Five things

Got tagged for "the dread five things meme" by Tangognat. Thanks, I think. Since I haven't been blogging long enough to extract a whole lot from my posts, here's fresh stuff. Maybe I'll try to work them all into posts in the coming year.

1. When I was eight years old, I was the pop-up inside of a rolling jack-in-the-box in our town's Christmas parade, and learned that crepe paper is not colorfast on snowy days.
2. I play concertina in an Irish pub band. Not that I'm fast enough to whip through the jigs and reels, but I do okay backing up the songs, can take an occasional lead break and love to play O'Carolan pieces.

3. I spent a wonderful summer working as a porter in a monastery, and learned that monks make mean manhattans. I also sold masses, but left blessing bicycles to the professionals. And I've never been Catholic.
4. I'm not fond of fresh goat's milk, preferring the pasturized and refrigerated bovine experience, which, on the whole, has fewer hairs per glass.
5. I have this statuette of Neil Gaiman's Lucien the Librarian of Dreams, and I got Neil to autograph it. Not for sale, ever.

Bodhran

This is just 'cause I'm proud of my bodhran and I wanted to try posting a photo from my phone to the blog.

I hand-colored the bodhran with a design from from friend and band-mate Gary Arndt. We play together as two-thirds of the band Celtic Knot. The two of us got invited to play as part of the Foods of All Nations fund-raiser for the multicultural center. Was I there as the library director, a musician or a community member? Who cares? We had fun.