The lockdown cancelled all the social dances where you'd dance with someone different every dance. These two weren't willing to stop dancing, so they formed a two-person pod and rented some studio space for their private use.

Their dance practices grew into romance, and the rest is (now) history.

I made a picture frame for them this weekend as a wedding present, using some of the cherry that I thickness-planed a couple weekends ago.

This was the second picture frame I've made in the past couple weeks, and I'm almost getting it down to a science.

I made the first frame from ash, which works fairly easily with a router, but doesn't like to sand smooth. Cherry, sand nice and smooth, but likes to split on the grain. If you're not careful, the router will catch on the grain split the wood and shoot a splinter the size of a cross-bow bolt across the room.

This did not intersect me. It did mean that instead of two large picture frames, I'll be making one large and one small frame.

I have a surprisingly wide-ranging and weird set of friends. When I mentioned that Bard was going to receive a penance, one friend offered me his college thesis on medieval penances.

Sure, everybody has one of those hanging around, right?

I mentioned the theremin a few weeks back, and this weekend another friend loaned me his Moog theremin.

The theremin is the first of the synthetic musical instruments. Basicly, it's a pair of radio-frequency oscillators one of which is controlled by the capacitance of the human standing near it.

If you think of the squeel from an old-time radio, and how it comes and goes as you reach for the tuning knob, that's it.

In a little playing, I find I can do a more-or-less musical job on tunes that "swoop" into a note. I played an almost recognizable version of "Cry Me A River" after a few minutes getting a feel for where to put my hand to get notes, and sliding from the wrong into the right one.

It's hard to get the kind of attack that you get with a piano or guitar, but you can do a decent job of duplicating a Tommy Dorsey trombone solo. (I can't, but maybe you could.)

I'm going to try doing a theremin backup to my filk of St. James Infirmary.