This past weekend my wonderful wife Sarah spent much time (apart from Palm Sunday Service, of course) at the Elegant Wedding Festival in Strasburg, VA showcasing her pottery, photography, and doing demonstrations.  She always has a great deal of fun at these shows and gets some great work down as well.  She has the opportunity to meet some great new people and make connections and commissions that help make working with her art more enjoyable.

Apart from helping her load and unload vehicles and hang out with the boys, I did get a chance to get dressed up and play a bit through the vendor's areas.  The event was not very well attended, which was a real shame considering the amount of work that the awesome organizers put into it, but we had a good time anyway.  I also made a few connections, some of which I hope bear fruit.

What a weekend!

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending the Harrisonburg, VA Boston Beanery's annual At. Patrick's Day celebration.  During saturday and sunday afternoons it was my job to pipe the goodie bucket around the restaurant a couple of times before it was deposited at some lucky table.  We did this once every hour.  It was great fun people watching.  Naturally, at these functions there is a fair amount of heavy drinking, though that is certainly not something that the hired piper should be doing and this one followed that rule.  There were also plenty of families enjoying a night out filled with joyous, if raucous, fun.  Some of the tunes I played included:

Atholl Highlanders
The Irish Washerwoman
Itchy Fingers
Cutting Bracken
The Pikeman's March

...and a few others.  While these tune are not ALL expressly Irish, I did hear a few of them while listening to the Irish music being played in the restaurant, and so felt somewhat vindicated :).  And, yes, I did play "Scotland the Brave" during my last turn 'round on Saturday night :)!  Why not?  It was a request!