The last few days

[snousle]

Going up to Ukiah for my birthday sure was nice. For the past three years, the role of this house in my life has been a Problem - whenever it came up, it was generally because something was going wrong or costing much more than it should have. And when I visited it, there were contractors running around everywhere making noise, crap strewn all over the place, and no time to really hang around and look at things.

But this time, the contractors left, it wasn't a total rubbish heap, and there was running water and electricity. And boy, was it great. For the first time, it actually felt like home. It will be very hard to leave our house in San Jose after twelve years, and I know from experience that I don't move easily at all. But it's going to be hard to feel homesick in a place like that.

We continue to shed once-meaningful objects. Yesterday, I finally unburdened myself of something that used to have a large place in my life, though more recently it had only occupied a large place in our living room:



I bought this harpsichord back in '88 or thereabouts. At the time, it was a dream come true. Having one built was an impossible expense, so I had resigned myself to never being able to own one. I was going to buy a used electro-accoustic grand piano (a very short grand piano with electric pickups on the strings), and was actually driving to go pick it up when I saw the ad in the paper for this instrument. And I could actually afford it, at a stretch. My father chipped in a bit as well.

Keyboard instruments were a bit of a flop for me. Many, many years of instruction and practice yielded a certain sort of technique, but it never got to the point of being easy and spontaneous. I could play, say, the simpler fugues from the Well Tempered Clavier, but I relied way too much on kinetic memory and never learned to read music properly. In the end, it was never fun - that, apparently, was an ever-receding goal that was made unreachable by sheer uptightness. The path was blocked by nothing but fear and shame. And that's kind of sad, but even now I don't know if I could ever overcome that.

(The other instrument I own is a bluegrass banjo, which is sort of like a portable harpsichord, albeit with only five strings to tune rather than a hundred and eighty. It is fun - I've neglected it the past few years, but it's much easier to play it freely and carelessly. And since Deliverance, we all know what that leads to. ;-)

Anyway, I've been searching around for a while to find someone who would take it. Even as a donation, it's hard to unload, since they're big, high-maintenance things that take a lot of upkeep. Merely setting aside the 30 square feet of floor space it requires has an effective cost of thousands of dollars for a prospective owner. The San Jose State music department took the bait, though, and sent over an appraiser so they could give me a tax deduction for it. Despite being in nearly perfect condition, it was valued at a dismal two thousand dollars. Sigh... not even much of a writeoff.

We loaded it into the back of a professor's Element - it fit with only a fraction of an inch to spare - and watched it roll away. In truth, I'm glad to see it go. Sure wish I'd done this ten years ago, it really hasn't done much for me other than take up space and generate guilt. Because of this thing, we were never able to have a fire in our fireplace! Can you imagine? What a freaking albatross.

I spent yesterday packing up our wine cellar. Cleaning and packing five hundred bottles takes a lot of time! My philosophy has always been "buy when you're rich, drink when you're poor". So I'm sort of looking forward to a lower-income future. ;-)

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[snousle.livejournal.com]

Well, I would still like to do a food trip to Japan and a complete tour of the Arctic. But that's about it!