Flippin’ Birds

Lots of “stuff” has been going on lately, so I thought I would just cover as many bases as quickly as possible to get everything up to date.

The cardinals did not make it. Shortly after I posted the picture of their eggs, two of the eggs went missing. For the longest time, there was one egg still in the nest, but before long, it too was abandoned and vanished. The good news is that the cardinals managed to “flip” their one bedroom, no bath nest to a single mother robin, and she’s already plopped down three eggs in it:

Mrs. S's garden, cardinal's nest, robin's eggs.

 We also have a nest of swallows in the loft above our front porch, but you can’t see anything except the mud of the nest and the crap all around it. If I hear the babies hatch, however, I’ll probably get a ladder out and take a picture of them.

At work, I found a nest in back of our plant with four plover eggs in it. A week later, three hatched. The next day, there was no trace of the chicks, eggs or mother. They were either eaten, or they moved on. (I’m believing they survived.)

Those are plovers. They live on the ground. In rock nests. You would hate being a plover.

I got my stamp collection appraised. I was offered a dollar amount that was about one-quarter of the insured value. I knew the stamp market was depressed, but I didn’t know it was depressed enough to make me depressed. So, I won’t be selling my stamps any time soon, which means, I’ve got to find some other way to finance a piano purchase. (Hello, home equity line of credit!)

We went to see Chris Botti in concert in Nashville last Friday. That was a lot of fun. He did most of the tunes from his Live in Boston DVD, which was cool. We got five autographs and a bunch of pictures with him. Here’s one: 

They call Chris Botti a "smooth jazz musician", but no bop fan like me would be smiling like that if he wasn't standing next to a modern day, be-bopping, Miles Davis-inspired  jazz artist. Believe it!

Saturday we went to Birmingham and heard a Mozart concerto with the conductor playing the piano while conducting. That was a first. They took the top off the Steinway so he could do that. I’d never seen that done before, either.

The notes in my piano drill book are too small for my old eyes, and Mrs. S hasn’t had a chance to scan and enlarge them for me, so my piano playing is languishing at the moment. Plus I was counting on a new acoustic piano to revive my passion, but that is not happening soon. I remain stuck in musical mediocrity.

I’m thinking about buying some piano method books, really going back to basics. I don’t know what else can make me want to sit at the piano, other than visible progress in actual capability of piano playing.

My second 10K race is one week from yesterday. That’s the focus right now. In high school, I ran an 11K race in 53 minutes, 5 seconds. I did the math, and that translates to a 48 minute, 20 second 10K. I won’t be running this upcoming race that fast, but someday, I will. That will then become my official PB (personal best). If I can run better than 58 minutes 3 seconds in this upcoming race, that will be my “modern” PB.

Still scared – still not back in the water

It’s a good thing I have my piano off in the seldom visited corner of the house. You know: out of sight, out of mind. Attentive (and even not so) readers will have noticed that I have not worked on my piano of late. I purchased everything I think I need to fix it and get it operational, but I have not jumped back in the pool since right around the holidays. The reason is simple: I’m scared. I’m deathly afraid that I will find the piano to be beyond repair, at which point, I will have to face that fact that I am hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars SOL. I know avoidance is not the best policy, but for now, it’s the policy I’ve chosen. Two weekends ago, I promised Mrs. S I would work on the thing this past weekend, but this past weekend, the temperatures hit darn close to 70 degrees, so I worked outside trimming all our crepe myrtles and all of Mrs. S roses instead, needing two and a half hours on Saturday and one and a half hours on Sunday to do it. So, here’s hoping it is cold and miserable next weekend to put me in the mood to work on the piano once again. Maybe I can at least finish it before I’ve owned the thing one year (Memorial Day-ish).

I’ve been occupying my other free time with practicing my melodic minor scales, searching high and low for a good trumpet, searching preliminarily for a violin, and seeking out and buying the last few CD’s I need to complete the entire 188 disc “core collection”. So let me write about those things instead.

For buying the trumpet, I enlisted the help of a classmate at school, and I did a ton of reading online. Since the trumpet will basically be just a decoration in our music room, the number one priority was to buy something that looked nice, but it also had to be playable, since I intend to mess around with it some. (That rules out “brand new student trumpets”, especially anything made in China.) Having only played the trumpet all of one summer when I was ten or eleven, I had to study some to not get too badly burned in the market. But since I wasn’t completely without experience. I was up to speed pretty quickly. Anyway, if you go to ebay and search trumpets, you will find about 135 pages with 50 items to a page, or roughly 7000 trumpets, mouthpieces, stands, pipes, valves, care kits, etc. It is no small task weeding out the wheat from the chaff. And after letting a really nice, rare trumpet slip away last week, I paid close attention this weekend and picked up a 1941 vintage Conn trumpet for right at $350. It is two-toned, engraved, and very classic looking. I’m excited to see it in person. Here’s a picture from the auction:

The 1941 Conn "New York" Trumpet

So after that, Mrs. S said, see if you can spend the same energy and effort to find a violin. Well, if you go to ebay and search violins, (wait for it) you will find about 885 pages with 50 items, or roughly 45,000 violins or violin items. Of those, roughly  44,273 of them are made in China. (Mrs. S said, “No ‘Made in China’, no matter how good it looks or how cheap it is.”) Despite the long odds, I still found a couple of nice ones, but the closest we could come to buying one, was finishing second in a reserve auction that the first place bidder did not win because not even he bid enough. Unlike the trumpet, it is unlikely that Mrs. S or I will play the violin, other than taking a few token strokes over it with the bow, so we’re primarily looking for something that looks nice and which we will be able to resell for what we pay for it. That means we’re going to have to spend a couple hundred on it, too.  And, we have to keep looking and wading through the plethora of Du-shi and Xiang Ho and Ming Mang Mong instruments.

Who knew having a music room to display an antique piano in could be so difficult and expensive?

I’ll write about the CD collection in a separate entry.