Monday, Monday and Ignorance Has Been Bliss

It's about time I sat down and caught up. Monday is my absolute favorite day of the week. A new start, endless possibilities and hopes.

Monday morning found me heading back to a tuning customer from last week. Mrs. M. is delightfully youthful yet is most likely in her late seventies. She is very involved in the arts, creates her own line of notecards, attends tai chi classes, belongs to a monthly book club at the local library, and more that I'm sure I haven't heard about. She had called on Friday to let me know that one of the problem keys was sticking once again. It was a beautiful morning to head out on the shore side drive to her home. When I walked in to the room where the piano lives, I noticed that 'the D' was half way down. I barely touched it and it came back up to rest position. I played it a few times...no problem. I played it verrrrryyyy sloooooowly and lightly. It stayed part way down. AHA! Mrs. M. most be a soft player. I removed the necessary case parts and 'eased' the key very slightly at the balance rail button to 'iron out' a slight depression in the cloth that was the hang-up spot. 10 minute turnaround time and I was on the road again. Before I had started out for Mrs. M's, I had loaded up two sets of keys for return shipping and would stop on my way back home to send them off.

The folks at ESP shipping were in their usual great spirits, joking around and picking on each other. I always double check the computer generated shipping labels as they are put on boxes of keys. In over 5 years there has never been an error.

Can you imagine the look on the face of Mr. X, living in Texas, when he opens the box that has been delivered to his door and finds a set of piano keys?

Especially when they don't belong to him.

Maybe he doesn't even own a piano. Or, maybe there is an old one in his cellar and puzzled, he goes to look to see if it still has all it's parts. Who knows? He looks at the box again and checks the shipping label. Yep, it's addressed to him. What would he do with it?

You guessed it. A totally wrong label. Should have been going to Illinois, not Texas. Oops. They did the correct address and, hooray, the price went down!

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Business has been a bit off, whacky, with the economy in R. Here in the States we are not allowed to acknowledge the whole R word, but I think you probably know what I'm talking about. Maybe they think that if the R word is accepted, it will be a short and swift slide to D so we're supposed to ignore everything and continue merrily along. Anyway, I can never tell whether it will be a heavy tuning week or loads of keywork or nothing. Lately, it's been a moderate amount of both including an advance tuning booking for May 31. Amidst it all my hunt for a part time summer job is not going far. I'm still looking but without much time to devote to it. I have been making progress with getting all the income tax forms finished. Amanda's are done and she gets money back from both the Feds and the State. My mom's are finished, too, and she gets a lot back from both. Mine are half done and I'll be paying out! I hope to get that chore done by the start of next week.

And it's been nice not to be spending hours on the phone with Medicare et. al. Wonderful, in fact, thinking that all is well and that it's just a matter of waiting for the insurance card to come through the mail.

It's been a week and it hasn't yet. I guess I'll be on the phone tomorrow. Please, oh please may this be all done!

And finally, after a long winter's absence. He's back!!!!!! For two mornings in a row Squirt has come to the sliding glass door for a peanut.