The life and ramblings of a SilkyRaven Goddess ;o)

Oh, boo. A gig I was expecting confirmation of (and the money from which I actually could have done with) has been cancelled. Or rather, this was a corporate thing and the corporate bods decided that they didn't need live music and least of all a classical guitarist (they didn't actually say the latter).

I wonder how best to promote, again, the idea of the house recital. It has worked in the past but it goes while it goes -I can do the playing but I'm clearly hopeless at promoting my own stuff. The idea was to sit twenty (more or less) people in chairs in a living room (yes, it is possible without them getting to know each other too well, I've done it lots of times), give them a guitar recital and a glass of wine in the interval, charge them twenty quid and give half to a local charity. Helps me pay the rent and helps a local charity. But I never know how to 'sell' the 'product'.

One of those things. Some people are really good at selling, my dad was one -but I didn't inherit an ounce of that. Maybe they swapped me in the natal clinic.

I'm crossposting this to Livejournal. If you can see it there but not in DW it's because you forgot to add me back there (remember it's a two step thing) :P

I'm absolutely hopeless for any DIY kind of thing -the only thing I can do with my hands is play the guitar -and that only when I practise _a_lot_. When I was a child it was my sister, no me, who used to help my granddad with all the household repairs, little bits of carpentry and even bricklaying. He gave up on me pretty quickly. My dad used to observe all this with an ominous, baleful expression in his face. All his fears seemed to be confirmed when I took up music and started growing my hair long. Mind, he was wrong on many of those fears but that doesn't matter. In any case, when I've put shelves up they've quickly come down -together with half the wall's plaster.

Today I replaced the rubber gasket in my Gaggia Classic coffee machine. The coffee it had been producing of late was less and less good and finally a couple of days ago the coffee started to come out from the edges of the headgroup (it says here it's called) and definitely not good coffee. So I bought the gasket online and today I set about replacing it. It should be a simple job, the web page I found with the instructions said about ten minutes. It took me 45. Ok, did I mention I'm not good with this sort of thing? Every step of the way there was something that made me think 'I've ruined the machine -back to yuk Aeropress or something like that'. But I got there. As triumphs go this is a very small, tiny one and I'm never going to put together a car from assorted parts (or an AK-47, as someone years ago showed me a video of a Russian girl of about 14 doing in less than two minutes, maybe just to make me feel inadequate), but I have a working coffee machine again.

Now back to what I do know how to do and practise my guitar scales...