14 July 2000
I arrived at my lesson Wednesday and promptly announced to Mark, "Just want to warn you—I didn't practice much this week." Mark: "I bet you played hockey, though." Me: "Of course."

I struggled through one round of All of Me and half a song from my Hal Leonard book, and then Mark implemented what I can only assume was Step 1 in his master plan to get me to practice bass as much as I'm practicing hockey: teach Lori the blues. He closed the Leonard book, pulled out some staff paper, and scribbled some instructions about how to play 12-bar blues in the key of A.

I worked at playing root-3-5-3 and root-3-5-7 in the first, fourth and fifth notes of the scale until I got a (really painful) cramp in my wrist, and then Mark took the bass and showed me all the songs that were based on the patterns I was learning. I'd been discouraged by the cramp, but recognizing the songs before Mark named them was inspiring. I left humming "Taxman", and I've been humming it ever since. Hopefully lots of short practice sessions will help keep my wrist from cramping up again.

26 July 2000
Mark tried to return to the Hal Leonard book at tonight's lesson, but I said I hadn't worked on it at all. (I thought I was off the hook after the blues break two weeks ago.) Apparently not; "You'd better work your way up to the section on eighth notes," he threatened, "or I'm going to get out the whip—and you can put *that* on your web site!" The problem is that I'm not going to have much time to practice because I've got to pack for the 3-Day tonight, get down to Cupertino and register tomorrow, and then spend Friday through Sunday walking.

We spent the rest of the lesson reviewing 7ths. I played root-3-5-7 on All of Me as Mark called out the chords (I prefer to be prompted like that until I can memorize the pattern): "C major, E dominant, A dominant, D minor, etc." Everything was going great until Mark called out "A7". I got completely flustered and yelled, "which 7th?" To me, they were all 7ths—I was listening for the differentiating word minor, major, or dominant. Turns out 7, just 7, is equivalent to dominant, but I couldn't get Mark to just say dominant because to him, saying 7 *was* saying dominant. Guess I'll just have to get used to it.