I'm All for Being Polite

Ack! We moved, and I didn't blog. School came to an end, and I didn't blog. Summer has started, and I am back!

Let me just start by saying that the move went well, we are free of the other house (although getting out was a chore, and I left a vacuum behind). The living room is full of boxes, but seeing as my mother is showing up next week, I think that will change. Now that I have time, some things are getting done. I still have a screen door in need of repair and towel bars to hang, and my mother is coming to help me paint; but I can see the floor of my office again and things are slowly finding homes.

In exciting news, I've continued with my guitar lessons. Last summer, when I realized that I would be teaching guitar (an instrument I hadn't picked up since university and then only because I needed to for a semester), I started into lessons with Pete, the guy 2 doors down from us who runs a full time studio out of his house. When the year was over and I knew that I wouldn't be teaching guitar again next year, I decided to continue with lessons. Guitar is one of the few "me" things I do, and despite the fact that I don't practice enough it's been a lot of fun.

So for the year, I was using one of the guitars from school. We rented 30 guitars so that I could teach the grade 6, 7, and 8s music this year. I was responsible for 30 classical Yamaha guitars that I was renting out to students for $20 per term. I was never so glad of anything coming to an end as I was of those guitars returning to the store. No more making sure where they all were, no more restringing (a job I sucked at), no more hounding 12 year olds for money. It was all good.

Except at the end of the year, my guitar went back too and I was back to using the guitar that was originally my father's. The first year my parents were married (so probably 1971 or the spring of 72), they decided to take general interest classes through the Peterborough Board of Education. My mother took furniture refinishing, and my father took guitar. My mom bought him a guitar and case for Christmas.

Guitar did not work out well for my father. Perhaps it was that he was 40 and trying his hand at playing an instrument for the first time. Perhaps it was the group setting. He says that his hands were too small to make it work. But after the course, the guitar was relegated to the top of a closet in my parents house until I announced that I would be taking lessons with Pete to be ready for the fall. Then that guitar that had been in a closet for all that time make the migration to my house so that I could use it for lessons.

Pete restrung and cleaned the guitar up for me last summer. He also commented that the strings were pretty high (another probable reason that my father had trouble), and recommended that I take it in to see what could be done about the bridge. I, of course, didn't do this because I suddenly had an instrument with strings a comfortable distance from the neck. So once again, my father's guitar sat in a corner unused in the case.

Flash forward to the return of the guitars. Suddenly, now that I have the time to practice, I'm back to the original guitar and it's awful. I now feel a need to take it in. In fact, Pete's comment to me yesterday at my lesson was, "This week, you can blame the instrument. Next week, we'll be back to blaming you."

So I went from Pete's to the repair shop and had the instrument looked over. The guitar currently has more questions than answers that go with it. I had to leave so that Len could see if he could figure out what could be done, and what exactly he's dealing with. We're not sure whether the instrument should actually be strung with nylon strings because it looks like a classical, but has a steel string neck. It appears that someone has tried to brace the bridge before, but my mother swears she bought it new and no one has done any work on it. But Len has promised to do what he can because he knew I'd like to keep the guitar for "Sentimental reasons". It's the polite way of saying, buy a new guitar. Which I'm starting to think I may do.