I've only been home since wednesday afternoon, and in a few hours I'm headed south to Portland and thence to the Oregon Country Fair.

For those not in the know, the Oregon Country Fair is like Folklife turned up to 11 and in a more natural setting. There are two-story vendor booths cunningly woven out of saplings from the site and a lot more ( Read more... )

It's been an eventful few weeks ( Read more... )

I'm back from Fiddle Tunes, worn out and broke and full of half-learned tunes, as expected. Unexpectedly, I'm making headway on learning podorythmie, the Quebecois foot-percussion, and I finished/wrote two tunes - The Wrong Waltz and Nancy's Sparrow. Even more unexpectedly, my laptop is dead, so this missive comes from the work computer ( Read more... )

Just realised that there are probably more people on my f-list interested in reading and writing than folk music anecdotes, and there are bits of FiddleTunes week that I haven't mentioned; namely, that I had dinner with Elizabeth Anne Scarborough.

So that was cool.

Fiddle Tunes seems to be leading to a fair bit of business for me.

Gordy (of Shanghaied on the Willamette) is considering having me do their next album cover. I was drafted to draw the card for Denis, Adelard, and les deux Andres, and Ray of the Centralia Old Time Music Camp-Out saw it and wants to use it (slightly modified) for the COTMCO logo. ( Read more... )

Stuff in my hand

Rise Up Singing, 15th Anniversery Edition (Spiral-bound, Westrider!)
CD, Le Groupe Sans Age
CD, Hand It Down
CD, Reunion
A book of crooked Quebecois tunes
A green plastic harmonica
A fun meter
An unraveling A string
A new A string of a type I'm not fond of.

Stuff in my headA polka which is not actually named Timmy, even though I keep ( Read more... )

FiddleTunes was an emotional roller coaster. There's something about late nights, hard learning work, friendly people and all the rest that really finds the chinks in my emotional armor. Doesn't help that the gorgeous-quebecois-pianist-whom-I-can't-have was there. Still, after the six hour drunken sing-along Tuesday, things went pretty damn well ( Read more... )

I'm off to FiddleTunes tomorrow afternoon!


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Did you get a Skellington in your mail today?
I'm the covergirl for the FiddleTunes brochure. It arrived in the mail yesterday, and I almost didn't notice (I'm wearing someone else's hat. It's a disguise!). Yes, my 15 minutes of fame was being mailed, without warning, to several hundred fiddlers. Hooray? You'd think I could hold Centrum up for a ( Read more... )

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