Sushi For Breakfast

As I type, Rick Mastracchio and Mike Hopkins are finishing up on their second EVA to replace a faulty pump unit on the ISS. Despite some drama earlier with a misbehaving connector, it sounds like it's turned out well in the end. I moved away from the coverage for a while earlier towards my recorders again, having gone back to them for the first time in ages last night after watching A Very CraftLass Christmas.

My recorder-playing break was mostly good, the only real problem I have is that my hands are too small for the Tenor. The Alto is just the right size, but there isn't much music written which doesn't dip below F. I know it's possible to transpose, and I did for a few things, but I prefer to play as is written rather than fall back into old habits. The Sopranino feels like a toy recorder (and sounds like one), and the Soprano makes me feel like I'm back at junior school.

To be honest, the feeling of being back at junior school isn't all bad. I enjoyed junior school a lot, and Christmas was the best part. There was a massive Christmas tree in the centre of the school - outside the hall, where the upper corridor met the main corridor. Each year our Christmas festivities would alternate between a Nativity play and a themed Christmas concert. During my third and fourth years, I was part of the recorder ensemble which played at the festivities. I think mostly we played the same songs each year, possibly in the fourth year (a concert on the theme of Christmas around the world) some of the songs were sung by the choir rather than by everyone.

Playing my recorders this evening, there are many Christmas carols and songs from back then that I don't currently have sheet music for. However, I found that I can still remember how to play some from all those years ago. I've also learned a brand new one - It Came Upon The Midnight Clear - which I've always liked, but we never sang it in school or church, and CraftLass sings it in her Christmas show. CraftLass and I had a long Twitter discussion last night about festive songs and religious denominations, and how these were influenced by the respective churches we were raised in as children. Please do listen to her show - it's 86 minutes long but you can listen while doing other stuff as it's all CraftLass playing guitar and singing, plus some talk between songs about the song's history or why they are meaningful.

It's likely I'll be Internetting for some of tomorrow as I don't expect things to properly get going in our house until people arrive in the afternoon. Have a happy Christmas everyone!

I'd spent most of the runup to last night thinking my tickets were for seats right at the side of the circle, when they were actually for the circly bit of the circle. Birmingham Symphony Hall is fantastic, it's big and intimate at the same time, but their online seating plan isn't great.

( A fabulous evening of music )
It was a fabulous evening - also a first glimpse at the refurbed bits of Birmingham New Street Station, but with the old cruddy bits of platform still sadly evident - in contrast to BSH, they're cavernous and claustrophobic at the same time. We got the earliest of our possible trains home but got a slow ride thanks to a faulty signal. And I then had a succession of songs from the evening in my head, which hasn't finished yet.

Did anyone else on my f-list play the recorder at school? I don't know how or why, but recorders suddenly popped into my head a few days ago and I found myself looking at them on Amazon. You may have seen a few tweets, I ended up having a conversation on twitter with a space-tweep friend about the recorder - which sizes we played, favourite music, and why are recorders brown?

I started learning the descant (aka soprano) recorder at 6, then at 10 I started learning the treble (aka alto) recorder, and continued playing both until I was about 12. I don't know why recorders have these alternate size names, I guess descant is used so that little children don't get confused between soprano and sopranino, but I used to mix up treble and tenor, so I think using the name alto would've been more sensible there. Both my recorders - bought via school - were Dolmetsch, like most schoolchildren's recorders seemed to be then. Sometimes you saw kids with more expensive-looking Aulos recorders, which seemed to have more of a flourish in their curves and had more parts highlighted in cream, the Dolmetsch recorders being dark brown all over except for the mouthpieces.

I loved playing the descant best at the time, most of our year-group who took recorder lessons were a big group of most of my friends. I wanted to learn the treble for a long time, at first I wasn't able to (maybe we couldn't afford it at the time, or because I was also having guitar lessons, which I wasn't interested in, but I had a guitar left from when our cousins emigrated so I was going to learn to play it whether I wanted to or not) but eventually I was allowed to, I loved how different it sounded. My cousin, three years older than me, was learning descant and treble recorders, and her teacher brought in a tenor recorder to one lesson and said each girl in the class would be able to take it home for a week to play it. Luckily, we visited on the weekend she had it, and she let me play it - a bit of a stretch for my seven-year-old fingers, but I thought the key for the bottom C was so cool.

I don't know where my recorders have got to, they're probably buried under piles of stuff in a cupboard or in the loft somewhere. The good brands of recorder on Amazon - Aulos & Yamaha mostly - sell for around £10-£15 for trebles, descants & sopraninos, so don't be too surprised if I decide to buy one. Tenor recorders are more expensive, £60 or so, and there are keyless models available - but I'd want a one with a key. There are more expensive recorders made from applewood for a few hundred pounds, and professional ebony-wood recorders for near to £1000, which probably explains why dark brown is the colour for cheaper recorders. I'm pretty sure I won't be buying a bass recorder, due both to expense and the fact that they all seem to be bent-neck models rather than with a curved pipe mouthpiece like a bassoon. But the thing that surprised me most is that the recorder book I started out with in the final year of infants' school is available on Amazon, still in print.

ZOMG you have to watch this programme! It's half-way through now, but you must catch it on iPlayer or a repeat showing or whatever you normally do. Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide To The Orchestra. It's Bill Bailey and the BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Anne Dudley (who composed the Jeeves & Wooster theme music, among other things). It's got lots of Bill Bailey's standard stuff in (Cockney influences in classical music, Theremin etc) but it's a fun way to see an orchestra.

It's so awesome cos when I was a kid, music lessons were full of how classical music is Stuff You Should Know And Appreciate and it was completely humourless. And popular music was the Devil's work. The Head of Music at my school wanted me to learn the Bassoon, apparently because there was one left in the central place where the city's school instruments were kept. The school couldn't have it delivered unless I said yes I would learn it. I didn't know what a bassoon was, but because I couldn't see one unless I said I wanted to learn it, I didn't get to see one in real life. And I didn't want to agree to learn the bassoon without seeing one, and apparently there were no pictures of bassoons anywhere at school. But now, thanks to this programme, I've seen one :)

So yesterday was the first full day of STS-124. And the start of the usual routine - the wake-up calls - I've been and bought Day 2's wake-up music from iTunes. And both Day 2 and Day 3 the "Good Morning, Discovery" was voiced by Shannon Lucid - she's old enough to be the mother of several of the crew, when I realised it was her doing the announcement I immediately thought it's like when you're a kid and your mother comes in to wake you up for school. Only no-one on the shuttle whines at her to go away.

Another CAPCOM for this mission is Nick Patrick, I heard him yesterday while I was watching NASA TV. It was odd at first, it took a moment to twig that he had an English accent. He's a naturalised American citizen, but he's from Yorkshire and has a light public school accent, very comforting I thought.

NASA have lots of hi-res pictures, so I made an icon of Discovery during launch. You can snag it if you like. Later today the Shuttle is due to dock with the ISS. And hopefully they can get their lav fixed :)

The Big iPod Backup Project is moving fast, I've now got a copy of all the files together in one place. OK, not quite all, but much less than I'd feared seems to be missing (less than 10 tracks out of 2200+) and I'm sure I've got backups somewhere. I've deleted lots of duplicate files, so I must remember not to empty my Recycle Bin until the project is completed. Now I just need to go through all my iTunes library and make sure the right file is attached to the right entry. Then I'm free to get one of those cassette-to-MP3 things and add on all the comedy stuff that I haven't listened to since I got my iPod back in May 2005.

And when I've finished with my current iTunes library sorting, maybe I should get started on my OU work? I've just discovered the workbook is available to download from the course website as a PDF so maybe I can catch up on a bit of studying over lunch at work :)