Stoopid cold, Day 5.

On my birthday I came down with a cold. Fortunately I wasn't scheduled to work that day or the next, so I could stay home and recover. But now it's day 5 of the cold and it's still not gone. Sure, I feel mostly better, but it's getting a little old not being able to breathe through my nose. And what a waste it was to have a couple perfectly nice days off and spend them in bed dreaming the feverish dreams of the ill. Grr. But now it is friday and I'm on the mend. Oh happy friday.

I was going a little stir crazy doing mostly nothing while fighting off the cold. I finished the book I was reading, "Pastwatch" by Orson Scott Card. I also finished watching all the netflix discs I had at home, Word Wars, a Deadwood season 2 disc, and "Touch the Sound", a biography of sorts of the deaf master-percussionist Evelyn Glennie. I can't honestly recommend "Touch the Sound" as it was quite slow paced and, at times, a little out there, but as a percussionist myself I enjoyed the footage of the music making. I had the good fortune to see Evelyn Glennie perform live and in person at Stetson Chapel back at good ol' Kalamazoo College in my school days. She really is amazing, but the movie, sadly, is not.

One thing about the movie I did find fascinating is a new percussion "instrument" I don't believe I've seen before. Imagine, if you will, a wooden ball, about the size of a softball, in this case painted red. Now imagine two specially designed wooden "sticks" such that you can balance the ball on the ends of the sticks in carved out shallow cups. The player holds the two sticks, one in each hand, and sort of juggles the ball in the air using various points on the sticks to make contact with the ball, thus creating different clickety-clack sounds. When done in rythm, this creates a percussion beat.

I must acquire this and learn to play it. If I knew what it was called maybe I could find it, but I don't even know where to start. Anyone have any ideas?