In the beginning

In the beginning, there was the Guitar and the Mandolin and darkness was on the face of the implementers.
         Then some jackass added a fiddle to the mix and things got really bad...

Somewhere in the depths of 2005 I ran (not; I rock) across an ad for an acoustic Guitar *AND* an A body Mandolin, $99.98 for the pair. That looked interesting, though I had no real idea about playing Guitar and very little more about the Mando. Then I found a $20 off coupon for purchases over $100. I added a $3 cable to my 'cart' and a week later was the proud owner of two instruments.

I think the same deal is still available today, but I didn't get that deal. The Guitar that arrived was the Rogue Grand Concert Acoustic/Electric shown above. Worth at least another $50. Oops, their bad.
So, when you get a deal like that what do you do?  If you're me you let them collect dust for about two years while you deal with moving, divorces and etc.

In late 2006 I got bit by the re-enterant music bug. Seems a common affliction for 50-somethings. And look!
I already had a Guitar sitting there. A better guitar than I was a player since I didn't know squat about playing guitar. So my sweetie and I went off to take Guitar lessons with Kent down at Troubadour Music who had a nice introductory series of lessons (4) for $40 and so we went and we practiced for four weeks and we learned several important things: It's really hard to play guitar due to having only three usable fingers with many of the chords requiring four, and that she wants to play banjo instead.  Coulda been worse, many of life's lessons are way more expensive.

A friend brought their fiddle along when they came to visit a month or two later. Turns out those early public school orchestra classes 'stuck' somewhat better than I had thought, I could at least figure out roughly what to do with the thing, thirty years later, and, it required only three fingers!
A beginning celtic fiddle class was being offered starting in a couple weeks and I set out to get an electric fiddle (documented elsewhere here) going in time for that class. Granted taking an unamplified electric fiddle into an acoustic fiddle class is kinda like taking a knife to a gunfight, but at least I didn't sound screechy and awful like some did especially when practicing. I date that class startup, January 6th 2007 as the beginning of my new musical adventures.  The other cool thing about Shari Aime's class was that she taught entirely by ear, no sheet music, no chord charts, just HEAR and DO. That has had an enormous impact going forward.
She also talked me into going to the Corvallis Celtic Session jams that were happening every Friday night at that point. I couldn't hear the electric fiddle at all in that environment so I started taking and playing the 'free' mandolin I'd picked up earlier.
The rest, as they say, is Herstory.