Home Again

I haven't written anything here for awhile. I've been traveling and celebrating birthdays. In the process, my laptop died which made written communication a lot more difficult. My mother in law turned 92 and I turned 55. My husband's son turned 27 the same day his grandmother turned 92. Great family get togethers!
The best part of the trip to Oregon was the absolute abundance of goods and services oriented to recycling and reuse of products in all kinds of ways. Curbside recycling is a given in the small town where my mother in law lives. No one gives it a second thought. It is just natural to do it.
My husband has begun playing the piano more seriously in the last five or six years, so his Father's Day gift from me was a piano---recycled from a garage sale two houses down the street. For $100 I was able to buy the piano and have the owners move it into my living room. After some research, we found (by tracing the serial number) that the piano was actually a Howard by Baldwin (that will mean something to the muscians out there) built in 1923. When the piano tuner came, we discovered that the piano had started out as a player piano but the mechanism had been removed. The people we bought it from said it wound up in their garage after someone donated it to their small church. After a few years the church disbanded without them ever locating anyone who knew how to play the piano. Long story short with the combination of the piano sitting unplayed for many years and New Mexico's extremely piano friendly consistently low humidity the piano is in very good shape for an 83 year old. Lance is enjoying playing more on a real piano than on the low-end keyboards he's been used to for several years.
In the process of shopping for a used piano, Lance met a piano technician/tuner, Cy Shuster, through an online Piano Forum who was coincidently moving to Albuquerque from Boston in June. So Lance and the 1923 Baldwin got to be Cy's first customers in Albuquerque. The piano got a much needed tuning along with a few other tweaks and adjustments and the piano and Lance are even happier now.