Not much in the piping department to brag about, but then I didn't start this blog to chronicle the subject, important to me as it is. Come the end of June, our band was set to play at a civic function; only four of us showed up--without our Pipe Major, absent, we were told, due to the passing of a grandfather. I still had to drone, not knowing all the chosen music.

It seemed a low blow when the PM's father died two weeks later. We learned afterwards that he'd long suffered from a chronic, progressive, presumably incurable disease.

Since my previous entry, the Deep Impact project successfully blasted a comet. Also last month, NASA finally got a manned mission into orbit for the first time since the Columbia disaster. Too bad all the eggs were in the shuttle basket.

Now comes word that a possible tenth planet has been discovered--except that, while it appears probably larger than Pluto, it's presumably a "mere" Kuiper-Belt object, as is Pluto! Things aren't so simple these days. On the question of what to call this body, I've favored the name Erebus since I started giving much thought to the matter of a hypothetical tenth planet.