You are not going to believe this!

First of all, the photo is totally random. I don't have a photo of what happened yesterday so you get a freebie of one of my grandkitties, Winston. He lives in Denton and is a real sweetheart. I miss him but miss his master a thousand times more.

So, here's what you are not going to believe that happened yesterday. You'll need a rather long back story first, so bear with me. About a month ago, I am playing a congregational hymn when the organ just cuts out. It actually switches to preset number 4 which has nothing on it. (For non-organist-type folks, presets are buttons that you can use to preselect a group of stops for a particular sound. This saves time. You don't have to push down all the stops manually to get the sound you want.) After the meeting, the organ kicks up again and does the same thing while Michael is watching. I also notice that one of my bass stops isn't working at all. Add to this that I've never really been happy with the organ. Michael has complained from the beginning that he couldn't hear the bass line. MF, my daughter who has visited from Czech, noted also that it was a little quiet. It just hasn't sounded right to me and seemed to have very little power and this was just the capper.

So I call the facilities office in charge of maintaining our buildings and the nice lady sets up an appointment for a repairman to come out.

So finally, for those of you who have persevered, this is the story of yesterday. Bill, the organ repairman, tells me first of all that unless the organ kicks up while he is watching, there is not much he can do. Oh great! It only did this thing on that one day. But he starts taking things apart anyway. I get to see the cool innards of the organ. Firstly, he notices that the bass stop I thought I had lost was completely disconnected. Wow, am I observant! I had never had it at all. So he reconnected it to see what was up. I tried it out and when I got to the lowest notes, this loud vibration and buzzing cranked up. I still wanted him to leave it connected, because the upper notes were okay and it was the best sixteen foot stop I had.

He does some more stuff. He replaces a battery. He tinkers. Then he decides to find out where that vibration in the sixteen foot stop is coming from. I figure the chances are small, small, small. But he asks for a ladder. He'd like to check the speakers. We wander around the building a bit learning that my key opens the front door and front door only and finally I go home and get one. On my return, he starts shinnying up the wall behind the organ (as the ladder is a tad too short) and pops over a ledge to find the speakers. I'm fairly appalled, afraid he will break his neck on my watch.

Once up in the speaker loft, he asks me, "Have they painted the ceiling recently?" Not to my knowledge, and I've been here two years. He then pulls up an enormous piece of thick plastic left by the painters. They had left it over the speaker.  His remark, "I didn't know what I was going to find, but I didn't expect that!" He goes to the other side, shinnies up the other wall and finds the same thing. So I've been playing for two years on an organ that had speakers covered up by thick plastic. No wonder the organ buzzed and sounded weird! I cranked it up and even on the lowest volume setting it sounds brilliant. At the highest setting, I think the neighbors across the street will be able to hear it. And the buzzing bass stop sounds absolutely gorgeous.

End of story? The organ may do that cutting out thing again. We'll just have to wait and see. But I am so happy that I have a brand new organ to play.  I think I will very discreetly start increasing the volume though. I don't want a lot of complaints the very first week.