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Hey folks,

As per your request I tried to find a photo online of me in high school and found one. Here's the link: http://images.milton.halinet.on.ca/details.asp?ID=16566

This photo was in the local Milton newspaper as part of a story about me going to Ireland for 5 weeks with Atlantic Challenge. AC is a great organization for young people who want to learn about rowing and sailing with the option of travelling abroad for competitions. The competitions are more about bringing together young people from different countries, learning how to work as a team and learning some skills. For more information, check out: www.atlanticchallenge.com

Someone else was asking about the word "Cheemo." This is a variation of the word "chimo", which you can read about below. I changed it from "chimo" to "cheemo" after someone told me that by coincidence, "chimo" is short for "child molester" in prisons (d'oh!) Anyway, here's some info about the harmless greeting, "chimo."

taken from: http://www.billcasselman.com/cwod_archive/chimo.htm

Chimo!(CHEE-mo) is a widespread and ancient Inuit greeting that may be accompanied by a gesture of salutation as well, namely moving the left hand in a circle on the area of the chest over the heart. Variants as heard by white explorers include teyma, tima, and timah. Some early explorers were told that chimo came from an Inuktitut root that meant ‘trade, barter’ and that the only greeting implied in the word when spoken to white southerners was ‘let’s trade.’ Even if that is true, today chimo is exclusively a warm greeting and is used in our North as a toast before drinking.

How I joined ETH...

Hey folks,

This is my first post since the new website has gone live so I'm going to give you the story of how I became involved with Enter the Haggis. James suggested this as a good way to start things off.

Milton, Ontario, 1997...

In grade 12 music class we were instructed to do a project on any style of music. A friend of mine at the time, Owen Pallett (you can read about him on wikipedia if you wish), and I decided to study Celtic music. I played acoustic guitar and he played fiddle and we arranged some Irish and Scottish tunes and performed them for the class. We enjoyed it so much that we decided to do a few local gigs - a strawberry festival, a German restaurant, lacrosse games and so forth. At some point someone made us aware of a local Renaissance faire that was looking for entertainment for the summer so we decided to audition. Although we passed the audition, I had to find a substitute guitar player for the gig because I decided to attend school in Australia for a six months.

At the Renaissance faire a piper by the name of Craig Downie was doing a one-man musical comedy show. He had also put together a band called "Enter the Haggis" and had his eyes open for a fiddle player to fill an opening in his lineup. He met Owen there and invited him to join the band.

York University, North York, 1998...

I was in first year university and received a call from Owen asking for my opinion on whether he should join a Goo-Goo Dolls cover band or a Celtic rock band (as he'd been offered both gigs.) I suggested that the Celtic rock group would be more interesting, unwittingly sealing my own fate. He ended up deciding to join Enter the Haggis and shortly afterwords I went to see the band at a venue at the University of Toronto. That was the first time I met Craig. I was wearing my dad's old "Nova Scotia" sweater and Rob, having come to Ontario from PEI, commented on it.

A couple of months later, I received a call from Owen saying that the band was looking for a guitarist to replace the current guitarist who was planning on leaving the band to open up a second restaurant. The restaurant is called the Paddock and Miranda from the Glengarry Bhoys currently has a weekly gig there (small world.) I had just started a four year university program and wasn't sure that I should commit to a band at that point. I called my mom and she said that I should go for it because that was what I was studying to do after all. The other problem was that I didn't own an electric guitar. I had sold the one I'd owned in high school when I moved out west to Alberta and British Columbia for six months. I decided that I was interested in the prospect of joing the band and remedied the guitar situation by heading to an area of Toronto that used to have a lot of pawn shops with musical instruments. It was at one of those shops that I bought the telecaster that is my principle guitar to this day for $550. Owen told me to call Craig who told me to come to a meeting/audition at his loft near King and Spadina.

I rode the rickety old elevator to the appropriate floor and nervously knocked on the door. Craig and the band's then bassist, Rob "Rodent" McCready were there and we shook hands, made small talk and eventually jammed on some of the songs of the day and some new ideas that they were working on. I was 19 at the time but must have seemed like 15 to Craig because I was pretty shy, naive and baby-faced. The whole experience was very unusual for me since I had grown up in a small town and had never seen an abode like that before. There was actually an article in a local entertainment paper about the band that mostly focused on Craig's loft. From what I remember of it... the shower was in the main room, was made of sheet metal with the classic triangular red and blue plastic faucet handles and a hockey stick instead of a shower curtain bar. There was no bathroom in the loft, instead a common one for local businesses down the hall. In the main area by the factory-style windows were two well-used couches and a small amplifier that picked up local radio frequencies from the nearby CN Tower louder than a guitar. The ceiling must have been 18 or 20 feet high with exposed brick and large air ducts. His bed was raised up in a loft area on top of a small office area. It was simultaneously one of the most and least comfortable places I'd ever been. Comfortable because it was so open, airy and relaxed and uncomfortable because it was unlike anywhere I'd been before and felt like another world. I just tried to find the article on the Internet somewhere but couldn't locate it.

I'm not sure when I received the official invitation to join the band, but it must have happened shortly after that. It was decided that I should come to several shows and watch Tom Patterson (the guitarist I was replacing) so I would be prepared to take the reigns. My first official show was in January of 1999 at an Irish pub called Slainte in Hamilton, Ontario. I wish I had video or at least a photo from that show that I could share with you. I was very nervous but I think the show went as smoothly as could be expected. I remember wearing a backwards plaid cap that my dad had been given as a young boy from his Scottish grandparents, as well as some clip-on shades over my glasses.

That's about it for me. If anyone has any questions or comments, I think there is a way to do so on this site.

Cheemo,
Trevor