In which territory is claimed...

or the past six months or so, I've been taking the flugelhorn round to the local brass quintet in the Wee Town, and pretending to be a french horn, a deception in which the leader and arranger fully co-operates. The regular horn player has been out of town for a year, and I've been trying to fill the french-horn-shaped gap. This has led to a few developments:

Development the first: Deep in my heart, despite all my efforts, I am still pretty much a saxophone player, but I'm starting to get over it. I still long for the days when I could blow for a couple of hours straight, and then go on with my day, secure that I had gotten better. Brass, while utterly addictive, is not so tolerant of enthusiasm. You will develop your stamina and ability in a properly, respectfully, gradual and tedious manner. That said, some progress has been made.

Development the second: I have actually played some gigs, and not stunk the joint out completely. My re-introduction to brass playing came a few years ago in a sheltered environment, among musicians who,  (God only knows why) tolerated my tendency to produce clams, and protected me from the consequences thereof.
      Landing in a quintet has put me in a very different sort of place. Toto, I have a feeling we're not in the shallow end any more.  There is no Cap'n to bail me out when my chops suddenly refuse to produce a sound. There's nobody else playing my part, to pick me up when I forget which beat comes after two. (Memo to self: three.) I'm now working off a straight lead sheet, and I don't have a full score to find my way back into the piece when I get wandered.
     Notwithstanding, I have managed to carry my end of the load, more or less, and I've continued to be invited back.

Development the third: Under pressure of a number of (for me) gruelling gigs, the latest on Easter Sunday, I've actually started to develop a better understanding of technique. I'm getting away from just trying to muscle it when I get tired, which is good because, um, oh, right IT DOESN'T WORK. I've figured that out in a mere six months. This morning, I managed to get some parts right that I never got in rehearsal. The trick consists mostly of backing off the volume, and saving something for last sixteen bars, where arrangers throw in all the nasties that they haven't found room for earlier.

     Other developments in technique have come from  several sources, including Chase Sanborn's Brass Tactics, which has been invaluable.

Development the fourth: I asked the boss when the real horn player will be back. Apparently, that is no longer a significant question. The chair is mine, for as long as I want it. This means that, finally, there's a Thing That I Do here. It's been long coming.

Development the fifth: Since it seems that I'll be a horn player for the next several years, the next question is whether I actually try to get my hands on something like a french horn. That would ease the problem of arrangements quite a bit, but it raises some further operational questions: E flat tenor horn, or french horn? Single french horn, or double? New or used? Horn or Mellophone? Kirk or Picard?

When I find the answer, gentle reader, you'll be the first to know. Meanwhile, I have a nice, velvet lined box in which to put the next clue I get about this, which will coincidentally be the first.

In which we ask, wha hoppen?

o, it's been a while since the last post, and I've actually had people check up to make sure that I haven't moved to Chechnya, or been assassinated by disaffected chipmunks, or carried off by the Bald Eagles which infest parts of the locality; none of the above has, in fact, happened.

I've been, um, adjusting to the new reality. Yeah. Adjusting. That's the ticket. I've been adjusting. The adjustment is, like many things, divided into three parts.

Part the First: I  hit town, with the grace of a polar bear falling off an iceberg. I had plenty coming up to keep my mind busy.

There was the deck in the Valley, which is now pretty much done (there's a little tweak I want to do to the blocking, and in a few years it may have to be redone completely, in which case it will be a much better deck...) but it's done.

I hit the gym, and got my weight squared away for the moment. My VO2 max would still get me a non-speaking role on The Walking Dead, but there's always next year.

The Great Tucker visited us, and discovered Swallows and Amazons, and we took a day to go to Historical Sherbrooke, and saw the blacksmith and the woodturner gave him a top, and we got caught in the fog, and rode a cable ferry, and took long enough getting home that we had to stop for junk food, and then had DONAIRS for supper, and almost hit a deer. Best. Day. Ever. (Great kid, Tucker. Miss him.)

Part the Second: It starts to sink in that I'm never going to get back to where I was. There won't even be something closely comparable to what I left behind. This fact hit around early summer. The hitting thereof was not a happy time. I continued to do stuff (woodworking, typesetting, playing cornet flugel, etc.) in a slightly bewildered way. I could still do stuff, but only if I didn't think too deeply about the situation. (Denial: the under-rated coping technique.)

Part the Third: Came the fall, I continued to play in the Brass Quintet, and joined a couple of choirs. I met nice people, and came to like them quite a lot. I have started to get back in the gym. Piano lessons in the new year are a possibility. The guy across the street has noticed my woodworking, and complimented my bench. I'm actually starting to learn some stuff about woodworking. I wrote a couple of pieces of music, and it's been hinted that more would be welcome. So, things are going better.

Except where they're not. Even now, in my "adjusted" stage, I still miss the Happy Pals at Grossman's, and regret with every fibre of my being every the 2000 Saturday afternoons that I could have gone to hear them, but did not. I miss Crusaders Rugby, and the squat sled at Iroquois Ridge Community Centre, and the John Laing Singers. I miss the hock shops on Church Street, and Niagara Falls.

I miss running up to Brampton for lunch with Ken and Ruth. I miss rep cinemas, and cramped little bookstores, and buskers in front of the Eaton Centre, and the Central Reference Library. (Need to know the engineering details of torsion boxes? Yeah, they have a book on that. They have a book on everything.) I miss the second hand stores on Queen Street; I miss Sayal's in Burlington.

More than anything else, I miss the Trafalgar band, and choir, and congregation, and everything about it.

So, it's getting better, for tightly constrained values of better. Next adjustment is realizing it'll never be the kind of better I was hoping for...

It's Christmas. I've been here about a year. Time to start carrying on.

Back to you shortly.

In which silence is broken.

obody will be surprised to hear that there are many things I don't know. Some may be gobsmacked stunned staggered  bewildered a little surprised to realize that I'm aware of how many things I don't know. This ignorance, believe it or not, exerts a braking effect on one of my favourite activities, which is running my mouth. It takes a truly colossal awareness of my own ignorance to stop me, but more often that you'd think, even I am  dumbfounded by my own lack of knowledge. 

The Things I Have the Gall Not to  Know are divided, appropriately, into three parts.


First are things that I'm learning (like woodworking and flugelhorn). On these subjects, I don't say much. Occasionally, I'll pass on what I've learned from others, like the 19/30 exercise, or the joy of knifing layout marks when sawing wood, but usually, I just keep shtum, for fear of missing what someone else is saying, or fear of making a complete fool of myself, or just awareness of the awesome extent of my ignorance.

Second come the things which I don't know, but which I'll learn if I live long enough, like Gaelic, Korean, Double Bass, counterpoint, and amplifier design. Here, the level of my ignorance will almost always keep me to a Trappist reticence, except for occasionally remarking to a bass player, "Gosh, that really is the coolest instrument in the world, isn't it?" Which remarks seldom provoke disagreement from bass players, oddly enough.

Finally, there are things of which I know as little as I can manage, and strive to know less, but which keep impinging on my life, and which provoke a response, however unqualified I am to give it. (Speaking categorically from a state of profound and perfect ignorance is an academic hobby endorsed by the past Oxford Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, so I plead in mitigation the malign influence of my elders and betters in this matter, m'Lud.) 

Today, we will consider a proposal to set off a wave of hiring by means of a miniscule reduction in fees charged by the federal government for UNemployment Insurance. What it boils down to, is that thousands of jobs are about to be created, by giving a number of employers a maximum of... wait for it... $700 each. (God forbid they should do something weird with the EI surplus, like, oh, I don't know, maybe... give it to unemployed people?)

Now, I don't have a masters in economics from the University of Calgary, a fact for which I am extremely grateful. (I find that the hard and fast realities of music theory, medieval history, theology  and brass technique are enough for me. The phantasmagorical imaginations of Milton Friedman et. al.  require a suspension of disbelief that is beyond my powers, so I try not to waste a lot of thought on them.)  

Still, even a music major can estimate the probability of success in this latest plan. So, as the sun pulls away from the shore, and the latest genius economic action plan sinks slowly in the west, may your humble correspondent suggest a little traveling music?

In which is the end of railing (Pt. 1)

ack in the spring, I put up a railing; This is how it ended up.


The first problem to be addressed was the old railing posts. They looked like they were intended for a railing, as they stuck up well above the level of the deck, but they were in the wrong places, and far too short to be useful. Also, they were in the way. I have a tool that fixes the last problem... and here they are, cut to deck level. 

This creates another problem: there is end grain sitting there, waiting to absorb the rain (and it does rain once in a while here... who saw that coming?) The plan was to cut them down level with the bottom of the deck boards, and put a cap on top. You can see the edge of a Triton router in the picture above. (The Triton is cool. It's from Australia, and works really comfortable upside down in a router table. Yep.)

This is halfway through the routing:

And here it is, nearly all done:

Very easy, and quite easy to avoid slashing up the deck boards on each side. For some reason, they feel a lot different when the bit touches them, so I could go mostly by touch.

Then, I got to this one:

As you can see, the router can't get into the corner. I needed a solution. And I had one:

I'm not sure that there is a lot of use for a two inch chisel in fine woodworking, but it's lovely for this kind of rough carpentry.  To my intense relief, it wasn't particularly hard to sharpen it by hand. Shortly, I wound up with this:

There are many people can do this without thinking about it, but it's very cool to do it for the first time.

Next up was the stairs. Doing stairs the second time will be easier; the first move should be to prepare a level, concrete pad at the bottom, so that you can get consistent height measurements... But in this case... after much frying of brain, I had the risers cut.

Now, risers should be cut out of 2x12's the biggest chunks of wood you can find... 2x10s (seen here) are not optimal, and you can see that some parts are way too thin for comfort. The solution was to scab on some 2X4s like this:

(I think the second riser from the left is now technically plywood, but it's solid.) All that remained was to put on the treads and risers. No biggy.

Next installment: Last railing, putting the deckboards back, finishing touches, and one more trip to the BORG.

In which is furlongs and more acronyms than reasonable.

unning in the Wee Town is interesting. The best training I ever did, I did in Southern Ontario, where there were at least the remnants of a rural grid of roads. Knowing how far I ran was relatively easy, with a ruler and a map. And here... not so easy.

The local roads are laid out in a sort of mangled radial pattern, following the lines of less resistance, wherever they may lead. In Toronto, runs can be planned by "Go to the next county road and turn right." Here, if you look for a chance to turn right and circle back home, you have to run to the next town first. Towns here are spaced out a great distance. (Parts of the province are rural. Other parts would require major immigration and serious infill development to become rural.) Loop runs around here start at five or six miles. So, to run a known distance, I'm up at the track. The track brings in a whole new method of measurements.


Back in the stone age(i.e. the 1970's), as we slowly discovered the world, some parts of it made more sense than others. One part which made little sense at the time was systems of measurement. The imperial system involves multiples of three, and twelve, and sixteen, which had just been discovered to be Too Complicated. (Seriously, the twelve times table? What kind of twisted genius super-race can multiply by twelve? Have we even discovered the twelve times table, or is that the thing they're working on at the CERN Large Hadron Collider?)

The alternative was the metric system. I'm sorry, the Système International. The SI has no commonly used measure of length between something smaller than the width of your little finger, and something longer than your arm, and is now the world standard. There is an undeniable genius to French political culture.

Of course, as with all declarations of new and perfect systems, subversion started immediately. Running tracks are now 400 meters. This is about seven and a half feet short of a quarter mile, which is not enough make a difference in training, or in any racing that most of us are likely to do. So, even though the local track is in meters, my training approach has not had to change since the 1970s. 

What has changed, drastically and fairly recently, is my ability to run. The last time I did any serious running, I measured my training in miles. That's not going to happen for a while. When I first went up to the track, I could run half a mile before I gassed. Intellectually, I know that's not far. Physically, it feels far. How to measure the distance? 

Meters, and yards are not marked anywhere on the ground. Miles and kilometers are discouraging, when you're running fractions of them. Even a lap is a discouraging distance right now. What's less discouraging is a half lap. Half a lap is within about three feet of... a furlong. 

Oh, the furlong. The perfect measurement. Organic. Sensible. Logical. Based on the well-known distance that an ox team could plow between rests. Standardized at 40 rods, the rod being the standard, normal, sixteen-and-a-half-foot long ox-whacking implement; no home should be without one, otherwise you may find yourself with an ox to whack, and nothing to whack it with, and then where are you? Don't say I didn't warn you.

Furlongs are easy to measure on the track. You run from one football goal line around to the other. They're short enough that I can run multiples of them, but not too many multiples to keep track of.

The current running workout is this: 
 Every week or two, do the Foot Journey of Length (FJ/L). (I can't call it a long run, because I'm still walking most of it.) As part of it, see how far or how long I can run non-stop. This is the Distance of Temporary Significance. (D/TSig.)

Two days a week, divide the D/TSig. in half. Run three of them, with a little rest in between. 
A third day each week, either repeat the above, or divide the D/TSig. in quarters, and run six of them, or, spend a Time of Astonishing Length (T/AL) on the the bike at the gym. The bike is useful, in the event of Unreasonable Soreness of Feet (US/Ft).

The fourth day, do any of the above, or repeat the FJ/L. 

When the D/Sig. gets over a mile, I'll rework the workouts, but for now this workout works.

Last Saturday, I did my Foot Journey of Length (FJ/L). It comes out to about six miles (thank you milermeter.com!) Of this, I could run about three quarters of a mile nonstop. (thank you again, milermeter!) Now, a furlong being half of a quarter mile, and a lap of the track being a quarter mile, I'm running three furlongs, three times. I've done this on Monday and Wednesday, and today I'm off to the bike, because of the previously referenced US/Ft.

More to come soon: The End of Railing, The Building of a Box, and the Visit of the Great Tucker.
  

In which the dark side calls...

'm not sure how I ended up here. I attended the highland games this weekend, because what is the point of living here if you don't?

     It's been forty years since I attended a highland games. Some things remain constant, and comfortingly familiar: the heat is amazing, the breezes are few, dust is everywhere, and the UV index is at a level that will sear steak.There have, however been changes, which I must classify as good, or the notion of human progress is put into question, and all society's done for.

     Tiny girls danced, often with grim determination, but sometimes with every appearance of enjoying it. The dancing is much more balletic than I remember, and not just in the movements. ALL the girls have their hair in chignons, ALL the girls are in stage makeup, which is dramatic on a nineteen year old, but just silly on a six year old.

     All the competitors, including the one boy I saw, were in Serious Highland Dancing Costume. Apparently the days when a piper would walk over from the band tent, change shoes and compete in a band uniform, no makeup, and hair loose,  then walk back over to play in the band competition have been banished to the memories of old guys.

     The first step of the sword dance seems to have a two-footed landing where there used to be a right-footed landing into a pas de bas. In the opinion of one observer, the new style looks like hell; everything just suddenly stops for half a beat. The elevation in the jumps is much more than I remember, too, which is progress in the heavy events, and I suppose must be progress in dancing, too.

     In the heavy events, little has changed. Large men threw heavy things with determination and some success. The occasional competitor is far less beefy than was formerly common, but even they can still throw a light (16 lb!) hammer halfway down a football field.

     There were nervous moments; who knew that a caber had a significant sail area? The field looked comfortably large, until some of the longer runups in the caber toss. In the end, there were three successful (turned) throws, and much rejoicing. There were no casualties, although spectators around the perimeter of the field moved in a sprightly fashion from time to time.

     In piping, all the snare drummers wear a two-shoulder harness now, as seen in drum and bugle corps, instead of the diagonal shoulder belt. It's supposed to be easier on their backs, but it looks about the same weight as a small Hyundai, so I have to take that on faith. There was not a single drum major sighted over the full weekend. This may be a regional variation, or simple statistical clustering. The standard of playing seems quite variable, but on average, high.


     Now, some of you know that I played bagpipes forty years ago, and may have made some surmises about my current proximity to them. Unfortunately, bagpipes are a woodwind instrument, and make the same impossible demands on my hands as other woodwinds, so there is no return to piping in my old age. But... there was a conversation with a couple of bandsmen.

      Maybe my willingness to double on any percussion instrument I could reach was where the rot got in. Maybe it was my destiny all along to go where I seem to be going. Maybe the irresistible call of  the dark side marked me as its own in my innocent youth, and has been, all these years, not defeated but waiting. Maybe we will never know why such dreadful and frightening changes occur. Whatever the reason, early this week, I will venture out and acquire a pair of drumsticks.

   

In which is railing

or, Return of the Deck.

I didn't take a lot of pictures (well, any pictures) of the first week of work. This is the earliest one, and it's from my dumbphone, so forgive the quality.

This was the end of the first week. The stairs at the far end had been ripped out, by the simple method of picking them up and walking away. They have been replaced with a rose trellis, supporting the massive rambling roses that were planted on each side of the stairs. NOTE: if you plant roses by a walkway, the roses are going to win.

Above is a better view of the trellis, across the romantic vista of stacks of pressure treated lumber. The top half is pretty thin, but the bottom half is way tighter than the code requires, so that's all right.

This is the other side of the trellis, with most of the roses put back up. For a while, I thought I was going to have to chainsaw them down to about six inches, just to get at the deck to work, but it was never quite necessary, and my hands are healing up nicely.

Because I'm not a jerk, I did leave them with a working set of stairs, almost to code. Note the lovely lag bolts holding stuff together. Nothing makes a 2x4 go straight like a 4x4 and a lag bolt. Better than a straight-from-the shoulder talk from a salty but caring Irish priest.

In the background are several pots of plants that my wife planted while she was there. Plants are not my department, until they're sawn into dimensional lumber.

And so, I had to leave it for a week. I was exhausted, I was missing my wife, and my hands hurt more than I could have imagined. On the plus side, I did get the railing well up, and I had learned a lot about decks. More shortly, on What the Cornet Player Did Next.