FALL IS OFFICIALLY OVER

Wednesday October 9 Hi of 75°.
Thursday morning October 10 Lo of 22° and snow.
Friday morning 16°!!!!!!
Saturday predicted Hi of 65°.
And then you hear "Welcome to Colorado"
Of course our garden (zucchini, pumpkins and 1 tomato) is gone and many of our flowers have died. The saddest part is that our Datura is done for the year.

For 10 years we had a Datura plant that had up to 15 blooms at a time, but it died out over last winter and we thought we would have to plant more seeds. However in the middle of June we saw some small plants starting. By September we had 7 plants with 4 of them producing blossoms. I have high hopes for next year!

10 year old Datura 2018

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Tambourine Shell Repair

A broken tambourine shell usually means that a new tambourine purchase is necessary. This can be exciting: I like getting new instruments, or sad: Any instrument that is damaged is a terrible thing. All tambourine shells can break, from my famous $14 variety to top of the line brands like Grover and Black Swamp. It's easy to replace a tambourine head but broken shells/missing pins and jingles usually means an early grave for the instrument. My early attempts at these repairs were stopgap measures until a new one was found. Wood or 'super' glue used on the shell turned out to be poor choices. It wasn't until last year that I really focused on shell repair. It happened during a Canyon Winds rehearsal when one of our tambourines exploded, pins and jingles were flying everywhere. Yep, it was the Resident Gorilla playing it. The shell had cracked between three sets of jingles near the head of the tambourine. We eventually replaced this with a Black Swamp tambourine but I s...

The Practice Pad

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Muffet is gone

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A Percussionist's Notebook

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