ShenanINGRAMS

I am sitting here listening to an elderly man tune my piano by ear. When he first arrived, I showed him my low C. This key is constantly making a 'twangy' sound after it is played, and then sometimes it stops playing abruptly. I didn't know how to fix it. Now I do. He is kind enough to show me all sorts of tricks, and I feel confident that if I had the tools, I could tune a piano by ear. I love learning new things, especially things that are useful to me. I pay him 85 Euro per tuning, per year. I could tune 2 pianos a week and make what I make teaching piano for 12 hours a week. Anyway, back to that C, it sounds terrible. When my piano students are playing, it is an obvious error because they tend to pluck the keys. When I play, I am able to cover it pretty gracefully, but it is a strain on the finely-tuned ears that God has given me. I always hear it, even when other people don't. He fixed it first. He saw my face and knew that I wouldn't leave him u...

Luke 11:39 says, "You Pharisees are so careful to clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are filthy--full of greed and wickedness!" Chloe spent the first half of the summer carefully tending her tomato garden. After about a month, I had to remind her every day to go weed it. After that second month, I decided to let her 'earn' her own trouble by not reminding her to cultivate her garden. After all, she had paid for the plants and soil with her allowance. Her tomato plants were growing beautifully by then and they were enormous! The tomatoes on the outside looked great, but it seemed like they were taking a very long time to turn red. It hasn't helped a bit that this "summer" was so cold. It only got above 80 for a couple of weeks and then not consistently or any amount of days in a row. So, one day I got out there to mow, weed-eat, and tackle Chloe's garden. I started pruning the tomato plants in the hopes of salvaging a ...