This is a picture entry, to catch readers up with the best pictures of the last month or so. These range from Christmastime to now. The less familiar looking people are my brother Noah, his wife Elizabeth, and their son Eli, who is seven and a half weeks younger than Edie. This month they met for the first time, and had a wonderful time together. And wonderful it was to see Noah and Elizabeth again too!

Today I was giving Edie her lunch (she's just fifteen months now), and Gary Cooper's wonderful CD of Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier was playing on our hi-fi (which is in the kitchen -- otherwise we'd never use it!). She didn't show any signs of paying attention to the music (though kids are like that -- and next thing you know they've practically memorised the thing you thought they weren't paying attention to!) until suddenly, when the B-flat minor prelude came on (which is just a series of beautiful chords), she stopped devouring her lunch, looked up at the hi-fi speakers, looked at me, and said thoughtfully: "play! lute!". I'm still shocked when she speaks, because it's so new. But this was even more shocking: she was noticing that the series of plain chords, played on the harpsichord, sounded rather like a lute. She was right. And I'm going to arrange it (down a minor third, I think, or maybe up a tone) for lute, since it was her advice that I should do so. And I think it'll be a gorgeous lute piece. Clever old Edie!

More text (and pictures) to follow soon. I'm aware that there's a huge gap to fill in since the last entry.