Sweater Project

I know, I know, I’m drifting again. But I had to get this recorded.

Never, ever piss off a woman of power. I did that yesterday and I suspect I am only beginning to learn my lesson.

I won’t go into specifics, but trust me when I say I uncovered some very directed emotion. I thought the entirety of it had been delivered in a particularly scathing e-mail until I tried to work off some of the distress it instilled in me by practicing my violin.

This is what I found when I opened the case:

I swear to Orpheus that it did not go into the case like that. 24 hours previous it was in one piece.

Hold on, it gets weirder.

I didn’t have a tailgut (a little loop that fastens the tailpiece to the bottom of the fiddle) to replace the blown one, so I fashioned one out of the strongest yarn in my stash. Knitting, fiddling - it’s all fiber arts, right?

Well, that held while I re-strung it. But as I was tuning the A string, the yarn snapped and I was back to kaboom again.

Okay, no problem. I work acrosst he street from a music store. I went in and dropped the $1.50 to buy a new tailgut and threaded it into the tailpiece, then slipped the loop over the end button. The end-button promptly popped out, setting me back to square one. A square I have come to call “kaboom”.

I called up Bill Smallwood, hill country legend and a man who knows a thing or two about violins. (And guitars, banjoes, bugles, keyboards . . . you get the idea.) I asked him if I needed to use some glue on the end-button, and he said no, friction alone should do it.

So I pushed and prodded and twisted the button back in, and it slipped out a centimeter when I set up the tailpiece again. But it’s holding.

For now.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2003 at 11:34 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.