Careful With That Axe, Eugene.

I'm still certain that the Lovely Mrs. byoolin's trebuchet has no idea what she's in for, but she wanted - heck, she insisted - that my Christmas present this year be a guitar.

An electric guitar.

She said, "I want to hear you play again." Before I met her, I owned a couple of electric guitars, but by the time we met, they were both gone and in their places I had a pair of acoustic guitars - a six-string Harmony and a twelve-string Takamine that was a gift from a previous girlfriend.

I seldom played the twelve-string; it was hard (for me) to play and hard (for me) to keep in tune. We sold it one month when we were short of cash. I felt little regret at letting it go, figuring that it would be better off in the hands of someone who knew what he or she was doing with it.

The six-string was easier to play, but when I moved from Canada to the US I left it behind, accidentally on purpose, in the old apartment. In hindsight, maybe I shouldn't have done that, but it made sense at the time. But here we are now, seven years removed from the last time she heard me play a guitar, long enough for the memories of buzzy strings, missed notes, atonal chords and (inevitably) the same bits played again and again and again to fade from her memory, leaving only the sweetly romanticized notion of me playing an instrument.

So I said "No, thanks."

That was my first mistake. You don't say no to the Lovely Mrs. byoolin's trebuchet. (Well, maybe you say no to her, but I sure don't.) So, after a few days, I carefully considered the error of my ways and said, "Let's go look at guitars."

Now it's five days later and I'm the proud daddy of a Squier Deluxe Stratocaster and a Vox Pathfinder 10 practice amp.



And you should see the look on the cats' faces when I turn up the gain.