i CAN’T take my micro-tuba to the repair shop, because the repair shop (which was originally owned by my friend and musical instrument repair instructor, larryLARS) is being SHUT DOWN (which, actually, doesn’t really surprise me that much: lars’ wife is getting old and she doesn’t want to be running a music store, and i understand that) at the end of july…
sam, the repair guy, said he doesn’t know where he’s going to go next. 😠
and, while initially, i got a zing of adrenaline, i quickly realised that if i put my hat in the ring to fix woodwinds for local school districts, i would have to come out of retirement, end my SSDI payments, and get a whole crapload of bailee’s insurance, so people don’t sue me out of existence when i can’t fix their youngster’s “heirloom” bundy flute “which he inherited from his grandmother” 🙄
but, in the short term, i also don’t KNOW any working repair technicians — other than dan oberloh, who has his own special story — who i can call to pull my stuck tuning slides and have the instrument back to me before i have to leave for OCF.
rehearsal season has begun. the past two weeks, i have had rehearsals on mondays, alternate tuesdays, and wednesdays, plus my classes on thursday and sunday. we’ve got one more week of panto rehearsals (monday and wednesday) before we take the show to the oregon country fair for half-a-dozen performances over three days, which should help us work out the bugs for the traditional “holiday” performances in december.
this is more a reminder to myself than anything else, but i MUST REMEMBER to take my micro-tuba to the repair shop and have them pull two stuck tuning slides which i can’t seem to get free… i MUST REMEMBER because i am taking my micro-tuba to OCF, and will need the tuning slides to work!!
macque is NOT COMING to the oregon country fair this year, for the first time in a huge gob of years (47, or something like that). he hasn’t been doing very well, health-wise, and the doctors have said that if he goes to OCF, it might just kill him. it will be interesting seeing how well this group functions without it’s titular head. we’ve been doing fairly well the past few years, but it has been because macque has been behind it all, pushing.
at the same time, i can’t help but think, “lucky bastard”… he’s got a time limit: he’s coming down the point where he can definitely point to an end of his life that he can do nothing about. it should have been me, in 2003. next time, i’ll have a DNR and an AND ready. who has those things lying around when they’re 43? 😖
then, when i get back from OCF, on monday, i have a sousa band rehearsal on tuesday, a circus class on thursday, a sousa band performance at an old folks’ home on saturday, and a unicycle class on sunday.
my unicycle class, this session, actually has 5 people in it! 4 people other than me! 😉 there’s the little girl who went from not riding at all, to riding a giraffe without a spotter, last year, and her (i think) younger sister, and their (i think) mother, plus two women who look like they’re of indian descent, one of whom is probably between 40 and 55 or thereabouts. i believe the younger one is late teens to early 20s.
five years ago, today (i wrote about it when i discovered what had happened, which would have been tomorrow), my 2TB Western Digital MyCloud drive was cracked, along with tens of thousands of others, all over the world, by an anonymous, malicious skript-kiddie, and was reformatted, wiping out two terabytes of music, including a lot of my original music, several years worth of irreplaceable business records, irreplaceable original artwork, and other miscellanea.
thanks to timing and my immediate REMOVAL of the drive from anything that might further damage the files, i was able to recover 743.3GB of data, of which approximately half is unreadable, and approximately half of the remainder is random bits of text or pictures, but with no information about what they are or where they go, they are, essentially, useless. i haven’t looked at any of the remaining data for a long time, because it is too depressing… but i still have it, which is also depressing. another really depressing aspect of this is that Western Digital KNEW that this was going to happen, having discovered the exploited bug in 2018, but because of the fact that the firmware hadn’t been updated since 2015, it was considered a “legacy device” and they didn’t bother to tell anyone about it. 😠🤬 AND their only response was to offer me a 40% off coupon for another Western Digital cloud drive. 😒
today i have recovered and/or replaced approximately 963.9GB of music, and i have actually recovered MORE of my original music than i had previously, thanks to a couple of friends… although i don’t have ANY of the source tracks or information about the individual tracks other than what other people had recorded. i recovered a lot of business records and some artwork, including the .eps file for the panchamukhi ganesha that is currently on the front of my car.
and my new cloud drive is a 12TB QNAP (it has western digital drives, but that’s because i didn’t find out about them until it was too late), which is a RAID-1 device that is backed up in three separate locations on a daily basis.
when i was in my early teens, i went to a concert of music by julius eastman at the unitarian church in buffalo new york. it was a concert for which my father was, more or less, the “official” photographer. julius eastman is considered (by me, anyway) to be one of the founders (along with philip glasss) of what is called “minimalist” music. i didn’t know this at the time, but my father very much disliked the music that he heard. he was only there to take pictures. he took several, including one that he called “In Like Fashion“…
In Like Fashion – a portrait of Julius Eastman, by Ron Hammond
while i definitely DID NOT “understand” the music i heard, it inspired me, and has continued to inspire me to this very day. julius eastman died in 1990, at the age of 49, of what was likely HIV-related issues, but, at the time, it was reported as “cardiac arrest”. his january 1991 obituary said that he was on the verge of starvation.
it turns out, julius eastman was a singer, as well as a composer. he appears on the 1981 recording i have of “Dolmen Music” by Meridith Monk.
okay, there has been a WHOLE BUNCH of stuff going on in the last few weeks, and i haven’t really felt inspired to write about them, or anything, for that matter, but whatever.
the “normal” big news is that we are now the owners of a dog training facility in south king county, and moe is BUSTING HER ASS getting things ready, and making sure all the instructors know what the deal is, and substitute teaching for instructors who are sick (or something, so many things are happening that i haven’t been privy to…), and moving equipment around, and finagling different equipment from other folks, and, and, and… it’s ultimately supposed to make it so that she doesn’t have to work so hard, but, for the moment, anyway, it has had exactly the opposite effect, and i don’t know when it’s going to get any better.
260531 snake-camel tattooHOWEVER that is NOT the reason i’m posting today. the REAL reason i’m posting is… you know that tattoo i got a few years ago, the one of the “snake-camel”? i got the tattoo a few years ago, and the overwhelmingly drunk/high week at the beach which the original “snake-camel” came out of, was a few years before that, but the tattoo was never really “what i wanted”, because “what i wanted” was a tattoo that glowed under ultraviolet “black” light, and the tattoo artist that did it for me was unable to use UV-reactant ink, because of some state regulation, or something like that… it’s not that it’s “unsafe”, it’s just that “regular” tattoo shops are reluctant to use UV-reactant ink because of… some reason. 😕260605 UV-reactant tattoo ink!! naturally, they sell UV-reactant tattoo ink on amazon, and, as long as i can find an artist that will do it “under the table”, there is absolutely no reason why i SHOULDN’T get a UV tattoo…
so, last week i played substitute trombone for the Fighting Instruments of Karma Marching Chamber Band/Orchestra, for the 100th anniversary of the Lincoln Theatre in mount vernon… it was a New Old Time Chautauqua benefit show, and i performed on the same stage as the Flying Karamazov Brothers, and Artis The Spoonman, along with Kevin Murphy (with whom i went to college, in the late ’70s and early ’80s), and a bunch of other familiar folks. it was there that i ran into a clown friend i have known for a few years; originally met through the moisture festival, and i visited him when i went to orlando in 2015. he now lives in bellingham, and, unbeknownst to me, he is a tattoo artist, so i asked him if he would do a UV tattoo for me, and he said yes!
so, TOMORROW i am going up to bellingham to get a 30 minute “touch-up” and change my green “snake-camel” into a GLOWING “snake-camel”!! 😎👍👍
it’s rare enough, when i say “i’m excited”, that i can’t actually think of the last time i was this excited about something… and the finished result is going to be SO COOL!!!
