves.

So off she scampers, uke in hand, to the local folk music/repair store, to pick the brain of an expert. Kind expert diplomatically explains the problems (her hunch was correct: ukulele bought from bookstore is no example of superb craftsmanship), and fills her in on different kinds of ukes available, in a way that makes her feel it is perfectly normal to become ukulele-obsessed over the Christmas holidays. He also lets her try some of the other ukes on display.

Oooh. They are beautiful… shiny… pitch-perfect… and so much easier to play (wider necks, strings much closer to fretboards). Dilovely is captivated.

Thus commences a period of devoted internet research and brain-wracking, which ends with the purchase, from that same kindly expert folkster, of the above Kiwaya ukulele, romantically named KS-4P. (P is for pineapple, because of the shape. It might be true that the choice was influenced by a certain two-and-a-half-year-old who saw the picture and said, “Mama, I want you to get the oval one!” all cute-like.)

Lady is a soprano ukulele of Kiwaya’s Eco Series, meaning she’s made of very thin laminate wood, so as to use less of the resource. The wood is Hawaiian koa (which some of you may know makes the best surfboards). Best of all, Lady sounds beautiful, even with just five chords plus the ones I’ve been discovering without knowing which ones they are.

Also, E is bequeathed the original cheap-but-inspiring uke. Everybody wins!

I am STOKED, Di-hards!

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P.S. How about just one more moment o’ James? It doesn’t get more fantastically Canadian than this. And as if he and his uke weren’t awesome enough, he rocks the fiddle too. Sean agreed I could marry him as long as he comes to live with us.

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