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.

Well this post really has a twofold purpose ...

#1 to show what little progress I have made on the sewing machine restoration project
and
#2 to try out a new blogging tool that is imbedded in a new web browser ...

So first ...

On the Sewing machine ... I took the whole thing completely (and I do mean completely) apart ... then I cleaned up a few of the pieces and started trying to decide what I was going to do about the "top" since that is where the damage is most prevalent.  I had thought I was going to replace the veneer on the top but after further consideration AND after doing some reading about veneer and how it is done I decided that working with what I was given would be best ... it would maintain the integrity of the piece and at the same time mean I didn't have to learn a whole new skill and experiment on a valued piece ... so I did some stripping, some sanding , lottsa re-gluing some more sanding a bit of ill advised staining ... more sanding ... more re-gluing ... and well here's what some of the pieces I have completed look like at this point ...









So ... still a long way to go on that but SOME progress is being made ...

Now about "FLOCK" ... this is a new web browser that integrates web browsing, networking, blogging, pictures and a bunch of other "stuff" ... this post is being written with the FLOCK blog editor, the pictures are dragged and dropped into the post using the FLOCK Picasa interface and hopefully I will now be able to include a link where you can learn more about Flock

Well, the crib/bed project is finished and delivered and in fact "broken in" by the newest Millsap clan member "Zoey Bade Corban Millsap" ... and she is indeed a cutie!
(For those interested that haven't already been button holed to look you can see pictures here ... Zoey.

Now that the shop has been cleared of that project and more or less put back together ... it's time to start something "new" ... or "old" as the case may be.

Several months ago my Auntie Pug Millsap gave me a cherished family heirloom ... and asked me if I could try and do some restoration work on it. I was both honored and humbled with the offer and promised that as soon as the "crib" was complete I would give it my undivided attention.

Sew ... uh ... So ... here are some pictures of the project in its "as delivered to me" state ... they give a pretty good idea of the condition of the piece and what I have ahead of me.

From SewingMachine

From SewingMachine

From SewingMachine

From SewingMachine

From SewingMachine

and there are several other pictures at this web album => Sewing Machine pics

As you can see it is a wonderful old treadle sewing machine. This one belonged to my Aunts's Mother if I have the family history straight. It's had a little time "in the barn" and that contributed to the weathering visible in its current state.

I rented some videos on veneer and restoring old antique radios that included some basic instruction on the repair of those cabinets ... and since I believe the sewing machine cabinet is of similar ilk I hope that those will give me some much needed guidance for this restoration project.

As you can see in these pictures there is some fairly "knarly" veneer separation on the top of the machine that I had thought might require actual replacement but after viewing the videos and stewing over it a bit I have decided to try and just recover what is there and see how that looks.

From SewingMachine

From SewingMachine

I'll try and post some "progress" reports as I go along ... that is of course making the hopeful assumption there is "progress" to report ...

I'm looking forward to the learning experience ... later ...
Bade

... sooooo ... let's paint the darn thing on the inside ... only been about 27 years since these walls were constructed and painted their one and only time! We have had the downstairs ceilings painted due to water damage and we DID go nuts a while back and take it upon ourselves to paint the kid's bedrooms and our bedroom ... but Carolyn was never happy with the walls in our bedroom and then there is this tacky (very 1980's) wallpaper in the kid's bathroom, the master bathroom and in the wet bar area ... Carolyn NOW really hates wallpaper ... and hey ... those kitchen cabinets look dated as well ... so ... let's paint it all ... we'll add some accent wall colors, get the wallpaper removed ... it'll be swell ... uh huh ...

So ... got a recommendation from my buddy Pete about a good painter ... called 'em up, owner came out to see what we wanted, exchanged a buncha emails with modifications and negotiations on the bid ... signed the final bid ... agreed on the date the painters would arrive ... and ... "... got hung up on another job so will start a week later than planned ... oh, by the way ... the kitchen cabinets we are gonna paint ... ya'll have to empty those completely before we can start ... see you next week..."

Oh crap ... these cabinets have been 'collecting' things for 27 years ... particularly the lower cabinets that have about a zillion 'collector's plates' my grandmother had and we are afraid to get rid of 'cause sure as hell when we do we'll discover one of them is worth $1,000,000 at auction ... so ... two days of boxing up all our kitchen cabinets and cramming stuff in the craftroom, the music room, all over the place ... done ...

Next day painter is supposed to come ... I'll call to confirm ... "... oh no sorry ... still hung up on that other job BUT he'll be there Monday for sure ... " ... uh huh ... Sunday night .. RINGGGGGGG ... "... painter is sick ... he'll be there Tuesday for sure ..." ^&*(*&^&*()(*&*() ... uh huh ...

Steamed a bit and then called painter office ... "have owner call me .. I ain't happy!!' .... RINGGGGGGGG ..." Mr Millsap?..." "... I ain't happy ... here's what we're gonna do ... we're going to ADD the kitchen fur down, behind the refrigerator AND the cabinets in the master bath ... and all this will be at the same price as already agreed to ... " ... "ok they will be there tomorrow!" ...

And they were ... but we're now about 13 days behind our planned schedule and through no fault of her own Carolyn had planned a trip to visit Brandi to coincide with the end of the painting project ... so now ... it will be in the middle of the project and oh joy it'll be me, the cat and the painters for a few days ...

The photo's below show the mess as the wall paper comes down and the kitchen cabinets are empty and primed ... more to follow as progress is made ...

From Painting

From Painting

From Painting

From Painting

From Painting

From Painting

From Painting

From Painting

From Painting

From Painting