Life of Wiley

The photos are now up in the photo gallery.

I hope I don’t get this sort of problem when Euan starts bringing home maths home work!

I hope my 40th birthday is marked with as much fun and in as much style as the party we went to over the weekend. Our friend Emmanuelle who’s Swiss and from near Lausanne celebrated her 40th by hiring a chalet at Les Mosses and invited all her friends to join her for skiing and raclette.

Euan and Eva had never seen so much snow before and it was lovely to see their faces. Euan took to hour long ski lessons and really enjoyed it (I was afraid he may have been put off at the point of trying on the ski boots), he definitely wants to go again. Eva really enjoyed being pulled about on a toboggan and racing her brother down the slopes. They both also really enjoyed the snow-tubing.

Les Mosses is a good place to go as a family skiing as the ski slopes aren’t too long so quite young children can cope with going all the way up to the top and there is plenty of space for tobogganing and building snowmen. It’s also not too far from the motorway so is within easy reach of places like Montreux, Vevey and Lausanne.

On the way back we took a train from Lausanne to Geneva Airport that included a play area, complete with slide, as part of one of the carriages. The kids thought this was magic and kept them amused for the 40 minute journey. It was a shame then when we reached Geneva airport that it was so child unfriendly with 3 or 4 sets of steps/escalators to negotiate (with buggy) without recourse to an elevator. There was nowhere for them to play either; in the end we went to the (free) viewing terrace where Euan could watch the planes take off and land and Eva could just run around!

I’ll post photos up soon, once I’ve got them off the camera.

On Tuesday I travelled up to Leeds from London with GNER. I travelled First Class (is there any other way? Actually by buying two advanced single tickets this is cheaper than the standard return fare that the company travel bureau use!) and in First Class you get free wi-fi (if the train is wi-fi enabled). One of the justifications for travelling this way is that I can get up to date with my morning e-mail as I travel using the wi-fi, but it didn’t work out that way because the wi-fi on the train was rubbish! I managed a stable connection for about 3 minutes before the train departed Kings Cross then for the rest of the journey the wi-fi signal was mostly non-existant. When it did appear it wasn’t long enough even to get a routing table to even access the train’s proxy:(

Still, as the alarm hadn’t gone off and I’d had to dash out of the house without any breakfast, the bacon toastie and free tea was nice:)

One of my favourite pieces of jazz music has to be Duke Ellington and Juan Tizol’s Caravan. It’s one of those pieces of music that’s very hard to get out of your head once it’s there.

On Monday night I got to play an arrangement of Caravan at the JSU Volunteer Band. It was amazing, though it’s going to need some work to get it up to speed and together.

It was a great rehearsal on Monday as we also did “String of Pearls” which has a solo in for lead trumpet. I didn’t do too badly on the first sight-reading run through, but contrived to mess it up on the second run through. Fortunately, Steve, the Band Sergeant had the foresight to do a copy of the solo so I could take it home to practice. I’ve been managing to sustain practicing every day for the last two weeks by doing it immediately after putting the kids to bed, it seems to be the perfect time to fit in half-an-hour or so. I’m working hard on slurring at the moment, and in particular lip slurs (which involves changing the pitch of the note purely by the position of the tongue in the mouth and pushing more air into the trumpet), which is good as the String of Pearls solo requires lip slurs.

I’m going to have to sign the Official Secrets Act for attending rehearsals in the future to allow me to go onto the JSU base at Northwood unescorted. Last week I’d turned up to rehearsal but couldn’t raise anyone to escort me to the building and had to go back home:(

The new CD from Jools Holland and his R&B Orchestra is absolutely fantastic. Well worth a listen.

This is the coolest 404 page I have ever seen! Makes getting lost that little bit more fun and amusing.

An interesting column from Madelaine Bunting in the Guardian Unlimited regarding Richard Dawkins’ programme on Channel 4, The Root of all Evil

Thanks to Nigel Coke-Woods for the link.

By plugging your PC into the blue socket and your monitor, printer, scanner, etc. into the red sockets you can power all the devices off just by turning the PC off thanks to this nifty power strip.

This is a UK version of the same thing.

If you’re looking to be more environmentally friendly and reduce your electricity bill, then perhaps you should consider these products.

As I indicated in this post I had two new mouthpieces for Christmas, a shallow one for playing the trumpet lead in the wind band and a deeper one for the more classical playing that I do in the brass ensemble. The reason for the new mouthpieces was so that they match the rim size (diameter) of the mouthpiece I use on the cornet that I’m comfortable with.

The first time I played with the new mouthpieces was on Tuesday night where I only lasted for about 15 minutes, but this was the first time I’d practiced since before Christmas and I was using a practice mute to keep the noise down.

Last night I rehearsed with the brass ensemble which was the first true test of the new mouthpiece and I managed 40 minutes which was a marked improvement. Everyone else was feeling the strain from lack of practice over the Christmas period too, which was somehow comforting.

It was a great rehearsal as Ken, our lead trumpeter, had written a new piece of music called “No Room” which was written as a Christmas piece for brass quintet depicting the story of Mary and Joseph looking for somewhere to stay in Bethlehem. It was a lovely, and at times, quite haunting piece of music. I hope we get the opportunity to play this in a church setting at Christmas time.