Eileen also reglued one of the keys where I pointed out to her some damage that has been causing it to wiggle loosely. It’s the one missing in this pic.

After that we walked down the local pub and had drinks and starters sitting outside and relaxing and enjoying the lovely weather.

The next step is to adjust the nut pins (little nails that guide and dampen the string near the keyboard, you can see them in the pic above) so that the strings will be a good distance from the jacks. This is a bit tricky because the jacks are not installed yet, but I think I can do this. I also may need to rewrap a couple of strings which are wrapped too low on the pin itself. After that we attack the jacks themselves. This feels like we are well on the way to having this done by Aug 5th, the date of my little fall gig.

Speaking of this gig, I had two musicians back out yesterday.  It’s a mother/daughter team, the oboist and the xylophone/glockenspiel player.

The mother, Debbie Coyle, is the religious ed director at the church I work at. She is a fine oboe player who has relatively recently returned to active oboe playing. Now she is a bit overwhelmed with the combination of her church work and oboe playing. I encouraged her to drop out if there was any discomfort or undue pressure coming to her from my little gig. One of the main points in my mind is to gather a specific cross section of musicians for a bit of mutual fun playing. So she finally succumbed and emailed me this is what she needed to do. Her daughter has not spoken directly to me so I’m not sure why she doesn’t want to play without her mom. I am a bit scary I know and the part is difficult. So it goes.

On the upside, my friend, Jordan VanHemert, read about Debbie dropping out and offered to play my oboe sonatina on his soprano sax.

Frabjous day! This actually is more interesting to me than hearing this 1976 composition of mine on oboe once again. I contacted Jennifer Wolfe, the pianist, and she agreed to do it with Jordan on sax instead of Debbie on oboe. That will be fun.  Thanks goes to Jordan and Jennifer for being flexible and helpful!

I’m happy to report that my daughter Sarah has a new part-time job as a graphics designer at Blitz Advertising (link to site).

She will be reducing her hours working at the local pub. She happily pointed out that Blitz is located where Fenchurch church thought of the answer to life the universe and everything in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books and movies. If you don’t remember, the answer is “42.”

Also happily the other daughter, Elizabeth, has rejoined Facebook.

She quit under an organized protest to FB’s bad privacy policy. I am selfishly glad she is back because FB does keep me connected better to her and others.