Here is the picture Russ Wilkins took of the Lion Fish we saw in Cozumel a couple of days ago ...
Today is Monday, June 22, 2009 ... Carolyn and I have been in Cozumel for 6 days and will return home Friday June, 26.
To date we have done 10 dives with a total of just over 10 hours underwater. All of the diving has been very relaxed and typical "Cozumel
Clear" but today we saw something worth mention.
Today we saw a "Lion Fish" on one of the reefs at about 35 feet depth. This is significant for a couple of reasons .... first and foremost, Lion Fish are NOT native to the Caribbean sea, they are in fact typically found all the way over in places like Fiji and such. Apparently, in the last couple of years there have been sightings of Lion Fish off the coast of Florida and even some "mention" of sightings around Cozumel in the last several months ... BUT ... per a recent diver magazine article indicated there had been no "documented" sightings of Lion Fish around Cozumel. We had asked a couple of local dive masters about them and they had all claimed to have seen a couple here and there and even knew of one having been captured ... you see ... the deal is ... Lion Fish are not only highly poisonous to humans, they are also voracious eaters of other fish and are actually a very bad thing to have showing up on the reefs where they are not native. They are indeed beautiful ... but unwanted in this area. Regardless, one of our dive group today is a very fine underwater photographer and he took several pictures of this critter . I will share a picture once I get it from the photographer ... we believe this one to be a juvenile fish since it wasn't very big and not as darkly colored as the pictures we have seen ...
So ... we can log another creature as "sighted" in our personal logs ... we have also seen several sharks, barracuda, a splendid toad fish, seahorses, lobsters, crabs, an eagle ray, several eels, crabs and many other less exotics during this trip ... but the rare (so far) Lion Fish is the big deal ...
First I am happy to report that Martin Guitar's customer service representative, Paula Primrose, contacted me via email to let me know that my 1971 D-18 guitar has now been officially registered in my name as the original owner! This means that any repair work that I have done by an authorized repair shop will be covered by warranty ... significant because I recently left that guitar at Guitar Tex in San Antonio with a repair estimate of ~$500 ... clearly I am pleased that this expense will be covered by warranty instead of me. The work will be performed by master luthier John Thurston. John is a renowned guitar repairman from the Baltimore area that just recently moved to Texas (he lives in fact out at Canyon Lake) and Baltimore's loss is definitely our gain. The work he will be doing on my D-18 includes a "neck reset" which entails actual removal of the neck from the body of the guitar, correcting the angle at which the neck and the body join and re-gluing the neck back to the body. This is a very critical and non-trivial repair (in this case due to poor quality control in the 1970-'s at the factory) and should only be done by a trained and experienced repair person. I might try it on a wall hanger but not even maybe on a vintage Martin (particularly not one covered by warranty!!).
And ... I am pleased to report that Carolyn and I will be taking a fairly long road trip in early October ... I have been "selected" to be one of six attendees at a "Siminoff Lutherie Camp" for building Florentine style (Bluegrass style) mandolins. This camp will be five full days of instruction by the author of the definitive text on constructing "F5" style mandolins, Roger Siminoff . Roger is a world renowned luthier, master builder and it will be a real treat for me to have the chance to get personal instruction from such an artist of the craft.
The seminar will be taught at Roger's shop/studio in Atascadero, California. That's about 1600 miles one way from Bulverde, Texas and we will make the trip over three days in the Mini-Cooper. Should be a fun (but really long) drive ... gotta get Mini-Rita in the shop before then for its scheduled maintenance.
The seminar will include 5 days of lecture, demonstration and hands on construction. At the end of the seminar I will come away with an "almost complete" F style mandolin that I will complete in my own shop. This will be the 3rd mandolin build for me. The consensus in the craft is that it takes about 50 builds to get to the point where you actually know what you are doing ... I'm hoping that by attending the seminar I can skip ahead at least 3 or 4 ... but we shall see ... I'm going to build an F4 style mandolin which is a bit different than an F5 ... I have an A5 and and F5 so I'm branching out a bit.
The decision to attend this seminar has been a bit of a "... teach a man to fish ..." decision for me. The cost of the seminar and the travel expense is significant and equal to the cost of an upper-mid=level F5 mandolin built by either a well recognized individual builder or a well respected company (Gibson, Weber, Collins ....) ... BUT ... I do enjoy the hobby of making stringed instruments and the opportunity to learn directly from a recognized master doesn't come around every day ... consider this like a week of almost private 8 hour a day guitar lessons from Chet Atkins ... Roger is in fact that well respected in the craft.
It will be my intent to document our road trip and the seminar experience via this (or an associated) web log ...
I'll keep you posted ...
It's funny how seemingly unrelated things can ignite a moment of reflection ....
The summer of 1971 I was 18 about to be 19. I had just completed my Freshman year at Trinity University and was back home in Midland for the summer. The previous 9 months while at Trinity had a significant impact on my future ,,, I didn't have a clue at the time, of the magnitude of change and personal growth those nine months would ultimately have.
It was during that time that I discovered I really did have a penchant for computers on a large scale and more significantly, I had the opportunity to explore what that could mean to my future. That nine months cemented for me my future career. I was much better with computers than I was with physics ... and I began to see that I could possibly make money programming computers and not just have to nail my degree in physics to the service station wall where I would be pumping gas.
In my first ever "programming class" (COBOL for those that remember such archaic languages) I met a young lady that later in the year I began to pursue with some serious intent. Basically I was happily trapped by my love of computers and the heart stopping power of long blond hair and deep grey eyes and a girl that wanted to know how to get a Snoopy Calendar out of the computer for her dorm room wall.. I never had a chance.
During that nine months I also discovered that my long affair with very loud "electrified" music was over and I wanted to "go acoustic". So in the summer of 1971, I sold every bit of electric guitar equipment I owned and bought a shiny new Martin D-18 guitar. I'm pretty sure I owed additional money besides my trade-in but hey it was a "Martin" and there simply wasn't anything better ... it was worth the price!
Flash forward now to present day ...
Yesterday was June 2, 2009 ... a milestone in my life ... Carolyn and I celebrated 36 years of marriage.
Today is June 3, 2009 ... another milestone . Today I celebrate 35 completed years working for IBM.
... and yesterday I spent a couple of hours in a small guitar shop talking to the resident guitar repairman ... we talked about the fact that the 1970's were basically the absolute bottom of the Martin Guitar Company's quality control ... and that D-18 I had bought almost 38 years ago needed some fairly serious repair work to get it in "playable" shape ... it never played or sounded quite right ... but hey ... it was a Martin and I was 19 years old and just starting to find myself ... it never occurred to me to file registration papers ... so on the suggestion of the shop owner, I contacted Martin Guitar to see if I had actually registered the guitar those many years ago ... I hadn't ... but the customer service representative suggested if I could send some pictures of me with the guitar from those long ago days I could still possibly be recorded as the registered owner and thus qualify for warranty coverage on the repairs.
and that brings me to the REFLECTIONS ...
I did in fact find a photograph of me and that guitar back in the 1970's ... I had lots of hair then, and I was very young ... looking at that picture I realized several things ... many years have passed, I have had a great career and will be one of the last of the generations that will retire from a job having only worked for one company and with a defined benefit pension. I have been very happily married to one woman with blond hair and deep grey eyes for 36 years. We have children and grandchildren that are healthy and happy with what I expect to be safe and secure futures in front of them and ... if I don't look too closely in the mirror I still see that 19 year old kid with the shiny new Martin ... so ... to me at least, it's amazing how so many critical circumstances can be traced back to a certain point in time in one's life ... and how looking at just one old photograph can bring all of the various threads together into a single tapestry.