Ok guys. I never played squirrel hunters and don't remember ever hearing it, although it seems sorta uncommon going by real life and the internet both, except for in the playing of John Hartford. He gave a concert at my college sometime in the early 70s...don't remember exactly when, so he mighta played it then but I don't remember. I was so fascinated with the dancing and fiddling at the same time....not to mention the vest and hat. Anyway, a few years back I learned it off of the BG Daddy site, although it was so notey and fast I didn't quite catch it all...but to me, with my love of rearranging tunes as I want to...lol...and my self-given permission to be free to do that, and my hope other people can enjoy that freely too so we can all have a good time playing music...I did limp my way through it one time on youtube, and only had played it long enough beforehand to be able to limp through in a sorry way and have never played it since. But today...unbelievably...a rare day...I had a chance to grab a fiddle...grabbed the one in standard tuning and thought to give squirrel hunters another try. By this time, I see what bugged me about squirrel hunters the other time around...I love the tune...but it has a chromatic feel that bugs me...so I was messin' with it for about 12 minutes (lucky when I get that much) and realized that could easily be changed to less chromatic feeling...then, I know John Hartford did long bows...not my thang...so when I had done it for YouTube my bowing seemed too choppy with it...my usual bowing based on n. shuffle and its natural spin-offs just wasn't clicking in for me. here's a link of how I did it back then, 9 years ago...don't get upset if you don't want a link, just pass it on by...and thanks... youtu.be/oOowbZd6k6c?si=oG2VIwZo_2ngGGB7

So now, this morning with coffee in hand...well, I set the coffee down for a while and ended up playing some, I realized the chromatic feel plus the n. shuffle feel, along with a slower tempo, which I'm always in favor of...it just sounds less hectic to me, not just this tune, everything, just about...anyway, I discovered in my 12 minutes of freedom this morning that I think I could make this tune work for me, looking at it again now, when it just didn't before. So that's my story for today.

Before that happened, our internet was out so I had been grappling to find how to contact the place to get it back on, talking to AI robots for hours and listening to terrible music in between robots, looking up passwords and secret codes and all that ... and apparently a centipede dropped into my coffee while I was on the phone. So after getting off the phone and hurriedly picking up a fiddle to try squirrel hunters while I had the chance, I took a big swig from the coffee and had something strange in my mouth...I gagged and spit everywhere...lol...sorry, it was gross...I had almost swallowed a centipede. Fortunately the fiddle was not harmed in this whole scenario. Not sure about the centipede...I don't know where I flung him...lol...I hope s/he's ok.

For the past 4 months I've spent hours and hours on phones, talking to AI robots and looking up all our secret codes and passwords and whatever... being frustrated because I just hate all that stuff...everything from medical bill calls to when somebody rammed me from the left lane at a high speed on a windy two-lane double yellow-line road as I was turning left with my turn signal on...dealing with the collision center's robots and the insurance's robots and the other person's insurance robots, etc. I've spent so much time with AI robots, filling out forms and trying to make sense...I'm starting to feel like one of the ol' AI gang now, myself. So I'm chalking up long days on the phone robots and trying to manage all the stuff here...the car rental place says I should have taken my red Jeep rental back a week ago, after they had given me a stinky busted up white Nissan days before, while the collision cent who has had ou car for a while contacted me to tell me to bring our car in for repair or make an appointment...and it was hard to find a human who I could tell that they already had our car, or another human in the rental place that they didn't give me a red Jeep, etc., It's all so crazy I can't make sense of it. Doctors told me to stop being so stressed out...yeah, yeah...easy enough, hey?