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May. 22nd, 2026 07:32 amJust got home from four days at Shawm Camp. We had a great time, played a lot of good music, and have somewhat better shawm chops than we did a week ago. And I'm thinking about things I could pass on to more-beginning shawm players, e.g. a Pennsic class entitled something like "Shawm Technique 102: Quotations from Chairman Bob". Or I might want to teach/lead a music-notation class, which I haven't done in a number of years. And apparently the deadline for getting classes into the printed schedule is this coming Monday, so I need to decide very quickly.
We woke up yesterday morning at Shawm Camp, packed the car, ate breakfast, said a bunch of goodbyes, drove to Indianapolis airport, flew to JFK (all the non-premium seats were taken by the time we checked in, so they put us in "Comfort Plus" seats with leg-room, no extra charge!), caught a cab home, partially unpacked, bought some groceries, ate dinner, drove to NJ to pick up the dogs, drove home with dogs.
Classes have been posted for Amherst, and they look pretty good; we're thinking of going to Amherst instead of SFEMS Med/Ren, so as to avoid a cross-country flight with instruments.
On the drive to and from retrieving the dogs, I listened to NPR talking to various economists and petro-analysts talking about the economic effects of the Iran war. Naturally, Trump still says the war will be over "very soon", and as soon as it is, "prices will plummet; there's so much oil out there." And his energy secretary says "In the long run, oil prices will probably be lower than they were before, because Iran will no longer have a nuclear weapons program. But in the short run, people are facing some discomfort."
Meanwhile, the reality-based community says that prices in various countries have already doubled or tripled ("some discomfort"), and when the Strait of Hormuz re-opens to shipping, it will take at least a month for new shipments of oil to reach refineries, and longer still before they reach consumers, and it will take at least a month to re-open oil fields that have been shut down due to lack of storage space, and it will take months or years to repair war damage to oil facilities, and it will take months or years for various countries to refill their oil reserves, and the already-locked-in shortages of fertilizer and helium will take months to work their ways through the supply chain to consumers, so prices won't actually come down for months or years if ever, and there's a good chance of recessions in various countries later this year. All because Trump invaded Iran in February with no more detailed plan than "decapitate the government and install a US puppet who will still be an oppressive Islamist dictator but will be scared into obeying us." It worked in Venezuela; why wouldn't it work in a much bigger, richer, more-anti-US, and more-militarized country in the Middle East? Anyway, the consensus seems to predict sharp price rises in Europe and Asia in June, and in the US in early July -- another reason not to fly to California in July.
We've been planning to go to a camping event this weekend to test our latest pavilion modifications before Pennsic. It's supposed to rain half an inch on Saturday, and another half an inch on Sunday, with high temperatures in the low 50's Fahrenheit... which I guess makes it a good test of the pavilion, but not a particularly appealing camp-out. So we're not sure about that.
We woke up yesterday morning at Shawm Camp, packed the car, ate breakfast, said a bunch of goodbyes, drove to Indianapolis airport, flew to JFK (all the non-premium seats were taken by the time we checked in, so they put us in "Comfort Plus" seats with leg-room, no extra charge!), caught a cab home, partially unpacked, bought some groceries, ate dinner, drove to NJ to pick up the dogs, drove home with dogs.
Classes have been posted for Amherst, and they look pretty good; we're thinking of going to Amherst instead of SFEMS Med/Ren, so as to avoid a cross-country flight with instruments.
On the drive to and from retrieving the dogs, I listened to NPR talking to various economists and petro-analysts talking about the economic effects of the Iran war. Naturally, Trump still says the war will be over "very soon", and as soon as it is, "prices will plummet; there's so much oil out there." And his energy secretary says "In the long run, oil prices will probably be lower than they were before, because Iran will no longer have a nuclear weapons program. But in the short run, people are facing some discomfort."
Meanwhile, the reality-based community says that prices in various countries have already doubled or tripled ("some discomfort"), and when the Strait of Hormuz re-opens to shipping, it will take at least a month for new shipments of oil to reach refineries, and longer still before they reach consumers, and it will take at least a month to re-open oil fields that have been shut down due to lack of storage space, and it will take months or years to repair war damage to oil facilities, and it will take months or years for various countries to refill their oil reserves, and the already-locked-in shortages of fertilizer and helium will take months to work their ways through the supply chain to consumers, so prices won't actually come down for months or years if ever, and there's a good chance of recessions in various countries later this year. All because Trump invaded Iran in February with no more detailed plan than "decapitate the government and install a US puppet who will still be an oppressive Islamist dictator but will be scared into obeying us." It worked in Venezuela; why wouldn't it work in a much bigger, richer, more-anti-US, and more-militarized country in the Middle East? Anyway, the consensus seems to predict sharp price rises in Europe and Asia in June, and in the US in early July -- another reason not to fly to California in July.
We've been planning to go to a camping event this weekend to test our latest pavilion modifications before Pennsic. It's supposed to rain half an inch on Saturday, and another half an inch on Sunday, with high temperatures in the low 50's Fahrenheit... which I guess makes it a good test of the pavilion, but not a particularly appealing camp-out. So we're not sure about that.
