The fucking thing jumped

 Last night I got 15 things camera-ready to list, and found all the things that had sold, and was going to get my bedding out and brush my teeth etc and get some practice in. 

My bedding consists of a really big piece of cardboard I lay down on the floor (indoor-outdoor type carpeting and this place used to be a machine shop so little shards of metal are always percolating up out of the carpet) then the 3-part folding futon (an actual Japanese futon) I get from where I store it in the loft, then a sleeping bag. When I get up I reverse this process.

I picked up the cardboard from where I keep it leaned up against the wall, and I had the PVC shakuhachi sitting on a music stand, tabletop type, on top of a big heavy cabinet.  The way the cabinet is placed, there's a sizable gap behind it that I never thought about. The cardboard hit the tip of the shakuhachi sticking out just a little from the top of the cabinet, and the thing jumped up and dove behind the cabinet.

To get it out I'll have to remove everything from al the drawers in a file cabinet that's next to the big cabinet, pull it out, then fish around back there for the shakuhachi. That's a lot of work that I'm not sure when I'll get around to doing. 

So at least for practice purposes I have my Yuu that I can play, and right now my primary concern is to make something to shut off that gap so nothing else can leap into it. 

This gets me wondering, though, what exactly makes the PVC shakuhachi play better than a Yuu? The only difference I can think of is that the bore of the PVC shakuhachi is smoother. I just sent off an email to Monty Levinson asking him if bore smoothness makes a difference and it will be interesting to see what he says. 

So I got my shakuhachi practice in, except this one song that seems to throw all of us. At least it's a rather delightful cacophony when we "play" it. I need to find it on YouTube because if I can hear it, it helps a ton in playing it. 

Then I got the Hall flute out and printed out the pages with songs from the Hall beginner book. I was able to play every song I tried just fine. It's nice that Mr. Hall arranged the songs so that none of them require half-holing. I'll just need to practice them a ton so they become "natural" or "2nd nature" to play. 

Geez  I can't believe that this office/living area is essentially not safe for any musical instrument more delicate than a trumpet, an instrument for signaling in war, or a drum. 

These days, music is only supposed to be pursued by those who are middle-class and higher. Schools for working-class kids stopped teaching music 30 or more years ago. Middle-class people can have a "music room" that's not used for 3 or 4 other purposes also, and keep their instruments safe from work accidents, family members or room-mates, etc. I'm really busking the trend, not having been middle-class since I was 11 or so, and now being the lower end of working-class, and yet still having middle-class aspirations.