guess

[bloke]

Many of you know (either from me mentioning it, from having sent her work, or from buying an instrument from her) that Mrs. bloke repairs all the woodwind instruments.

Before we were married - and during the first year that we were married - she was a waitress.

When she was expecting our first daughter (up until a month or so before that first child was born, when she actually began repairing woodwinds) she actually had another job.

I wonder if it would be amusing for you all to try to guess what that job was. (??)

---------

OK...
Here's another thing you can attempt to guess:
When she began repairing woodwinds a month or so before that first child of ours was born, what was the very first type of instrument she repaired, and how extensive was that repair?

[MikeS]

Job before starting woodwind repairs- Secretary of the Treasury. I have a two dollar bill with what I am convinced is her signature.

First woodwind repair- Making a new Heckelphone bocal from a Dairy Queen bendy straw.

What do I win????

[York-aholic]

Mrs. Bloke’s job at the beginning of your marriage: x

Was she your parole officer?


First woodwind repair:

repadding Kenny G’s soprano saxaphone

[arpthark]

Rodeo clown

///

Ophicleide overhaul and repadding

[bloke]

The very first woodwind instrument she repadded wasn't some plastic bodied clarinet or silver plated flute.

Rather, it was an alto saxophone that I had completely refinished including removing all the springs from all the posts and all the pads and all the little pieces of cork from all of the keys.

Never having repadded any sort of woodwind instrument before, she had to start with a saxophone from scratch, figuring out how to put the wire springs back in, figuring out where the little pieces of cork belonged on the undersides of the mechanisms, figuring out how thick those little pieces of cork had to individually be, figuring out how to glue pads into pad cups without making a mess and just how much glue to use and how to level pads that weren't quite hitting tone holes squarely. If I may have polished the top of a tone hole a little bit too much on one side, she also had to learn how to use the tone hole file to re-level the tops of any tone holes that I might have inadvertently damaged. If I possibly pushed a post off to the side just barely in the process of polishing, she had to analyze and solve that problem as well.

She succeeded with almost no help from anyone, and related the entire job to the seamstress work with which she was so adept.

When she decided that she was finished, that instrument played quite well.

The last job that she had before we bought this business was a being a bartender at a restaurant.

Truth be told, she's always been really good sorting out mechanics. When our kids were very small and toys that had plastic moving parts inside would break, instead of throwing them away, she would drill out the rivets, figure out what broke, figure out how to fix them, put them back together with screws (where she had drilled out the rivets), and give them back to the kids.

[anadmai]

I thought her full time job was keeping you under control.

[gocsick]

I thought her full time job was keeping you under control.

You mean he could be worse without Mrs. Blokes calming influence?!?!?!

[bloke]

I thought her full time job was keeping you under control.

She knew to never try.
Who wants to go through life being "under control" anyway ?

Even people with pink hair, nose rings, pre-printed signs, furnished bull horns, and pre-placed stacks of bricks are "under control"...
Their nonsensical and violent behavior is financed by a couple of billionaires. They completely remind me of extras who show up to be in movies who are paid $100 or $200 a piece so they can imagine themselves as being a part of something important... blobs of non-thinking humanity following others instructions...

[anadmai]

IMG_5050.jpeg (20.02 KiB) Viewed 2435 times

[Stryk]

Well, she does a FANTASTIC job at it, regardless of her preparation!

[bloke]

There are a whole bunch of people who don't understand the difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory.

Most of those same people believe everything Google says, so I'll use Google as a source for them:

https://www.google.com/search?q=who+are ... fId=ChxjMe.

Today, so called "protesters" remind me of movie extras.
(I've actually been hired to work in a couple of movies, not as an extra but as a musician whose face and sounds appear on screen.)
Extras drive all over the country to be paid something like $100 a day (or maybe it's a little more these days..??) to just be blobs of human flesh filling out landscape and scenery, and they do this to make themselves feel like they're part of something important. Paid protesters are the same, and I suspect the pay scale is about the same as well. Since they know nothing about that which they're pretending to protest - and can't be trusted to not say something really stupid into the microphone, they are instructed to not speak to media, just as extras on movie sets are not allowed to talk into microphones.

It never occurs to them to learn how to do something useful, like install or repair plumbing or heating and air conditioning systems or something like that.

Since so many people have embraced their sociopolitical beliefs as a religion substitute, I know I'm not going to change anyone's mind.

[anadmai]

Agnostic all the way. I'm a child of TWO pastors. The only substitute is therapy.

[bloke]

I believe there's something larger than myself, because there's too much evidence pointing to that. The tinier the object that we view, the more organized are those objects. Larger the masses that we view, the more organized are those huge masses.

As far as organized religion is concerned (even if their headline belief systems follow along with my own) I'm very skeptical that their primary purposes are what they claim (certainly not as they've evolved over the past century, but also in their long histories). I'll politely and respectfully accept their money for my high quality services - just as do their preachers, their orange jacketed traffic control people, their secretaries, and their janitors, but I'm not going to hand them any of mine (with them claiming that me doing so is a "tithe").

[prodigal]

She probably mixed excellent, precise drinks! She does excellent work on woodwinds!!!!!!