This is it, up close. The final steps were finished today, and now I have a fully playable, tunable, juicy, meaty bodhran. It is a happy day indeed. My first green drum — it's a pretty dark green, very classy.
I went to Chief O'Neill's last night to play at the session. Brendan McKinney, the owner of the pub, leads it. I had been told all sorts of things, how intense people are there and how they eat players who don't play well, hang them by their toes over a boiling kettle of Guiness. Fortunately, it wasn't quite like that. They play fast much of the time, and sometimes loud, but all the players there were good, and no one was mean. Having two pipes players of the level of Kieran O'Hare and Brendan McKinney is pretty cool, too. I love the sound of uilleann pipes played well, and they both do.
There was one other bodhran player there, a gentleman from Cincinnati who was very impressed with the drum. He also told me about this competition he's planning on doing. It seems like every notable musician in Chicago has competed and won the All-Ireland at one point or another. Assuming we end up leaving town some time later on, I'm never going to be able to play Irish music anywhere else; the players won't sound any good. (ha ha)
The bodhran sounded great, attracted compliments from a couple people, which was nice. The drum head is goat skin, which is extremely sensitive to heat and humidity. The pub had a fire in the fireplace, which dried everything out, wreaking havoc on the pipes' tuning and the drum skins. I had to keep tuning the drum down to have any control over it. I got home, tuned it way up, and in the morning, the skin had loosened up considerably. It's a very volatile instrument.
The guy who made this drum is Mike Quinlan, and he does nice work. He's been woodworking for quite a number of years by now, but as a bodhran maker, he's relatively new to the game (about four years of experience). He's the only game in town as far as I know, and he's quite good, and super nice. When I was at his house today getting the tuning pegs adjusted, he showed me the concertina he's building. The man is building an accordian! He plays bodhran, and wants to learn concertina, so he's building one. That, to me, is extremely cool.
Babble babble babble. I'm really happy about having a drum that was made for me. For less than two hundred dollars, I might add.
Lisa and I spent most of the day out of the house. Since we've gotten Carly we haven't done that so much, and it was nice to take the opportunity. As far as we can tell, the doggy did fine on her own — she seems to have a bladder of steel anyway.
We went to a farmer's market downtown that's held in the building used by a culinary school, which means we got to see food being made as well as sold. The main reason for going was an amazing carrot cake made by a local woman, and sold at one of our favorite restaurants, Lula Cafe. I had called her asking where I could buy her cakes elsewhere, and she told me about this market. Today we bought a couple slices, but she also gave some advice on making cakes, including where to buy larger pans and other good kitchenware.
Later on we saw John McCutcheon at the Old Town School. The show was excellent. He's a great performer, storyteller, and a totally badass hammered dulcimer player. As an encore, he performed some hambone (body percussion) which was cool and made me want to work on it.
In a fit of inspiration and folly, I also picked up an irish tin whistle in the Old Town School's music store. Fortunately, this flight of fancy is less expensive than a set of uilleann pipes, or even a guitar, so if I ended up going nowhere with it, no big deal. Many of the bodhran players I've met here try to play whistle, and I figure it might help me learn tunes if I get somewhat competent on it. We'll see. Maybe I'll just be another idiot drummer with a whistle.
After we got back, and got jumped all over by the dog, we wrapped up our day watching The Closet, another wonderful movie from French director Francis Veber (who also directed one of my all-time favorites, The Dinner Game. The Closet is about an accountant who gets fired from his job at a rubber manufacturer, and for a variety of reasons thinks he's ready to kill himself. His new neighbor comes up with a scheme for him to make the company think he's gay, so they'll rehire him to avoid a potential scandal for discrimination. It goes on from there with great scenes, wonderful acting, and a variety of great comic touches that Veber knocked my out with in the Dinner Game. I highly recommend this movie. Strangely, the main character's last name is Pignon, just like it was in the other movie. Is there something inherently funny about that name in French? One other note: allegedly it's based somewhat on Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener, although I have no memory for the story and can't say.
No session at the Abbey tonight, so I've been home looking at whistle tutorials and reading comics instead. My bodhran is ready, too, so I am going tomorrow to get it. I won't be able to play it until later in the week when the skins are fully dried out, but I can't wait just the same. My first green drum, how exciting!
Big thanks to Jes for her site fuckcorporategroceries, which resulted in my taking a trip to Elmwood Park today. I went to Caputo's, which is so much cheaper and better than any other grocery store I've been to here. It reminded me of some of the places in Pittsburgh's Strip District.
It's two miles from the Oak Park Whole Foods, so I went there afterward for soy milk and other hippy goodies that can only be found at Whole Foods. Living outside of the bay area means that you don't have the Berkeley Bowl, so to get your hippy on, you have to go corporate with Whole Foods.
There's probably a better way. I'd like to find out what it is. Maybe if I read some more of Jes's site, I'll find out.
Continuing on the subject of food, we went to Allende, on Naz's recommendation. Lisa was pleased, so was I. We can't decide which we prefer between Allende and Irazú, which is good, because we like them both. Chicago is growing on us, gradually, like gangrene. We'll keep searching for the perfect burrito, but these places are good.
I need to update my bookmarks page with all the sites of the people we're meeting here. I also need to update my friends page. Maybe I need to rework both of them. A more recent picture of myself might not be a bad idea either, considering it's been more than a year now (I think) since my hair has been short. Anyway.
I went to Silver Spring, MD earlier this week to visit Isaac. His birthday was Tuesday, but the circumstances lately haven't been the best for him, so headquarters sent me down to help cheer him up.
On the big day, we went to The National Aquarium. I hadn't been to Baltimore since the Feminist Expo a few years ago, but it was nice to go back. The big draw at this aquarium, for Isaac at least, is their collection of poison arrow and poison dart frogs. Both of us took pictures, and I just posted mine. I have misplaced my camera cable, so we had to wait until I got back to Chicago to look at the pictures on a bigger than 1.5" screen. Here you go, Isaac!
I look forward to taking Isaac to the Shedd when he comes to visit. It's certainly a fine feature of our fair city.
I think this is an excellent idea. I'm going to have to see if I can find some weblogs for CMU professors. I wonder if there are any.
There's a part of me that thinks this is obvious: war is not the answer. I see anti-war sentimentality all over the web sites and news I read, so it feels obvious to write that. Of course, I don't watch TV, and I avoid the major corporate news outlets. The drums of war don't sound very loudly in my world.
Clearly it's not obvious. The propaganda machine is working in all the wrong ways.
Where's the debate? Who among our representatives are raising the questions that need to be asked? Are our congresspeople doing nothing, or is it just not patriotic to publish a dissenting view?
I'm not the marching type, but I might.
If I think about this too long, I'll get sick again.
Apple has a web browser called Safari. It's for Mac OS X, and is quite nice. One of the lead developers has a weblog that lets the rest of us follow some of the progress he's making on his portions of it. Safari is in the beta stage right now, so it's coming along every day.
Hyatt has asked people to post comments, or use MT's trackback, offering suggestions and comments. The comments on that entry are incredibly full right now, so I'm posting here and trackbacking. Here are my suggestions, Dave.
There is a lot to be liked about where Safari is right now. I using it right now because the Chimera nightly I was using was uncommonly crashy, and it's mostly a pleasure. If all these things were worked on and fixed, I would be a happy camper indeed.
[Update: One of the bugs I filed, which I didn't list here, related to the All Music Guide has been fixed in the 2-12-2003 update. The back button now works on that site; it wasn't before due to javascript foolishness. This is partially the AMG's fault, due to not just using regular links fer cryin' out loud. Anyway, it's fixed. Excellent.]
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Following one of the great traditions of all websites, the pet photo, there is now a Carly gallery, including specifically requested photos of Carly with her ears down.
Lisa and I are on the quest for the perfect burrito in Chicago. We grew very fond of Cactus and El Sombrero in Oakland and Berkeley, and have yet to find something we like as much here. Chicago taquerias may have some great carne asada (I hear many do), but we don't eat that stuff, so it's possible Chicago's burritos just aren't going to cut the mustard for us. We've tried El Cid, Mi Ranchito, Abril, Tecalitlan, El Tapatio, and Zacatecas, many of which receive rave reviews in the press. They're all good (or at least pretty good), but none makes a really great, straight-ahead veggie burrito.
Tonight we tried a Costa Rican place called Irazú, which was a big step in the right direction. Their veggie burritos have all the right things in them (rice is something we both like a lot, but many places leave it out), although they don't have pico de gallo. They do use big chunks of avocado, though, which is a big plus for me, and black beans, which Lisa loves. The search is still on, but we both liked our burritos a bunch, and we'll be eating their food again.
My sore throat has regressed to a once-every-five-or-ten-minutes cough, which I hope indicates that I'll be better soon. This illness hasn't been serious, but I like being healthy. I've stayed home from sessions tonight hoping that not staying out until four will help me get better faster. Which means I should probably go to bed.
Lisa has started going to work again. She's feeling better after her cold last week, while I am in a state of merely mostly good health. I feel mostly fine, but not completely. It's kind of annoying.
Anyway, Lisa is working again, and Carly is trying to figure out what happens to her during the day. Lisa leaves, and Carly starts watching the door, pacing around, whining. It doesn't last a really long time, but Lisa is missed immediately. The hardest thing we're dealing with at the moment is keeping her from jumping all over us when we come home (especially when Lisa comes home, since she's gone the most). Incredibly, there are some people who don't like a dog jumping all over them, so we have to try to curb that habit a little bit.
More doggie pictures coming soon.
Well, we said we were going to do it, and we've done it. We visited Anti-Cruelty this afternoon and came home with a dog. We rechristened her Carly; we didn't really like her old name, and she apparently wasn't really answering to it anyway.
She's a sweet dog, loves to have her belly rubbed, barely ever barks. She likes humans, really doesn't like cats, and was having some difficulties with other dogs at the shelter. When we took her to the pet store nearby to pick up food and other necessities, however, she had no trouble with the other dogs, just a lot of curious sniffing. We'll have to see how she does with Buster, Cyrus, and Princess (the other three dogs in our building) as time goes on. For now, though, we're making each other quite happy.