Iain Lowe

I’ve been spending a lot of time with the Gospels in the past little while, occasionally dipping into Paul’s letters.

I find it fascinating how the different authors have completely different takes on Jesus’ life and the lessons he taught. I like the epic aspect of John, how everything seems larger than life and Jesus is fulfilling prophecy with each breath he takes, I like how Matthew’s depiction of Christ is so human and frail. I like how Luke showcases Jesus’ divinity but I find he makes Him a bit inaccessible. Finally, I love the mystery in Mark at the end when the women don’t tell anyone of Christ’s rising. If your version of the Bible has Jesus appearing in Galilee afterwards, check out some of the versions based on the older scriptures.

I have been reading more about the historical origins of the different books of the Bible and have found it really exciting to discover the nuances of the interpretations and translations. Paul’s letters can be seen as the first attempts at distance education! It totally changed my view of these texts when I realised how they were initially transmitted and copied.

Fun stuff…

My little dogwood is doing nicely. The leaves keep growing and the trunk seems nice and solid. I potted it last weekend and added some root food to make sure that transplant takes properly. I trimmed back the tops of the branches to encourage it to grow laterally a bit more. I hope I can actually bring it home soon and start to keep a closer eye on it.

We’re going to postpone the bees until next year. I convinced Mom that we should get some so we’ll start the process of acquiring and placing the hives this fall/winter. In the spring, we’ll contact one of the local beekeepers and get a nuc from him. Sometimes good things come to those who wait…

My mother and I have made a bunch of boxes for our garden in the country. We have already planted three of them with tomatoes, peppers, leeks, watermelon, strawberries and zucchini.

I planted a bunch of saplings in the fall. Three of them died and one survived. Originally, I had wanted a birch but it turns out the plant we grabbed was a dogwood. It is full of beautiful leaves. I’ll post pics next time I go and see it.

Bible-thumpers or those that hate them? You decide.

I finished my second reed today that actually plays in the chanter. Other than the bottom D and the low G, all the other notes seem to be reasonably in tune. Encouragingly my back D is nice and solid even at high pressure and my high E doesn’t warble like my other reeds.

Unfortunately, my bottom D is about 60 cents flat and my low G is also about 5-15 cents flat. After speaking with Reed Doctor Daryl I am going to attempt to bring the bridle back and lengthen the scrape a bit. I can see that the bottom of the scrape is very thick still and the transition to the middle looks like a bit of a hack job.

Still, not bad for a second reed. I also have managed to more or less get the hang of the wire bridle. I replaced the stupid twist-tie on my first reed with a proper wire and that perked it up immediately.

Both reeds are hard to play and require much more pressure than is comfortable. I’ll try to get the lips thinner next time and hopefully that will help.

Last weekend in Killington I got to meet Bruce Childress.

It was after one of the concerts and we ended up in one of the conference rooms for a couple of tunes. Bruce was there with a new guitar he had made for himself and I managed to spend a good 20 minutes begging for information on the setup he uses for pipemaking.

Mostly he gave me tips on reamer-making as well as a strong suggestion to prefer gundrills over d-bits. Be that as it may, I think that the d-bits will remain much more in my budget in the near future.

I asked if he was accepting apprentices and he told me that he wasn’t. He said the best thing to do was to keep going to events, talking to makers and leeching as much information as possible.

A great opportunity. Thanks, Bruce!

Last weekend I had the opportunity to spend some time in beautiful Killington, Vermont with a huge number of alternative bagpipe aficionados. We had a number of classes, and there were presentations and talks given all weekend long for the faithful. I had the wonderful chance to take group lessons with Eamonn Dillon, Bill Ochs and Debbie Quigley and managed (after recovering from a slight clerical error) to have an hour of Bill’s time to myself.

I learned a great deal and it was just fantastic to spend some time with so many other pipers in one place. Everywhere I went there were pipes, little impromptu sessions and great people sharing their music with each other.

Both Saturday and Sunday night featured concerts with some fabulous pipers playing Uillean pipes, Northumbrian smallpipes, Scottish smallpipes and Borderpipes.

All in all the craic was fantastic and I’m so glad I was able to attend this year. Events like this are a must for anybody attempting to learn these instruments for which teachers are few and far between!

When I was younger, my family and I went and stayed at a riding camp in Wales for a week. We rode every day and took care of the horses (and stables) every morning and night. We stayed in a little trailer that (as I recall) was fairly nice.

While out riding on nearby moors we saw both strawberry and cerulean mares. Those are colours I never expected to see on horses in real life!

Last week I had an appointment to do my road test for my driver’s license. It was booked a little while ago and I told my girlfriend and our friends when it was. I scheduled the time off and made sure that I had somebody to take me out to the service center. When my friend got to my place to pick me up I went online to check the address of the service center. When I entered my information into the form, it asked when I would like an appointment. My heart dropped a thousand miles. I pulled out the little slip of paper the woman had given me and saw that my appointment had been the day before! I was floored to say the least.

I called the SAAQ to see if something could be arranged and was told by the man on the other end of the phone that “only you can take charge of your life”. I asked when the next available appointment was and he quoted me the 29th of October. I was on the verge of losing it but I kept calm and asked how I could get an appointment faster. He told me that the only way was to check for a cancellation which I could do by calling the SAAQ once, twice or however many times a day I had time for (“because, if you are very busy, there is nobody else that will make these changes in your life for you”). I asked him if the same information was available on the website for the SAAQ and he told me that, while it was available, it would be better to call because the agent could check appointments faster than I could check the website.

Little did he know, I am a programmer. Who builds web applications. For a living.

I cooked up a little script that hit the SAAQ website every 60 seconds. This took about 90 minutes to write. After it ran for two hours it produced an appointment for me the following week (August 8th).

Fast forward to this afternoon. My friend comes to meet me at work and we head out to Dorval. Upon our arrival, I make sure to confirm with the guy at the counter that I really do have an appointment today at 1:20 PM. He says I do so we duck across the street for a bite to eat. Now, I’ve been a bundle of nerves for the past couple of days and it was all I could do to force down some chow.

When we get back, 10 minutes before I’m due to take the test, I present my papers to the guy and he points out the my insurance expired on the 1st of August. Oh, the humanity! Trembling with barely concealed rage I go back to the waiting room, sit down and frantically dial the number for the insurance company. Several minutes later they confirm that, yes, I do have a valid insurance policy and all I have to do is let them know what I need and they will be more than happy to fax it over.

I step up to the wicket when my number is called again and explain my situation to another guy behind the counter. He gives me a fax number and asks that I have the papers faxed to his attention. I call the insurance company and am told “no problem, sir, it’s on its way”. I wait. And wait. Then I ask the guy if he could check for the fax. He tells me “it’s not here yet. Sometimes they take a while”. Now, that’s not really how faxes work, you know? My fax calls your fax and when I transmit the document, I get a receipt. It’s what we programmers call peer-to-peer. It’s not like email which is fire and forget.

I wait 25 more minutes. The guy has disappeared.

Then I get up and go find another guy to help me out. As I speak with him, I can see my first guy through a window in the staff room calmly finishing a late lunch. The bastard didn’t even have the courtesy to tell me he was going on break or refer my file to somebody else. He just left me hanging.

It turns out that the person at the insurance company wrote down the wrong fax number. I give it again. They get it right.

I wait another hour and a quarter before I finally get to take my test. My evaluator, Joe, has trouble with my name but seems to be a genuinely kind and funny guy. We drive around for about 15 minutes and then he takes me back to the parking lot to test my parking skills. He asks me to pull in front of a spot and back into it. As I pull forward, another guy takes the spot. Joe, flabbergasted, bursts out laughing. We find another spot and I manage to berth the car expertly.

I’m all done. I have my license. If you’re reading this, Joe, thanks for being a great guy and not being like the other dour-faced monsters that were evaluating some of the other people there to take their test.

Oh, and if anybody needs to schedule a driving test at the SAAQ and already has a file number, let me know: I might be able to help you out!

I finally got not only a sounding reed but one that plays reasonably well in my chanter. I get most of the bottom octave bang-on (the F is a little off), my back D gurgles like a newborn and I can get a little ways up into the second octave. I need to replace the bridle (a crummy hack I made out of a twist-tie) with a proper copper strip which may help a bit to clean up the bottom octave and help me into the second. I seem to recall Daryl saying that the gurgling back D comes from air escaping so I’ll have to go back over the sides of the reed and make sure that they’re nice and airtight.

I think the major problem I was having before was not bringing the scrape far enough down the blades as well as not making the back of it (farthest from the lips) thin enough. While making the scrape I did a lot of comparing this one to one of the pair Neil sent with my pipes. Holding the two reeds up to the light was a great help in getting the thickness of the blades correct on mine.

Now I can move on to making reeds that sound bad as opposed to reeds that don’t sound at all!

Daryl and Dylan came over on Sunday and we played tunes for a couple of hours. Some good stuff. I learned three new tunes this weekend, all on the pipes, all without learning them on the whistle first. It’s funny, now that I try to go and play them on the whistle I have a lot of trouble figuring out the fingering. I’ve been getting a good hour or so practice in each day which has done wonders for certain aspects of my playing. Daryl gave me/us some good pointers on the weekend and Dylan showed me how to play a couple of triplets that I had been having trouble with. I also learned how to do what’s called “cross-fingering”; that is, to play certain notes without using the keys on the chanter. In some cases the cross-fingered note is easier to play than the keyed note (although they sound the same, obviously).

I’m going to call this one done. Obviously I’m not “fluent” but I can really have a good conversation at a reasonable speed. I’m pleased that I had the chance to do this. I’ll need to keep practicing so that I don’t forget but on the whole, I’d say I have a better mastery of ASL than of Spanish.

My last tune was (take your pick) The Boys from Wexford or An Londubh. I really like the setting Mick O’Brien and Caoimhin O’Raghallaigh use for An Londubh on their album “Kitty Lie Over” so that’s the one I play.

I have to say that the last tunes came much faster than the first. A lot of these tunes I can now fairly easily play on the pipes or on the guitar as well as on the tinwhistle. I did manage to learn a bunch about cuts, a little about strikes and not a whole lot about rolls. I have a tendancy to play a lot of trills which is a throwback to my recorder-playing youth.

My brother used to be a guide at a rafting company. He took us down the river once. Awesome stuff! Definitely something I would do again. He also did a several-day-long camping/rafting trip down the Colorado River which also seems like it would be a lot of fun.

Since I try to play a little bit each practice session with my drones on, I find myself learning to tune them rather quickly. It is really important to check both the first and second octaves when tuning your drones to make sure that the jump doesn’t throw them out of tune.

I’ve been practicing fairly regularly; about 20 minutes every day. I can now play quite a few tunes passably (to my ear of course, not for general consumption).

I have found that playing with the drones switched on is great practice for my bellows arm since I need to pump the bellows more often. Of course, with the drones off it is easier to stay in the higher octave and the pressure from the bag goes straight to the chanter, which makes it quite a bit more responsive.

The note fingerings aren’t really giving me any particular trouble anymore; I’ve even figured out how to work in my CNat key for tunes like Doinna and Condon’s Frolics.

I’ve been having quite a bit of trouble with my reed this week however and I am now trying to learn what adjustments I can make without causing the reed to completely shut down or open too wide. Luckily I have two reeds and the other one is fine!

I realised today that I know O’Sullivan’s March, a really nice little jig in Gmaj. One more tune to learn and I’ve met my goal.

I figure the only way I can do this is to set the money aside in a separate account. I think I’ll have trouble if I try to say to myself “such-and-such a chunk of cash is untouchable”.

So I opened a separate high-interest savings account.

The first rule of the Six Months Living Expenses account is this: thou shalt not take out that which thou hast put in.

My initial deposit in the account is approximately 0.0208% of my goal. I’m starting small.