blowing one's own trumpet

...which I'm just told, by my trusty translator, equates to Tooting Your Own Horn, in Americanese.   There was, whichever it is, a lot of it going on - in very literal terms - under my office window today.   Ah, my office.   It ought to be an oasis of tranquility (though internally, it's opposite the common room, which was chiefly distinguished today by people talking - good - and by excellent sandwiches and, yes, miniature cheesecakes, which are not at all good things to put within ten yards of me).   It looks onto trees, grass, paths, and what, until the last few days, I'd always thought of as vaguely nouveau-sub-Ruskinian-Venetian brick faintly Italianate buildings.   But these buildings have taken on an identity, and seem to belong to the Music Department.   I can't for a minute complain about being at an arty, creative, imaginative institution - but there is, indeed, a lot of musical activity now taking place under my window, most of it today involving trumpets, horns, cornets, saxophones, tubas, souzaphones, and a whole lot of other things besides.   So of course, in the end, on my way out to the library, I went to investigate - and it was the Brass and Percussion Orientation Session.   Orientation for what?   One very good thing about the arty, creative etc etc environment, of course - and the fact that it's Los Angeles - is that no one even seems to notice that one's taking pictures.   The whole campus is full of people taking pictures ... at the very worst, I guess someone might confuse me for a new student's parent.