With soothing lullabies, hypnotic ballads, and good old traditional jigs and reels, Thornhill Road will mesmerize you with their fresh approach to traditional Irish Music. Along with flute, fiddle, and whistle, Valerie Rose and Heather Winkle deliver sweet harmonies masterfully accompanied by guitarist Mark Boronkay.

Book Thornhill Road for your next celebration!
www.thornhillroad.com

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Game of Cards
www.thornhillroad.com/mp3/game-short.m3u

As I Roved Out
www.thornhillroad.com/mp3/rov...hort.m3u

...take it, said Yogi Berra. And so I did.

My earliest memory is a giant purple inflatable Easter bunny that my parents propped me up against for my first Easter photograph at age one.

Around the age of three my mom sat with me at the piano and by seven I was competing nationally in piano concerto competitions. I can say this with nonchalance because it was so long ago it seems like I’m talking about some other child prodigy. I appeared as a guest soloist with the Mansfield Symphony Orchestra when I was eight. The stage was so big and the grand piano so long it seemed to stretch endlessly into the shadows. My feet didn’t quite reach the pedals. People asked whether I’d be a professional musician, but I already had a different answer. I was going to be an architect.

I did end up studying architecture at Carnegie Mellon, but before five years of sleepless nights and statics calculations, I needed to explore. I joined a cast of Up With People and spent the next year on tour. I lived with 92 different host families in 9 countries and 21 states. I played the keyboard and sang in nearly 200, 2-hour shows. I set up and tore down 23 tons of stage equipment every three or four days. I visited nursing homes. I read to children in orphanages. I picked up garbage. I spoke to teens about drugs and communication and community and hope. I cleaned up beaches. I tended Danish pigs. I met the president of Bermuda. I performed with David Hasselhoff and Liza Minnelli. I danced at Radio City Music Hall.

I was ready to stop living out of a suitcase and slow down the pace. Carnegie Mellon Architecture. What are a few more years without sleep? I’m pretty sure I held the record for number of times taken to the emergency room for a 4am exact-o accident. But somewhere along the way I decided that I didn’t want to sit alone in the back of some firm drafting stair details for another non-descript office building. I wanted to work with people to solve complex problems. Problems at a more human scale. I discovered Industrial Design.

Jigsaws. VCRs. Medical equipment. Way-finding. Home networking. It was all about understanding a complex problem, taking it apart – literally and figuratively – and putting it back together again in a way someone else could use. What was his goal? What was his context? His experience? How would he approach it? What cues would it give him? What feedback? It’s all interaction design.

I gradually realized that everything I enjoyed was interaction design. I studied American Sign Language and interpreted communication problems for deaf and deaf-blind people around Pittsburgh. I worked as a tech writer and translated clunky software interfaces into usable products. I worked at Netscape to design a new help technology and work with developers to use it for their products. I worked at Intuit to research and develop financial “what if” scenarios to wrap people’s finances into a meaningful picture with tangible goals. I worked at Yahoo to design mobile interfaces for pagers, pdas, and web phones to help people find and use information they needed wherever they happened to be. I worked at eBay to develop the next generation of selling tools to help people integrate real-world processes into their eBay businesses.

And here I am. I’m taking apart complicated traditional tunes and arranging them into new music. I’m studying the properties of silver and gold and soldering and filing and forging raw metals into beautiful objects. I’m studying Irish Step Dancing and putting the patterns of 4/4, 3/4, 6/8, 9/8 into physical motion.

I can sleep next year.