302nd day sober. Last night I re-organized all my music stuff, and got the "horns" (trumpet, cornets, clarinet) ready to sell off. I just don't mentally like a lot of "stuff" and I was happiest when I had the least "stuff".
I want my "stable" to be the Shakuhachi Yuu I have now, the "enhanced" Shakuhachi Yuu I plan to order any time now, and the silver flute.
So that was my overnight, organizing stuff into groups, the trumpet gets the original mouthpiece plus the Blessing 3C, this bottle of oil and slide grease and the nice gig bag and stuff that goes with it, the Yamaha cornet gets this and that, the US-made cornet this and that, and so on. I even dragged out the ukulele I got just before Guitar Center went bankrupt or closed or whatever they did.
Oh, and before all that, I put new spit valve corks in all the brass; factory Yamaha ones in the Yamahas and these cheesy ones I got on Amazon for the US-made cornet. That went quicker than I anticipated.
The thing is, the Yamaha trumpet and cornet and the Yamaha clarinet are probably nice enough to consign at West Valley Music. They probably don't want another uke, and the US-made cornet is just plain grotty.
I can get a little for the uke at Starving Musician, or just wait until I come across someone who could use one and give it to them. Same goes for the US-made cornet.
I didn't practice last night but I finally got around to reading this post on Reddit in r/shakuhachi where a guy asks about warm-ups and .... one guy claims to be able to hold a note for 2 minutes. That sounded impossible so I did more reading and on another shakuhachi site there was a full-on "how long should you be able to hold a note" discussion and and apparently a skilled player can hold one of the higher notes for a minute, and the lowest for 45 seconds. It comes down to using a very small mouth aperture.
I packed/finished packing 15 things and took them to FedEx and the post office, picked up packing stuff on the way back, and visited Tom for a bit. He's getting tired of the antics of his pot-head assistant and I remembered Chris, a guy Ken hired to help with the move from the old building. So I'll try to get the two of them together.
There's plenty of war news on the radio and I have to say, I was really wrong about the situation. I thought Ukraine's government was a puppet right-wing one the US installed, that most Ukrainians didn't want, and Russia coming in would be met with little resistance, much welcome, and Russia and Ukraine would team up to clean up things like the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.
Instead, nobody wants the Russians in there including a good number of the Russians, Ukraine is fighting back enthusiastically, adjoining countries are taking in refugees, not only Ukraine but several other countries are very big on joining NATO now, and lots of non-Ukrainians are sending help and even volunteering. They're getting themselves kitted out at their own expense and going over there. Captured Russian conscripts are going online saying they thought it was a training exercise until the shooting started, and the ruble's devaluing fast.
It's just another chapter in the bloody history of Eastern Europe, really, and all we can do is hope it fizzles out.
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