or, all the odd places I play my pipes ( Read more... )

Much to the amusement of the nursing professors across the street, I went out to the little pocket garden over there with my pipes and skippyclese and played pipes while the petals from the Kwanzan cherry tree blew around us. It was lovely. And the music wasn't half-bad either!

So it finally happened - at lunch, I was playing my pipes in a practice room in the Music building on the other side of campus, and a student knocked at the door. He said 'Pipes!'* and we talked about sessions and the local piping/celtic music scene until he finally realized that he was cutting in to my practice time and he wandered off. It was ( Read more... )

Way back when, bagpipes were put together with waxed hemp string wrapped around where the different pieces fit together. The string has been switched to cotton or cotton/poly, but the practice of wrapping string around the various joint pieces is still called 'hemping'. It is about my least-favourite bagpipe chore, so I tend to put it off until ( Read more... )

I'm hoping that soon I'll be able to get out my pipes and play them. I know perfectly well that it will be at least a month before I sound at all decent on them if I manage to play mostly every day. I've got endurance issues to work through and I need to make sure I don't pull my now-healed abdominal muscle at all. It has been at least a year ( Read more... )

If you haven't heard (and not many have), I'm finally on the right combination of medicines that enable me to function, mostly ( Read more... )

New office, new desk, new pile of crap, no major crises incurred during the move. So that's all good. I'm farther away from central campus, but at least I have a nice window, and a ceiling (no more exposed pipes!). I think on the whole it'll be fine ( Read more... )

I'm feeling all scattered and out-of-sorts this morning - my office is being moved (theoretically) to a different building. Except that I'm not packing (which is fine), and I was told the movers will be here between 10:30 and 11. No movers yet. And the phone-guys should be here to move my phone, or should have been already... My office-mate is ( Read more... )