First things first: I continue to be extremely lucky and am booked for the foreseeable future. I am not currently accepting new clients, and I will post a news item if that changes.
Well gosh *darn* that was a hell of a year, or hundred years, or whatever that was. My wrist is mostly healed (still a few more months to go before my last follow-up) and functionality is quite acceptable, I am vaccinated, my kids are getting vaccinated in a few days, I’ve signed another long lease at my current home/workshop- it feels like a new chapter.
I’ve been kept unusually busy since returning to saxophone repair just about one year ago exactly after taking a yearlong sabbatical. Between homeschooling my kids (not remote school, home school) for the duration of the 2020-2021 school year, shattering my wrist and recovering, and then just the regular old lifestyle of being self-employed and living in the woods during a pandemic, demands on my time were a little higher than usual for a good long while.
Anyhow, let’s just assume you’ve read enough covid thinkpieces over the past year and a half to last you a while, and we can skip that part. Like everybody else, my relationship with the world, and with work, and with people, has changed. I am finding my way to whatever the new normal is, and bringing what I can of the best of what was along with me to whatever will be. Also I built a teardrop camper (started it in summer of 2020, finished after my wrist healed in summer 2021) with my girlfriend and I camp like, all the time now.
My upcoming projects, now that I feel like I am sort of back on my feet, are numerous. Besides just regular saxophone repair, I need to overhaul this website. You may or may not have noticed that I moved the Open Source Saxophone Project (RIP- it ended up being almost all my stuff so it felt needless to have it spread out over two websites) stuff over here and have finally made an index of all of the content I have created so far. This is a decent first step, but what really needs to happen is I need to completely reorganize this site and make it a lot easier to browse and also to download or copy so that my content, for whatever it is worth, can live on after me.
I am barely two decades into a lifelong project here, and I’ll be damned if I let the ease of use of WordPress as a creator become an albatross that prevents the ease of dissemination of information I have created if I get hit by a bus. So: a big project awaits me. I am thinking static site generator like Hugo, but I am unsure yet. But that is what will happen here next- a complete overhaul. It will take me a month or two I assume, if all goes well, and it never does. But while this site looks semi-dormant know that I am hard at work making it better in a foundational way in order to create more content going forward.
I will continue to make YouTube videos as always. I also (thanks to Brian at GetASax) have acquired a personal saxophone again (King Zephy Special alto) after needing to sell mine during the months I couldn’t work after shattering my wrist, and am mid-overhaul on it as I write this. It will feel so good to play my own horn again.
I also left Facebook, which feels more momentous than it is, I suspect. I hope that my time normally spent in that walled garden will become time spent working, or enjoying real life, or creating saxophone content that can be shared more freely, regardless of the size of audience.
I am also, luckily for me, booked for overhauls for a long while- through 2022 and well into 2023. If you have already booked one with me, check in with me if you don’t mind. I think I have everything in order, but I have a nagging feeling that I misordered or even just plain messed up my waitlist document at some point and I am slowly going back through my emails to double check, and it would make that a little easier if folks checked in.
This also means I am not accepting new work from new clients for a while until that list gets a little smaller. It is a bit daunting to have it longer than a year or so, and folks can get ancy. I’ll chip away at it, and sometime in 2023 or 2024 at the latest I expect I will open my waitlist back up. If you are a previous client and need a checkup on an overhaul I’ve already done, get in touch and I will get your horn on the bench.
So that’s it for now. All is well here, I am well, and I look forward to reconnecting with the world and with all of you. As always you can email me at stohrermusic@gmail.com or give me a call at 919-901-1191.