Time Sure Flies

Here it is almost the middle of January. My last post was about playing with our class at St. John's home. Since then we played at the Eastman School of Music for their annual Christmas Festival. The pictures were taken with my iPod and are not perfect, but they convey the general atmosphere.

The lady with her back to the camera is Mitzie Collins, our instructor. In the bottom picture, Anne is directly to her left.

Our Eastman School lessons begin again next Tuesday. In the meantime, we have had one private lesson with Linda Taggart, who is a local dulcimer player and teacher along with being a Lutheran minister. She is a busy lady.

For our upcoming class sessions I am working on Red Wing, The Rakes of Mallow, The Road to Lisdoonvarna and Soldier's Joy. That's a lot, for me anyway. We went to the Y today to renew our membership. It's free this year with our new health insurance company, Aetna. We were also asked to be sacristans at our church and we're planning a lunch on Friday with our sailing friends.

Back to music for a minute. Linda had mentioned a program for putting all of our sheet music on an iPad. It's called Unreal Book. I have scanned some music onto it by using the iPad's camera. I don't know just how handy this will be. I can certainly see the value of not having a lot of heavy binders to carry around, but, of course, the music on the iPad is smaller than on an actual sheet. You can adjust the size, but then you don't get the whole piece in view. Linda mentioned another program called Musescore with seems to do the same thing. I guess as we progress, I'll have to see how this all works. She also said that we probably wouldn't be happy for long with the 12/11 dulcimer. We did buy that one as an "interim" instrument, so, again, we will have to wait to see what develops.

So my message to anyone who is thinking of retiring is to keep on working. Working is not as much fun, but you'll have more time.