REPAIRING THE CONCERTINA (almost)

In our harp circle, we thought it might be nice to have some sort of alternative sounds against all those harps, so I decided maybe I could add some easy chords with the concertina. 

I got the concertina out -- I've had it for about 30 years or so, John got it for me for Christmas the year we went to Mystic Seaport the first time and where a guy was playing it on the pier and I thought, "I could do that." 

As it turned out, I wasn't really very good at it.  I could play the chords, but it kind of escaped me about playing a melody with the chords.  On the other hand, I did get so I could do a passable version of Waltzing Matilda. 

But as time went by, the concertina got kind of sad sounding, and I didn't play it much.  Then about five or six years ago, we went to Cotati to see the accordion festival, and I realized that it was pretty easy to fix the buttons, and came home and fixed a few of them. 

So when I got it out,  I thought it would be pretty playable, but no, the buttons I didn't fix back then had now disintegrated.  So I took the thing apart and replaced the rest of the little sleeves. 

Each button has a little sleeve of rubber material aound it, (the black stuff in the picture) which holds the key up when it isn't engaged, and when the key is up, the hole is covered, meaning no air can get through, meaning there is no sound.  I found that the tubing that people use for oxygen was the right size, as long as you could cut it into pieces about a half inch long. 

Melva had given me some of this tubing, and I usually use it to make peyote stitch bead tubes.  So after I spent a couple of hours hunting for this tubing I started the project.  First you have to take the concertina apart, then you have to do whatever fixing you're going to do, then you have to put it back together again, because you can't tell whether you've fixed it unless you do that.  So there's a lot of taking it apart and putting it back together again.  I had a cutting tool but it seemed like I could actually cut the tubing better with the scissors. 

Once I got the melody buttons fixed, I discovered that some of the bass keys had kind of collapsed, so I took that side apart and just replaced all the little pieces of tubing, put it back together and even though all the keys were standing up, and the holes were apparently covered, it plays constantly, whether you press the buttons or not. 

 

I'm uploading a little video of how horrible it sounds now. All the notes are playing all the time, as if all the holes are open, which perhaps they are.  And my ADHD is such that I don't want to putz around with it anymore, I'm ready to move on to wrecking something else.  Maybe tomorrow at Tara.  

THE NEW SINK

Okay, so I haven't been writing, and wait til you see just how exciting this entry is.  It kind of starts on Sunday, when we were house volunteers on the Sacramento Old City Association tour.  This is an annual tour that is a fund raiser for SOCA.  The tour is usually put together to highlight a certain neighborhood, and is quite dependent on getting people to volunteer to let about a thousand people wander through their house in a day. 

We were volunteering in a really nice house.  It wasn't very busy, among other things because it was house #7 on the tour and people usually will start with whatever is number 1 and work their way up to the higher numbers.  And we were there for the first two hours.  So we were mostly sitting around talking, admiring the furniture and how cool the house was and just generally kicking back and having a good time. 

The problem wth events like these is that people spend a lot of time getting their houses just perfect for the tour, so at the end of the day, you've seen lots of cool furnishings, nifty old houses and (mostly) nice remodeling.  In fact, one of the houses we toured turned out to be our house, and I didn't even realize it until we got in the kitchen and they had pushed the refrigerator into the closet just like we have.  This house was also on a bigger lot than ours, and the owners in the 1940's had added an annex onto the back, which removed the little room that we sanctimoniously call the library because it has built-in bookshelves, but  where we actually spend endless hours sitting in front of the boob we use for our endless watching of television.

Anyway, once we got home, things start looking pretty shabby to us, especially our kitchen snk which is missing most of the original enamel and is impossible to get clean.  We still like the tile and don't want to put a more modern thing like granite countertops or whatever the countertop du jour is, so we figured we'd replace the sink and probably have to replace all the tile because tile would get broken while the job was being done.  Oh yes, and the garbage disposal more or less has totally rusted out.  

The next day I called our regular plumber -- when you have an old house you practically have a plumber on retainer, and asked what the procedure would be for getting a new disposal, replacing the sink and replacing whatever tile got broken in the replacing.  He gave us a quote, told us what size sink to buy and where might be a good place to buy new fixtures, and told us to have our tile guy come and take the old tile out and then come back the next day and replace the tile.    We called our tile guy, Azim, who did our bathroom floor almost 5 years ago as it turns out, and he said he could install the sink, do the tile, and he'd be done and all the plumber would have to do is connect up the sink and install the disposal. 

Anyway, we told Azim to do all the work he wanted to, which included replacing the bathroom tiles the idiot handyman broke while he was doing a  lame job of repairing a light about a year ago. 

And obviously business is slow, because that was yesterday, and Azim and his helper showed up this morning, took the old tile out around the sink, went to the plumbing supply and picked up the new sink and fixtures, put the sink in (which was an inch bigger than the old one)  didn't break any collateral tiles,  regrouted the whole countertop, so it looks like new, and all we have to do is wait for the plumber to come tomorrow.  We got a pretty cool faucet, which is in this picture but isn't actually connected up yet.  

Looks pretty cool, but we have a tendency to leave fruit sitting there and rotting, spilling coffee and not wiping it up, ditto with cranberry juice, all of which stain the grout, but for now, it looks pretty cool.  We'll see how long we can keep it that way.