All five strings in tune at once!

And they stayed that way while I ran through the practice exercises twice.

Things I am learning: which tuning pegs go with which strings. Kinda important.

That metal strings don't stay put. You tune one, then the next, and by the time you've tuned the fifth, the first ones need to be tweaked. But once you've done that a couple of times, and the strings decide to stay put awhile, and you strum the chord, it's glorious and exhilarating. I wanted to get up and run around in circles.

That the strings are really close together. And it's ridiculously easy to play the wrong note.

That I need to buy a pitch pipe. It would be a lot less annoying than having to get up and manually skip the DVD back while tuning. I think it took four repeats last night before my banjo was in tune. On the other hand, getting up and down to fiddle with the DVD player is good for my joints. If not for my patience. And a DVD player is harder to misplace than a pitch pipe.

That if you buy a second package of banjo picks because you can't remember the safe place in which you put the first package, you will find the first package when you are wrapping things up for the night. When I die, my children will not find money under my mattress. (Sorry.) But they are likely to find small packages of banjo picks in the most unlikely places. Hey, I didn't have a banjo case when I bought that first package.

That my personal attorney is right; you can't play the banjo more than three minutes without grinning.

That wearing lineless bifocals (multifocals, in my case) is perhaps incompatible with seeing the strings in order to play them. If you take out the perhaps. For the moment I am having to hold it more like a dobro or run the risk of my head falling off.

That Earl Scruggs is to banjo what Einstein is to science.

The happiness continued after banjo practice; I finally nailed the timing on one of my recorder exercises. Whether it stays nailed is another story. And I accidentally got the high E right a couple of times.

Knit Night was a blast.