What to Call It?

I'm welcoming title suggestions for my most recent oil painting.

Jake the Thief

I had a bit of help with a job estimate on Saturday.

The job was to evaluate a used, well-known name, grand piano.  The customer had purchased it only a week before and was anxious to know if his money was well-spent.  (Why don't they ask before they spend it?)

Anyway, the estimate was a combination thing of checking the piano and also determining whether a climate control system should be installed.

The client could have spent twice the amount and still have gotten a very good deal.  He was happy to hear that.  It was determined that it would be best to wait and see on the climate control system and also decided that he would have it tuned during the first half of April.

Jake, my helper on this Saturday morning venture, was a Jack Russell Terrier (I think).  Actually, by Jake's behavior, I'm darn well certain that's the breed.  While Jake clamored for attention, I did a quick check on the tuning.  Supposedly the piano had not been tuned for over a year...and it had just been moved.  All things considered, it sounded remarkably good.

Except for two bass notes which I offered to touch up while I was there.

I opened my tuning kit and grabbed my tuning lever.  Jake watched, then settled down under the piano.  Other than a couple grrrrrrs Jake was quiet...and seemingly motionless.

I should have wondered.

Jake was a thief.  While my tuning kit was open on the floor, Jake stole my upright lid prop and settled in with his new 'bone'.

Mauled lid prop with the leather half chewed off and very soggy

It took some coaxing with real treats to get him to give up the mauled lid prop.  Leather and wood was evidently a good toy treat and the leather was great fun to chew on...and pull apart.

I'll remember Jake the Thief when I go back to tune.  My tool kit and my newly releathered lid prop will remain well out of reach!

Lunacy

The 'Snow Moon' last night

My goodness!  The email/web/Internet in my world is nuts right now.  I can't wait for some of it to sort out.

Well, I guess that I CAN wait...and I will.

It's like this:  I have a primary email account.  Currently that account handles personal emails, historic society emails, and two separate piano technician related groups.  There is a big shift happening with the piano groups.  The main group is being dissolved, yet the members don't want that to happen.  A replacement format has been instituted (group 2) that the vast majority of the main group don't like.  The talk is to abandon ship.  Sooooooo, that brings us to the web based piano groups.  I already belong to a group that discusses piano stuff.  It's open to anyone, so it is not very technician based.  Now I've subscribed to two alternate piano tech groups that are determined to replace the main group.  These are the folks from the main group who have abandoned the 'official' new format.  Both these two new groups are Google based and I receive them through Gmail.  I could change one of them over to my primary email if I choose, but the other is a Google+ format that sticks with Gmail.

So, that's two email address...each handling two piano groups, plus other stuff.

Still with me?

Good, because there's more!

There are my two Yahoo email accounts.  The one tied to this blog that also gets a lot of advertising because of using it when signing up for things like BFF Friendly's or Staples.  It also handles my Facebook notifications. The second Yahoo account is my business email.  Somehow the business email also ended up as the spot where I receive two other Yahoo group news digests.

Of course I also have an email through my website.  Thankfully that forwards through to my primary email account.

How many is that?  Ummm (counting off on fingers)...5.

And the non-email places where I write, kind of at my leisure...here at my blog, my personal Facebook page, my business Facebook page, and my website.

I'm tired.

2,4,6.......

Most of you know that I hate winter.  Yep, snow is pretty and all if only it didn't make for work shoveling, nasty driving, mud when it thaws, wet socks when someone tracks it in to the house and cold temps. 

Even worse is snow when it is windy.

Overnight and today we are predicted to have 4 - 6 inches of the white stuff.  Not bad until you add wind gusts over 35 mph.  So...once again we have drifting snow.  A pain to shovel.  Nothing in all the wrong places and too much where you don't want it.  You no sooner move it and it's back where you don't want it again.

Phase one has been completed.  You'd never notice it by looking out the window.  Phase two will be at noon.  'A' has to be at work at 3 p.m.  Hopefully the storm will be over by then.

Blizzard Finale

This video was posted on Youtube by BearskinNeck.net.  Although somewhat redundant, it gives an idea of the day after the blizzard.

Blizzard - The Day After

Since we have dug out, since being on the roads is allowed once again, since, well, since sometimes you just have to go out and have a look...

Sweats?  No sweat at 18°

Frosted starfish

The Tavern (the Pewter Shop)

Plastered with ice.  Buildings along North Road sustained damaged on their water sides.

At the corner of North Road...debris at bottom are rocks...and shingles from a neighboring building

Just a little digging to do!

The Latest Pics

The garden shed...waiting for Spring

 Done shoveling for the morning.

My back drive totally drifted in

 Waaay too much snow and drifting!  It doesn't really show in the pictures.

Looking out the sliding doors to the deck with 5 foot drift (what deck?)

  Drifts are up to four feet.  Good spots are bare!  Evacuations are underway along the low lying coastal areas and there is the rumor that a house on Salt Island Road in Gloucester is in danger of heading out to sea.

Second Post - Starting the Worst

Looking across the front yard

 It is nasty out there.  I've been out twice kinda shoveling.  First time I did everything.  My drive, my mom's and our three walks. 

Mr. Cat in hibernation

This last time, with horizontal snow at somewhere above 35 mph, I did around the cars and just my porch and the front walk.  That's it for tonight.  I expect to wake up to something between one and two feet and drifts.  My back drive will take days to clear, it is totally drifted in.

Mr. Cat's view of my truck

Minimum of twelve more hours to go and just starting the worst part.

First Post of THE Blizzard

This is mostly for those of you who do not 'do' Facebook.  Where I have posted the weather map from The Weather Channel.

Here we go!

We are going to have a blizzard here in the northeast.  It started snowing about an hour ago and will continue until sometime late Saturday afternoon.  The governor of Massachusetts has requested that all vehicles other than emergency and DPW etc. be off the roads after noon today.  No driving folks.  Guess that means I have a very good excuse not to drive A to work today.  She's supposed to be there 2:30 - 6:30.  By 7 p.m. they are expecting widespread white-out conditions.  She'll call in to say she will not be there today!  Thankfully she has tomorrow as a day off.  She worked extra hours yesterday as the store was swamped with shoppers.  As of 8 last night there was no bottled water, no milk, about 10 (or less) loaves of bread, and very little in the prepared foods aisle.  The produce shelves were near bare.

Noting other spots...our bank is closing at 2 p.m. today and will not be open tomorrow.  The dump will be closed tomorrow and open on Monday instead.  All schools are closed today.  There is NO on-street parking through tomorrow night.  Most events have been postponed.  In less than an hour, most everything will be shut down!

High tide is expected to be a problem.

I have no tunings scheduled for today.  I do have to sets of keys in the shop and I've been working on them so that they are past the 'need power' to finish stage.  At least one set will be able to be shipped on Monday no matter what...well, as long as the shipping place has power!  The other set hasn't been prepaid so I'm not so concerned about the time frame.  They know I will not return ship unless they are paid up.

We are prepared for the storm.  Plenty of food and water in case we are snowed in for weeks (grin).  Four shovels.  Both vehicles are parked in the front so that there will be less shoveling to get out.  The other shoveling can happen after the main driveway.  A and I went out this morning and checked on our 94 y/o friend AK who just got home from the hospital yesterday and we stopped at the pharmacy for a few things for my mom.  Other than shoveling periodically, we are housebound for the duration.

Of course I'll take some pictures and post here (as long as I have power!).

We're under that mess somewhere!

Here's a satellite view at about noon!  Looks like a decent day in Dunedin, FL.
Update:  The Governor of Massachusetts has officially BANNED vehicles on the roads after 4 p.m. today.  Emergency crews, etc. only.  The roads will be closed.

Piano Tuning and Repair

I am making reference to my new website.  As part of promoting search engine hits on the site and thus upping my ranking I am writing...

Debra Legg Piano Service provides professional piano tuning and repairs to Rockport, Essex, Gloucester, Manchester, Hamilton, Wenham, Beverly, Salem, Peabody, Danvers and Rowley, MA.  Debra Legg also services player pianos and reed organs.  Visit her website at:

www.debraleggpiano.com  

Some of you might even post a link to the site on your blog!

As time permits I will be adding a photo gallery page as well as some images on the other pages.

A Big Project...

still in the works.

You might notice a new link - at the top of my Links list in the sidebar.

This has been a major undertaking with a very steep learning curve!  I started at 9 a.m. and it's now 2:48 p.m.  I've only taken a 45 minute break for lunch.  I'm done for today.

There is still much more that I want to do with the site and over the next few days I hope to add more...including pictures, and change the contact page with a contact form that uses my site email.  It'll all get done.

Just not now.  Not after a grueling 4+ hours.

Up for Air

Ivory keys stained by mouse urine - yuck

Regluing all the loose ivories using special clamps

 Yeah, it has been busy around here.  Mostly work, work, work.  Which is a good thing.  R and I have been to Maine to service a player piano.  Then I went to Wakefield the following week to repair another player piano.  I've had a lot of ivory key repair work in the shop.  I love the finickiness of regluing, bleaching, and other key repairs but three of them at the same time takes up a lot of bench space!  I put some pictures here and you can see more on my FB page.  Just look for Debra Legg Piano Service on FB.

Same set of ivories - much prettier after bleaching!

Anyway, I'm finally down to one set of keys still working their way through the process, so I'm a bit more relaxed.  Today, R and I went to the Cape Ann Museum.  Every January they have free admission for Cape Ann residents.  We spent about 90 minutes taking in a whole bunch of neat stuff.  I wanted R to see the Ralph Coburn exhibit, so we started with that.  Then we worked our way down from the third floor checking out all the rest of the neat stuff there.

So yes, I'm still alive and have resurfaced!  And.....



the staircase is still clear!

Resolution

This year I have decided to make a New Year's Resolution.  This is not something I normally impose upon myself.  I figure that starting a new year and actually making it to the end of that year relatively intact is enough to hope for, never mind trying to set a specific goal for the year.  So, this new year shall start with a clean staircase.  Yep, I will try to keep it that way all year.  No using between the rungs as a convenient filing system.  Everything will find a place to belong without cluttering up the staircase.  It will look a lot nicer and it will force me to keep only what really needs keeping.  In the past (and I have no photo evidence - too ugly and embarrassing), coupons, keys, an odd photo or two, a saved newspaper clipping, gloves in winter, reminders for renewals, papers to hang on to to give to someone else who might be interested in what ever the subject happened to be, business cards and more......accumulated between the rungs.  NO MORE!  I have a desk upstairs (although it mostly is storage for things that have no place to be stored rather than a desk where I sit).  I have file cabinets in the workshop.  I have a filing box near my computer.  I have a mail holder thingie (with key hooks) on the workshop door that is home to my calendar and bills to be paid.  The calendar even has a storage pocket for each month where I keep stamps...and small stuff.  I have bookcases and, in the workshop, storage shelves.  And the best thing yet...I have a trash receptacle nearby!

Done

Another one?  Really?

Tuned the last of the pre-Christmas piano tunings this morning.  The last one was supposed to be the same piano but tuned last of the day on Friday.  That is until the church decided they didn't want to roll the extra piano into the sanctuary until after Sunday's service.  The tuning got moved to today.  The permanent sanctuary piano turned out to be the last tuning on Friday.

Got that?

Merry Christmas to everyone out there still reading!

Ho, ho, ho 'tis the season.

Cleaning Up for the New Year

Since I have today off (YAY) and I had the weekend off (YAY), I decided it would be a good time to sort and clean.  You know...all that stuff that just gets shoved into any available spot, just temporarily until you have time to clean.

Ahhh, 80° and humid - to be there now...

I found this postcard in a pile of stuff that I had intended to scan someday.  The scene is Palm Passage, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas USVI.  In December 1980 and January 1981 we spent a month on St. Thomas.  We often ate lunch at the outdoor cafe in Palm Passage.

The autographs on the back of the postcard

This card was never sent and was used for autographs.  Many evenings, while staying at Point Pleasant, we would walk around the cove to Coki Point and listen to a group of young locals playing steel drums.  They were the high school band.  We'd buy ice teas and find a bench under some palms and listen for a half hour or so.  I think they enjoyed the appreciative audience as most of the tourists would just walk on by.  They got a kick out of being asked for their autographs. I wonder what these 'kids' are up to these days?  Wow, they would be around 47, 48 years old!

Stumped

It only took ten years to make it happen...

The linden tree as the removal service began work early Friday morning

Friday A and I had the linden tree cut down. It was a beautiful tree in many ways.  A tremendous annoyance in every other.

Waaayyyyyyy up there with a chain saw

Back when we moved here and built our house attached to my parent's house my mom would not allow the tree to be cut down.  "It's beautiful."  "The house will look so bare at that end."  "Just trim it some."

This guy really knew his stuff

Well, all that may be so, but A and I got real tired of the bugs that, along with my mother, loved the linden tree.  Spiders, bees, winter moths and ants.  The spiders and ants particularly bothered me.  For many months my truck, which was parked beneath the tree, would be covered, inside and out, with spiders and ants.  Mostly the spiders gave me problems as they bite.  Nothing like driving down Nugent Stretch, at night, trying to squish spiders on the inside of the windshield as I drove.  They came inside the house, too.  I think the ants taught them how to do that.  The bees arrived when the tree was in bloom.  They would buzz all around, high on each branch...and then crawl around on my truck trying to lap up the sweet sap that would drip down.  Oh yeah...that sap was a real hassle, too.  For a month or two the truck would look sugar coated.  A hates the winter moths.  Don't ask me why, but at age 30 she is deathly afraid of moths.  It was hard getting home from work after dark and seeing thousands of the white-winged things crawling up the trunk of the tree...and then have to get out of the truck parked right there next to 'em.

Less and less tree

Ten years of whining and complaining to my mom combined with her forgetting that she had said not to cut it down...

Chain saw man back on solid footing

Now its gone and along with it all those pesky problems.  I'm sure we will miss the green of it and the shade of it near the house next summer.  We will love, however, the opportunity to have a better, maybe bigger, vegetable garden.

Me and the stump (Thanks, R, for the photo)

Gone except for the stump.  The tree service's stump grinding machine is in the shop for repairs so they will be back in the next week or so to erase the last reminder of the linden tree.

(I missed some of the action - the main trunk being felled and slamming to the ground.  I had to be at a tuning job.  I got home in time to see it in its fallen position, though, before being sliced up, loaded, and hauled away.)

A Book Review

I'm starting to write this book review after noting that Blogger has a Save feature.  I kind of knew the feature was there, just wasn't too sure about how well it would work. I won't be publishing this right away.

But I really want to write about this book.
And
I don't have anything good to say about it..

This is the book.

THE book

I heard about it from a fellow SBHS board member.  She found it while browsing at the library.  I reserved a copy...placed it on hold...and headed down the next evening to see what I was missing!

I wasn't missing much other than a good deal of aggravation!  The majority of the text is about Dogtown rocks and boulders.  Mostly it covers material already covered in previously published books by other authors.  And they did a better job of it. In fact, the only new information in this book seems to be an analysis of the lettering styles on the Babson Boulders.  Wow!  The author says that the various styles proves that they were carved by several people!  No kidding.  (Or...maybe one guy was just having some fun trying out new styles?  No, not that, but a little lack of research can be a dangerous thing.)

She goes on to indicate that there are numerous Native American cairns in the area woods.  Well, maybe, I say.  But after reading the next section of suppositions and fictionturnedtofact by Ms. Gage, in my opinion doubt is cast upon everything from her pen.

The stone mounds

Ms. Gage claims that the stone mounds at the Haskins Estate (Haskins Park, Poole's Hill) are Native American cairns.  Or to be specific, the cairns are under the neat covering stones.  She feels that these loose rock cairns were not in keeping with the other stonework of the estate claiming that their covering stones are not cemented out of respect to the origins.  She indicates that the pools were cemented stone, as well as the entry pillars.  But what about the 'dry' stone walls?  No cement there.  Even much of the foundation work was not cemented. The author would have done better to have researched more thoroughly before adding guesswork and misinformation to her publication.  If she had really wanted to convey the truth about the mounds, rather than making them into something she wants them to be, she would have found out that the mounds are most likely just the remnants of clearing the land for Haskins to build his estate in 1892.  The hill was originally referred to as Popple Hill because of the enormous amount of stones covering its surface. Oh and that was 1892 NOT the 1880's as claimed by Ms. Gage.  Anyway...in the early 1960's, Frank Glynn, a noted Connecticut archaeologist examined the stone mounds of the Haskins estate and found nothing predating "American flowerpot".  Sorry Ms. Gage.

As to the rest of Ms. Gage's suppositions about the Haskins property...

The upper pool 2012

The lower pool 2012

She writes:  "In the wooded area beyond the lawn he built stone-lined landscaping pools...The pipes were part of an elaborate landscape pool system...The pipes were used to add aesthetics to the water flowage from pool to pool...The vertical pipe produced a bubbly fountain affect...The horizontal pipe added an additional quantity of water at the bottom to create a waterfall affect into the lower pool.  It was an illusion amplified by the sound of a waterfall...The pools...were not part of a formal garden...This is the complete opposite of the gently rolling open lawn..."  She continues to add that there were paths through the woods meandering around the landscape pools.  Hah. 

Period photo showing the upper pool in its manicured setting

Truly in error. Had she done a bit of research at the SBHS (which is just down the hill from Haskins Park), Ms. Gage would have found many photographs showing just the opposite of the landscaping details she goes on about.  If she had checked around, she even could have spoken to former residents of the property!  Indeed, the 'wooded' pools WERE a part of the formal landscape. The 'top' pool was a swimming pool, not just a landscape feature!  The bottom pool was a run-off pool for overflow from the pool above.  Both pools had beautiful 'island' gardens.

An aerial view c.1930.  The double set of pools shown as numbers 5 and 6 and obviously included within the lawn area.

A slightly different view from the upper pool.  House to left, cottage to right.  Stone mounds surrounded by young trees and shrubs just right of middle.

And the pipes that Ms. Gage is sure were for the elaborate landscaping pools?  Mr. Haskins had a complex  system of pipes because he was providing his own water supply for the estate.  Pumps drew well water up into the estate's own storage tank and then the resulting pressure from the elevated tank supplied the water to the houses and to the barn.  You can find the remains of these pipes all over the woods in the area because the burned leftovers of the buildings were bulldozed off to the sides taking all the piping along.

Ms. Gage also claims to have found a cistern near the cottage.  What she fails to realize is that her 'cistern' was actually a cesspool.  One of two on the property.  A shame to mix up those usages!

Photo taken during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 showing the water tower in the background.

Ms. Gage's lack of thorough research about the Haskins property leads me to wonder about all her other suppositions presented as facts and the feeling that this is a book she should have never published.  Thank goodness she only paid to have 100 copies printed!

Sorry, Ms. Gage, that's just how I see it after a year of research.

 

It Feels Like Winter

At the beach a few cold winters ago.

Dickiebo sent this along to me:

This is amazing, if you have not seen it before just type in your address or any

family addresses and look through the window at the snow falling on your home

today. It's amazing!!!!

.

Click below to get something for Christmas you won't get anywhere else this summer.

http://www.pusher.com.au/clients/pusher-christmas-2011

 

 Yes, it works.  Amazing to see my first Florida snowfall!

Determined...

to win an autographed copy!

Homer's Mom Wrote Another Book...

and I want a copy!

This book would have been on my Christmas list...but it won't be in stores until January.  So...I'm hoping to win an autographed copy that WOULD arrive before Christmas.  You'll be seeing more of Gwen Cooper's book as I try to increase my odds of winning. (Some of you may remember her other book, Homer's Odyssey, when it spent some time in my recent reads section of the sidebar.)