Tours

Our first fun tour on Monday was a tour of a piano store and restoration shop. We got to try out the pianos, find out a little more about how digital pianos are made, hear about the history of the building, and see the workshop. Here are some cool things I learned (which you may or may not find interesting):

For a high-end digital piano, what they do is record the sound of multiple pianos on each note, and get a kind of average, which they use to define how the note will sound when played by the digital piano. And they do this for every single variation in sound that the piano has--they have different settings like "Grand Piano," "Concert Grand," "Strings," "Folk," and lot more. For some of the lower end digital pianos, they take the sound for one note, or one octave, and then use the computer to double the frequency and find the sound for all the other octaves. The consequence of this is that you don't hear the different timbre of the highest and lowest notes that you would on a regular piano.

This just made me think about how amazing sound, and light, and the world is! Think about how many pixels a digital camera has to have to produce a good poster print. Then think of how small a negative can be and produce as good of a poster print. And then compare that to sound. It has taken so much to be able to imitate an acoustic piano.

The building itself is all brick, and the inner walls are 3 bricks thick. It wasn't easy to wire the place for electricity. It was also "wired" for gas lighting, and they have working gas lamps. I was surprised at how cleanly they burned.

Down in the workshop, they had pianos taken apart, which they were restringing, revarnishing, and fixing in other ways. They even had this huge organ down there to be fixed up.

Anyway, we had a great time on that tour. Here are David and Wanda in front of the building.

Next, we toured the research labs. My lab is pretty cool, because we have a real helicopter in it. Here's Wanda in the pilot seat.
Here's David showing a section of a particle accelerator. He gets his data from a huge particle accelerator that's more like 4 ft in diameter, and a hundred miles long.David explaining his poster.
Then we went to Battleground and Prophet's Rock. Here are Wanda and David beneath the rock. And on top of it.
Isn't David's had awesome? Wanda bought it for him at the Feast of the Hunter's Moon. It smells good too. At one point he opened the closet and said to me, "Doesn't that smell so good?" I stuck my head in and said it kind of smelled like the pizza we had the night before. I did not successfully detect the smell of leather.

Okay, so this isn't a tour, but I had to put in a picture of the mozzarella sticks that David made for us. They were delicious!

Feast of the Hunter's Moon

David's mom, Wanda, arrived on Saturday. We got back from the airport, ate lunch, and headed over to the Feast of the Hunter's Moon. The Feast of the Hunter's Moon is a huge reenactment of trading in the 1700s. There were a ton of booths with all kinds of fun things to see and do. Here's a little taste of our visit.

These girls were 6 and 8, and they were playing fiddling tunes. I recognized some from the fiddling group--Strolling Strings--that I was in back in Junior High.

Lighting the cannon . . .
And firing it! It was loud.

They had some cool shops set up. I liked these wooden carved dice. At another shop, they had what looked like marble dice, too.
This was also a nice assortment of horns and weapons. Those dark wood rods with a ball at the end are actually maces, and there's a sharp point at the end.
They had some canoe races, but we didn't go see any of those.


Some of the booths had people working on a craft. This man was carving legs for chairs. You can see what he's done on the ground beside him.This woman was spinning.
It was interesting to see how basic it was. The yarn doesn't actually go around that big wheel at all; it's just used to turn the bobbin at the top faster.Here they were cooking bread in an outdoor oven. David's trying to figure out how to build one in our future backyard that won't look tacky. Maybe covering it with sod, and then we'll have an artificial hill at the same time.
Making the bread dough that goes in the outdoor oven.

There were a lot of fife and drum corps. Here they are marching by.
They had bagpipes, too.We had a long wait to catch the shuttle back to our parking, but it was a really fun event! And the food we tried was delicious. Wanda and I tried Forfar Bridies and they were so good! They're this luscious pastry filled with ground meat. Yum!

Wanda particularly wanted to try buffalo meat. Since the buffalo stew we got was rather disappointing, we got some bison from the grocery store later, and made our own buffalo burgers. They were surprisingly good! Here they are cooking.
And now, we can each say that we have eaten buffalo.