vaneramos | Big organ

This photo was featured today on Blog Guelph. djjo and I went for a walk yesterday afternoon, but it was windy and cold, so we didn't get far. The sun was preparing to set. On the way back across the covered bridge, I photographed these Canada geese settling down to roost. The middle of the river is a safe place from predators, but it's a miracle they can stand motionless in close-to-freezing water for hours. You'd think they would huddle together, Danny said. Apparently geese have a strong sense of personal space.

Today I worked for the first time on the concert organ at Roy Thomson Hall. With four manuals, 71 stops and over 5,200 pipes, it is the largest organ I've touched! It was mostly a tedious tuning job. The reeds of most pipe organs need to be tuned this time of year, but most church organs have only a handful of reed stops and they are designed to be tuned easily. In this case, I counted 19 reed stops; that's more than 1,000 pipes! But that was not the worst of it. The entire swell division was slightly out of tune with the rest of the organ and had to be retuned. Mixtures, which include several ranks of small pipes sounding the upper harmonics of each note, are particularly onerous, and we had to tune two of them. I had the easy job of holding down keys, but it was a long day.

I arrived home to discover the news that I passed my probation on the web content site, so now I can accept work orders without restrictions. I had planned to do so this evening, however after a 10-hour work day it is time to wind down.