My daughter is going back to college in a few weeks. She brought my Yamaha MX-88 with her to keep up with piano, but it's kind of a behemoth: it's heavy and takes up a lot of space, and there's not much space to be had where she's going to be living. I could offer her my MX-61, but I think she really likes having all 88 keys.
Is there a decent(ish) 88-key keyboard that's built a little bit more portably?
I've learned about the 4% rule since joining this sub - basically, plan to live on 4% of whatever you've saved up and it should last you for the rest of your life. Problem is, that doesn't really seem to add up to much. You'd have to have saved 2.5 million just to have an annual 100,000/year, which these days is a comfortable but not phenomenal income - and from what I can tell, very few people are able to manage to save up even that much. Is this really feasible for anybody?
As title says - AC unit failed about 6 years after installation. I had the original documentation, so I called the installer and they agreed it was the evaporator coil, and the part itself was covered by warranty. They said that the labor to install it as well as replace all of the leaked refrigerant wasn't.
The docs don't go into much detail on what the warranty actually covers... before I start trying to argue with the installer, I thought I'd see what folks here with no dog in this fight have experienced.
Wife and I have been married for 24 years now. Oldest kid just graduated college, youngest is a junior in college out of town and it's been just us and the dog for a couple of years now (and our oldest wants to take the dog in the fall so it'll just be us).
I love my kids and I love my wife, but I've sort of been looking forward to this era of relative peace for a while. I don't have any soccer practices or piano recitals or gymnastics meets or swim competitions or graduations or PTA meetings or Cub Scout trips to attend, so I finally have some time to practice guitar and piano and get back into performing music that I'd been putting off since I got married and started having kids.
Or so I thought.
She seems to have had this expectation that since the kids are gone we can spend literally every second together. Like I said... I love my wife and I love spending time with her, but she packs every. single. weekend and every. single. evening with plans for us. There's always some festival or winery or block party or friends anniversary or something. She brags about how lucky I am that she's always finding fun stuff for us to do and complains that I don't try to find fun stuff for us to do, too. I like all this stuff, but I like my alone time too - she doesn't. She doesn't want to be alone. Ever. She even says she feels "guilty" leaving me to go hang out with her friends and I've said out loud that I'm actually ok and I can entertain myself when she's away and I actually enjoy having some time to myself and she still won't do it.
Any old guys that have successfully negotiated some down time from a wife who was expecting to be together literally all the time?
I bought one but out of the box it feels really gimmicky - it "harmonizes", but the harmonies sound very fake. I've always left vocal sound processing to the FOH guy, assuming that his professional mixing board is going to have better effects than my pedal. OTOH, it would be nice to dial in a great sounds and be sure that that's what I'd get live rather than hoping the sound guy knows what he's doing.
Do the audio folks push back when you try to hook one up? What effects do you actually find work well?