37th day sober.
My computer completely died. I told Ken about it on the phone last night and he said, "See you tomorrow night!".
I got up today, took packages to the post office and fedex, then went downtown and checked in at the "Fix Laptop" place. Prices have gone up, and I didn't see any Dell Latitudes. But, the guy says he can replace the hard drive in my machine for $100-$150 so I'll take it over there and see what he can do.
I bought a fan at the hardware store, some (more) experimental stuff for trumpet spit valve "corks", had visited a couple of lunch trucks on my way to the post office so I'd eaten, and got back here and put things away, started in on The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, and messed around with my trumpet cork stuff.
Presently Ken came by and had gotten an old Dell laptop set up and got it online, tested its connection with the printer, made sure I can print out shipping labels, and wrote out my pay check although I told him I won't put it in the bank until Thursday because that's my day to go to the bank.
I almost neglected to mention, in thinking about better materials than cork for trumpet spit valves, I'd been thinking about the 1937 King Master cornet I once had and how much I regretted letting it go. It played fine, and I'd used some odd little orange silicon stopper things on its spit valves and they worked great.
Thinking about it made me think of this little hole-in-the-wall place, an embroidery shop, that had brass instruments for sale. I went over there and it was still there. The guy had a cornet, a King made by H.N. White or something, with a #4 mouthpiece. I played it a bit, up to high C and the E above that, and in the end, although it's a bit dinged up, "It'll make a honk" was my verdict and I gave the guy $50 for it.
So now I've got another fix-up project and I'm able to get caught up on Ebay.
No comments:
Post a Comment