Gifts to Myself

It's just past my birthday for this year. So, it is time for yet another retrospective.

I bought myself a gift for this year---a silver-plated cupronickel alto flute with straight and curved head joints made by 龙口金鸣乐器有限公司. It's the ``last'' representative that would round up the core instruments of the flute family. The original intention was not really to purchase my own alto flute---it was to have a shared high quality alto flute with my then wife-candidate. Well, she is no longer my wife-candidate, and thus that plan is garbage.

I already own a B-foot version of a vertical bass flute made by them, and I love the resonant nature of the sounds, as well as the quick reaction of it. Getting an alto flute from them seems like a no-brainer as well, despite their obvious ``no-name'' nature. My then wife-candidate owns an alto flute from them as well, and it definitely sounds good enough.

And so, I am now an owner of an alto flute, whom I named Eliana because it is a cool name, and it commemorates a new friend I made while spending some evenings at the nearby bar drinking and reading after work, before I had quit from my last job.

For these two low harmony flutes that I have, I can attest to the soundness of the mechanism, the goodness of their reaction, and general accuracy of intonation. I have not tried their other instruments to make any other pronouncements. But what I usually say still holds---the strength of a brand name only suggests that there is a certain low variance in the quality, it is still important for one to physically try out any musical instruments that one might purchase to see if one likes the experience of making music out of it. A ``no name'' brand can still have pearls among them all, but their usual high variance would mean that one may need to try many more instruments before finding that one pearl.

I think that this alto flute is likely to be the last purchase of a musical instrument for myself for quite a while. As seen in the instrument family representation section, I have very good coverage of the different ranges/timbres of instruments within the three instrument families that I care the most about (dizi, flute, recorder, and saxophone). Most of my planned and actual purchases over the years were done according to this principle. The only instruments that I may want to look into the future are a baritone saxophone, a contrabass flute, and maybe a sopranino saxophone.

I may want to get a special piccolo at some point, something that goes down to a low C, or even low B. But that is really not of the highest priority, as are the rest of the instruments that I might want to get to round up the representation. As is, I think my sound palette is good enough, and as many people have pointed out exasperatedly, I only have that one mouth to play these instruments.

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The anniversary of my birth came and went mostly uneventfully. Folks who cared enough to remember did come out of the woodwork to wish me a birthday greeting (shoutouts to CH, RX, YT, Winnie, XL, my other sister, and folks from the care group), and everyone else who didn't have Facebook to remind them did not say anything.

It's okay. It is the consequence of a deliberate choice that I made a few years ago to keep that specific date from being blasted all over the Facebook. On that social networking website, I am largely invisible, as it should be. I can be contacted as needed, but there is usually no need to contact me there.

It is the same strategy that I use for LinkedIn as well.

I did end up having dinner with my other sister and her hubby in the evening though, having north-east Chinese cuisine out next to Lor 27 Geylang. We did a la carte instead of the BBQ/hotpot, because we were just lazy to do our own cooking. Food was great, company was, as always, amazing. The power did trip at some point, but it was quickly rectified; it is still a mystery to me why the power could have tripped then.

Just a point of note though, ``my other sister'' isn't some half-sibling from nowhere---she's my unofficially adopted sister because she and I share the same surname. Our surname is sufficiently rare in Singapore that it is just funnier and easier to think of each other as siblings. Same reason why when I see anyone else with the same surname, I just call them my cousins when I am talking with other people---makes a good conversational piece that makes it more memorable.

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I met up with Harish to go on what can count as a hike in Singapore, along the southern ridges of Singapore. This is a route that I love walking, and had done so on several occasions with folks like Wangki, Roticv, and even XL with her hubby. Of all the times I had taken this route (traditionally beginning with the really stupid stairs of Marang Trail off Marang Road), I had only ended up in Kent Ridge Park maybe twice, including this one with Harish. But this time, the weather held up fine, and the company was right, and we managed to extend the route from Kent Ridge Park to go through NUS, before heading through to the west most end of West Coast Park, a park that I had hitherto not known of its existence before, despite having spent four years studying in that region, and about six months doing internships nearby.

It was a good hike.

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And that's about all I care to write at this point. Till the next update, I suppose.