St Pats day photos

Here is Jane and Adam at our first gig. A 9am breakfast we were playing outdoors (in the shade) at a race course (Ascot) for a few hours while bus loads of folk arrived for a fry and a pint.

The races commenced around 1pm. We were booked here from 9-11 and 4-7 so at the break in the middle we left our PA in place (removed the mikes) and left my organiser run the show for a few hours. For Finbarr, Owen, Feargal and possibly Martin craig, the picture below will be impressive, for the rest, tis a bundle of wires.

Jane was at large with a can of green hair spray, here is Denis with a beard that looks like it was doused in creme de menthe!

New member of the family

Hi guys, meet Fionn, our new black, flat haired retriever.

We picked him up from the pound yesterday, he is about a year old, he was found wandering around a suburb in north Perth and has been in the pound for the last 2 weeks.

He is bigger than Reilly, and a bit rougher, but once he is familliar with the house he will calm down a bit. He has learned to sit, stay and is a great companion for Reilly.

Here we all are at the park taking him out for a run.

Happy St Patricks day everyone!!!

Well its that time of the year again. The time of the year when anyone who is in Irish band could do with a bit of bi-location. Four gigs tomorrow, 9-11 12-3 4-7 8-11 at a race course and at a casino. Its a fairly packed day with only an hour between each gig which includes travelling from one venue to another, parking, eating and squeezing in a few scoops of the black stuff! Its a reasonably big affair here, there is a little parade and every irish pub opens (earliest at 7am) for a full "irish" breakfast and serves guinness all day. If only St Pat could see us now. Looking forward to enjoying a cool pint of homebrew after all the gigs on saturday and listening to the semi-audible hum of our new dishwasher in full swing!

It has arrived

Its here, our dishwasher has arrived. Its still in its box, but here is a sneak preview......


I am going to wire it up this afternoon after work and hopefully have it finished before our gig this evening. No more washing dishes!!!!!!

Christmas Photo

Here is a photo from my visit at Christmas time, its Steve Kelly and Owen Kelly (no relation) in the Bodhran (my favourite pub). Also, I am wearing Conor MacCarthy’s jumper in this, which I stole after our gig in the shelbourne. I try my best to steal at least one garment a year from him; it keeps him on his toes and in fashion.

Conor (in Finland) emailed me a reply and I HAD to post it:

The Finnish winter was long and hard and more that a little chilly. In February temperatures plummeted to a nipple freezing -35C. Struggling to survive without his trusty brown jumper, he was forced to strech the bejesus out of his left sock, cut a hole in the toes (for his head)and stretch the all-too-thin material over his frost-bitten torso. However, this moved proved to be disastrous. While journeying over a frozen lake on the way home one evening, a wandering bear picked up the scent of the naked left ankle. The ensuing attack was vicious to the extreme. Heavily limping home with half a leg, he realised the trail of blood and and bone fragments and goo would soon attract the wolves. He removed his body sock and streched it over his stump in an attempt to slow the bleeding, but to no avail. The wolves were in a playful mood. They began with the fingers and worked thier way gleefully towards the eyelids, nibbling all the way. Luckily a passing ice-cream van scared them off, and salvation seemed once again a possiblity. However, just meters from the saftey of his apartment, he caught a nasty cold and died. "If only I had my trusty brown jumper" he thought. And as the vultures circled his mucus filled head, he realised where he left it..in the shelbourne. And then he realised. Charlie's some langer.

Homebrew Discussion Forum

Hi guys. As you know I have been making my own beer here for the last year and am getting better and better at it, largely due to this website http://brodiescastlebrewing.com/index.php?action=forum (the image is the castle this website is named after AND after the administrator of the site Simon Brodie)

Simon and his buddies have been a great forum of discussion and a great aid to my brewing skills. I still have a lot to learn, but they sure helped me get off the ground and continue to help me through their collective experience of successful AND disastrous brews. Its a good read if you have an afternoon to spare and want to know what homebrew addicts talk about.

Thanks guys.

Finally, I'm in a jazz band

I always wanted to play in a big-band, sinatra style, with full swingin' string section. I always wanted to set up that kind of orchestra but I wouldn't know where to start, where to get the charts etc. Well, a trumpet player I met during fiddler invited me to his "pops" orchestra last night and it was great!


We played a lot of stuff (it as pretty much a repertoire playthrough rather than a rehearsal). We played a lot of the standards, i got to yell out pen,sil,vania, six five, oh, oh, oh, AND we all got to rip clean into the opening "daa da da daaaa da da daaaaaaaaaaaaaa", of a cool James Bond medley. Fantastic.

Fiddler in the Pit

Well it’s finished, the show that has occupied every single bit of free time over the last month has seen its final curtain call. It was a good run, plenty of laughs along the way and I met a lot of fantastic musicians in the pit. Still haven’t seen the show, but I am in no rush to hear any of those tunes any time soon! Here is a signed program from the Topol guy and also a note from the MD. I used always try to distract her and make her laugh at really important entries, which is the duty of the viola player in any ensemble.

Reillycam: episode 45

Its been a while since Reilly featured on the blog. Here she is spotting another dog in the distance….

Corks Finest...

I popped around to an alehouse near my place yesterday for a beer and look what I came accross. They import beamish from cork! Tasty!

Show biz secrets: lesson 41

The chuck bucket. (sorry the text is so hard to read, camera phone, dimly lit backstage area)

Check this out, I came across this industry secret backstage last week. Its two buckets for the nervous actors to have a quick tactical chunder before they go on stage! "The show must go on" i guess.

Kegerator Modifications

Hi guys. I "modified" my kegerator:

http://violacharlie.blogspot.com/2006/10/keg-fridge-part-1.html

http://violacharlie.blogspot.com/2006/11/kegerator-part-2.html

http://violacharlie.blogspot.com/2006/11/kegerator-is-complete.html

over the weekend. From the outside it looks the same, beer tap on one side, magnetic chess on the other...

...but when you open it you get an idea of the sheer amount of booze this machine can deliver. The right hand side is all beer, a keg of homebrew and a few other shelves of bottled beer and glasses and the left hand side (the freezer) is for ice and now it also has vodka on an optics dispenser. The benefit of having this inside the freezer is that your glass of Russia's finest is served chilled every time

Here is a close up of the freezer section. There is room for two large beer glasses in the freezer also, which I like to be frosted for my beers

And here is another view of the beer section.

CSM Update

For all you cork exiles around the world, here are the latest picture (thanks Mom) of the CSM nearing completion.

All looking good and on schedule to be opening in a few months. Seems like a million years ago when we were all marching and protesting for the new school and nothing being done about it, and now, there it is!

You can see in the bottom left of this photo, a very eager viola player trying to get in so he can get some sneaky practice done on his cha-cha’s before the gig season kicks in.

Oh the weather....

Hi Guys


It was a bank holiday weekend here this weekend so only back into the swing of things today, what a weekend! Plenty of gigs and a few parties thrown in along the way too. It was great fun. It topped 44 degrees in the back of the house yesterday, ouch!

A few pictures from the weekend, which I'll post later in the week.

PS3 Update

Well here it is, finally, the long awaited PS3. Still not sure if its better than the Xbox 360.

Another sunset

Hi Guys, here is another spectaular sunset around the side of the house. The sun sets here in about 20 mins, so it gets dark really quick, but as a result you can literally see the sun move below the horizon. Totaly different to Ireland, and the colours are amazing pretty much all the time.

The Pit

Here is my settup in the pit. The lighting wasnt the best, but you get the idea.

The conductor is on a raised platform in the pit so she can see the stage, that is why my music stand is higher than normal so that she is in the line of sight. That also means that I can fit another music stand under my original one and put books, magazines and my palm organiser on it. For the last few nights I have been playing chess on it (and have yet to win a game). Whats cool is that I can sit back and operate the thing with my bow, its pretty efficient. Even in parts where i have a 4 bar rest I'd be thinking "hmmmmm, rook to bishop 3, pawn to king 4",etc. Its great and makes the gig go really quickly.

And of course, my ultra-useful viola stand. I am the envy of all the other string players in the pit. Tee hee hee

Gig photos

A girl I work with got married abut a month ago. We played for it and were invited to the meal and the celebrations afterwards. Here is one of Jane and me playing and below is all the people at our table. My boss is the tall bloke on the left.