I went to a rehearsal last night. Set up my keyboards... powered on my trusty EPS 16+ sampler and stood there as the power supply burned up and started to smoke. (Sidebar: Has anybody ever tried to find parts for a piece of equipment that was 11 years old when the company went out of business, and THAT was 12 years ago?) I took the thing apart last night and there was so much damage... capacitors all swollen.... obviously more to fix than it's worth.

So this morning I got online ans started hitting the usual suspects... eBay and Craigslist. I found some stuff but not a lot. And the thing I can really use is an EPS 16+ because I have all these samples on discs....

I was finding a lot of the EPS available, but the samples are not backward compatible and my samples will not work in an EPS. I was not sure of that when I started shopping, so I struck up a conversation with a guy in PA and it turned out he had an EPS 16+ for sale a short while ago. I explained that in my position, my budget would only allow me to spend what he wanted for the EPS, and since that wouldn't work I guess I would just have to make do without it. I explained why things were bad and that here I was at age 60 going back to playing in a bar band for supplemental income and that it was so bad I was in danger of losing my house.

He wrote back to me that he himself was an aging musician and hoped that by age 60 he had a house to be close to losing and that he would have thick enough skin to play in a bar band again. Also that his EPS 16+ did not sell on Craigslist at the price he wanted and that it must have been the universe telling him to let me have it at the price he wanted for the EPS.

Sometimes things happen that just renew my faith in humanity. I am truly blessed far more than I believed just a short time ago.... Now I need a reason to be near Philly so I can meet this guy and thank him in person.

I am using the new 1040XTRAEZ form this year. It has just 2 lines.

1. How much did you make in 2023?
2. Send it to us.