Combining thought and art eats time...

Early this evening I was playing with my new hammer dulcimer, which arrived this week, trying to re-learn the songs I had been working on back when I lived in Tasmania, and had a different hammer dulcimer there. However, either I was doing something wrong back then, or this one has a slightly different arrangement of where the notes are than that one did, because the patterns I had learned no longer, quite, apply. ( what do I mean by the phrase slightly different arrangement? )

That project wound up eating three hours of my evening, but, not surprisingly, looking at the tune in that sort of graphic presentation makes it much easier to try to go from what I see on the screen to hitting the correct strings. Yes, there will be lots of work required to get my hands to hit the correct string, at the correct time, every time, but the learning what the correct string is part will, I hope, go faster this way

In other news, one of my friends I met at the two European Textile Forums that I attended has published a summary of the last one we attended. Since a number of you are interested in textiles I thought I would share the link here. Do go look, and do consider attending this year's forum, too! It should be lots of fun (not that I can go register until I find out if I will have any teaching commitments that conflict, but if I can go, I shall).

This week's progress report on uni work: Good. Spent Monday-Thursday at the home office of the mining camp, selecting samples for geochemical analysis. Because this is my first contact with drill core one of the geologists there generously gave me her time to work with me, and discuss what sorts of details I should be looking for in the rock when deciding on where to take samples. It was fun and educational.

This morning I didn't get any uni work accomplished, instead I drove out to the hospital for my appointment to get new hearing aids. I didn't really expect to get new ones today, but I did! I explained to the guy that to my mind the most important thing was to get something that could communicate with my phone, and that is exactly what he gave me. I now have a new pair of hearing aids, and a little white box that hangs from a string around my neck that acts as an interpreter between my phone and the hearing aids. If I want to listen to music from the phone I push the music button on the box, and suddenly I can hear music, perfectly clearly. If I get a phone call I simply push the phone button on the box, and I can hear the other person just as clearly as if they were talking to me in the same room. No line noise of any kind. In fact, if the other person doesn't at least say something like "uhhuh" regularly to indicate that they are still listening, I can't tell if they are there at all.

I am not certain that someone who doesn't have a hearing problem can ever appreciate just what a miracle this is. I grew up hard of hearing, and phone calls have always been a challenge for me, since I could not see the other person to read their lips, and the volume on the phone was never loud enough. My first love was so soft spoken it was actually impossible to communicate with him on the phone at all. He would say "mumble, mumble, mumble", and I would say "WHAT?", and he would repeat his unintelligible murmurs, and I would shout "What did you say?".... I suspect that with this new technology it might even be possible to communicate with someone like him over a phone. But, to be fair, I haven't given it that hard of a test, yet.

It is now nearly 01:00, so I had better go do my yoga and get some sleep. We booked the laundry room for 07:00 tomorrow (ok, I suppose that it now counts as today), and it would be nice to get some rest before starting on that project, especially as we have gaming planned for the rest of the day, and it would be nice to be awake for that.