It seems silly to say how much I'm anticipating how the repairs to these two stringed instruments are going to work out. The repairs to the mandolin didn't amount to much more than cleaning up the old glue spots, and then re-gluing them and then using wood clamps to hold it correctly aligned until the glue sets.
Like the guitar, the mandolin is not a high dollar item to begin with. I don't remember my motivation for buying it, but I don't think it had anything to do with bluegrass or old-time music. At the time that I bought it I doubt if I'd ever seen that many people play a mandolin close up.
Thangs have changed in that regard. My friend Rainey started playing a mandolin when a friend of his insisted he borrow his mandolin to see if Rainey might enjoy playing it. He did, and I sort of gained an interest by osmosis. I didn't think my interest was so great I'd buy another mandolin, but finding the one I forgot opens the door for me to at least explore playing it.
The guitar interests me because I played it like it was for a good long time. As a matter of fact, when I thought about the guitar I had in the attic I truly thought it was a different guitar. An acoustic jazz guitar that had an accident.
The jazz guitar had other qualities than being broke that made me unenthusiastic about hauling it out and repairing it. It was a heavy, cumbersome guitar that didn't have much reach to it. The fret board was bowed so much that there was no practical way to straighten out again.
I can't say I was delighted when I opened the case and saw which guitar it was. I am glad it wasn't the klutzy old jazz guitar. I'm pretty sure that if it had been I would have just put it on my trash pile and burnt it with a little prayer about ashes to ashes and all good thangs must come to an end.
There is some things I do get delighted about, and that's lighting up stuff I don't want around me any more rather than giving it away or taking it to the trash dump. Some things, when I'm done with them, I don't want nobody else to have them and possibly go through the same disappointment I did. I burn them figuratively at the stake.
I burn old clothes that I've worn because I don't want nobody else to wear them. Sometime even if they're brand-new and I get a bad feeling. I wish I could say that I'm a careful shopper and look for clothes with a little class at a good price, but according to how many clothes I don't wear but once or twice before I burn them to a crisp, I suspect most of my shopping is thoughtless impulse buying, and it's my shame about indulging in that kind of stupidity that causes me to burn the evidence.
When I win the lottery I'm gonna have all my shoes tailor-made just to see what that might feel like. I do know how store-bought shoes feel. No two pair are alike even if I buy the same brand. I suspect this might be true for other people too. Maybe even people who only buy tailor-made shoes. Part of that probably has to do with how my feet themselves change from time to time.
I have a bunch of carving tools I've never used much. I don't have much of a knack for sharpening them. That seems to be a craft all by itself. I first became aware of that while I was in the Navy. There I became aware of seaman's knives. The kind that have marlin spikes on them for dealing with ropes and knots. Some of the guys could sharpen them keen enough to shave the hair off their arms, and others, like me, were lucky to get them sharp enough to cut butter.
Often enough these days I am getting the feeling that I've lost years of my life exploring and participating what goes on with the internet. I knew when I started writing on my blogs that might cause me to lose interest in the e-mail discussion groups I participated in for around fifteen years. What I found out doing that, however, is that what I really enjoy doing is trying to capture drifting thoughts with words. I like wool-gathering to get the raw materials I need to weave my tunic of one-thread.
