In Physics class senior year in high school, I attempted to build an acoustic guitar. Not being an experienced luthier, I ended up with an instrument about 1.5 times the size of a normal guitar, with only one rounded side. My guitar has character! It sounded great, but due to time constraints with the project, I used eye-hooks instead of tuning pegs, and the guitar doesn't tune very well, and is pretty much unplayable because of it's size. But it was fun, taught me a lot, and got me a better grade then a lot of people who filled up beer bottles with water.

On a related topic, I picked up my dad's acoustic classical guitar senior year in high school and started teaching myself. Starting sophomore year in College, I play weekly for a religious organization on campus called The BCM (Baptist Collegiate Ministry, a non-denominational student religious group.) Along with my friend Lee, a keyboardist, we lead songs every tuesday at 7pm for half an hour. However, the fun starts around 5 when Lee and I arrive at 'The B', a house just off campus, and mess around on our instruments for the next two hours. I just got a new acoustic steel-string guitar for Christmas of 2003, and am still teaching myself and playing routinely. I hope to continue playing guitar for fun throughout my life.

I have always lived in the same house all my life. It is an older house, built in 1914, and hasn't really been remodeled since. Therefore, there are a lot of things in the house which are constantly breaking, or on the verge of breaking. Growing up, it was discovered by my parents that i like to tinker with things. My mom took this to her advantage, and always has a list of things for me to fix around the house.

For example, we have this huge windows on our main floor which weighs about 100 lbs. In 19 years of my life, it had never been opened. Hidden in the walls to the side of it, are two cavities, with 40lb weights suspended by a rope which attaches to the window itself. Somehow during the previous occupancy, the rope had been cut. I took apart the frame, replaced the rope with a new piece, and put everything back together. This was about a two hour process in the summer of 2003. This winter will be the third time I will have to take apart the frame and perform maintinence on the window. Once the nail in the rope to attach it to the window came undone, a second time the rope on the opposite side got stuck on the pulley. And over my first semester of Sophomore year, the same rope, damaged I believe by getting stuck in the pulley, frayed and snapped, and has the appearance of having been cut. I wonder if the previous occupant went to all this trouble as well, and once the rope frayed by itself he left it to be paint locked and rot in it's own misery. Sadly for me, my parents loved the taste of the spring air flowing through the window, and I have been asked to fix it again, which would involve replacing the pulley in the window frame. A task I don't belive I can do without some major carpentry, as the pulley appears to have been built into the frame of the house. When my parents asked me to fix it, I said something along the lines of 'Yeah... I really don't want to.' I was then told to fix it. I am hoping to escape back to New Orleans for my second semester of Sophomore year without having fixed the window.

Since I have been fixing things around the house, I have done a lot of electrical work, some carpentry, lots of painting, a good bunch of miscelaneous tasks, a fair ammount of plumbing, some carpet removal, created a storage space in our attic, and so on. It has been fun, although tedius at times and has lead me to be a well-rounded person.