Dreaming of a White....Easter?

We woke up this morning and saw snow covering the ground, finishing the dusting which began eerily last night. Spring started last week, right? Apparently not in Germany. We barely got any snow all winter, and then a week into spring we have two days of the stuff. It's melting fast, but still. Yeesh. Signs of the apocalypse.

Gwen and I are taking it easy this weekend. We're both on call and have taken turns going into the hospital at various times to do work. Otherwise, it has been another lazy weekend for us. Gwen's been reading mostly. I've been working out, drinking coffee, surfing the web, watching the reasonably-timed March Madness games (via ncaa.com which streams them free!), playing Madden and then putting in stints at trying to beat Bark at the Moon.

It's not going well. I'm routinely failing at about 94-96% now, during the second solo. Occasionally if I'm not careful I'll still fail in the first solo. My hands are cramping, my "strap shoulder" is sore, and the frustration is mounting. I almost broke the guitar on Friday, and then took Saturday off from the game to relax. I swear I can hear the song in my sleep. I have to be over 50 times attempted now in the past week. This is getting ridiculous. I've been experimenting with different hand positions on occasion, but it still comes down to my inability to nail the repeating hammer downs in the solos. I'm about 75% (average) on the rest of the song - unfortunately given how many times I play I have to simply conserve energy during most of the song, as a result I miss about 1/3 of the quickly repeating green notes which make up the bulk of the song. It's simply too tiring to strum that fast over and over again to try and nail them - which also kills me near the end, after the big solo, I'm often too fatigued to pound them all out and as a result I head into the final solo with less green and more yellow/red than I should. Also, having played the song poorly so many times, I have some bad muscle memory laid down which hurts my ability to improve and nail all the other parts of the song. I make the same mistakes over and over - my brain can't switch the gears after it becomes so ingrained. Correcting those mistakes is going to be difficult, but necessary to put me into the best possible position to get through the second solo.

Come to think of it, I really hate this game.

(Worse, Gwen picked put the guitar and rifled through expert (on GH one), which she had never attempted before, having gained the majority of her current skills from GH2 and later. She didn't fail a single song and after she passed Frankenstein (on the first try), I looked on agape in some sort of proud horror and immediately banned her from trying Cowboys from Hell and especially Bark at the Moon. I can see it now - she steps up to Bark at the Moon and nails it first time out. (Which I could see happening too - she is really good at hammer downs and pull offs compared to me. Plus she's seen me play at at least 30 times and knows all the strategy for star power, etc.) If that happened, if she stepped up and knocked it out of the park on the first attempt - I would cry. Just shake my head, lie down gently, sob, and go into the fetal position, never to come out. I don't have the emotional strength to watch that after failing so many times. As a result, she's banned. BANNED! She can continue to amuse herself with the other Guitar Hero iterations. Maybe in a few days I'll let her try Cowboys from Hell since I'm not really playing that at all right now. We'll see.)

So I'm stuck. I usually play one other song to warm up and go right into Bark at the Moon. After pouring my soul into 5-15 failures at a clip, I don't have the strength or interest to try anything else, or go back and try to get five stars (or four even) on some of the other songs. It's just not happening. It's Bark at the Moon or nothing now. I doubt I'll ever play another non-warmup song again until it's beaten.

It must be beaten.

In case you haven't seen it, here is my pain: (I picked one of the videos where the guy actually screws up a fair bit. He's still a jerk because he finishes the song, but less of a jerk than others - whom I'm convinced sold their souls - that get 100% on the damn thing.)





And back to rosier topics - the Easter "blizzard"....