Kind of fun again

It's been a minute (actually about a year), so let's sum up what's happened up to now:

Short form:  Yoyoka, then Sina's Home at Last, then bookmarked Sina's "learn to play drums in 10 minutes", then didn't watch it for weeks at least, sure that it wouldn't be true in my case.  

Then I watched it and realized it was extremely simplified, but a simple backbeat can go far in a lot of pop music that I know well.  So I patted my hands and legs for awhile, evaluated and decided to buy a cheap pair of pine drumsticks.  With them, I beat on pillows and an old office chair, taking care to strike the general areas where the relevant drum/cymbal would be in a drum set.  Lots of YouTube videos, some useful, most too far advanced or a dead end, or the drumming version of a golf tip, promising miraculous, instantaneous improvement if you just use this piece of gear I'm selling.  

In August, signed up for Drumeo's 30-Day Drummer to add some structure to my learning, and to acquire a practice pad.  A pair of hickory Drumeo sticks came in the deal, which was OK.  So was 30-Day Drummer.  

After 30DD, tried the Drumeo Method and kept with it for a few months, until it wasn't fun anymore.  I went back to pounding pillows and that chair with the pine sticks, getting my lessons from their new Workouts, which are focused, bite-sized lessons.  I watched the Pat-Boone-Debby-Boone Workout and noticed several of those little licks in Rikki.  Timely!

I watched the Half-time Shuffle several times, and played around with it a lot, or at least enough that I can do it just as well as I can do a basic backbeat.  It's an Intermediate lesson, more advanced than I should be trying as a newbie, but I know me, and it's more fun learning drums this way.

I learn by doing, not by reading the manual first.  (This does not apply to life-and-death applications.  For them, I learn all I can before starting.)  Just dive in and when I hit a hard stop, look up the answer.  

So now, it's Workouts instead of Method, and creating Moises stems for songs I like and slowing them down in Goldwave before listening to them again and again.  I'm figuring things out.  Still moving forward.