News of the week of May 16, 2023

<a title=”Chmee2, CC BY-SA 3.0 Sickle33

Schedule

We meet on Tuesdays at 7:45 pm at the home of Wendy Goble and Richard Schmeidler in Arlington Center. Please let me know if you want to come.

Housing report

We have gotten some walls clear to move the furniture to, and found some of the notebooks with the music we play. I’m getting some friends to help, and maybe we’ll get all the music we need in the next week or so.

I wouldn’t move the rehearsals there until there’s a bathroom which should be soon, but it’s going slower than I like. In any case, there won’t be hot water until the gas company comes. It’s been a year since we requested the connection and over a week since we told them we had done everything they (eventually) said they wanted.

News of the week of May 2, 2023

098 The fairies sit round on mushrooms

Schedule

We meet on Tuesdays at 7:45 pm at the home of Wendy Goble and Richard Schmeidler in Arlington Center. Please let me know if you want to come.

Housing report

The electricity is there and the floors are done, and the electrical work is close to done, although I still don’t have an ethernet line between the two floors.

The plumber is supposed to start my finish plumbing on Monday, and the gas company is supposed to connect the gas on Tuesday.

I’ve been having nightmares about moving for almost three years now, and one of them happened Friday. I think it’s all fixable, but it’s going to be days or weeks of hard work.

The people from the storage company showed up as scheduled with a giant truck and four guys. They started bringing things in, and I was telling them what room the things went in. My picture of this was that the furniture would end up where I wanted it, and then I could unpack the boxes onto the shelves and drawers and cabinets I wanted it in.

Unfortunately, they started putting boxes next to the walls where the shelves and drawers will have to eventually go, so the living room and dining room are essentially full of a mix of boxes, bookcases, etc. and there’s no way to unpack the boxes until you move the furniture where it has to go. I think the boxes are all less than 50 pounds, but many of them are much more than I want to move.

When they were taking things upstairs, they usually asked me what room they should go in, and I told them pink, yellow, or blue. But with the pieces of the bed, I don’t think they asked. They just assumed that the large bed should go in the larger and sunnier of the bedrooms. I have tried both rooms and have decided that sunny and a view of the large street are not figures of merit for a bedroom, so I had the good bed in the back bedroom. It was taken apart for the move, and has now been put together in the wrong room.

A complication is that the storage room where I would expect to be able to put boxes that I didn’t want to unpack yet is cluttered with all the stuff that the movers didn’t move back in 2020 because it was quitting time on Friday.

I’m sure I can get some assistance from the contractors, and if I call the storage company, they may even come back and move the bed for me. But I can’t just open some boxes and get the large notebooks that we used to play out of at Cantabile meetings.

News of the week of April 18, 2023

Meeting Report

We have been mostly or entirely playing out of the booklet for NEFFA.

NEFFA

If you’re going to NEFFA tomorrow (Sunday, April 23, 2023), please stop by our event, Pasttime with good company. The original title, which was less interesting but more descriptive, was “Social Polyphony”. It’s the music English-speaking people in the 16th and 17th centuries sang and played together in social settings. There will be rounds, part songs, lute songs, and hymns. The audience will be given music and encouraged to join in.

Schedule

We will not meet on Tuesday, April 25, 2023. Several people can’t come, and the rest of us could use a break. Otherwise:

We meet on Tuesdays at 7:45 pm at the home of Wendy Goble and Richard Schmeidler in Arlington Center. Please let me know if you want to come.

Housing report

eversource.jpg

My electricity was connected on Friday. The flooring people are coming on Monday. There are still other things that need to happen before I can move back, but I have no reason to believe that any of them will be as difficult as the electricity was. A couple of days before the Eversource trucks arrived (6 of them, with 8 people), our contacts were still implying that it would be weeks before we could be put on a schedule. So I assume someone made a phone call. Many thanks to whoever helped and/or sympathized.

News of the week of February 28, 2023

Turdus viscivorus 1873

Schedule

We meet on Tuesdays at 7:45 pm at the home of Wendy Goble and Richard Schmeidler in Arlington Center. Please let me know if you want to come.

Happy 72nd Birthday to me

Thanks to everyone who sent birthday wishes, either in person, by phone, email, or post.

Celebration

Someone emailed me that 72 is a perfect square (9) times a perfect cube (8).

We had a small dinner party, with roast beef, a good wine that (serendipitously) went very well with the blackberry appetizer, and a chocolate cake.

A friend who couldn’t come to the dinner party because of having covid called. He’s on the Paxlovid, and his symptoms are pretty much gone except that he gets tired with very little exertion.

Someone posted that he hopes my housing situation is resolved.

HOUSING

electricity.jpeg

Not yet, but there is some hope. We got the electricity connected.

This means that soon we can get gas connected (which we requested last May). They wouldn’t do the gas because the first thing they want to do when the gas is connected is test the furnaces, and that requires electricity.

Once we have both gas and electricity, we will have heat, and the people who are doing the floors will be able to do the urethane.

Once the floors are done, we can start moving things in like appliances and plumbing fixtures, and then it should be a small number of weeks.

I don’t have a schedule for any of this happening, but I believe all the people who are working on it want it to be over.

PETS

For those of you who missed it, Maia died last May. She is missed, especially in the current situation. I’m not doing anything like enough walking, and I don’t think it makes sense to adopt a new dog until I have my house back.

orion.jpg

Orion is doing his best to be helpful.

News of the week of February 14, 2023

Nutmeg (PSF)

Schedule

We meet on Tuesdays at 7:45 pm at the home of Wendy Goble and Richard Schmeidler in Arlington Center. Please let me know if you want to come.

News of the week of January 17, 2023

Three Soldiers with Muskets MET DP849317

Schedule

We meet on Tuesdays at 7:45 pm at the home of Wendy Goble and Richard Schmeidler in Arlington Center. Please let me know if you want to come.

NEFFA

We are scheduled to lead a workshop at NEFFA at 11:30am on April 23. Please let me know if you want to be in the group – I can list you as a performer if I know soon. You should expect to come to some Tuesday rehearsals if we do that.

Otherwise, please come and participate that day. I expect the pent-up NEFFA energy after three years of online festivals to be impressive.

News of the week of January 3, 2022

EB1911 - Helleborus niger

Meeting Reports

January 3, 2023

We played:

Schedule

We meet on Tuesdays at 7:45 pm at the home of Wendy Goble and Richard Schmeidler in Arlington Center. Please let me know if you want to come.

News of the week of December 20, 2022

<a title="Danapit, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons” href=”https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nativity_scene_n_Schumpeter%E2%80%99s_house_Trest.JPG”&gt;Nativity scene n Schumpeter’s house Trest

Schedule

We meet on Tuesdays at 7:45 pm at the home of Wendy Goble and Richard Schmeidler in Arlington Center. Please let me know if you want to come.