Rivers of Papillion

The Kapitano household has a new member. Perry is a 12 week old papillion with white and red-brown colouring. He looks a bit like a miniature lion.



He's called Perry because...well, Spock's Kennel Club name was "Black Knight", and Perry's Kennel Club name is "Red Knight", which together evoke the Knights of the Round Table of Arthurian legend. Dino has been retroactively named after Sir Dinadan, and Perry named after Sir Peredur - aka Sir Percival, but we can't call him Percy because one of the Parrots is already called Percy.



Either that or Dino is retroactively named for Dean Martin and Perry for Perry Como. Or possibly Perry Mason. Accounts vary.



In any case, he's gone to sleep on top of each of us, sniffed everything in the house, and figured out how to climb stairs. The breeder got him nicely papertrained (trained to do some of the less endearing things dogs do, on newspaper) , which is why there's now a conspicuous sheet of damp newspaper on the floor in most rooms.

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Why is it, whenever I've got the energy to do something, I find I've got to do six other things first to make it possible, and by the time I've done them, there's no time or energy to do the original thing?

That's how most of the housework gets done - the last time I needed a clear table with pens, notepads and textbooks for a bout of studying, I got a bit carried away and ended up rearranging the tables and hoovering the whole room.

I can't remember which song I was working on that I thought could use the sound of brass instruments, but I searched through the dozen brass VSTi software synthesisers I could find, and found none of them were much good. So, having a basic grasp of the modeling of brass acoustics, I thought maybe I could create my own - using one of the VSTi creation programs.

There's SynthEdit, designed originally for analog synthesiser emulation but extended far beyond that. There's Reaktor, and there's Tassman, the demo versions of which I've heard produce amazingly "physical" noises that could fool a listener into thinking they were listening to a bizarre instrument invented by Heath Robinson. All three, of course, are incredibly complicated programs to use.

So, I sit down with all three, read the instructions, play with the controls, and decide which one is more likely to suit my needs. All of which takes months, and is constantly interrupted by other projects. Maybe one day I will have a realistic trumpet sound, appearing on a completely different song. If I take a break from making instruments to get around to recording it.

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It's confirmed, Dino will soon be the father of two puppies. And he's been booked to be the stud (ha!) for another bitch. After which, we're thinking of getting another one.