Musical Morning

I've taken the morning off from work today to await the arrival of the Piano repair man.

Karen and I have my grandmother's old baby grand piano in the next room, and it needs work.

When my grandmother passed away many years ago, the piano went to my older sister's house. She was the only one with kids at the time, and we all thought that that made sense. About ten years ago, when none of her kids showed a strong desire to play piano, it came to Karen and I mostly on the strength of the fact that Karen is an actual musician.

It's a lovely old instrument, but we think it needs some serious attention. It dates back to around 1900 and was once outfitted with a player-piano mechanism.

My father grew up with this piano in his living room in the 1930s and 40s, but he didn't take to it.

I remember sitting at it in the 1970s in my grandmother's house as a kid, experimenting with different combinations of notes and being endlessly fascinated with the sustain pedal. How many notes could I get to sound at the same time? It made a grand sound.

So I am waiting here for the man who can look it over and tell us what needs to be done to bring this wonderful old instrument to life.

On a slightly related note, I've added a new section to the sidebar here. I have been playing around with the Pandora music site lately. They now make available snippets of code to add links from weblogs to the "stations" that Pandora users can create.

It stuck it below the Blogroll. Have a look and let me know what you think.