Together again

We had a busy weekend.  On Saturday the weather was very warm, in the middle 20s, so Duncan and I brewed up a couple of different types of beer: we did a "Special Belge" ale, which promises to be an amber beer of medium strength, and a lower alcohol "Belgian Saison".  These are showing signs of fermentation, and I will be checking the specific gravity every 48 hours or so until primary fermentation has stopped.  We checked today and there has already been significant change in the specific gravity, which means that the sugar has already started getting digested by the yeast, and is being converted to alcohol.

The weather on Saturday was condusive to working outside, so I took the large dining room table from the garden apart and repaired the legs.  Last summer while Maggie and I were in the UK for Bethany and Tim's wedding, the boys had some friends in, and one of the partygoers sat on the edge of the table and cracked one of the legs, so I had to saw out the broken tenon and replace it with a biscuit of new wood, and then glue and pin the legs back into the feet.  It is not a very sturdy design, but it does the job okay, and gives us lots of dining room surface in the back yard... we need the extra space, because we have a visitor!

The Belgian government has eased back the travel restrictions just in time for Mother's Day, and so I was allowed to go and pick Malcolm up from his apartment in Boom.  Yoshi came along for the ride and we checked out his projects in person, including his Wappen harp guitar reproduction.  It is really beautifully done and is getting quite close to completion.

As well I had a first look at the closed "box" of the L5 archtop jazz guitar that he has been building for me.  It already has a great sound which one can test by tapping, and I sang a few notes into the soundhole; it has a very strong resonance centred around an Aflat, with quite a bit of strength on either side of that note.  That is actually a pretty good key for jazz or swing: Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode was first played in B-flat (not very far away from A-flat).  A-flat is a good key for trumpets and saxophones: they are transposing B-flat instruments so when they play a note on the page, it sounds a tone lower than written.  So that means that a song in A-flat (four flats) would look like it was in B-flat (two flats) for the horn.  The neck is also more or less done, and is just waiting to be joined up with the body, and then the fingerboard goes on.  It's looking great.

I had made english muffins the evening before, and returned with Malcolm by around 10:30.  We had eggs norvege to celebrate Mother's Day.  (Maggie is wearing an apron in the photo, as she did volunteer to make the hollandaise.)

One other aspect of the new regulations was that we are allowed to go see a few close friends again, as long as we maintain appropriate social distancing, and if possible stay outside, in a well-ventilated area.  Maggie sewed up a bunch of different colourful face masks for the Hammers, and so we decided to go and deliver the masks, pay them a visit and have a late afternoon beer and snack together for the first time in two months.

Then it was home to make some phone calls to the boys grandmothers/our own mothers, and then we settled in for a big meal of roquette, tomato and avocado salad, followed by roast lamb, baked sweet potates, and broccoli.

Today Malcolm and I are going to work a bit to prepare the songs for the recording session tomorrow, and Maggie is back at work.  Duncan has a school meeting tomorrow via teleconference so perhaps we will receive some news about his future assignments and projects.

The weather here has turned quite cool and extremely windy, with powerful gusts up to 65 kph, so I hope that the house handles it ok, and that the garden pavillion doesn't topple over again.  According to the forecast, the wind gusts will be at their strongest around noon, and then things should calm down a bit.  Unfortunately we are still looking at dry conditions for the next week, after a very tiny amount of rain over the weekend.  I will have to keep watering the garden, unfortunately...