Whew Sunday

 22nd  day sober. I didn't go to sleep until 7AM and woke up around 1:30 and got up around 2. I was pretty tired up from the hour or so of walking, all the time on the light rail, the things I did in Mountain View, and then all the commotion with Ken being here in the evening. By the time Ken was gone, it was all I could do to cook up the 2nd serving of "night time" spicy udon with the last of the shrimp and fish cake, list Ebay stuff, then try to get sleepy and go to bed. 

I did plenty of reading on, well, clarinetty things last night though. I'd thought Doreen Ketchens, "The Clarinet Queen" was a flutist who'd only changed to clarinet after years on the flute. Nope. She was a clarinetist from the beginning. And she was on-track from early age to become a classical clarinetist, until her boyfriend-to-become-husband, egged her into trying out playing on the street. Then she kept getting humiliated by her relative inability to play jazz, so she worked hard on jazz. That hard work sure paid off because she's great! 

I also learned that my student clarinet and #2 reeds are just the beginning and over the years, better equipment can make a huge difference. One teacher mentioned a student who sounded terrible, and the teacher discovered him playing on a stock student Buffet mouthpiece. He handed the kid a Fobes to play while he told the kid's parents to buy him a "5RV Lyre" which the kid started using and was doing "4-octave exercises" in no time. Gee, and I thought I sounded all right on a #2...

I left here at 3, dropped off some trash on 6th street in a trash can there, dropped off some books, band-aids, and some masks Ken had insisted I take, in the little free libraries. 

I went to Dai Thanh and got some raw peanuts and a can of fizzy water and some money back, and went over to Da Kao and got some little dumpling things and some boiled peanuts for $5. There was a bum ahead of me in line who was trying to get his (stolen?) card to work, and I guess eventually paid the guy in bum-change, I'm not sure. So the guy first totaled my purchases up to $7.50 then did some things and it came to $5. Maybe he was glad to have a decent person instead of yet another bum, come into his store. 

I ate over on the college campus and had some asshole in a car (by definition, though, if you're driving a car you're an asshole) honk at me so of course I flipped him off. The cowards never want to step out of their multi-thousand-pound death tanks and have a fair fight. Johnny Law is still around too much but if things get spicy, there are going to be a lot of cars burning, I'll see to that. 

So as I was eating on campus, I saw some campus bike cops go by, and thought, they ought to go undercover; they'd catch all kinds of baddies in cars. 

I left by way of 3rd street and rode past the 7-11 with its usual couple of crazy zombies gyrating around out front, then realized I needed to stop at the Amazon place to pick up the scissors I'd bought. A couple of days ago, one of my pairs of scissors had disappeared. I finally just ordered another pair on Amazon and figured I'll take the pair I keep upstairs, downstairs and just use those. Of course once I'd ordered a replacement pair the "lost" pair re-materialized in my cooking utensils drawer. I use scissors heavily enough that I wear them out, so I'll be glad I'd ordered this 3rd pair in a year or two. 

So I picked those up and some bubble mailers, passed the zombies again who were really whooping it up (I saw quite a few really "gone" zombies today) and rode over to Nijiya for a bit of shopping, and got back here. I'd been out an hour and a half. 

After wasting time watching a bunch of dumb stuff on YouTube and having some snacks, I finally turned to a halfway-boring documentary about WWII and got the clarinet out and figured out how to put it together. I blew into it and ... nothing. I finally got a low note (I was holding all the keys down) and gradually got where I could make it make a sound. I started in on the band book and learned notes C,D, E, F, and G, besides a few I got by randomly trying out pressing different keys. I got a few pages in on the band book and worked out "Saints" and "Amazing Grace". 

I'd had to sand down the cork on the Fobes mouthpiece first though, to get it all together. They're always generous with the cork on those. And the reed I had seems to work fine. Everyone tends to get the orange-box Ricos because they're a bit cheaper or something, but the pale blue box ones are considered quite good and worth shelling out a little more for. I may be on a beginner clarinet with a beginner mouthpiece and a #2 reed, but I think I had it sounding pretty good. (Mr. Sowlakis had told me in the distant past when I took a few lessons from him that I had good tone.) 

The last time I'd played, and tried busking with, a clarinet I didn't have months of at least an hour a day of practice on it, or anything, under my belt. I feel like all the trumpet practice did me a lot of good and not least to convince me that there's nothing like regular practice to make progress. 

So I got in at least an hour, keeping time by that old WWI documentary, and that's enough for today. 

I also printed out a trumpet fingering chart for Tom, and got together my replacement corks and some Q-tips and tools and such, because tomorrow night I'm going to replace the corks on the spit valves on his trumpet, so he won't be limited by those, since he said they're in pretty bad shape. I'd told him how I've gotten pretty good at replacing corks and take a dim view of how much the repair guys charge for this simple operation. 

I had fun blasting some super high notes too - it doesn't take nearly as hard a push as it does on trumpet. I feel like, with plenty of work, I'll be able to go just about anyplace with this thing. And I might be right, as it, or a soprano sax, can be played quietly or not, can be heard above a crowd or played really soft and mellow. And Asians are fond of both instruments, after all, the king of Thailand plays the clarinet, and Kenny G. (however you feel about Kenny G.) is hugely popular in Asia. 

I had some dinner, took apart a precision potentiometer no one wants to pay anything for, and listed the parts along with some other stuff.