Piping
Click image to view slideshow
Click image to view slideshow
About 10 years ago, Carolyn inspired me to learn how to play the pipes. She'd been playing for 6 or 7 years at that point, and she was (still is!) a terrific piper. I've been chipping away at it since then, but I'll never be as good as she was back when I started. But, I've become a reasonably decent piper, and I pipe with the Mohawk Valley Frasers Grade 4 competition section. Our band plays 6 or 7 competitions a summer and literally a coupled dozen other gigs that range from college graduations to parades.
One of the highlights of my life was taking part in the 2010 NASA Desert RATS test of geological field operations of NASA's next generation space exploration vehicle in the San Francisco Volcanic Field north of Flagstaff, Arizona. The week-long test was designed to simulate how astronauts on the Moon would travel in rovers, conduct field work along traverses, and communicate with a science team on Earth. I was part of the science team in the "back room", and I was the imaging lead in charge of remote imagery for one of the rovers. At the end of the week-long test, I had the incomparable experience of piping the rovers back to base camp.
While I was at Desert RATS, NASA interviewed me, and you can see my interview on line at the NASA TV archives. Ignore the dopey ad at the start. My interview begins at about 17:42 into the broadcast.