Well And Goodly

Wednesday, Apr. 29, 2009 - 1:11 a.m.

First off -- Laila Cat gets to go to the vet today and get her stitches and her splint removed.

Then she'll be staying at the vet hospital for a couple of days while the vet and the crew observe her movements and make sure the leg is healing and moving properly.

They really love her there, and it's a great staff.

If you haven't donated to Old Buddy Dave's Cat Repair Fund, and have been planning to, that's excellent.

The button is over there on the bottom left when you're ready. Thanks. :-)

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Yesterday afternoon, while leaning over the front of my Yamaha keyboard to plug in the MIDI-to-USB cable, my ample bosoms did something to the settings having to do with tuning and transposition.

I'd just played something worth saving on the keyboard, and had scrambled to get the cable hooked up so I could play it into Garage Band and dither around with it in there.

So I leaned over the keyboard while it was on, with my torso pressed against the main control panel array, plugged in the cables, and then discovered to my horror that -- for some reason I still have not determined as of this writing -- Middle C had become a horrifyingly off note that existed somewhere between B and B flat.

I turned it off and turned it on again, and the godawful grating wrong sound was still there.

I thought the keyboard was ruined. It isn't just any keyboard -- it's a Yamaha PSRGX76, which is the best keyboard I could afford to purchase for myself with the money my Dad left me after he died from a heart attack.

In my mind's eye, this was something he bought for me. If something had finally gone wrong with this instrument, it would be like saying goodbye to my father all over again. And the thought of that was like somebody was in my mind, closing blackout curtains across all of the windows in there.

And the other keyboard I'd been given was now four hundred miles away, in Anaheim, thanks to the gracious efforts of Alan, who had taken it down there for me back in the second week of April when he'd gone to a seminar.

So if this thing was gone -- I would have been well and goodly fucked.

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I have no idea what my girls did to my keyboard. And no amount of tuning with the conventional settings was doing any good at all.

So I did the only thing I could think of to do. Well, after I wept a little, I mean.

I pressed the master reset -- and then I unplugged my keyboard, and I took out its batteries.

And with that master reset and battery removal there went the first songs I'd ever composed with that keyboard.

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Now, it's not a complete loss, mind you. I do have audio copies of that music. I suppose if I really wanted to, I could now sit down and recreate them in MIDI form in Garage Band. This is on my list of things to eventually accomplish, and if my musical interests continue, then this accomplishment shall come to pass.

It's still a little strange to have all of the keyboard memory banks empty again since the week it arrived.

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However, the upside is -- the keyboard is working again, and Middle C is where it's supposed to be.

Everything is all better, except for that music that vaporized from the keyboard's memory banks.

Choosing to reset everything only reset everything; I never did find out what happened.

Uh oh, I just thought of this one and I wasn't telling you this story to get to this punchline, but here goes anyway:

At least now the keyboard is decombooberated.

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That's it. Have a good Wednesday.

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