If I recall, at one point, you mentioned you've made whistles in the past? Tell me more about that.
What is it about cooking you most enjoy - the process, or the results, or something else? Why?
What do you do to motivate yourself when you have a task you need to do but don't want to do?
1) So, I like doing crafty things. Cooking falls under that. A couple years after I started playing whistles, I discovered the handmade whistle community. There's a whole different world out there beyond the $5.00 Generation brand whistles you find at many music stores. So I've always been fascinated by it. One day, I sold 3 or 4 handmade whistles (some of which can go for between $600-1000) to fund my adventure in making them.
Using the money, I bought a 12" mini lathe (for shaping the bore), a 60" wood lathe from harbor freight for roughing out the square blanks to mostly round, and for drilling the hole. I had a custom gun drill made for the boring, since they're self guiding. I got a drill press for the finger holes and some jewlers files for shaping the windway and ramp. And I bought a pair of digital calipers so I could measure all of the whistles in my collection to figure out the magic formula for bore sizes etc.
I would go to Woodcraft and buy 12x1x1 hardwood blanks by the dozen.
I practiced for nearly a year before I made my first salable whistle in terms of quality, which I still carry with me. I sold maybe 300 whistles at $75.00 a pop. I started experimenting with making whistles out of
Corian (the stuff they make countertops out of), which was really stable and made great sounding whistles, but was brittle and wouldn't survive a drop.
http://www.tinwhistler.com/music/reviews/stonehenge/stone_rye.mp3
It wasn't long before two other guys took inspiration (the whistle world is small) and started making hardwood whistles, but for $35.00 a pop. My sales dried up. According to the business plan I drew up, those prices were unsustainable, because sometimes wood just breaks and so you have loss. And I was already making less than minimum wage working weekends in the garage, so I closed shop. Those guys did too within 18 months or so.
I sold the lathes for more than I paid for them to a guy who did robotics at NASA and who had broken his lathe. He needed them that day for an emergency project and couldn't get one. I sold the rest of the power equipment, and consider the entire venture a success--I ended up making more than it cost me to get started (lathes are expensive, yo) in less than a year.
A part of me wishes I hadn't sold the equipment, but I was in the process of preparing for my divorce, and since I wasn't using them, downsizing my assets seemed to be the sensible option.
I want to get started again some day, but I will need a bigger lathe if I do. A 12" lathe is just barely suitable for the task. If I can sustain the same level of sales that I did the first time around, it'd make me some really nice money once I'm retired from the 40+ hour a week grind. Once you get really good at it, the median price for a hand made whistle hovers at around $350, so it's a good income if you can do it.
2) I love the crafty "create things people love" aspect of cooking. There's not much more satisfying than cooking a great dish and watching people sigh in pleasure as they eat it.
3) I bitch and moan about it, but ultimately, I just get up and do it. It's stuff that needs done, and waiting isn't going to make it better, so I just bite the bullet.[DOUBLEPOST=1454952708,1454952195][/DOUBLEPOST]
Can you read music or do you learn your tunes by listening?
What other instruments do you play?
If one were to visit D.C., where would you suggest they stay, and how to get about?
What is your favorite cuisine?
Do all of your exes live in Texas?
1) I read music, but not well enough to sight read while playing. Written Irish music is just a barebones representation of a piece anyway. It gives you the basic notes, but doesn't convey any of the flavor, nuance, or swing of a tune. So I use sheet music to learn the barebones, and then I listen to good players to understand how the tune is supposed to really be played.
2) Transverse Irish flute, low whistle (which some people consider distinct from the traditional tinwhistle because the size requires a different play style, much like a violin and viola are just differently-sized versions of the same instrument), I took 2 years of piano, but I don't remember much (but I can still play enough Axel F to drive my wife crazy every time we go into a Radio Shack), I'm in the process of learning to play the violin, and I play uilleann pipes at a beginner-intermediate level. Uilleann pipes, despite having a chanter that looks a lot like a tinwhistle, has completely different fingerings.
The spoiler has a couple of vids of me playing the Uilleann pipes after a couple of weeks of practice. Most people need to play a few months before they can get to that level (which isn't awesome, but is passable), but I think the 20 years of tinwhistling helped me pick it up faster--different fingerings notwithstanding. I've gotten a lot better at the bellows work since then, which is where my musicality really suffers in the videos.
3) Hmm...I'd say stay anywhere near a metro station. Metro is *the* way to get around DC. It's affordable, easy, and relatively safe. Though I hear that there are some lines that you don't want to be on at certain times, I've never had any problems with fights or muggings. The further into DC you get, the more expensive stuff becomes, so you might want to stay a little further out like Falls Church, or along the new Silver Line that metro has put in and is currently expanding.
4) Asian. Doesn't matter of it's Thai, Japanese, Chinese, whatever. I just gravitate toward it whenever I have a choice. At any given moment, I may have a craving for a specific Asian cuisine, but it varies, and I wouldn't put any one above any other. Even within those broad guidelines, I know there are subgenres (like Hunan, Schezuan, etc). I haven't found one I didn't love.
That said, I do have a fondness for strawberry crepes romanoff.
5) All of my exes are
from Texas, but I'm old. People move. My son's mom now lives in Durham, NC (of Bull Durham fame).
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So, what's with not wanting to be on the bandwagon? You think a tinwhistle's a solo instrument?
Last time I did an AMA when everyone else was doing one, and I didn't get much love. I figured if I started one when people weren't burnt out on the idea, I might get some real questions instead of "which would you rather fight..a horse sized duck, or 100 duck sized horses."