Oh Happy Chinese Lute Day

Here are some images of the hallway my brother and I put the wooden floors down on. The first photo shows the state it was in for the last twenty two or three years ... it's NEVER EVER had any form of covering (which isn't good, because you can get lung problems from the concrete dust etc). In the first photo, my room is to the left of the encyclopedia bookcase (which is normally filled with ... encyclopedias!) The second (finished flooring) photo is looking at my brother Jeff's bedroom - on the wall on the left you can see my mother's dart board. We better put something down to protect those floors before playing darts.

Here is the finished front entrance. I'm not sure if I took a photo of the floor before we did it. It was also a floro which had never had a carpet or any before. Only cement. Now WOOOOOOOD!!! Woo hoo! My Chinese Lute: My Chinese Lute arrived today, after a wait of little over a week - it was even cut open and Australian quarantine brochures placed in the big styrofoam package. Some of them were Chinese brochures. My mother said that perhaps they thought I was chinese. I joked that the lute was a gift from Uncle Hamish Wang. It cracked her up (but Uncle Hamish Wang didn't laugh ... I wonder why!!) This cost me a total of AUD $185.10 - the postage was $185 and the purchase of the lute was $0.10. Now I have to learn to play the thing. Well, as a stringed instrument it won't be too hard - but I am already figuring out it's not quite like a western lute. Actually, I started playing some stuf fon it immediately after I tuned it a little (but the tuning is probably not the correct Chinese tuning). My mother was amazed that I could play identifiable tunes almost immediately. I started by playing Kiss's 'I was made for loving you', followed by a few other tunes, and ended with Yankee Doodle. Don't ask me why I did those tunes, but it'll be alot easier once I find how to tune it, and find out how it's correctly played. I'll do a search on google to see if there is any Chinese Lute music around. My mother is impressed by the art work. As she says, it makes a good ornament to hang off the wall and stuff. I was playing around on ebay and saw an Indian Oboe for sale as well. I wasn't sure whether I should bid on it or not. I still have some one cent bids in for cello's and stuff, but most of my bids are being outbid on other things. I forgot that I was bidding on some rugs this morning, and didn't check the site till after the auction was over. Waaah! I missed out on some cheap rugs.