I’ve been away from the board since July or August, as I had to prepare for my first ever overseas trip, to a family/spiritual community reunion 130 strong, hosted for the first time in Marseille, France, and I stayed 3 weeks in Marseille, and 9 days visiting with community friends in London. 
Visited the tower, had a few ales at pubs with my friends, and played the warpipes (had to take those, they’re my community trademark, and the UP was just too much to deal with until I had some international travel experience under my belt) in Highgate Woods where my warpipes teacher trained the Irish Volunteers after the split – http://www.sonic.net./~johnpipe/bagpipes/lnoble/lnoble_irv.html
The weather’s a bit cold for woodworking yet, but by the spring I hope to get back to a bit of pipe making, but it’s going to be a simpler project than the regulator project, which is shelved for awhile due to a remarkable personal discovery, which sheds a lot of light about the peculiar “outside-the-box” methods by which I approached my square-bore regulator project, and why I’ve decided to put it aside for a while.
I discovered that I am what the “muggle” neurologists call one who “has Asperger’s Syndrome” (when they are feeling somewhat friendly toward us) or “Asperger’s Disorder” (when they are not.)
For myself this has been remarkably liberating, and I’m happier than I’ve been in a half-century. 
Knowing myself as well as I do, this has led to my having a remarkable spiritual experience, of the sort I’ve only read about in books before, such as the ancient Vedic “Upanishads.” 
On the temporal side, it explains why I had a better time learning the warpipes, as I had weekly one-on-one sessions with a master piper, whereas I’ve not yet had the same experience on the UP.
One characteristic of us “aspies” as most of the community likes to call themselves, is a free spirited personality, without a lot of built-in discipline, so in areas like learning to play an instrument, we do a lot better when learning from a very good teacher, in a disciplined musical educational environment, than tying to pick it up outside that.
My own dismal level of UP playing compared to GHB is indicative of this. I don’t have natural discipline, so learning to play regulators once I actually finish building and reeding a set is going to require getting that same one-on-one tuition, if I seriously want to learn, and a lot of hard work. 
This is one reason why I may not complete the regulators, why ruin a perfectly good half-set? 
At any rate, this all came to a head on my 63rd birthday, making it the best ever for me.
Oh, yes, I have my personal opinion now that my genetic type is both a physical and spiritual “brahmin” in the Vedic sense, and as both my mother and my old man were “aspies” and therefore “brahmin” too, and as he had been USMC during his careers, I now often sign myself in the Sanskrit for “Warrior-Brahmin”, as seen below.
Best wishes to all for the coming piping year,
Your Friendly Neighborhood Kshatriya-Brahmin, sometime piper and pipemaker, and General Household Handyman, 
Johnpipe