About Last Night

Today was supposed to be a day of rest. I was going to tidy the apartment, take a stroll in the freezing sunshine, maybe read a book. Instead I have spent the day walking gingerly from the bed to the couch to the bathroom to the kitchen and back to the couch trying to force toast and water into my mouth to alleviate the stonking hangover and frequent bouts of nausea brought on by too many whiskeys last night. Shame on you all: Lowercase L, Nonsense Verse, Quixotic Optimism and Simon’s Brain.

If there is a bright side then it is that I managed to read a few great stories in the New York Times in between dozing and hoping that the phone didn’t ring because the thought of pressing it to my ear made me feel sick. One article in particular stood out, John Tagliabue’s profile of Étienne Vatelot, one of the world’s great violin restorers:

He may order the violin cleaned or, if there is damage to the wood, repaired; the finger board, usually made of soft ebony wood, may be uneven and in need of being sanded down. He may adjust the tension of the strings, the angle of the bridge, the tiny wood piece that supports the strings. He may adjust by fractions of an inch the sound post, the slender wedge of wood inside the violin that the French call l’âme, or the soul, of the violin, for its crucial role in creating the tone.
Link.

I also notice that Opinionistas is having a few problems. I hope she’s okay:

He finished his diatribe, I stared at him for a minute, then launched into my timed response. It all flooded out, I couldn’t even believe the crap that emerged from my mouth. ‘I need to know if this is going to work, I can’t wait forever, I want this step in our relationship,’ I may have directly channelled Marisa Tomei in ‘My Cousin Vinny.’ It wasn’t pretty.
Link.