Time for a tune-up

Twice a year we have to get our piano tuned, a $110 affair which is still cheaper than what I have to put out for my car and a whole lot less maintenance than just keeping a horse properly shod. A friend of mine informed me that costs $60 to $80 every six weeks.

The piano tuner this time expressed surprise that it was so much out of tune. He thought that at the ripe old age of 3.5 years, it would start settling in a little better. I, on the other hand, was not at all surprised. For one thing, I'm actually beginning to hear when a piano is out of tune better than I used to be able to do. For another, our piano seemed to be holding its tuning much better than it has in the past until we went to southern California over the New Year holiday. Thinking it would be a great time to cut our heating bill, we turned off all the heat in the house while we were gone a whole week. After we had been back home a couple of days and the house had returned to its normal temperature cycles, I sat down to play the piano. I was appalled. Some phantom had come and untuned the piano in our week's absence.

But all is well again. After an hour of expert care and mind-numbing ping, ping, ping, pause, ping, ping, ping, our piano is back in tune and ready for another six months.

On a side note, when I tried to tell our tuner about the miserable time we had sitting in the pouring rain to watch the Rose Parade (while our piano was dry but getting colder by the minute), he wasn't very sympathetic. Turns out that during the Christmas holiday he was flying to the east coast in a United Airlines twin engine airplane when the pilot announced that they had just lost an engine and would be making an emergency landing in Detroit. Although the flight crew were as shaken as the passengers and the pilot had only handled this particular problem before on a simulator, the pilot did land the plane safely. Of course it was 2:30 in the morning on Christmas Eve and the airport was not expecting anyone so there were no facilities such as food. It was a long night for everyone.