Meanwhile.
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When I was first married I bought a piano after a lot of shopping, a Baldwin Hamilton chosen for its tone rather than appearance. It cost more than the others and I had to make monthly payments, but the sound was worth it.
Then I had a bunch of kids, and had less time to practice. The computer's easier to manage, because you can save work to resume later, and the projects don't have to be shared until they're ready! Anyway I'm not the performing arts type. I've talked about that before (huge rant...)
Then to top it off I got that magnificent yellow dog, who took up all the available room in this rather small house of ours. As the dog grew larger and larger, I sacrificed more and more things to try to keep him. I figured I wasn't playing the piano much anyway, and I could put his magnificent kennel where the piano was. So I let the piano go to a relative who wanted to borrow it / store it for me.
Once the dog reached full size, he went bonkers being confined inside a small house, and I didn't want him as an outside dog getting cold and lonely in wintertime, so he had to go.
Then I had neither dog nor piano.
I kept the twins!
Being pianoless was okay for a while. When I began to need music, I spent some time trying to play my old guitar, which happens to be a nice one, very mellow and soothing.
But then I really started missing my piano. I found myself thinking of it at nights again. Now I have the space for it, but no way to get it back home. Estimates for piano moving started at $400, and I don't have a pickup and can't very well move an 800 lb piano with just me and DH anyway (were he willing to try it, which he isn't)
Sigh.
Andrea has an electronic keyboard, which I am allowed to play, but not exactly encouraged, shall we say? It's kept up on her top bunk with its wires wound around the bed frame...
(Anyway her middle G doesn't work, due to long-ago cat barf. Last year I cleaned it and got it working, but recently the same key went silent again. Middle G is kind of important. Here's the inside of a Yamaha keyboard, in case you're curious, with the "before" view of the problem. )
But, guess what! I have a piano again!
Kinda.
A lady offered this 80s electronic keyboard which has been in a church attic for years. It weighs a ton, and it's obtuse; at first I despaired of it working because it wasn't making any sounds in the headphones, but it turns out you have to read the manual and push a few buttons before it'll do anything! But it does work. The keys are weighted, it even comes with a pedal. It requires external speakers, and I happened to have a set of computer woofers and tweeters up in the attic which I'd been about to give away thinking I'd never have a use for them! At first I despaired of them working too, but it was just a bad audio cable. I tried another audio cable, and that one was bad, too. Luckily there are at least five audio cables in the attic. My Dad was right, you should keep everything that might EVER be useful! :-)
The cool part about a real piano is that it plays even when the power's out, but the cool part about the electronic keyboard is that it's always in perfect tune. I would never spend the money to keep my poor old piano tuned. I did tune it myself with the free utility Tunelab, but that was such a big operation that I only did it every couple of years, and anyway it just doesn't sound quite as lovely as when the tuner does it.
This satisfies my "piano" urge, it sounds lovely and the keys feel almost like the real thing, and this all cost $0 to put together.
See, that's the top hutch from my old computer desk!
Long story, actually. I sent a money order to get this puzzle from White Mountain Puzzles, and they sent me an email (they must've had my email address on file from back when I submitted the sweepstakes card that was included in the puzzle from Cabela's, and THAT'S why we don't send in sweepstakes cards, folks) to say they wouldn't ship the puzzle until I gave them my phone number.
What if they hadn't had the email address? Would they have replied by snail mail to demand the phone number?
WHY should they have it anyway? They're shipping the puzzle, not faxing it! They have the money and the address and that's all they need.
We went round and round until I told the bastards to send me back the money order.
I was gonna just leave bad reviews all over the internet etc, oh, haha like I've got time to do that.
Anyway they wanted $17 for that puzzle plus shipping, and here it was at Costco for $10. Cool.
And here is Dave all finished with it.
I LOVE IT when the power goes out. It's so quiet! The moment that electric nerve-wrap in the walls goes *blip*... it's just so peaceful.
It's so lovely and quiet.
It's like your day winds down to a graceful stop, and now you have all the time in the world to do word puzzles and learn new embroidery stitches.
Well... except for carrying buckets of snow inside to heat up for bathing and washing dishes. There's the backbreaking physical labor part. Except for that, it's all good and no bad.
I love using candles! Candles are so romantic and friendly. You get a little warmth and personality along with your light. I wouldn't let the kids take any to their rooms, though. Poor things, they had to use cold, cheerless battery lights because of their nervous mother. Oh well. Go to bed.
Of course you have "all the time in the world"... for a while. Dark is going to come and nothing can stop it. I love that, too. There's an elemental quality, a more direct connection between work and life. If you get water in, you'll have a bathie tonight. If you get a fire going you'll be warm tonight. Otherwise you'll be sitting in the dark wishing the power would come back.
I don't wish the power would come back. It's so lovely to go to sleep in a warm little house, when it's utterly quiet inside and outside!
And then, there's the dawn. When you've slept in utter darkness, it's SO GREAT when it gets light outside. Yay! It's Day! How often do we really appreciate how wonderful dawn is? There's not much poetry written to the dawn any more. Most of the time we sleep right through it.
DH made me call the power company like five times a day asking for estimates. According to the recording, the estimate is: "We have 47 separate outages, and here's a list of locations that are without power. After you listen to the whole list, please appreciate that we are literally stringing up lines and then before we can restore service another tree falls. We have crews coming from other states to help us. So sit tight and shut up. If there's anything else you want, press 1 to talk to a representative."
The power came back on the first day, then went off again an hour later. I was made to call to make sure the power company realized it had happened. The nice lady apologized for my inconvenience.
I said, "Oh, don't worry, I actually love it when the power's out."
She said, "Oh, I do, too! It's so quiet!"
DH said we'd probably get bumped to the bottom of the list now that I told them we didn't want it anyway.
(But they supply us with power because we pay for it by the kwh, not just because we want it.)
The power came back on just a few hours later, then went off again in the evening. Yay! If it goes off at six, it'll probably be off all night.
And that was before the big freeze! After piles of beautiful fluffy snow, we went out and stomped pathways around, went sledding, cleaned up the remains of the canopy carport that collapsed (on top of the mower and rototiller, which I couldn't get out; they'll have to wait 'til it thaws) and then we had a little bit of rain, then a deep freeze, then some more wet. Then the wind started blowing. No surprise that trees were flopping over right and left.
It looked like a battle zone out there with all the big fir branches all over the yard, and you could still hear them falling. There'd be a sound like a shot, then a cascade, then a big whump. That sound was coming at regular intervals from all sides. In case of the sound coming from directly above, I put on DH's hard hat before I went into the woods. It caused him amusement. Laugh your guts out. It's better than a tree limb through the skull.
Day 1 and Day 2:
DH says it was "at least a foot and a half" of snow. As this ruler proves.
Day 3:
For our last big snowstorm a few years back, the power was out for six days. After six days, one gets used to it. I had to do laundry by hand. DH said we could run down to the laundromat-- but pffffhooey on that! Laundromats are as gross as motels. Who wants their laundry in the same machines as who knows what who else has been stuffing in there before? Not me. Anyway it's useful and educational to experience how our grandmothers did the laundry out on the prairie, having to haul the water in buckets. Everybody should do that once in their lifetime.
But after six days, I REALLY started to miss my email. Checking it at the library just isn't the same.
The high point was meeting a group of homeschool mothers, who stood in a circle comparing notes about how long their power had been out. They asked when mine came back on.
"Still isn't."
They all turned and looked at me for a long moment. One said, "But you appear to be clean and happy!"
Ummmm. Yes. Correct. Electricity is not necessary either for cleanliness or happiness.
Some of them talked about the generators they'd bought for future such occasions, and recommended one for me. I said, "But the problem with that is that you're still dependent on the grid. The generator only helps as long as there's gasoline available."
At that point I lost them. There were uncomfortable looks. Rather than anybody saying, "No, disasters only happen to other people in other places, and we don't appreciate you talking like it might ever happen to us," they simply remembered other things they had to do and dispersed.
Oh, well.
We have a plastic tree that we pull out every year, but it’s just not the same as the real thing.
The kids hauled out the Christmas junk in enthusiasm on November 20th this year, which ticked me off extremely. They asked Daddy and Daddy said okay!
I snobbishly declined to help in the decorating process at all. I figured the kids would make a royal mess of everything, and then I’d have the satisfaction of knowing they did it all wrong and somehow that would make me feel happy inside. But… Karen was in charge of decorating and it came out like fairyland, really beautiful. The plastic tree was a picture, and they had nice application of lights and symmetrical draping of garland around the living room. They even got the garland over the doorways mostly even. They did the downstairs too, and put the smaller plastic tree in the boys’ room.
So the whole house was decorated for Christmas for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the only holiday I really like and get enthusiastic about, and I don’t appreciate its being trespassed upon that way.
(I don’t mind New Years or Valentine’s Day, which may be pagan but at least aren’t masquerading as anything else, but there isn’t that much to do on those dates.)
Well… I ignored it and did my whole turkey feast and THANKS thing as well as I could.
After that it was okay. I’ve said before, I admit the pagans had a valid point re lights. In Northern parts it does get very dark and we may be tempted to panic that the sun will die and never come back again. The lights do cheer our eyeballs up a bit.
And the good thing about the plastic tree is that we don’t have to pay money for it, and we don’t have to kill a tree.
On Dec 21 we all got some kind of foodborne illness thing, which caused me a great deal of interesting symptoms, but I’ll spare you having to skip through the description. What with the lost sleep and the tummy pains and overall weakness and unhappiness, I suddenly HAD TO HAVE A REAL CHRISTMAS TREE. I don’t know why that follows, but it just did. I was too sick to tolerate that plastic mockery of a fake tree any more. Ed said he wanted a nice fancy Christmas this year, and now I needed Christmas to smell like Christmas.
So I dragged my barely-mobile self into the van with a couple kids, a tarp, a rope and a saw. There’s a place just up the road where I got a tree more than a dozen years ago, for only $20. If they weren’t still a going concern, there was another place over the hill that I was sure was; I had seen them when I drove by, harvesting the trees that would end up for sale at Walmart for $45. I had a twenty in my pocket and was ready to bargain.
Well I stopped at the place just up the road first, and this is what I saw:
Hm, I’d say they’re not in business any more! A guy came out of the house and told me the tree business had been his father’s thing and that was a long time ago.
I asked if I could have one of the little ones for $10, and he said Sure, he guessed so. Or a top off one of the big ones would be okay too. He had to go back in the house and take care of his grandson.
Those overgrown stalks are noble firs!
I didn’t have to behead one of the tall ones. There was a little tree just a bit taller than me growing up almost in the roadway, a nice little noble fir though unsuitable for tree sales anyway because of the duplicate trunk that it had, and one really long branch sticking out. Who cares, it’s fine for me.
I was SICK blast it, and not in the mood to saw, could barely manage it, but at the first cut of saw into tree trunk that SMELL filled the air, and Christmas aromatherapy kept me going. The pagans have a point about the tannenbaum, too.
Watch me as I fling this tree on top of the van and then loop a rope around it. Then drive home slowly, because that wasn’t exactly secure.
I was SICK blast it, but somebody’s got to get busy with a whisk broom getting all the forest debris off, shaking the needles and then lassoing it upstairs via the rope (I knew what would happen if I tried to bring it over the carpet on the stairs!)
Beginning to SMELL a lot like Christmas :-)
Of course I’m really posting this well into January, I’ve slid behind on everything!
Here it is January 6th and the tree is still up. Everybody else has taken theirs down, but I have no intention. That lovely sappy noble fir smell gets into my nose every time I walk up the stairs, and it’s not like it’s not still dark outside and we huddled in our caves don’t still need cheering!
I’m keeping it watered and it can stay until it turns orange!
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