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Caught putting it in my basket to check shipping cost and offered 10% off. Nice email chat with 'Wes' about weights and timescales. No council tax or water rates for the next two months. Birthday next month. Forgive me for I am weak.

Now routed out ready for pickups.

Two good ones this week. Refreshing our memories with Fortunate Sons on monday. Started finalising our full theatrical performance for Fractured Persona tonight - we have the 'script' and setlist, going through song by song and recording definitive live versions. About 40% sorted tonight, just a couple more off the original album we need to brush up on. And look how our rehearsal room treats us:

A splendid plan! On 24th January I'm playing at a Wassail and we're going to lug half of it along. I just need to choose which half!

Receiving email showing a new bass. ✔️ Remembering there's no council tax or water rates to pay for the next two months. ✔️ Being asked by my family what I want for my birthday at end of February. ✔️ Being cyber-spied eying up said bass and being offered 10%discount to tempt me. ✔️ Realising that all the above put together makes this practically a free bass. ✔️ Is that a trigger I hear being pulled? ✔️

For balance, I won a bass on Ebay auction late Sunday evening [after my bed time] (bit surprised no one else bid on it tbh as there were 40 plus watching it); paid first thing Monday morning, Monday early evening seller sent the tracking info and expressed hope it would ship Tuesday enclosing picture of package and label; it did get collected, tracking updated on collection and later that evening to show at hub, then this morning email saying delivery today and 12.07 the driver arrived and knocked on next door unit and, as Gary wasn't in, put it in his shed and dropped a note through the door to say in shed. I heard him knock so went round and asked, guitar box, this size ? Yes he confirmed, I said it's for me unit 7, he got the parcel back out of shed and sure enough my name and my Unit number on the label, so he handed it over, but also showed me his delivery app which clearly had the address as Unit 6 - now how does a scanned label correctly addressed end up creating an entry on a drop list with the wrong number on it, that shouldn't be possible, someone somewhere must have done a manual data entry, I guess when they were assigning the parcels to the subcontractor Polish driver who is actually covering half our district, because all the Parcelforce drivers who could left their employ over the last couple of years and they can't recruit new drivers on the new Ts&Cs they are offering now they are owned by some foreign billionaire. We've had 3 new PF drivers who all left inside a week in the last year, one of whom is now a Sainsbury delivery driver, which isn't a well paid job, but less hassle and stress than working for PF as he was happy to tell me last month when he delivered my beanz and muesli 🙃 We are lucky here, the posties do a great job and collect and deliver a lot of the smaller PF items, even though its more work for them for which they get diddly squat for and the Posties' depot is 25 miles from the PF one. It does show sometimes as the stuff collected doesn't always make the trunk run to the regional hub that night, but they do deliver everything they receive as soon as possible, often a day earlier than expected as they like to clear the decks each day as much as possible. Now we have a regular Evri driver again even they are pretty reliable, the problem with Evri seems to be collections from drop off shops (autogenerated manifests not actually checked against packages I reckon) and theft and kpi driven prioritisation at the central hub - in last year 4 packages lost or delayed by up to a month, in every case fine till supposedly at the hub. The one that arrived after a month had clearly been found on the naughty step at the drop off location a few weeks later. Parcel companies can all hit a KPI of 99.95+% daily, it's what they do with the 0.05% of a million packages that is the difference between them, and none excel with those, but some seem to take more responsibility than others.

No, but it does help to remove the existing solder, meaning there's less left to heat and keep melted. Especially if you're struggling with an underpowered iron.

I still haven't looked at your playlist. I didn't want to until I had finished with my one. I've chosen 40 from a massive list that went on for far too long. I think I've avoided adding anything from my list that was in the original 500. Here it is.

Just love this gig from World Party, Chris Sharrock and "Paul" from The Bootleg Beatles supply D&B. The late Karl Wallinger up front. Not sure of the other members.

There's quite some information here about threaded inserts, you just have to do some searching. I like them, easy and functional. My travel bass has a Status neck with inserts. I detach the neck before going to the plane. Soundwise it doesn't matter, wood bolts or inserts, but inserts are reliable, and enable multiple removals without any issues.

A solder sucker doesn’t melt the solder.

Something simple but effective, as they say. Mostly an exercise in note recognition, the complete 11 minute Sam Jones performance of the tune 'Autumn Leave' from the classic 1959 Cannonball Adderley record, 'Somethin' Else'. https://bilbosbassbites.co.uk/autumn-leaves-cannonball-adderley/

Maybe a solder sucker might have helped. Cheap ones are only a couple of quid.