Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Low-energy days the past two days. Enough pain to be uncomfortable, but not enough to count as really noteworthy given my usual pain levels; just really slow-moving, low-energy, allow the cat to pin me to the chair by falling asleep on me, put off what I can get away with putting off -days. Behind on LJ reading. Behind on email. Only a little bit behind on dishes.

But I made it to rehearsals for both groups this week (neither one on time, but I got there). And I did manage to keep my electricity from being turned off. Now I just need to manage to pay my phone bill and scrape together enough loose change to buy enough gas to get me to gigs this weekend.

Thrir Venstri Foetr will be performing at Marching Through Time in Glen Dale, Maryland both days this weekend. We're scheduled for 2:00 PM and 4:20 PM, but you'll really want to get there earlier and take in the various military demonstrations and camps.

I had an interesting experience a few hours ago, trying to teach a skill I really wasn't sure how to teach. I was trying to teach a bodhran player how to play a snare drum, and there's something about how to hold and move the sticks that I couldn't figure out how to communicate. I got part of a clue shortly after she left, and hope I'll get another chance sometime so I can find out whether my idea works. (I can do it right, and I could see what she was doing wrong, but I had trouble describing the two.) Since an important bit of my self-image is "teacher", I do want to know that I can figure out how to teach this.

(I think a certain amount of it is a trust/confidence thing. You have to be able to trust that the stick will bounce the right way, because if you try to control it too much, it won't. Which means that even after I communicate this, it'll take practice for the feel to become natural enough to trust without thinking about it. I remember how the mechanics of how to hold the sticks was taught to me, but this is more of an approach to movement than a grip problem.)

Hmm. Now I find myself wondering what playing a drum kit in Lunar gravity would be like. Or microgravity. Have any astronauts taken stick-percussion instruments up?