and to all a good night.

We had a very mellow, low-key Christmas here in California. J has been with us 100% since March--without any change to the official court-ordered custody arrangement, which is a thing that can happen--so this is the first Christmas we've had him for the entire day. Historically he's gotten a present on each of the "12 custody days" (our house) leading up to Christmas, so he got up on Christmas Day and asked, "Wait, is it actual Christmas, the day? I have no idea." He's never been a calendar-watcher: the only exception that comes to mind is when he was waiting for me to come back from Chile.

(He asked so often that Anna used an aikido calendar to mark off the days. Not the usual behavior for 5-year olds. Anna just today unearthed and tossed the calendar.)

The gifts this year felt well-chosen, with lots of good surprises coming from knowing each other well. J got some excellent games, and gift certificates to buy more games. I got Anna a scholarly book on RPGs, which hopefully isn't terrible, and a gift card for the art store, where she will have to buy things for herself. Anna got me a basic Swedish textbook, because while Duolingo is entertaining, it's unable to teach the rules for things like making plurals or (much worse) combining plurals and definites:

• en kvinna = "a woman"
• kvinnan = "the woman"
• kvinnor = "women"
• kvinnorna = "the women"

It's funky and different from English, without being excruciatingly difficult, but reverse-engineering it from examples is tiresome.

Anna also got me my own set of metal dice for our family Dungeons & Dragons game, including a bright red one for my character who has some sort of fire elemental in his ancestry, and really enjoys and is quite skilled at setting things on fire. (J created him for me some years back. His name is Sneaky McStabStab, he has a pet rat named Bitey, and he hates seagulls because seagulls killed his parents.) Anna also took pity on my musical obsessions and got me a tenor guitar, an obscure instrument experiencing a bit of a revival.

I can't play that, but I'll eventually be able to play this:

It's a lovely, fun little thing to play.

an odd bit of wisdom.

Growing up as I did in the pre-Internet age, I learned to program in grade school, but then found a complete lack of documentation for every system I tried after that. I didn't like it enough to type, then hand-write, then re-type hundreds of lines of code every time, so after I'd exhausted every futile permutation of "SAVE FILE" on every kind of computer I had access to, I stopped.

In high school, I discovered I fit in, or as close as I'd ever come to that point, with the theater folks. A strange and alien species at the time.

A couple of the older students there described getting some stage experience by showing up to work on load-ins/load-outs for summer concerts at the local amusement park. To this day, I have no idea what exactly they had done, because I called ahead and people were like "lol no." I did somehow make my way to the professional theater in town, and I thought I was volunteering, but they paid me, which was a nice surprise. So I met professionals for the first time.

The first shock was destroying an entire set and throwing it away. Not the kind of abstract minimalist sets you build when you're combining artistry and thrift, either, made of eminently reusable platforms and walls. This was the interior of some Victorian or Gilded Age mansion, with moldings carved from styrofoam, and the sort of paint jobs that make you realize that scenery painters are just working with this whole higher skillset that, rightly or wrongly, gets almost no use in real buildings.

This was also the first time I'd ever even heard of the aptly-named "sawzall," let alone seen them deployed with such joy and abandon. Cutting down piles of cheap softwood filled with nails and screws is really where they shine, especially if someone else is buying the blades. "Sometimes Mike brings in his chainsaw," said Peter the Technical Director.

The TD runs the tech side of the theater: scene shop, lights, sound. In smaller theaters, they often take on design work, as well. They usually have a vast amount of experience in all things theater-tech, and they're in charge, so, as happened one day, they're who you go to when something goes wrong and you Need An Adult™. A journeyman carpenter--not growing up around the trades, this was also the first time I learned that "journeyman" was still a real thing--screwed up.

Peter didn't miss a beat. "Oh, yeah," he said. "Just cut a new miter block on the radial arm saw, and toe-screw it in."

Someone chimed in, "Wait--didn't we screw this up on the last show, too?".

"Sure," said Peter. "We keep making the same mistakes, but we get better and better at fixing them."

music adventures.

I've been giving the guitar a break this year, since the muscles it uses interfere with the muscles I need to strengthen for the violin. I can get away with mandolins, it seems, and they're both fun and practical--stop laughing, I can hear you from here--because the near-universal tuning for an ordinary mandolin is the same as a violin, G-D-A-E, and the fingering distances are pretty close as well. I use them to help learn violin music, because they remove that extra challenge of the violin where I do not automatically know if I am playing the note I am intending to play.

The exception to the mandolin tuning is the instrument I have that I always think of as an "octave mandolin," which--bear with me here--is tuned an octave below a regular mandolin. But here we get into murky territory. The length of an instrument string that vibrates is the "scale length," and there's physics connecting the scale length, the mass of the string, and the pitches that string can ever produce when plucked, plus the engineering constraint that the string can't vibrate so much it hits the fingerboard. ("How good it sounds" also involves physics, but not in the kind of predictable way that everyone can agree on.)

I think of mine as an octave mandolin...except, I was looking around recently, and the usual octave mandolin scale length is 21-22", like the ones from Red Valley Mandolins. Mine is 23.5", and the guy who built it calls it an Irish Bouzouki. Sure, except everyone else's Irish bouzoukis have a scale length around 25-26"; again, like Red Valley's. Bouzouki tuning varies, but G-D-A-D is common, and empirically, that's one sweet spot where my mystery instrument makes its best music. G-D-G-D is also really nice; G-D-A-E produces all kinds of dodgy harmonics and twangs.

(There is an instrument with a 17"-19" scale length, tuned C-G-D-A in between a mandolin and everything else. Hilariously, we call this a "mandola," and so do Europeans, which is fine except that many Europeans call the octave mandolin an "octave mandola," even though it is an octave below the mandolin, not the mandola. Just to clear that up.)

You'll notice that these all have 4 pairs ("courses") of strings and are sort of agnostic about how they're tuned. Swedish music introduced me to the plucked instrument in this video, which has 5 courses and is generally shaped the same as the 4-course things above.

History gets a little murky in spots here, but amidst the folk revivals of the 70s and 80s, everyone realized guitar/mandolin makers were underemployed, and started commissioning custom instruments. Over on the guitar side, Pat Metheny asked Canadian luthier Linda Manzer to make him something "with as many strings as possible," giving him the Pikasso:

That had never been done before, because, honestly, why would you? It's harder to build than it is to play, and that's saying something: given the problem of supporting massive string tension but leaving a wooden soundboard free to vibrate, pianos solve it with a frame made of cast iron. But Manzer nailed it, and is the undisputed master of the form.

For any random instrument, there's always at least one person able and excited to play it, and over in Mandolin-land, luthier Stefan Sobell made what are basically large 5-course mandolin siblings. The Renaissance cittern was different, having 4 courses with 9 strings (one course has 3 strings), but the string count was similar, and over the course of a decade it became clear that more people were playing the modern instrument, and Sobell called it a "cittern." To the extent there's any consensus, modern citterns have a scale length of 21"-26", but the truth is, it's all so fuzzy that it's best to label them all "CBOMs": Citterns, Bouzoukis, Octave Mandolins.

an exhausting violin excursion.

A couple weeks ago I had to drop the kid off at a Dungeons & Dragons game down south, and since it was more or less on the way, I dropped in to visit the (literally) world-famous Gryphon Stringed Instruments. After a delightful hour there, I stopped by to visit a violin maker/repairer nearby, Jerry, before heading home. He was writing a song about his friends in New England he'd visited over the summer, and we chatted about that and my violin interests, and he had me try a violin and bow he  was selling: Chinese, but by a Chinese shop he had advised and trained. He said it had been played for a while by a youth orchestra musician, whose teachers/conductors--ironically, of Chinese background themselves--banned Chinese instruments. That's a pretty big hammer for that problem, because there's no shortage of good-to-amazing instruments coming out of China now, and no shortage of bad-to-middling instruments coming from elsewhere, like Romania and Bulgaria.

I see where they're coming from: as with all things made in China, the secret to high quality is developing relationships with makers who know you will pay for it. A friend of mine who insists on running his own email server once discovered he was getting a lot of spam from Turkey, and realized that he didn't know anyone in or near Turkey and could reasonably expect not to get valid email from Turkey, and just black-holed all of Turkey from his email server. That's a lot more effective than banning Chinese violins, though.

This particular Chinese violin was radically different than my rental (which another luthier had pegged as Romanian, speaking of middling instruments). It was light and subtle; to get a good sound out of it, I had to play better, and it rewarded my better playing. Next to it, my rental felt like the tank it was, built with its freedom to resonate bounded by its ability to withstand being rented out to beginning (and often young) violinists. Jerry said he'd picked out the bow, a $200 carbon-fiber number, to match the violin, and in fact it did sound better with that bow than with my own. The violin felt so much lighter, the bow felt so much heavier.

Except I got out the kitchen scale, and the violins weighed the same, and the bows weighed the same. It was weird. The weight is just distributed around differently. Bows are the obvious cases, there: professionals can spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on a bow, and presumably they would be happy to fritter away that money on food and rent if they didn't feel like it helped their music. It's a stick! But it's the right stick, with the weight and the springiness distributed all just so.

This kind of "home trial" is routine with stringed instruments, and as far as I know is almost unique in retail. Anyplace you'd want to buy a violin online from has a 7-day or more return policy, from SHAR or Fiddlershop down to this random guy who's so far out in the sticks of Illinois that's he's outside of St. Louis. You want that assurance even more for expensive instruments, of course--bear in mind that "expensive" in violins starts at like $9,000--at the same time that musicians are increasingly less likely to be able to float the cost on their credit card. So you give them an ID and a deposit or whatever, and you borrow the thing to try it out in your everyday surroundings.

Jerry may or may not have been sober that afternoon, but it was also a $1,200 setup he was offering at the "New England discount" price of $900, so he didn't look at an ID or anything, just had me write my name and address down. He said he didn't think I'd want to bring it back, so obviously that instrument was named the Foster Puppy Violin.

It was not quite the right violin for me, nor a great time to be spending $900, so I did bring it back, but I was struck by the experience and I decided to upgrade to the third and final tier of rental from the place I've been renting from.

Last weekend I went out to do that, but I decided to check out another, perhaps more obviously sober, luthier in the vicinity. He had photos of stunning instruments on his website--which is rad, most people don't bother--and no prices, which is common and doesn't mean much, but still feels ominous. I played a few old-ish violins in the $1200-2000 range, German and Czech, and they were so different. Instruments below $900 or so aren't usually very distinctive, but these were. One was full and rich, one was bright and sharp, one seemed sort of mysterious but wasn't what I wanted. The one I liked was a German violin from 1889 or so, and I suspect if I were ready to spend $1800, I could have taken it home happy. It may still be there when the time comes. There are so, so, so many violins.

In the 1800s, as Europe and North America industrialized, the violin-making centers in France and Germany stepped up production of what are called "trade" violins: imported into the U.S. and sold through stores and catalogs like Lyon & Healy or William Lewis & Son. (I don't know why Italy lost out on this trend.) They came at all levels of finish and quality and wood, but in particular many of them were built with the fronts and backs too thick, because it was cheaper to mass-produce them that way.

Now, 120 years later, they're still too thick, but now they're made of 150-year old high-quality European wood, so there's a long-running side business in taking these violins, which originally sound kind of muted and boring, taking them apart (which violins are meant for), and "re-graduating" or "re-voicing" them, carving and sanding away the overly thick plates so they can resonate. This is a specialized form of wood-carving, and you have to know what you're doing, but if you have the skills and motivation, you can buy an old German violin for a few hundred dollars, re-graduate it, and maybe sell it for a few thousand. The 19th-century charmer I played is one of these, discounted because of a particularly tricky repair that automatically devalues the instrument by 40-60%. (The luthier said some people seek them out for that reason.)

Someday.

twists and turns.

Ten years ago or so, I did a 3-week residential program at San Francisco Zen Center. There was a guy there, James, who lived there full-time, and was close to his full monk/priest ordination. He was strikingly young, under 22, I think: even in American Zen's boom years of the 70s and 80s, it was rare for anyone that young to decide to be a professional cleric. But there he was.

The folks at City Center were an insular bunch, often not very interested in connecting with the transients like me. I did have one conversation with James, and it stuck with me. One night he was stationed at the front door desk, working on the copious sewing of the several items required for monk ordination--the sewing takes a few years, as a rule--and I talked to him about his background. It emerged that he had never really lived out in the world: he went from his family of origin directly into two or three consecutive religious communities. He didn't seem to know about the world that was out there, and professed not to be interested in it; his path to adulthood was the same as the path of his calling.

I was skeptical.

He did finish the ordination, and eventually moved out to a Zen center in middle America that needed a priest. He had a blog, updated erratically (as one does). Six-ish months later, his blog mentioned he was stepping away from the priesthood for a bit, to live alone and independently. I think of him often, and not just because I was right, as amusing as that can be: his experience is thought-provoking. City Center wasn't wrong to ordain him, I don't think, but most of the teachers there are pretty sharp, and I don't imagine they were surprised.

I look him up sometimes, and usually don't find anything, except for this most recent time. He's a public defender, with a couple of little kids.

In my hometown. Which I don't think of as a place people move to, as a rule, although I'm sure housing is cheap.

never a dull moment.

There are finally people working on the house! Underneath the terrifying loose pseudo-insulation and rat biowaste--the cleaning company disinfected it after vacuuming--we actually have a considerable attic up there. Snazzy steps pulling down into the hallway replace the previous 3'x3' "access" that required carefully placing a stepladder underneath it and levering yourself up and through.

The attic guys had put proper insulation down, but luckily they didn't glue it or anything, because there turned out to be a lot more knob-and-tube wiring than expected, so what was thought to be some re-wiring along with replacing our terrifying ceiling fans turned out to be quite a lot of re-wiring along with replacing our terrifying ceiling fans. The new ceiling fans, while not artistic, do look nicer, and more importantly do not shake alarmingly. No household appliance should be a memento mori.

The guys have been laying plywood on top of the ceiling beams, so we can store stuff up there; specifically, we will need to empty the garage so it can be destroyed and replaced. This was going well enough until one of them put his foot through the kitchen ceiling (he's fine), and that itself wasn't so bad until in their work to fix that they didn't put up enough plastic sheeting, giving the entire kitchen, and much of the flooring elsewhere, a layer of sheetrock dust. Anna did a deep cleaning, and then had stern words for the contractor: putting a foot through the ceiling is an understandable accident, but trashing the kitchen is not. Anna's stern words are quite stern; I would feel sorry for them, except that they fucked up.

We did a couple days of having Leela confined to the office and backyard, but it was endless barking, so we've been bringing her to the kennel for the day. They call it "All-Day Play," which I'm sure it is for some dogs, but Leela is complicated and mostly hangs out alone or with the humans. She hates going, though not as much as she hates the groomer (she unreservedly loves going to the vet). Something in her little doggy brain re-lives her actual abandonments every time we drop her somewhere, even as she grows more secure and confident with passing years. This has reached its apotheosis this month, as she is routinely "removed" from the general population into a different room, not for behavior problems as would be usual, but because she figured out that each time other dogs are being brought in or taken out is an opportunity for her to escape. (This is a beagle specialty.)

There's a double gate with a sort of airlock-like area in between, which they call the "bubble," just for this purpose; they can't really stop her, so they just stick her in solitary at the rush hours. I happened to see it firsthand on Friday, as I was taking a break from a conference to handle parenting stuff by telephone and decided to look at the video stream for the Small Dogs room. I spotted her meandering in from outside, and then a dog was getting taken out, and I watched her work her way into the press of dogs pushing up against the door, and then...go under them. Her Jack Russell heritage gives her a deep chest, but also a fantastic flexibility, presumably for those times when the rats won't come out of their burrows and you have to dive in after them. She can flatten herself a bit more than your less specialized dog, but what she can really do is flatten herself and then move, in a sort of commando-crawl. She's shorter than any full Jack Russell variant would be, so she goes over to the crowd of dogs, drops herself 3-4 inches, and slinks out under them.

She is also quite gifted at staying in human blind spots, so much so that I'm rarely surprised any more when we're walking off-leash and I look back to find her, only to discover that when I turned to look backward, she went around my other side.

Luckily she's quite charming, and the kennel folks seem to find her a fun change of pace.

up on yonder mountain

Driven by a restless, consuming curiosity, and a desperate need to grow up, I've accumulated a lot of good stories. Some of them belong inside other stories, like the saga of the aloe plants an unstoppably enthusiastic Mexican woman in Baja gave us, even though we were living on a sailboat. This one came up at work recently.

My parents were kind enough to send me to Europe a few times, including twice with my high school choir. Both trips were to the Bavaria/Bohemia/Austria area, where it's always worthwhile to visit a palace or two of the unfortunate King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-1886). Schloss Linderhof is lovely, even in winter, but clearly arose from a "I wish I had my own Versailles" kind of impulse. Much more interesting...



...is Schloss Neuschwanstein. It looks like a fairy-tale castle because it's meant to, and because it's the pattern for Disney's various Magic Castles and logos.

It may or may not be fair to call Ludwig "mad," but he certainly wasn't well-adjusted or mentally well. Bavaria is not a big place, and he spent a lot of money building these things, which didn't get much use before his extremely mysterious death at age 40. He was a huge fan of the problematic composer Richard "There's A Reason The Nazis Loved Him" Wagner, and up several flights of stairs, at the top of the building, is the Hall of the Singers:



It's unclear to me if any of Wagner's work was ever performed here, but that was the intention.

One of the magic things about traveling with a talented group of a cappella singers is the ability to just make music whenever you get the urge: during a long layover at JFK, for example. People appreciate two dozen high school students singing beautiful songs, in a way that they may not appreciate my violin playing. We walk into an acoustically interesting room and start snapping, to test the sound. We want just the right amount of reverb, for a room to be "live" by not deadening the sound. If there's an actual echo, the sound will be muddy and vague, and we won't be able to hear each other.

The Hall of the Singers is a good room.

I don't know who had the idea. We sang all the time, rehearsing and performing. It was just what we did. While some other kids made sure we had all the voice parts, I asked our guide if it would be okay. Clearly no one had ever asked this before--and probably has not since--but if I interpreted her thought process correctly, she wasn't entirely sure what I meant, but couldn't think of a rule against it, and said it was probably fine. She was prepared for the worst, but she had no way to know.

We were really good. Like, it wouldn't be outlandish to buy tickets to see us, kinds of good. We had a tyrannical but brutally effective director, forged in the merciless fires of Midwestern chorale culture. Our standard was not that of New England prep schools, but of competitive college choirs.

I'm not sure which song we sang. It was either "Hark, I Hear The Harps Eternal" (there's the St. Olaf Choir, a solid approximation of how we sounded and how our director conducted) or "Sing To The Lord," both being famous-ish (the legendary Robert Shaw) arrangements of a particularly resonant kind of American a cappella folk song.

(It's called "shape-note" music, after its notation devised to include more diverse levels of musical literacy. To be honest, I find recordings of it intolerable to listen to: except in extraordinary cases, it sounds like people barking in unison.)

We picked a plausible starting note, and we sang. Some of us had been performing that song for 3 years, and not infrequently, either: we did standalone concerts of our own, but also did short sets for any number of trustee and alumni and parent and faculty events. The men performed in tuxedos, which were rented for us--for the whole school year. We were pros.

We sang with all our power, in that bizarre performance hall, built by a somewhat unhinged prince for a racist composer genius. It was gorgeous. The building is like a Bose Wave stereo built out of stone. They could hear us down in the kitchens. People inched up the stone stairways to find the sound.

It's a weird thing, a cappella music. You carry it with you, always. Your singing voice is like if God handed you a violin or a guitar or a drum, and told you what kind of instrument it was, but not what it was made of, or how to use it well. My first guitar, with its laminated rather than solid wood soundboard, was constrained by its ingredients: no matter what techniques I learned or how much I practiced, it would never make great music. At best, if I learned on better instruments, I could go back and sound like a great musician playing a crappy guitar (though probably not having a lot of fun with it). But you've only got the one voice, and the best singer you can be is the best you can be with the voice you got. For each of us individually, that may be much or it may be little; but together, we change our sound. We can create a voice bigger than just our singing together. That's the voice we gave to whoever was there to listen.

This was sort of our group's theme song, which I think is an objectively stunning piece of music.

light dawns on Marblehead.

I've been watching Agatha Christie's Poirot from the beginning, since Netflix only had series 9-13, and a while ago, and I flamed out trying to watch the final episode, which is very sad and bitter. It's amazing how thoroughly Arthur Conan Doyle defined the modern detective genre: at least in English, any venture into detective fiction is either avoiding or nodding to Sherlock Holmes. So it is with Hercule Poirot: finicky, unpredictable, brilliant, prideful. But Poirot was a policeman, and respects policemen, where Holmes more often than not can scarcely cloak his contempt in politeness. Poirot freely loves and cares about people, with some spiritual foundation, alluded to as Catholicism; Holmes cares, but is never able to articulate why, and his conduct in personal relationships rivals the most awkward teenage boy trying to talk to girls at a dance.

(No that wasn't me SHUT UP)

Series 3 begins with a flashback double episode, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles," which takes place during World War 1, and shows Poirot leading a group of fellow Belgian refugees around town.

...I didn't know there were Belgian refugees in World War 1. As I thought about it, I realized I had no idea what Belgium's experience of World War 1 was, why it should have been that way, or in fact much detail about World War 1 at all. (I mean, I read at least some of "In Flanders Fields" in school, so I knew there was at least one battle in Flanders, but we don't call it "World War 1" because it was highly localized.)

This odd-looking gap in my knowledge arises from having studied history in a thematic sort of way. I can tell you about the technological, economic, artistic, and geopolitical consequences of the war, and a decent amount of what went into it, but by definition, that airbrushes the details so you can see the broad strokes of color. I'm not great at memorizing pages and pages of raw information--ask me how much fun I had the final time I was an actor, or why I stopped after a single semester of Chinese--so I took advantage of a liberal arts education's offer to focus on concepts and patterns rather than memorizing.

The problem is that human events sometimes just don't quite make sense without some missing keystone fact. Part of the Middle East gestalt remained out of focus until I happened to hear author Stephen Kinzer on NPR, talking about how the CIA ousted the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran in 1953.

I didn't know Iran had a democracy! Suddenly it made sense why the Shah was hated enough that his overthrow could rebound so hard and consistently derive so much energy from anti-American sentiment. Not that they didn't have problems at the time, but they were working on solving them their way, and we broke their country because British Petroleum wanted us to.

Returning to Belgium, I went searching and found Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, which covers a manageable lead-up to and first 30 days of the war. Her writing is spectacular! And...wow. What a mess. I've barely started and already found a keystone fact I'd been missing: the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War--I didn't remember anything about it except that it had happened--was France:

• being baited into declaring war on the confederation steadily becoming Germany;
• losing; and
• forced to surrender under thoroughly humiliating terms,
• designed to cripple for generations their ability to make war,
• adjusting their borders so they could only be on defense,
• signed at...Versailles!

Oh, damn. Dear readers, Shit Has Gotten Real, because after the 1871 Armistice of Versailles, France paid off its indemnity early, and immediately re-set itself to only think of offense. All this time, I'd thought the 1919 Treaty of Versailles had been ordinary human vengeance, and it certainly was, but not (or not only) for the Great War.

What a fucking mess.

lots of surprises.

I'm not sure how many people pick up the violin because of Swedish folk music. Outside of Sweden, and possibly Minnesota, probably not many. I'm actually not sure there's many inside of Sweden, either: tons of people (possibly most) spending their time performing folk fiddling traditions have music degrees and/or started playing as children, and after mastering the classical tradition, either returned again to the music of their childhoods, or learned it for the first time and found it more satisfying.

Don't get me wrong: I like Irish and Scottish fiddling, and Cape Breton, and bluegrass, and old-time. And Quèbecois, although I think you have to be able to dance while playing, so it will probably remain beyond me: the percussion in this track is the fiddler chair-clogging.

I don't really care for Cajun or zydeco fiddling, except in moderation, but I won't claim there's any logic to that, because it all sounds repetitive and similar to me, which is equally well said of most fiddle music I do like, to say nothing of lots of other music I enjoy.

Of course, all those fiddle traditions (and more!) are one family, carried from France and Ireland and Scotland over to Canada and Appalachia and Louisiana, mixing with everything they encountered, like Spaniards, enslaved Africans, and each other. Like any instrument unconstrained by the tyrannies of fixed pitch, the violin is tailor-made for musical syncretism. Want to play music with quarter-tones? If you can hear the difference, and remember where you put your fingers, the violin will play it for you.

Owing to Scandinavia's failure to thoroughly colonize the Americas, Scandinavian fiddle music is...something else. And then within Scandinavia, as far as I can tell, Swedish music is weird. The thing that grabbed me about Swedish music is the same thing that makes it hard: everything about it is just unexpected. I have all these decades of listening to classical and Irish music (and Cajun, until admitting I didn't like it), but I listen to Swedish music, and I constantly feel like I had NO IDEA that note was coming. To say nothing of the rhythms: a Swedish polka is the Polish polka we're used to, in 2/4 time, but the Swedes have a polska, which sounds like this:

Notwithstanding that the band is a supergroup of Swedish Folk Revival ninjas, this is a Christmas concert for normal people, and this is the kind of music the audience is expecting. The musician Lena Jonsson (not in that concert) described the polska as "in 3/4, but the second beat comes sooner," which is enough to make most of us ordinary (and non-jazz) musicians cry out to the heavens. "WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT EVEN MEAN, THAT IS NOT WHAT A BEAT IS."

It's more of a pulse, and it's part of why the email from the local Nordic music ensemble told me to use the sheet music as a starting point, but not to invest too much time in it, since the band plays whatever it plays and mostly uses the music to remember how songs start.

I highly recommend watching the whole concert. It's so different, but so damn catchy.

a long morning.

Another court hearing yesterday! Good times, good times.

After June's Crabby Judge Adventure, I was expecting Crabby Judge 2.0, and my own hope was to direct her crabbiness where it belongs, at Angry Biodad (ABD), who keeps pulling fun stunts that dodge her orders. Crabbiness levels were surprisingly low, though, and I think were helped by a couple of attorney appearances: one new associate, who came charging hard at the judge out of the gate, and immediately wished he hadn't, turning red with embarrassment as his aggressive claims fell apart like wet tissue paper. This was followed by a guy who:

• looks like he's in his mid-70s,
• talks like an immigrant from some long-ago part of the Northeast,
• seems like maybe he focuses on jury trials, because he was standing up and gesticulating and emphasizing a lot, and
• wore a bright emerald green blazer, and the biggest cuff links I have ever seen: disks over an inch across.

Hard not for him to be the highlight of everyone's day.

From the sanity-preserving low expectations of this just being a continuous holding action until J turns 18, the outcome of yesterday was A+: the previous interim order continues (J chooses where he lives and who he talks to) and ABD's primary shenanigans for dodging previous orders are kneecapped. He can now see the harbingers of doom on the horizon, which he's worked so hard to avoid:

• The many medical and psychological professionals who have gotten to know J, and, to their misfortune, ABD, will be interviewed and their opinions collated for the judge.
• He has to keep payments current with the court-appointed medical arbitrator who isn't allowed to work unless both parents are paid up (thus letting him continue to veto medical care simply by declining to write a check).

While it's not always a comfort, I am always grateful that he's not intelligent, focused, or wealthy; he's sort of the Ford Pinto of narcissists. His contribution to the world has been purely genetic, and whatever his own original potential, he now lives in that far realm of fantasy where he reads things on the Internet and uses that lofty education to assess the medical expertise of people who teach in multiple departments at Stanford Medical School while running world-class clinics.

The closest he comes to personal growth is learning from an occasional support group that in repairing his relationship with J, spending months telling J he should feel bad for how much he's been hurting ABD's feelings may have been counter-productive. I'm quite sure he doesn't understand why that should be the case. He's a simulacrum, the most shallow imitation of an adult human; a little like Pinocchio, if Pinocchio told the Blue Fairy to fuck off because he was already a real boy, thank you very much, and God, if it isn't just like a fucking fairy to try and tell you who you are.

(You may think I'm exaggerating, but one of the final straws for J was ABD going on a bender of anti-feminist ranting; a standard feature of Men's Rights Activism, which I promise is far worse than you're imagining, and probably gave him the referral to his scumbag lawyer who specializes in representing domestic abusers.)

Onward to the next seven weeks, then. It goes how it goes.

signature.

So here's a thing from Fiddle Tunes.

There's a famous (as these things go) Swedish folk band called Väsen (pronounced, for those of you getting any funny ideas from German, "Vessen," with an "e" roughly like that in "mess"). The fiddler, Mikael Marin, plays I always assumed was a large 5-string violin, which it sort of is, except he's a violist and it's a 5-string viola. This is a little confusing in that a 5-string viola has the viola strings (C-G-D-A) with the high E from a violin; a 5-string violin has the violin strings (G-D-A-E) with the low C from a viola. You wouldn't be playing world-class viola or violin repertoire on either one: even if there weren't compromises in the sound (relative to the classical norms), you'd be hard-pressed to get the classical music world to take you seriously. They're mostly applied to folk traditions, like bluegrass. Or Swedish folk music.

Marin's instrument is visually striking just from a distance, because the fingerboard and tailpiece have a light-colored border:

It's hard to overstate how rare this is, except to say that to an untrained eye (including mine) every violin or viola looks exactly like every other violin or viola, going back centuries. And it's not like people haven't experimented, but they repeatedly come back to the classics: witness this shop selling no less than four copies (probably more) of Guarneri del Gesù's Il Cannone violin. Which was made in 1743! The modern guitar is a kaleidoscope of designs, and didn't even exist until the 1800s.

The fingerboard in particular has remained a sacrosanct black for a long time now, typically ebony, glued onto a neck made of maple. Some original baroque violins had inlays on the fingerboard, and of course Norway's Hardanger fiddle is off getting high on its own supply. The online consensus about fingerboard inlay seems to be that

• Over enough time and environment changes, the surface can become uneven as the inlay shrinks or expands at a different rate than the fingerboard.
• It makes a weird violin and you'll probably have trouble selling it.

Marin's viola was made by a famous Swedish luthier, Per Klinga (who died last year), and is clearly of the "I am going to play this until I die and I don't care who has to deal with it after that" class. I just assumed Marin had asked for it as a feature (and his wife Mia has a matching 5-string violin).

Except...Anna Lindblad, who was teaching at Fiddle Tunes with her bandmates, has one too! It seems pretty common on Klinga's instruments.

I got to see it up close when I went to ask her about it after class, and it's beautiful. I couldn't see everything the maker did, but the light-colored outline around the fingerboard is this stunning curly maple, all striped and finished to play with the light hitting it.

As it happens, Per Klinga's instruments are famous in and around Sweden and its music, and if anyone wanted to sell one, it would probably take all of a week before someone took them up on it. The old advice goes to buy an instrument that makes you want to pick it up and play; I couldn't pick it up, but I really, really wanted to play it.

back home on the farm.

The trip home was no less stressful than the trip out: while no instruments fell on my head--I claimed a window seat on the shuttle, out of range of falling luggage--when I went to print my boarding pass on Saturday, I discovered I had somehow booked my return flight for the same day I left, meaning I was supposed to leave on Sunday but had no flight booked. Getting home before Monday was expensive.

A variety of household stuff went dramatically poorly while I was gone, and kept going for a couple days after I got home, so in retrospect certainly the trip wasn't worth it, as amazing as it was.

I did the math later in the week, and including my lessons, I crammed about two months of playing time into a week. Physically this was not at all as hard as I expected: my decision to back off the guitar and mandolin, which use exactly the motions of the left thumb I need to learn not to use on the violin, is clearly the right one.

Every morning there were two classes with the "artist faculty," well-known (relatively) performers who span a bunch of different traditions: Scandinavian, Irish, old-time, Quebecois, Cajun, Cape Breton, and others more obscure or hybridized. After lunch there's "Band Lab," where you learn and prep a few songs to play at a dance on Friday night and a concert on Sunday. Finally the end of the day has sessions with tutorial staff, who are about the same level as the Artist Faculty, and cover the same range of styles, but not as famous.

I went to a class with Donna Hébert, who's sort of a general northeastern North America person, but then I remembered that Swedish music is why I picked up the instrument in the first place, so I mostly stayed with the Scandinavians the rest of the time. The morning teachers were Fru Skagerrak, a trio of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish women, and they were amazing. At some point I realized I'd actually heard of Anna Lindblad (Sweden), but mostly through random YouTube videos.

Everybody was really nice! And also way above my head. Most of the time, every available space, inside and out, was full of groups that sounded like this:

That's not a specific band, just a circle of very good players. They all either know the songs, or they have the skills to pick it up as they go. Nobody called the tune, or the change. It was pretty daunting, and the only circle I was really able to join was a group of drunk twentysomethings on Friday or Saturday night, who were declining (and/or too drunk) to play at their full speed. It was fun! But I have a long way to go.

The attendees were mostly white, with a skew towards folks near or past retirement, who could take a week without working. The one non-white performer was Fiddlin' Earl White, who seems to have spent his decades moving around the country every 3-5 years collecting and transmitting fiddle repertoire. He performed in the finale concert on Saturday (open to the public, which most of the week's concerts weren't).

Now, there was a Kids Track and a Teens Track, and the teens were led by The Onlies, a group that themselves grew up going to Fiddle Tunes and the kids' and teens' programs (there's an adorable video of them kicking ass at a dance in 2011). The Onlies taught the kids a Swedish polska (not the same as a polka), and then a super-catchy fiddle tune blended with a secularized (and also catchy) tune called "I Belong To The Band, Hallelujah!".

The teens played at the public finale! They were great. Then Fiddlin' Earl White gets up and does a set with his band, then says, "That tune they played before is called 'Chips and Sauce,' by the clog dancer Ira Bernstein. And I actually taught it to The Onlies, several years ago. Here's the original."

Around and around it goes.

Fru Skagerrak played a set, too, including a bunch of Anna Lindblad's songs that I now want to learn, as it turns out she is a kick-ass songwriter. They played a convincingly Swedish tune, which was actually written by a Cajun musician, who had met the Swedish group Väsen many many years ago when they were at some music festival in Louisiana, and the Cajun guy then went home and wrote a Swedish song. Which was then performed by a Scandinavian trio, at a festival in Washington state.

Around and around it goes.

The final song of their set was this Anna Lindblad tune, from her album Med vänner ("With friends"). The dancer is Nic Gareiss (here's a great video of the two of them playing Quebecois songs), and the guitarist is the amazing Roger Tallroth from Väsen. Lindblad wrote the song about the friends and music you meet at festivals like the Tønder Festival in Denmark, where she met the other 2/3 of Fru Skagerrak. It's a Cajun/Zydeco tune, by a Swede.

Around and around it goes.

now that you mention it...

The PNW gave its all for a damp day yesterday, transitioning seamlessly from mist to rain to fog to more rain and back to fog. The air has a delicious, unfamiliar smell, like the arid, resinous spice of California mixed with the salt of the Atlantic coast I grew up with. On Sunday one of the locals was warning me about the capricious weather, the vast and rapid changes a single day can bring. It was no good to tell her I grew up in New England, that I've lived in California for twenty years and the primary thing I've hated about it has been the monotonous weather. It never does any good. It's like telling someone, "Oh, thanks, I'm not vegan, I just really prefer the taste of the ice cream substitute made from oat milk and xanthan gum."

I accept that if I'd spent the past twenty years shoveling show for several months of the year, California's eight straight months of cloudless, blinding sky would look a lot more appealing. I hate it anyway.

Not what I'm writing about, though. No, the misted-over Puget Sound has me thinking about fog.

Ancient sailors--on the Mediterranean, for example--used to sail along the coast during the day, and beach their ships at night. If you know anything about sailing, you'll understand that this is an incredible pain in the ass. You have to know all the landing spots for thousands of miles of coastline, and spot them correctly, and hope the wind will actually carry you there. Logically enough, a sailboat can't sail directly into the wind, but modern boats can get shockingly close. Not ancient ones, as a rule, so if the wind is coming from the direction you need to go? You have problems.

(This is the non-deity part of Odysseus's long journey home, and it slowed down Alexander the Great's invasion of India considerably.)

Long ago, I did a course at the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School, sailing a 30-foot wooden boat around the thousands of islands of Penobscot Bay. Currents and winds being what they are, we did a fair bit of night and fog sailing (sometimes both). GPS was mostly limited to the military then; LORAN was okay for coastal navigation in North America, but in any case, electronics were expensive and took batteries, and we had neither engines nor generators nor solar panels. (Now, by comparison, though it doesn't alway feel that way, electronics are dirt cheap and power efficient, and battery technology is much better.) We navigated anyway! Without dying! Or even coming close. Looking out on foggy water, that certainly feels insane, even though I've been reading nautical charts since I could read, and I helped my classmates.

Here is the infrastructure and information purchased by your tax dollars and recorded on a chart:

• High-granularity depth and sea bottom surveys.
• Terrain surveys, contour lines, and landmarks.
• Automated lighthouses/buoys with foghorns, each of which has light/sound patterns unique within some large radius.

Say you're in motion, with your compass telling you you're headed due northwest. You see one light with a pattern "[white] [green] [pause 2 seconds]" and another going "[red] [pause 1 second] [red] [pause 2 seconds]". You now know exactly where you are. You can measure their angles relative to the boat if you want, but you don't really have to, because the system is designed to prevent you mistaking one lighthouse for another. Only got one lighthouse? Use the terrain details to find a hill or a water tower or something.

(Boat hit something? Your navigational skills might not be as good as you thought! But maybe you can use that to figure out where you are. Make lemons with that lemonade!)

Here is what I realized, looking out on the foggy entrance to Puget Sound:

Our sailing ancestors were batshit insane.

I have no idea what they did when fog appeared in these rocky, island-studded coastal areas. Did they just drop anchor at the first remotely safe spot? Without navigational aids, you're stuck with "dead reckoning," which is a neat exercise if you're doing it for fun, but might be all too literal otherwise.

No wonder ships wrecked all the time.

FIDDLE TUNES SUMMER CAMP

I'm spending the week away from the family, in the breezy and gentrifying Port Townsend, Washington, at the annual Fiddle Tunes Workshop (or whatever it's called--the name has changed over time). It's about 2.5 hours from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, and it turns out to be a little out in the sticks. This is probably because Sea-Tac itself is sort of in the sticks, and then you have to cross a bunch of salt water to get here.

Fort Worden is one of a triangle of Army bases built to make naval attacks on Puget Sound a fruitless suicide mission. Then we invented airplanes, won World War II, and it eventually became a state park, with an arts organization to take up residence. I didn't grow up around military bases back East, so maybe they all look like this, but the architecture here is the same as the former bases I've seen in California: tall, blocky, gratuitously unattractive. Unlike the Presidio, these all need paint, but there's a lot of moisture in the air, and the money is better spent giving kids music lessons.

The trip out was a little rough in spots. I discovered that I hadn't gotten the helpful email about which shuttle I should be on, because the paperwork didn't go through and I wasn't on the list. There was space much sooner than I expected, which was great! It was a little airporter kind of shuttle, with the ceiling racks full of instruments. I put my seatbelt on, but said to my seatmate, "For all the good a seatbelt will do us, given all these instrument cases waiting to be flung into us."

You can guess who was the only person to have an instrument fall on their head. I didn't see it coming, so there was no chance to dodge, and very loud reflexive profanity. I'm grateful it was a lightweight foam case: a banjo, or the kind of fiberglass or carbon fiber cases you use for really nice violins, would have given me a nice concussion, instead of just ringing my bell a bit.

Day 1 went really well! I'm surprisingly better than I assumed I was. Day 2 was harder, as I'm still tired and I also went on an epic walk into town last night. But I'm on vacation! It's been a while. Maybe I've forgotten how to be on vacation.

so that happened.

Despite my lawyerly heritage, I didn't grow up around actual litigation or other court proceedings: more stuff like tax/zoning/real estate law. As a result, like so many Americans, my impression was that of the Law & Order TV series, where you see the lawyers doing motions and depositions and whatever, but of course they don't show the months in between when you're just waiting for the next court date.

There are months in between court dates. But ours finally arrived!

I say "ours" even though I'm not named anywhere, and by the strictest letter of the law, I don't exactly exist. In fact, Angry Biodad (ABD) has always reflexively thought of me as some sort of backup babysitter in J's life, which has often been useful, especially in the times when J was struggling with the tension between his biological parents. I'm an alternate category of parent, called a "Chris": a poorly defined but highly reliable source of unconditional love.

The hearing was a little nerve-wracking, since the judge got progressively (and mostly justifiably) crabbier as it unfolded. I see where they're coming from: they don't know us, they don't know J, they just have the ruling from two years ago, and a new pile of papers with a bunch of contradictory claims in it. This whole motion was J's idea, so the filing had a ton of his statements in it, and he needed to vet it before filing (and in fact had some corrections); buuut, the previous ruling was very clear that no one should show J any court paperwork! (Because ABD had done exactly that, last time.) And Anna had taken faithful dictation for a couple of angry emails J wrote to ABD, because J's had a headache for nine months limiting his screen time, and that also bugged the judge. There wasn't really a better way to do this, though.

The goals were:

1. Let J stay with whoever he wants without hassle, which means ABD stops showing up at school or the house to pick J up as though everything's fine.
2. Get a court-appointed person to talk to J (and his doctors and therapists and whoever) and get his voice into the record.

The judge's summary went something like this:

1. For fuck's sake, none of you people have abided by the previous court orders. You suck.
2. The child is 6'1" and is clearly not going to comply with the existing custody order, and there's no point in my ordering something a 6'1" child isn't going to comply with, so: 
• the original custody order stands, but
• my interim order is that no one will try to force the child to comply with the original custody order.
3. Contact (phone calls, whatever) with the non-resident parent must be initiated by the child.
4. To unravel the parents' clusterfuck of conflicting hearsay and sketchy document serving habits, Family Court Services will interview the child and everybody with "Dr." in front of their name, so I can be sure of what this kid actually wants and if there are good reasons for it.
5. Family therapy with ABD and J continues, with the mom if the therapist wants.
6. None of you will talk to the kid about court stuff.
7. See you in August.
8. Go away.

If you're going to be rebuked by a judge, the best kind of rebuke is certainly the kind where you get the outcome you wanted along with it. Success!

so much typing.

I just finished an epic fantasy book called Oathbringer, by Brandon Sanderson. I've been chewing through all of his books, and he doesn't seem to work on any scale below "big," which, along with being a fan, is probably how he was chosen to finish Robert "Died While Writing The Twelfth Book" Jordan's The Wheel of Time series (which turned out to need another two books after that).

I have a pretty high tolerance for thick fiction, and my conversion to ebooks means I can have a computer do the wordcounts for me. Moby-Dick, about which generations of students have justifiably asked "Really? You're serious?", punches above its considerable actual length of 214,000 words. For some reason we thought Neal Stephenson had reached new hardcover weights with Anathem (345,000 words) and Reamde (403,000 words), although the much earlier Cryptonomicon was 470,000 words.

Oathbringer weighs in at a healthy 454,000 words, but what really got my attention was the size of the file: 73 megabytes, well over the 50 megabytes accepted by Amazon's Send To Kindle app. Reading without the Kindle service is annoying, because I read dozens of books concurrently, switching between my iPhone, iPad, and actual Kindle, and the Kindle service keeps track of my location (and, less frequently, notes) in each book.

The series containing Oathbringer has a character with a genius for drawing, and this volume, #3, just has a whole lot more illustrations meant to be her art. Luckily, the nice thing about text is that computers are really good at manipulating it, and Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire--1.3 million words, but with a file size pushed over the edge by Piranesi's engravings--already drove me to figure out how to split up a book. This turns out to be pretty easy, since I'm already using the standard "I need the tool that does everything and it's okay if it's obscure" ebook app, Calibre.

Looks like I'm holding steady finishing a book per week. So many of them have been Sanderson's, though, I feel like I should get double credit.

not my first choice. or second, or third.

We're in what I really hope is a peak stress period dealing with Angry Biodad (ABD), but at the same time, J is magnificent. Standing up and telling his story to anyone who will listen, plus ABD, who won't. Growing up with courage and kindness, and adorably confused that I should think that was anything admirable or out of the ordinary.

We've tested the legal system a bit now, with both sympathetic and unsympathetic cops, and verified that while a cop might be really mean-spirited about it, he is not going to drag a kid kicking and screaming to go with a parent he doesn't want to go with. Jerkface Cop charged in with his own emotional baggage, and said all he can do is "enforce" the court order...but that turns out to be toothless, and limited to just being a jerk (to me and to the kid). As J talked and talked about these problems going back to when he was little, and all the ways he's tried to have an honest conversation with ABD, Jerkface Cop got quieter and quieter and seemed to understand that this was a very different situation than the one that caused him so much pain. I hope he takes the lesson from it, but who knows.

I myself am a bit of a mess, self-medicating with a combination of cookies and music. I'm still enjoying the fiddle, but it's also demanding, and I enjoy having the mandolins (3) and guitars (2) as easier outlets.

It's been a pretty shitty month, all things considered. But it could be worse.

the shape of events.

In a new twist, this year I'm talking to people about what's going on in my life. I've always assumed they didn't want to know, or they would somehow feel alienated, but in fact that's how we build relationships. I tweak and frame the stories for each relationship, of course, but besides that, it's important for me to tell the story over and over. As we explain to others, we explain to ourselves, and we internalize the story: pretty important when it's learning to tell the story of your life (and so, yourself) in a different way than you've always known.

In this telling, I need a quick sketch of Angry Biodad's (ABD for short) conduct. He's firing off shotgun shells of bullshit, without regard to any kind of consistency or plausibility, even within a single audience. Denying things which are well-documented, including documents with his signature, or emails he sent a few days previously.

In college, I took a linguistics survey class. The professor was prone to over-sharing about her life in useless (and at least not creepy) ways, but she did say that she enjoyed watching her kids pass through the phases of linguistic and cognitive development. She described one day when she discovered a cookie missing, and confronted the 5-year old.

"Did you eat that cookie?"
[Child pauses to think.]
"You ate it!"

So while dedicated gaslighting is no joke, ABD's level of sophistication is blessedly low. In fact, it looks like this, though unfortunately the movie isn't current enough to use as a reference. Stuff like telling J his fears are irrational, then telling a psychologist he's never told J his fears are irrational.

It is true that men can go far in the world by baldfaced assertion; they can even be elected President instead of the most qualified candidate in history, if that candidate is a woman. It doesn't work nearly as well if you're not rich, though. Lucky for J.

musicking as therapy.

We're having some drama with J's Angry Biodad--you might call it The Great Drama™, in its scope, and the years of its anticipation. It's one of those dramas where one does well to prepare for physical conflict, hoping to avoid it, and yet violence would eliminate the shadows and interpretations where gaslighting can operate. Perhaps, once on the other side, we can have a party and raffle off the extra pepper spray we no longer feel we need.

We are all coping in our respective ways. Improbably or not, mine involves putting energy and effort into musical instruments that I mostly haven't in the past, especially--get this--practicing. There's the ongoing battle of wills with the violin, but there's the octave mandolin, and the regular mandolin, and I've even been picking up the guitar a bit more, although it's awkward because it's not tuned in fifths, and one of the reasons I decided to jump on the mandolin as well as the violin is that my left fingers have never liked spanning the long distances of the guitar.

I had an electric guitar for a long time, a lovely Fender Stratocaster that might now be worth more than I paid for it (it had a rosewood fingerboard, now a premium feature due to conservation issues). I never really learned to play it, though. The electric guitar has six strings and the same tuning, but that's about where the similarities end: it's a radically different instrument.

Luckily for me, people have been making electric mandolins for a long time. Not a lot of electric mandolins, mind you. You're not going to just walk into Guitar Center (or anywhere else) and pick one up. There's only ever been a double handful of "mass"-production models, and only about a handful now. The extremely-niche website emando.com can help you find a used one, or a willing/experienced luthier (anyone who's built a solid-body guitar could build you a solid-body mandolin, if they want to, but they have to earn a living and might not want the bother).

I decided to start small, with the only solid-body mandolin kit on the market. I used to fantasize about building an electric guitar from parts, and this seems like a low-friction, low-cost path to the mandolin equivalent. If it sticks, maybe I'll get a nicer one, or just upgrade the kit.

Fender and Gibson both made electric mandolins, and Fender re-issued theirs a while back:

I bet it'll be fun.

squiggly-style (a technical term).

I decided to buy a mandolin. My octave mandolin has been really useful for learning fiddle tunes, as I can experiment and play with understanding the melody without having to deal with the dozen other things I have to do right on the fiddle to produce a tolerable sound. The octave mandolin is huge, though, about the same scale length (vibrating length of string, from the nut down to the bridge) as my guitar (648mm or so), compared to the violin's 327mm. My new mandolin is probably typical at just over 352mm, so the notes (and hence the fingerings) are much closer. My first violin teacher told me the fingerings were the same, but it was a while before I realized she meant it literally, in terms of where you actually put your fingers.

(Big Muddy Mandolins will make you a mandolin in violin scale, so if you're a good enough violinist I guess you can play like this. I can play my Suzuki violin pieces easily enough.)

Mandolins come in a handful of shapes, and unlike the violin, which has barely changed in the past 400 years, the story of the instrument itself is a fun romp through musical history. They started out in the bowlback mini-lute form, which is what composers like Vivaldi wrote concerti for. Eventually people experimented with carved tops and backs like the violin/viol families have; F-holes instead of open (round, oval, whatever) soundholes; flat tops and backs; and all kinds of variations and mashups. Instruments vary so widely among components, wood quality, and simple luthier skill, that it can be tricky to generalize, but maybe the best you can do is this guy who plays the same music on mandolins from the three major categories:

The rules of thumb, including some visits to music stores and playing a bunch:

• A bowlback is not at all what I want.
• Flat-topped mandolins are often full and boomy with lots of sustain, like my octave mandolin. This can leave melody lines a little muddy.
• Open soundholes tend to cut through less than F-holes.
• The F-style ("Florentine," ironically unrelated to whether it has F-shaped soundholes), which I call "the kind with all the squiggly bits" for the sake of conversation, is considerably more expensive (30-50% more for the one I bought) than its teardrop-shaped A-style siblings, because the squiggly bits take a lot more work to make.
• The F-style can sound a bit different, but nowhere near 30% different.
• You may need an F-style if you want to be taken seriously as a professional bluegrass musician, just for appearances.
• Internet prices are the same as shop prices.

After I did all the reading, I kept an eye on Craigslist, and went to the neighborhood music shop, where Anna's ukuleles came from. They had two (2) mandolins, which were educational, but not nice. It turns out that while I am not a good enough violinist to distinguish between a half dozen violins at a given price point, I first picked up a guitar decades ago, and fretted instruments are absolutely something I know about. And I'm good enough at them to be pretty picky about how they sound and play, especially the neck shape, which you just can't feel until you get your hands on it.

Next stop was the world-class--literally, they have an international reputation--Gryphon Stringed Instruments. They escalate pretty quickly into the multi-thousand dollar price range, but they do have a handful of lesser models, including some Eastman mandolins. I liked how they played, but the MD304 (oval soundhole) was a little quiet, and the MD315 (squiggly-style) was $220 more, and...really, I'd rather that money be spent on nicer wood. Gryphon didn't have the MD305 (A-style, F-hole), and didn't know when they'd get them, owing to trade disruptions with China. Elderly, a Midwest shop that does a big mail-order business, also doesn't have them, so who knows.

I remembered that Santa Cruz has some good music stores, so I carefully called ahead to Sylvan Music and determined that they had enough of a selection to make it worth the hour-long drive. They actually had even more than I thought, a whole row of sub-$1200 instruments, so after dismissing the cheap ones, I spent an hour playing up and down the handful of Eastmans, including the MD515 (squiggly) and MD505 (non-squiggly). The winner was the MD505, and they had a variant the Internet hadn't told me about, the MD505-N/CC. This not only had the "vintage" finish I liked--avoiding the sunburst finishes which trend pretty garish on even the nicest mandolins--but they skipped the white "binding" to round the edges and make it more comfortable to play, and which makes it look even more understated.

It's an absolutely lovely instrument, a perfect example of how instrument quality has increased over the past 40 years even as prices have decreased (in real terms). Even 20 years ago I don't think you could have gotten this good a deal. Globalization certainly has its share of discontents, but I can't regret how accessible it's made genuinely good musical instruments.

This one should last me a long, long time.

they never had such a supper in their life.

I've been listening to this on repeat, so I share it with you.

The singer is the astonishing performer Chris Thile, who Garrison Keillor chose to take over the older-than-me radio show A Prairie Home Companion. Besides being several generations younger, Thile is a fantastic musician--arguably the world's best mandolin player--with a wide-ranging love of music in all its genres, neither of which describes Keillor. My parents love the show, so I grew up listening to it on most weekends, so I'm confident saying that Keillor's show never meaningfully changed over the decades.

(Minnesota Public Radio fired him with a vague explanation, but on investigation, it turned out he's a predatory harasser like so many men in charge. Keillor owns the trademark on "A Prairie Home Companion," and it appears Thile was diplomatically happy to suddenly change the show's name. And what an amazing change. One musical guest recently played a rocking-out techno-infused song, at the end of which Thile shouted, "Take that, public radio!". You can feel the joy.)

"The Fox" is not a complicated song: with a capo, you can use the G, C, and D chord shapes on the guitar, mainstays that are probably the first three chords anyone learns on the instrument. So I learned them over 35 years ago. I took lessons. I'm not a great player, but strumming basic chords is a thing I can do pretty fast, in complicated ways. I can't play it at speed, neither on the guitar nor on the octave mandolin. It's harder than it sounds like it should be.

I'm glad they can play it, though, so I get to listen to it.

De har flera elefanter.

"They have several elephants" is not an obviously useful sentence for Sweden, though it is chock-full of delicious cognates. Lest anyone say the Scandinavian cultures are too hard to tell apart, friends using Duolingo for Norwegian say it gives them sentences like "I am drinking on the floor," which I think we can all agree is in every way less appealing than "She has a bear." It certainly suits the flavor of Norwegian I'm descended from, though.

After years of Spanish, an occasional dalliance with French, and shaking my head from afar at German's die/das/der, I am really appreciating Swedish's lack of linguistic "gender." At some point--I gather pretty recently, as these things go--condensed from having a masculine/feminine/neuter like German, into just having the indefinite articles ("a/an" in English) ett and en: ett äpple, en elefant. That dictates how you form definites ("the"): äpplet, elefanten. And the word "it": det, den. (I don't know which "it" you use when you don't already know what the object is, but I'm sure it's something.)

However it got there, det is actually pronounced sort of like "day," but of course that's the natural pronunciation of de. So instead, de is pronounced..."domm."

Maybe "m" wasn't pulling its weight and they had to give it some extra work to do.

everyone has their story.

I've spent an abnormal amount of time at the Apple Store this past six weeks or so, dealing with both my personal and work laptops. The personal machine needed a new battery, which in modern MacBooks is a single piece with the keyboard and trackpad; this was actually pretty awesome because four years of constant use left both the keyboard and trackpad pretty beat up. The work laptop is limping along, and I can use it, but I've warned IT I will probably end up begging them for a less haunted machine.

The guy who helped me with the haunted work laptop, though. Nice guy, in his 20s, who besides working at the Apple Store, is not just in a band, he's a drummer, and has done some sound engineering.

(I'm sometimes not good at not having conversations, and I opened this up by being startled when the idiots running the sound system dropped the microphone a few times with the volume about double what it should have been, in a space that is fundamentally a 2-story tall empty concrete box. I mentioned compressors and limiters and we were off to the races.)

He loves model trains, and he's far and away the youngest officer of his model train club (association? I don't remember) in many, many decades.

He makes and sells various train parts, using a 3-D printer. He'd like to build a business around it, but needs to buy injection molds, which are expensive.

His uncle knows a Japanese angel investor who loves model trains, and might be excited to provide the capital. If I were that investor, I would be very, very happy for the all-too-rare opportunities to kickstart model-train-related startups.

I live in a very strange place.

sköldpaddan dricker vatten.

I'm having fun with Swedish. Our next-door neighbors are a very nice Danish couple, so I decided to check out Danish on Duolingo as well. (I was about to write "as a lark," but that sort of represents everything I do with my spare time.) There's a certain level of mutual intelligibility among Swedish/Danish/Norwegian, so I thought I'd see for myself. It's interesting, of course: the words for "man" and "woman" are cognate (man/mand and kvinna/kvinde), but "boy" and "girl" are not (pojke/dreng and flicka/pigin).

(I had to stop both Danish and Norwegian: all the words are too close together for me to keep track, and I also don't trust Duolingo's pronunciation across the three.)

I bestirred myself to actually look up Swedish's indefinite articles (translated as English "a/an"), en and ett. One Swedish teacher writes that there used to be three, formerly labeled masculine/feminine/neuter, but then they simplified and now about 75% of things are en, and the remainder ett. These come in handy for forming the definite article form ("the"), so ett äpple becomes äpplet, and en björn becomes björnen.

The rules get more complicated with plurals and then definite plurals, depending on the final vowel (or occasionally consonant?) in the word. Duolingo doesn't help with this: it's fun, but it's best not to confuse it with learning a language, exactly, since it neither focuses on useful phrases, nor explains rules nor grammar. I mean, do I know more Swedish now than I ever expected to? Sure, and I love learning stuff. But, Duolingo clearly has algorithms driving much of its learning, and may have topped its previous best sentence:

Hon har en älg. / "She has a moose."

With a new contender:

Björnen tycker om vegetarianen. / "The bear likes the vegetarian."

Though once I get off the plane in Stockholm, I will definitely look for a chance to use either of those.

books books books

I came in just shy of finishing 100 books in 2018. It wasn't a goal, but I was surprised how much I did read, and some of it took a while, like The Tide, A Perfect Red, and perhaps the longest-running, "great for small increments at bedtime," Cuisine and Empire: Cooking In World History. So far, nothing compares to Moby-Dick for great literature to put me to sleep. (Robinson Crusoe might, but I couldn't get past the first couple paragraphs. Maybe 2019 sees me trying again.)

I started in on audiobooks a bit, for the times when I can't focus my eyes, or I'm doing something else (driving, dog-walking) and need something different than podcasts. The clear winners here were The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft, and various Conan the Barbarian writings by Robert E. Howard. Lovecraft, for all his reputation of writing in the vein of "O, but it is so cosmically horrible I cannot describe it," actually goes ahead and describes it, quite well. The Conan works are also pleasantly surprising, and once you adjust for the era and medium--he was writing in the 30s for pulps like Weird Tales and Oriental Stories, not angling for a Pulitzer--it's easy to see where Howard's avowed feminism shows up. I'm also revisiting Christopher Moore's work as audiobooks, starting with Practical Demonkeeping.

Reading in 2018 was a path for growth, but also an escape from anxiety, and work, and work-provoked anxiety. I've got a lot of stuff to do this year, internally and externally. We'll see what happens.