...but I won't be able to deliver their stuff (including a formidable stack of bass clarinets, tenor saxophones, and a couple of 60-year-old Martin baritone saxophones that actually now play well... as well as a gob of tubas) until I repair two more tubas that belong to another school, as both of these schools are way off to the east in the same direction, and there's no way I'm going to drive round trip to one of them and then drive round trip to the other one...
... A couple of days ago, a customer from about 1100 miles away showed up for a scheduled visit, and I nicely straightened out one of those 19-in short model York tuba bells for them, as well as an obviously Holton-made satin silver upright baritone horn bell that is every bit as large as a modern euphonium bell... I think it's the same size bell as that Holton 4-valve front-action large-bore instrument that I sold here a few years ago - whereby I both shortened the main slide and the bottom bow to bring it up to 440 tuning).The really old baritone horn bell is engraved Chicago and has the brand name Frank on it. The owner told me it doesn't stand for Frank (as in Frank Holton) but another man with the last name of Frank who was associated with Holton... The same customer was also one of my European- made tuba bell customers, and now the pair of beautiful new (Holton 345 sized) bells have been picked up.
... This customer also had some car trouble when they were about 5/6 of the way here, so - when I was driving home keeping up with traffic on the freeway - driving home myself from playing at nursing homes with a quintet (going 80 mph to keep up with traffic) - I was having to route my customer (with my super-budget third-tier-customer B-grade Verizon-towers cell phone service... an incredibly inexpensive add-on to our Xfinity Internet service at home) off of the same freeway (a couple hundred miles back...as they were simultaneously headed for blokeplace) and send them over to two-lane byways -:so they could drive slower to get here... (For some reason, they had phone and texting, but had lost their GPS for a while.) I then had to make other calls and texts (with sparse tower service) to pull in some favors and set up a repair visit for them the next morning at an honest shop. Fortunately it was an easy fix (their vehicle sounded and ran like it was a horrible problem), and my customer was elated with the quick fix and the southern/honest/good-guy repair price. They made it back home just in time to see their grandchildren arrive at their home (which they hadn't seen in a couple of years), as well as to play a really high paying gig that that was really important for them to play. Squeezing them in - as well as their issues - with all of my work was a little bit emotionally exhausting, even for the stoic old bloke.