Mollenhauer Contrabassoons fo’ me. Period.

I’ve owned two Heckel basoons. Biebrich.

I am now, thank God, the owneeer of a fantastic BMW R1150GS motorcycle. I could not be happier. Literally, even my beloved 26 week pregnant wife sees it. Since I’ve deleted my old posts you can’t see it, but those that know me know that I’ve been riding since I was 11. I LOVE this thing.

I have been and now am playing on bassoon and contrabassoon reeds made in Europe (Italy and Holland and, mostly, Munich – wonder if the guy who makes my reeds also makes the fuel injectors on my motorcycle. Possible?). This is a huge deal. I own the very best bassoon reed making equipment in the known universe and that is _not_ a subjective statement. I have studied this art with the very best bassoonist in this country and I have made reeds for the principal bassoonist of a top five orchestra in the world. But, for my tonal concept and my bassoon I have found that my three suppliers regularly make reeds that I can do _anything_ on. I’m playing more, different, repertoire than I ever thought possible and I think this is due to the quality of these reeds.

I love my Pelikan pen.

My straight razor is made in Sollingen.

I think my Berkenstocks are coming out of the closet soon.

I love things from Germany. They just _work_.

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I won’t bore anyone with the details but I want to go on the record, officially, as stating that both the approach and the solution to the DST change in Microsoft Exchange that Microsoft have chosen are absolutely terrible. Yes, Microsoft (and Google), I said TERRIBLE. It is a testiment to your bad message storage schema that you are having this problem – my other mail servers by other vendors are not having this calendaring problem. I have applied every single patch you’ve given me. I have run every vbs script to give my users every permission required. I have run your little cheap-ass “lets use a single user tool but give the admin a wrapper in the form of a DOS batch file – no MONAD?, come on, DOS?” solution. All of this for about a 70% success solution.

I’m hoping that you fix this shyte during the summer so that I don’t have this problem when George’s DST fiasco rears its ugly head again. Between the two of you I am going gray enough that I shaved my beard to hide it.

Don’t make me shave something else.

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Sometimes it is the odd things that make you feel comfortable.

Tonight I was writing some DLINQ code to try out its O/R mapping potential on a simple Active Record Pattern domain model. I remembered doing this type of work (in DAO -!!!- and ASP 1.0 in VBScript, damn I’m old) back in the day with Trippy sitting across the cube while we were both listening to Radio 1. I flipped on Radio 1 and I really think I got more done than I would have otherwise.

Lately, I’ve been a BNN.FM fan. You can get it in the International section of the radio stations on iTunes, too. I love The Netherlands and listening to great music while hearing Dutch kind of takes me out of myself at work sometimes. Give it a shot. Dutch is actually a pretty easy language to understand if you have a good ear for languages. But, the songs are all in English so you shouldn’t have too much to complain about. Plus, the stream is pretty strong and I don’t think I’ve ever had it drop.

Now, it is time to enjoy my Sticky Rice 2000 Leagues roll and watch the second half of the recent Met performance of The Magic Flute I DVRed a couple of weeks ago. Watch your PBS listings, I really like Robert Gunn as Papagano. Plus, this one is in English so you shouldn’t have too much to complain about with that either.

Goede Nacht…

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Sorry guys, you can’t make cheese out of human breast milk.

I make cheese somewhat regularly for myself and thus am familiar with the requirements. The protein is different, fundamentally, than cow, goat, or even ox milk and there isn’t enough milkfat to cause it to curdle correctly. I believe the most you could do is to make the breast milk thicker, or just more sour. You ain’t gonna get solid enough curds to press into anything like mozzarella, I’m 99.999% sure.

Trippy, is this the kind of cross-posting you wanted :) ?

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Today is my birthday. I am exactly one-half as old as Enrico Morricone. Or one-half as old as Maynard Ferguson was when he died a few months ago.

Tonight, at half-time of a Brahms German Requiem concert with the RSO, I was just informed of a temporary promotion in the orchestra. Assistant Principal/Second Bassoon. This is actually a big deal and I’m really, really happy about it. I’d worked pretty hard for this and it is as a replacement for my good friend Marty who is taking 1/2 season off.

We’ve got a whole bunch of stuff in the family going on: moves thought of, recitals planned, and then there is the addition. We find out the details of its genetics next Thursday. It’s funny, I guess. When it rains it pours.

Still, I’m confident. I don’t own a home as I’ve never believed that someone could really like where they live enough to do such a thing as buy a house. I have had the same jobs for almost seven years now, one starting shortly after the other. I’ve been married now for almost two years. I travel constantly. I am constantly trying to keep up with one challenge after another. Par for the course? Probably. But, I’m confident that I am in the right place at the right time.

One thing is absolutely for sure now and in the future: I have no weekends between September and June. Every day comes after the other with only rare evenings of respite. But even with this, both the Mrs. and I value knowledge, hard work, and love so we’ll make it through. When the product arrives, well, I’m pretty sure he or she will as well. At the very least, no one will be able to say that our family is lazy or unproductive or slackers :)

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I wrote Now that I

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Dear Friends,

XXX XXXXX

Mr. Herzberg changed my life is so many ways I’ll never be able to explain them all. Night after night spent on his couch in L.A. with pictures of the greatest bassoonists ever to have lived watching down on me, seeing him throw his shoe across the room at his big projection screen T.V. when Trent Lott came on, his introducing me to sushi, his taking me to Harbor Freight in search of a good allen wrench set, his care in showing me every detail of how his profiling machines are put together (I’ve got almost 2000 emails from him, seriously), looking through his very crowded (very, very crowded) garage for some bassoon reeds he made in 1932 or something like that, having him help me get this incredible instrument I play every day, having him scream “Fuck” or “Shit” or something after ever small little mistake I made in a Orefici study until he was finally able to stop after hours of my practice. His kind manner. His caring hand on my shoulder.

I have one of the last reeds that he played on, pulled right out of the reed box he had in his bassoon the day he stopped playing in 1989, sitting in a small glass-enclosed box on my piano. That means a lot to me. But, I also carry around his care for perfection and his banged-into-my-head technique and philosophy for playing the bassoon. That is priceless to me.

Mr. Herzberg changed who I am forever and, though I’m thankful he no longer suffers, I will miss him more than words can say.

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