Asheville

My resting place for the week is beautiful Asheville. After a few weeks in Austin and 9 days in California, one week of relaxing in Asheville doesn't quite seem to be enough. I have unloaded from the past trip and sorted it all.... now I'm packing for Silver Leaf Renaissance Festival in Michigan. I need to open the pop-up and take out some things I won't need for this trip, but overall, the packing doesn't look like it will be that tough.

My other project of the week has been to learn a couple of tunes on the "bombard" or "sopranino shawm". It's really a bombard (traditonal Breton double reed instrument - really loud), but it basically qualifies as a shawm. The only difference is that the bombard has a key for the low F. A high shawm would not. And the shawm would probably be made of a lighter brown wood. Whatever... I'm practicing on this because I need to gain and maintain the power to blow that hard, and I need to learn fingerings for an F shawm because I have a real F Alto shawm on order from Joel Robinson. I am very excited. My fingers become less retarded each day.