What to do with a broken camera?

Taking all the website and catalog photos on our Nikon 5700 hit a bit of a snag when the camera got tossed around during a recent business trip. Shooting with smaller cameras the last few weeks has been a drag. 5 megapixels seems like a minimum need.

I set up a nice little photo shoot booth in my office for taking snaps of the instruments for consignment sale, and that has proved to be a major help. Having a set place, with all the doo-dads I need saves time and hassle. I've taken to using dowels suspended on foam blocks to suspend the joints of each instrument. No shadows!

I'm playing a wedding gig.....

this coming weekend. It's the first one I've done in about ten years. I thought I was burned out on this kind of thing, but with my friend Karen on Cello, and me on oboe, I'm thinking it'll be a fun time.

Plus I found a nice site to download sheet music for $40 a year. Virtual Sheet Music seems to have enough, though it is certainly not everything I'll need.

Here's another great link

for info on displaced, evacuated musicians from The AmericanSymphony Orchestra League.

Monday morning is usually a very busy time - and this one seems to be even more so. For some reason :) we had about three times as many orders logged over the weekend, and there will be almost 70 reed orders to prepare today!

I wonder how many double reed players in the Gulf Coast - storm affected region play double reeds? We pulled all the names of folks we know there who we think might have been affected, but now - what to do with that list? We could email them - but will they have access? We could mail to them, but that seems ridiculous. We wish we could reach out in some way, and let them know that we care, and that they can come to us for help. If you know anyone like this - let them know we want to help them rebuild from a double reed point of view. There's not much we can do up here in New Hampshire, but that seems like a good way to start.

cane hardness

Here's an interesting idea I heard from Uncle Mikey:

If you want harder cane - soak it long and then dry it out - it'll be harder. I know this works when I don;t want it to - like when I forgot some reeds or cane in water overnight, but why not use this as a technique, if kept in check. I'm going to try soaking cane for a few hours, drying it and comparing it to the initial batch. If this works, it could be a real boon.