A Vacation to Make All Other Vacations Envious (except that I'm doing almost nothing; some people get bored doing nothing)

The sport of curling, win or lose, male or female, whatever the conditions or circumstances, seems less intriguing than watching ants while they're slogging their way through that Terro substance that they supposedly take back to their headquarters and share with their fellow ants until it kills all of them. I've seen no evidence that it works unless a person uses the heavy-grade version that you can't buy at Home Depot but have to get from your pest control company.

I'm having an awe-inspiring break from the usual grind of medical school.  An esteemed concert pianist had to cancel a concert and a series of master classes all geographically accessible each night to a particular hotel. The guy was a bit of a prima donna if his demands for lodging are any indication. He canceled too late for the hotel to find anyone else to rent it for anywhere near what the pianist was going to pay. I'm paying roughly a quarter of what he would have been charged (the hotel will presumably bill him for the difference between what he would have paid and what I'm paying), which is still an entirely ridiculous amount of money for me to be paying for a hotel suite, but I have only one life, and it may as well be an enjoyable life. Money isn't something any of us can take with us when we make our final departures. While I plan to live to a reasonably old age, I don't plan to leave an excessive sum of money sitting in banks or various other investment funds. I do not wish merely to live, but to live!!!, and doing so is going to cost me a few dollars on occasion.

The hotel suite has, of all things, a Steinway baby grand which, due to the thickness of the walls and the placement of the piano within the suite, may be played at any hour of the day or night without complaints from neighbors or management.  I woke up a couple of hours ago with a mild attack of insomnia, and chose to deal with it by playing the piano. I've seldom if ever had the luxury of playing the piano at 4:00 a.m. without having a Nerf football thrown at my head as a result.

A few friends are flying in for the weekend. I had originally said that no one could sleep in my hotel suite if they visited, but I'm waffling and allowing six friends to scramble for couches, recliners, or the one extra bed in the suite. My stay is here going to be longer than originally planned, so solitude during this break is of less importance than i originally thought it would be. Besides, part of the fun of this vacation is having my peers be envious of me.

I even have a bodyguard who comes as part of the package, I'll need to tip him, but otherwise he is included in the flat rate I'm paying for almost everything.  I have no real use for him for the most part during the daytime. I have him hang around at night just because there are predators in the world, some of whom seek young and single women whom they consider to be vulnerable. Once the guy leaves, there is still reasonably tight security at the hotel itself, so it's not like I'm fair game for every sick puppy who might desire to make a leather coat from my hide.

I chose the study of medicine because I find it interesting, so even when I'm on break, I can't leave my field of study alone entirely. Yesterday, with an invitation, I went to  a hospital affiliated with a medical school near the hotel at which I'm staying. I scrubbed in for one pediatric abdominal surgery, talked to a few other specialists, then left. That's the nice thing about this being a vacation. There's no such thing as a shift. I can come and go as I please at any nearby hospital that will have me on its premises.

Breakfast will arrive soon. I'm having pancakes and fruit. I would probably gain weight on this trip were it not for one small issue: I cannot gain weight. My mom has issues with that as well, so it's presumably genetic. If she eats an amount that is roughly equal to what the average  sumo wrestler probably consumes, she can look good.  If I didn't wish to get myself killed, I could show you all a picture that proves my mom can beef up enough to be sexy.  I'm probably years away from that, though, plus I have a colon condition that makes it impossible for me to retain food long enough to absorb enough nutrients to look the way my mom looked in the particular picture in question. It's getting better, though, in the sense that fewer people accuse me of having an eating disorder. I'm less skinny and am starting to look my age, I consider it a very good thing.

I have no solid plans for today. After breakfast, I'll probably go back to sleep. When or if i wake up, I'll call and ask for a snowmobile to ride. I will need my bodyguard for that activity if no students are on break with whom I can tag along. Snowmobiling anywhere  interesting isn't particularly safe as a solo activity.

I watched a bit of the Olympic sport curling on TV. I don't get anything about it, as in exactly how it works or exactly why anyone would choose to do it. To me, as either a participation sport or a spectator sport, it seems roughly as compelling as is playing marbles. I haven't seen many televised marble competitions lately. they're probably around, though. Chances are that I'm simply not looking at the right channels. 

The Don Quixote of Piano Tuning

My dad carries piano-tuning tools with him in the trunk of his car. The trunk of his car is rather jammed by the time he fits his suitcase, his tennis racquets, his golf bag with clubs and irons, any medical equipment he needs, his emergency road tool kit, and his piano-tuning tools. There would be positively no extra room in there for a dead body or anything else were it not for the fact that his baby --whichever Martin guitar with which he is traveling at the moment -- takes up the center of the rear seats. The car could be filled to capacity with passengers and the guitar would still have to have the safest spot and its own seat belt. That's where my dad's priorities lie.

The reason my dad carries piano tuning tools with him is that he cannot stand the sound of an out-of-tune piano. I'm the first to agree that a piano that has not been properly tuned is unpleasant to the ear. My way of handling the situation, though, is the way a normal person with a sensitive ear would handle it: A) I don't play out of tune piano; B)If someone else does, I leave. I don't dismantle a piano that belongs to someone else with no authorization whatsoever to do so.

My dad learned to tune pianos because my mom and I both have sensitive ears as well, and my mom was having her concert grand tuned every month or so. At roughly one hundred bucks a pop, this added up very quickly into a sizable wad of cash that could presumably be used for something much more practical. (Clothing for his adolescent daughter would have been my choice method of disposing of his unneeded or unwanted cash, but not his, apparently. He's content to have me be seen in public looking like the child of someone whose unemployment benefits expired just before she outgrew her wardrobe.)

When it was just my mom's piano he was tuning, I didn't give a great deal of thought to the matter. It was her piano, and if he screwed it up, she would probably have bought another piano of equal or greater value and had it delivered to our home the very next day. Now there are two pianos in our home. I have a Kawai ebony baby grand. As baby grands go, it's actually a bit large; the model is sometimes referred to as a "parlour grand."

I should explain a bit about piano makes and models at the upper end. The very finest pianos are made by the Steinway and Bosendorfer corporations; they're considered the Lamborghinis and Ferraris of the piano world. Other companies, including Bechstein, Estonia, Faziolo, Feurian, and Grotrian, likewise consider themselves among the ranks of the elite. While they're all high-quality instruments, and I certainly wouldn't turn anyone down who tried to sell me one for a few bucks in some back alley deal, by and large the other mentioned piano makers are the Rick Santorums, Michele Bachmans, and Ron Pauls in the Great Piano Race. The major competition, the one that takes place after the mere hopefuls and wannabe contenders have been vetted and exposed for their single-issue agendas, lack of substance, and Tea Party/Birther connections, as well as for the skeletons in their closets, in all likelihood will continue to exist in the forseeable future between Steinway and Bosendorfer.

As far as Steinway and Bosendorfer go, both are equisite instruments. Bosendorfer has more than 88 keys on some of its models, with the extra keys going to the extreme bass range. Ironically, Steinway features greater clarity in its deepest tones. Bosendorfer is known for a more mellow tone, and its strengths are probably best displayed in the playing of more subtle and nuanced musical works. Steinway shows its forte in a firmer sound, and, of course, the amazing clarity of the deep tones, which often, on other makes of pianos, sound more like loud and percussive noises than like actual musical notes.

The subject of my father tuning our pianos became more of an issue when my Godparents bought a "parlour grand" (large baby grand) Kawai piano for me. The Godparents' choice of the Kawai brand for me was not a coincidence. My Godparents wanted me to have a good-quality instrument of my own on which to practice while the other piano was in use, yet didn't necessarily want to drop the 100K for a Bosendorfer, or even the minimum 45K for a new Steinwsy. Their choice in piano makes for me was well-advised. It's thought by many people who know about such things that for any given amount of money, one will get a better instrument from the Kawai corporation than from any other. This is not to say that Kawai pianos are the finest on the planet, but if a person is going to drop twenty-thousand dollars for a piano, he will get a higher quality Kawai than any other make of piano. Thus, while my piano is not the Steinway that my mom owns, it is a beautiful-sounding and -looking piano. I don't wish to have just any Tom, Dick, or Harry wander in off the street to take it apart and put it back together again purely in the interest of science. This was initially a source of conflict between myself and my father, as I detest the sound of a piano that has digressed from A=440 and the relative auditory distantces between pitches of keys. I wanted my piano in tune every bit as much as my mom wanted hers to be; I just thought shelling out about a hundred bucks every month was a suitable alternative to having Andy Amateur mess with such a valuable and sensitive instrument, especially since no one was necessarily volunteering to replace my piano when dad inevitably screwed it up beyond repair.

The compromise we reached was that my dad would take a week-long refresher course for people already familiar with the art and science of piano tuning. Following this course, he received certification as a piano tuner. Even following successful completion of training, it initially gave me a slight urge to pluck strands of hair from my head a handful at a time on each occasion that he approached my Kawai with his tools. (This is how a person might feel about watching his or her only child's heart being transplanted by a second-year surgical resident.) I've since grown accustomed to it, due in more than a small part to the fact that I have enough money in the bank to replace my Kawai were my dad to kill it with the slip of a tuning fork or whatever tool he happened to have in his hand.

Now, for me anyway, the issue is one of embarrassment. If my dad hears patrons playing a poorly-tuned piano in a lobby of a hotel in which we're staying, he puts on a white lab coat, excuses himself to the person playing it, and proceeds to open the thing up and make the needed adjustments and repairs on the spot. What is amazing to me is that he has never been stopped at this "tipping his hat to windmills" sort of behavior when it comes to pianos. He goes about his business (which is, in a technical as well s a practical sense, not really his business at all) with an air that implies he's doing exactly what he should be doing. As he leaves, the attending hotel, restaurant or even school employee, will typically bring up the payment arrangement, or lack of one. My dad will just dismiss the topic with a wave of his hand, saying that he'll send the bill at the end of the month. He won't, of course, because it's questionable at best to even perform a service that was neither requested nor authorized, much less to charge for it.

The interesting thing will happen if my dad ever screws up beyond repair an expensive piano. He has lots of medical malpractice insurance, but it, of course, doesn't cover the doctoring he does on pianos. I can console myself with the idea that it will probably never happen, but still, the idea of losing my inheritance to a botched Bosendorfer or Steinway job is never totally out of the back of my mind.