I mentioned my intentions a while back, and have been surreptitiously checking the used electric violin section of eBay for good deals. I found that all the violins were either like $50-100, and obviously pieces of shit made in China, or like $400+ (and in many cases $1500+) and therefore wayyy to expensive for me. I ended up on a happy medium, buying one for about $200, which is Korean-made (Korean=Quality, my friends. Believe you me), with a built-in preamp, and looks pretty sweet to boot. Turns out the guy that I bought it from was an English teacher a stone's throw away from here near Mt. Fuji (well, several stone's throws, I guess. About 40 klicks.) and just returned to the US 3 weeks ago. So now I have to pay like $70 shipping. Lame. Anyway, I always feel reassured that I'm not getting swindled when I deal with a real life person, and one who is smart enough to append a spam-flag to the end of the Gmail email address he uses for eBay registration. Good on you, Joshua.
I think I'm going to have to buy new strings for it, as apparently all e-violins come with sucky strings by default, but I've been to a good musical instruments store in a mall nearby, so that shouldn't be too much of a problem. I've only replaced violin strings a couple times though, so hopefully its not too different/difficult with this one.
I assume that I can get violin sheet music somewhere on the internet, else I'm going to have to resort to playing the few songs that the Suzuki-method managed to permanently instill in my brain like 10 years ago (Witch's Dance, Devil's Dream, Mississippi Reel, Gavotte in G-minor, Star Wars theme, etc). But either way, I'm pretty excited about getting it, as it'll be fantastic to have something constructive to do to while away the hours of confinement in this room when I'm too exhausted from work and/or generally too complacent to go out and do stuff.