unheated part of barn is mostly cleaned up, and now Mrs. bloke is cleaning up her woodwind room

[bloke]

Shelves accomplish amazing things re: elimination of messes.

There are already a bunch of shelves in her room, but more = less clutter and less stuff on the floor.

These two pieces of pegboard (somewhat distressed) have actually been outdoors sometimes...maybe even rained on, but she remembered them, we pulled them out of the loft, cleaned them up, painted them, and these old pegboard-hung shelves were in storage (from our old brick-and-mortar...and we have a bunch more of these, but not much more room in her workroom for shelves).

Organizing our (barn) paint cabinets, I found some OLD (good!) paint - two gallons of which are Sherwin-Williams sort of "eggshell" color...so (after cleaning grease/dirt/dried mud off this old funky pegboard) I blobbed on one (ridiculously-thick "good enough") coat of that Roll-Royce of paints. OK...if "Good Housekeeping", it could have used a few second-coat touch-ups, but for a workroom in a barn, this just-better-than-throwaway-pegboard looks good enough. For the 1x2 strips, I went out to the garden and brought in some that I had ripped on our table saw to use as tomato stakes (way to many extras leaning against the corner of the garden)...so this cost $0.00 (well...our Torx size 20 star driver - which fits the really short deck screws, as all of the regular sizes take a 25) was worn and slipping, so I had to go buy a replacement...' wooden floor/wood stove hardware store sold Mrs. bloke a single/no pkg/name-brand one for $2.

...so I went out there to take a picture, and she's already put some ready-to-sell alto saxophones on them.

- Accent (Taiwan - "good")
- Yamaha model 21 (original-original Yamaha entry-level, before they came up with any shortcuts. I re-lacquered and she re-padded it.)
- John Packer JP245 (Taiwan - upper model)...NEW...amazing intonation/workmanship, yet still not-at-all expensive

PLEASE BUY THESE, SO SHE HAS ROOM TO STICK SOME MORE UP THERE.

[bloke]

"Temptations" cat treats:

yes, we buy those by the lb.

no, there are no cat treats in that container, but some other things.

no, we don't buy Tupperware (nor off-brand plastic containers) when so much stuff - these days - is sold in "Tupperware-like" containers.

[bloke]

edit:
She stuck a (new) English horn up there in the open space...
Someone needs to buy that as well.

[Three Valves]

When I get a chance to retire I'm cleaning out all the stuff my wife was supposed to be cleaning out for the last 2+ years.

[bloke]

There's no internet out there, but it feels weird to have the floor of the barn really clean and be sitting in a chair at a table and a great big space - instead of a bunch of clutter - and able to examine individual instruments from schools and type up quotes on my laptop out there, rather than scribbling them on paper and bringing them back into the house and typing them on the laptop in the house.

Someday we might have internet out there, and sometime I might restore the phone line which got corrupted which I had run out there when we first moved in, but it's probably better to just have the radio and to not have those distractions.

[bloke]

We took our regular 65 gallon sacks of trash to the dump today, perhaps four of them which we might accumulate over one and a half to two months, and also a couple of sacks from cleaning up the barn, and then two full size tuba shipping cartons of additional trash from the barn, and maybe a way oversized alto saxophone box of things made of metal, and a baritone sax shipping carton full of old crapped out fluorescent tubes, other crapped out bulbs, and some other glass containers. I think we actually might be able to stuff all of these summer repairs in there and still have walking space between the various schools to pull instruments from the stacks and carry them into our work rooms. That's different!

[bloke]

It's sort of fun to have things cleaned up. There are probably twice as many instruments to repair as most any other summer, and I really don't know how we're going to get them all repaired in time, but that having been said, I was able to store them all and yet have room to walk through the entire building without having to move anything out of the way.

After dinner, we will have written up formal quotes on every instrument in there and submitted them. Other repair people know what is nuts though: in the summer, requisitions and purchase orders cannot be submitted nor approved until after July 1st with almost any school system, and most all band programs need their instruments repaired and returned by around July 10th or so. This forces repair people and repair companies and music stores to do the repairs without having them approved for payment and just hoping that things will be like they've always been in past years.
Finally, school systems have stretched out their payments from 30 days to 45 days due to basically being broke - though they won't admit it, so repair work that is done and turned in by July 10th may only be barely approved for payment by July 10th or so, which means that it doesn't get paid for until around September 1st or maybe even Labor Day, and - in the meantime - the repair people have to live, and they have to pay for all of the replacement parts that they purchased, materials, and the light bill required to run the machinery, light up the shop, and cool down the air in the shop hopefully down to at least 79 degrees fahrenheit.

[bloke]

' just finished looking over and writing up the last two dozen instruments from (assuming no last-minute add-ons) the last high school...

Young scholars are so very imaginative in the ways they find to alter their environment, these days !!!