Fall Happenings

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I’ve almost made it to November! Yay!

Don’t know why I’ve been looking forward to that month, but I have been. I’ve got a lot going on in November, so maybe that’s part of it. It’s also nice that cooler temperatures have finally arrived in Georgia. I set up the kerosene heater on the back porch last weekend, which is pretty great. We’ve had pretty substantial precipitation for the last few days, so sitting on the porch hasn’t been particularly DRY, but it has been fairly warm with the heater – and the breezes have been fantastic.

Next Monday (11/3), we’ve got a chimney sweep coming to clean out the main chimney. Hopefully, they’ll do it the correct way, because I don’t believe that’s been done since Sandie first bought the place. We’ve got a cast-iron stove insert in the fireplace, and when she had the chimney “cleaned” prior to moving in in 2020, that person did not take said insert out – so I can’t really see how he actually cleaned anything. I hired a guy last year to come do it, but he got here, saw the stove, said, “I really didn’t want to start my morning this way,” and left. This time around, I told the folks up front that there is a stove in the fireplace – they said that wasn’t a problem. We’ll see. I’d really like to get everything cleaned correctly. I’d also like to find someone to fix the blower attached to the stove insert, but maybe – if the chimney guy does pull out the stove – I’ll be able to look at it and perhaps fix it myself. It tends to make a lot of noise when it gets going.

On Tuesday (11/4) the brass band starts rehearsing for our Christmas concerts. The director and I have been going back and forth for the last month about what tunes to include, what to leave out, what order to do things, etc., and he finally made a decision this morning. Fortunately, I’d been putting copies of everything we discussed on a shared folder, so it was easy to take out everything that didn’t make the cut, and the band should be able to get their parts without any confusion.

We started rehearsing for next year’s NABBA championships a couple of weeks ago. Made some good progress during an all-day-Saturday rehearsal, and I’m kind of pumped about our potential. We’ve got another all-day rehearsal coming up on the 15th.

Also on the 15th, I’ve got a rehearsal with Morningside Presbyterian – playing tuba in a quintet for their 100th anniversary celebration. Should be fun, although I pulled out the big horn last week and learned to my horror that I’m rustier than ever before on it. Had trouble just getting down to a G below the staff. Have been doing some wood shedding and long tones and will continue to do so up until the gig (on the 16th),

On the 17th, I head to the woods for a week. Going back to Fort Mountain State Park here in Georgia for a change. Normally, I’d head up to Michigan, but I just didn’t want to stay at Wilderness Park again, Cheboygan State Park doesn’t have the walking trails that I want, and Pictured Rocks closes for the season on the 15th of October. So I figured if I’m not going to one of those places, I might as well just save gas and stay in GA. Won’t have the Great Lake or the wind, but I’ll have a nice bunch of trails to walk – and I’ll have a campsite with electricity and running water, so it’s going to be a different kind of camping. Going to bring a coffee maker, electric cooler, an electric space heater, maybe some string lights for inside the tent, etc. I’ll still have propane-powered stuff as backups, but it might be fun to try “glamping” this time.

I’ll be getting back from the park the week of Thanksgiving, and Dad and Dianne are planning to come down and visit us on that day, which is awesome. Dad moved back to SC (from OH) about a month ago and is living with Dianne. Sounds like the two of them are getting along well, and it’s REALLY nice having him closer. Looking forward to showing him the cabin (and my woodshop) in a few weeks.

So that’s what’s on the docket. If I think of it, I’ll try to provide more details as the month progresses.

Wilderness State Park – 2024

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As the title would imply, I’m at Wilderness State Park in Petosky, MI, this week. I arrived yesterday afternoon, late enough to take everything out of the car, put it in my cabin (the Sturgeon Cabin), drink some bourbon, and go to bed.

This morning, after a breakfast of granola and berries (I’m hillbilly like that), I drove to the Walmart in Cheboygan and picked up 3 new lanterns. The cabin is DARK. Got back, got things organized, and I guess my vacation can now REALLY begin. On Election Day, no less.

Wilderness State Park? I found this place last year, when I was trying to book a week at Pictured Rocks and discovered that Michigan is now closing a lot of its parks (yes, Pictured Rocks is a national park, but I group them all together) on October 15th. This did not sit well with me, since I like for my Michigan sojourns to be at least a bit chilly, so I went on the hunt for the northern-most park in Michigan that I could reserve in November. I found Wilderness. And I spent a week last November living at the park in a tent.

It was glorious.

On one of my walks last year, I stumbled upon the Sturgeon Cabin, and instantly fell in love with it. It’s a log cabin that’s about 3 miles from anywhere, right on the shore of Lake Michigan. No power. Hand-pumped (tannin-filled) water out front. A vault toilet about 100 yards away. Wood crib that holds about a two cords of wood. So secluded that you almost don’t see it if you drive past on the “road” (literally a couple of dirt ruts) that goes past it. When I saw that I could reserve it for the second week of November, it was a no-brainer to grab it. I’ll have some pictures up in a future post.

This is smaller than the cabins I’ve stayed in at Cheboygan State Park. It’s probably 18×22 inside, with two bunk beds and another single bed, a table and benches, a counter with two shelves, and a wonderful little wood stove. Behind the stove is a stonework that looks like it may have been an actual fireplace at one time, but it is now just a great place to store wood – and whoever was here before me left me a good supply, so I probably won’t have to go to the wood crib before I leave.

Behind the cabin is a short path through some trees and shrubs to a private beach on Lake Michigan. I say “private” because – due to the way the land lies – you’d have to REALLY want to get to this beach from anyplace other than the cabin. On the other three sides of the cabin are fairly thick woods. This is the type of place that I’ve fantasized about retiring to for the last 30 years. I may never (let’s face it, I’ll never) get to realize that dream, but I can live it a couple of weeks every year.

So that’s a description of where I am. Over the next week, I’ll try to get daily entries in – with photos – so I can remember what I did this week in November of 2024.

Wilmington Trip

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Sandie and I took a long weekend and drove up/over to Wilmington, NC, last Friday. She lived there for about 14 years and wanted to show me around a bit and reconnect with some old friends.

We tried to go to a seafood place at Wrightsville Beach for dinner Friday, but the line to get is was so long that we bailed on the idea and got Mexican food instead.

Saturday, we went to the historic district, took a walking tour, and got some seafood at a bar and grill (which was actually really good). Saturday night, we drove past Sandie’s old house and she spotted a neighbor “kid” (now with two kids of his own) that she recognized from her time there, so we wound up spending an hour at their house. Not overly thrilling for ME (shoot, I didn’t know anybody), but she had a good time.

Sandie and one of her old buddies pose in front of a giant basket of French fries

That evening, we went to one of her old hangs – a pool/dart bar – and hung out with some of her old friends while being filled with bourbon by one of her old bartenders.

Fortunately, we got an Uber driver for that last, because the bourbon was pretty freaking good.

Wilmington has an extraordinary history as one of the earliest, largest, and most influential towns in North Carolina – Cornelius Harnett, for example, was a signer of the Articles of Confederation and a native Wilmingtonian – but it also has a pretty dark period which was nearly forgotten until just the last 10 years or so. I’m speaking, of course, about the Wilmington Massacre of 1989. During a few days in November of that year, a group of White Supremacist Democrats not only completed the only successful coup d’etat in American history, but also exiled the majority of the city’s prominent blacks (and a good number of sympathetic whites), and murdered between 10 and 200 other blacks (nobody seems to have a good grasp on the actual number). As a result, huge numbers of blacks fled the city, flipping it from majority black to majority white literally overnight, draining it of skilled and unskilled labor, and pretty much handcuffing it economically.

The massacre can in some ways be considered to be the spark that spread Jim Crow throughout the south, as it became a blueprint for Southern Democrats on how to disenfranchise blacks without also losing the poor/illiterate whites. One enduring legacy – in 1898, blacks made up 56% of the population in Wilmington. Today, that number is 16%. This is not a spurious relationship – Wilmington today is still seen by many blacks as somewhat of a sundown town.

If you’d like to learn more about this, check out Wilmington’s Lie – a well-told and well-researched tome covering the event itself, the political causes of it, and the political fallout from it. I found it to be eye-opening, depressing, and fascinating – and quite relevant to today’s political and racial climate.

Grave of Cornelius Harnett

Rain…

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The post title pretty much says it all. It has been raining here every day for what seems like 6 months. Okay, maybe two weeks. Point is, it’s hot, humid, wet, and I’m just waiting for a tree to fall on either the shop or the house. Sitting on the porch is uncomfortable because it’s so humid. Sitting inside is uncomfortable because Sandie keeps the thermostat at 12 below 0. So I just keep calm on carry on.

The shop reorganization continues. After pulling a 12-foot-long cabinet off of one side wall, I moved a cabinet from the floor of the back wall to the side, mounted my radial saw inside of it, put a layer of plywood on top, and I’ve now got a bench stretching basically the entire side wall (with a radial saw in one end). I’m planning on taking the existing (kitchen-type) countertop off of the remaining cabinets at the back wall and replacing it with plywood to give myself more useable bench space there. First, though, I’m moving my glue cabinet from one side of the shop to the other – to hang it over the space at the end of the “new” bench on the side wall. It’s a corner cabinet, and I’ve cut it down to just the part containing the lazy Susan. Just trying to figure out the best way to hang it on cleeats now. Trickier to keep it level than I’d anticipated, but I’ll figure it out.

Bench space in the shop,with the radial saw mounted inside a cabinet. Glue cabinet will hang in that corner.

On the “other” home front – my house in Duluth – the water bill has been steadily creeping up over the last few months, and I’m now convinced that I’ve got a leak somewhere, but haven’t been able to find it. I asked Terry, my renter, to put some food coloring in the toilet tanks the other day to see if we can spot a leaky toilet, but I haven’t heard back from him yet. Planning on going over there this weekend to see what I can find (and also to collect rent). I’m really hoping it’s just a leaky toilet. Not looking forward to having to hire a plumber to find and fix a hidden leak.

Dog Days

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Mojo (Sandie’s little dog) went to the vet yesterday. He (the dog) wasn’t particularly thrilled about this, but he had (probably still has) an ear infection that looked nasty, smelled disgusting, and was obviously bothering him. Sandie spent some time Monday night torturing him by pulling hair out of his ear, and I couldn’t stand listening to him yelp, so I insisted that he go to the vet.

Ear looks better and doesn’t smell anymore. And I didn’t have to hear him scream.

In other news, it has been hot and rainy since we returned from Canada last week. The yard is slowly growing into a jungle because it’s always raining – or when it’s not it’s like walking into a steam room whenever you go outside, so nobody has felt much like mowing. I’ve been spending some time in my shop redecorating. Pulling cabinets off of walls, reconfiguring them, planning in my mind how I want things to look. It’s a slow process, but should give me a lot more bench space when all is said and done.

Work is beginning to really bore me. I feel more sorry for the folks that I used to supervise every day, because doing tech support is just so uninspiring. You fix one thing and there are 10 more lined up to look at. Half of the questions seem to be variations of “Why doesn’t report A match report B?” My knee jerk response has always been, “Because they’re different reports,” but that wouldn’t fly, so I end up going into the database and comparing the reports on a line-by-line level until I can pinpoint exactly which record is missing from one report or the other, and it’s always because, for whatever reason, that record shouldn’t BE on report A or B and the user has done something stupid. I can’t explain this to them in technical terms, and I don’t understand it in accounting terms, so I usually end up finding the issue and then asking a teammate to translate for me. It’s just…boring. I like having projects that have endings. This type of support just doesn’t have those. Don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to do it.

Got a call from a group of doctors who stick cameras up your butt a few days ago. Seems that my doc REALLY wants them to do this to me. I’ve avoided it for nearly 60 years, but I guess I’ll bite the bullet and get it done, if only to get Sandie off of my back about it. Not something that I’m looking forward to, although I am a bit curious about how much weight I’ll lose during the purge process before I do it. That could be interesting.

Football season is only a month or so away. So that’s nice.

Not much else to say today. Maybe something amazing will happen tonight.

To Canada and Back

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Sandie and I got in the car two Fridays ago (July 5th) and pointed it north for our third annual sojourn to Magnetawan, Ontario. Stayed in Perrysburg, OH, Friday night and arrived at Camp Ulvik mid-afternoon on the 6th.

We spent a week there, doing what people do for a week at The Mag – sitting on the porch or our cabin, jumping in the lake, eating great food, drinking good bourbon (or, in Sandie’s case, wine), playing cards, visiting Parry Sound and Huntsville, eating pierogis from the snack bar in town, and generally relaxing with friends and family. The group this year was composed of Cy, “T,” Jamie Tall and his partner Alee (pronounced “Allie”), Trude and her friend Wayne, and Sandie and myself. An older group (Alee, at 29, was the baby by far), we may have done more sleeping and less “athleting” than in years past, but Jamie, Sandie, Cy, “T” and I did get a couple of hours in on the tennis court late in the week. The fence around the court was replaced (at ridiculous expense) sometime between last summer and this, and it seemed a shame to waste the opportunity.

Sunset on Ahmic Lake

It did rain a couple of times. For the most part, however, the weather was phenomenal. It was pretty drizzly for most of the day Monday or Tuesday, so we all went to Parry Sound and – except for Cy and “T” – we took a 2-hour cruise around the Georgian Bay on the Island Princess. I’d never done that before. It was interesting and a good way to kill a couple of hours. Not something I’d put on a “must do” list by any means. Particularly at $56/person.

There were at least 11 loons in the cove near our cabin, which was pretty sweet. I only heard them a few times, but it’s nice to know that the population is doing okay.

Last Saturday (July 12th), we packed up and hit the road by about 10AM. Crossed back into the States at Port Huron, MI, (the Blue Water Bridge there is terrifyingly high and narrow), and stayed in Lima, OH, Saturday night. Got home at around 7 Sunday evening, much to the joy of Mojo, Sandie’s little dog – and hopefully Joshua and Chamberlain were also pleased to have me back. They were not as ebullient in their happiness as was Mojo.

The 2024 Ulvik Gang

I wasn’t thrilled to get back to work on Monday morning, but fortunately I got another respite on Tuesday. The big boss came over from England, so the service team met him out our office (yes, there’s actually an office in Atlanta), where he went over our new application with us for a few hours and then took us all out for an afternoon of lunch and bowling, It was the first time that I’d ever met three of my 5 co-workers, including my immediate supervisor. The bowling alley SUCKED (after two rolls, I didn’t even try to shoot well), but being able to see people who I’ve only known from Teams meetings for the last two years was nice.

Interviews and Shop Renovations

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I was working in my shop last weekend (on the aforementioned closet shelves) and started looking around and seeing wasted space and other inefficiencies. When Sandie bought the house, the shop was outfitted with what were obviously cabinets that had at some point been in a kitchen. There was a long rank of cabinets along the back wall with a kitchen sink in the middle of it. Two ranks of overhead cabinets were mounted on the side walls. Another floor rank ran along one of the walls. And there were a few of basically stand-alone cabinets scattered here and there. They weren’t in the best places, but I guess they were fairly functional, the sink notwithstanding.

Sandie had a long workbench that her father had made, so we put that in the shop as well.

Then Sandie decided to remodel her kitchen….and I added most of THOSE kitchen cabinets to the shop. Took the kitchen island, added some casters, made it a mobile workbench. Moved the other stuff around against the walls. Made a little “L” on one wall. There was, to put it mildly, a lot of counter/bench space – and not a lot of room for anything else.

Over the past couple of years, as I’ve tinkered around with the shop layout, I’ve come to the conclusion that probably 50% of the cabinets are completely unused. And this weekend, I noticed that the long rank of overheads that had been there from the start (in which I’ve been storing lots and lots of paint) are most decidedly bowing in the middle. Add to that the fact that the paint is not very organized, making it difficult to find what’s needed, and I decided that it was time to make some changes.

I haven’t really figured out what those changes will be, but I’m sure that at least THAT set of overheads is coming down and probably being relegated to a pile of scrap wood or a dumpster. First, though, I need a place for the paint. So I build a couple of simple shelf sets out of plywood, which will hang on cleats on the wall. That was my Sunday project. Came out pretty good, and each unit holds 16 gallons of paint. Now all I have to do is figure out where I’m going to hang them. Once I’ve done that, I can commence with taking down that set of cabinets. I have NO idea how I’m going to do that without hurting myself, but it needs to be done, and it will start the process of making a great workshop.

One of the paint storage units I built on Sunday. Much easier to locate the correct paint now…

In other news, we interviewed 5 folks for the director of the GBB job last week. One more to go (next week, when I’m in Canada). No clear leader at this point, and it’s going to be tough to whittle the 6 down to three finalists, who will each take a concert series this year to help us (and the band) decide who gets the gig. Some have very strong administrative skills, others have strong brass band experience. I’m kind of hoping we can get one of the latter as the primary director, and one of the former as an associate.

Wrap for the GBB Season

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The GBB finished up our 25th season last night by performing at the annual Euphonium and Tuba Festival (IET). We’ve done this many times before, and IET’s creator is currently one of the applicants to replace Joe. He’s a superb musician and has done a great job over the last 25 years or so at getting his name out there and developing contacts in the brass world, which has Simone wondering if he’s looking at the GBB job as a chance for more self-promotion. I wonder that about several of our applicants, but it’s not a showstopper for me. We need somebody who’ll be able to bring the best out in the band – particularly in terms of dynamics. If they can do that, I don’t care if they’re in it for the band or for themselves, to be honest. As long as they’re committed to actually being there and following through on band commitments, I’m good. One of the applicants let us down a few years ago – bailing as our conductor for personal reasons about a month before we were to compete. Granted, it was a big deal for him. He was to receive the GA teacher of the year award of some such on the same weekend as the competition; but it had us scrambling to find an alternate conductor, and the guy we ended up with really didn’t understand the music. One of the adjudicators was the composer. As the piece was extremely personal to him (the music dealt with an unexpected stroke that he had which left him struggling to do anything, much less compose, for a few years), he was not happy with our lack of interpretation.

At any rate, that applicant will not get my vote.

In other news, yesterday was Juneteenth, which is now a federal holiday, and my company gave us the day off.

I celebrated by attempting to electrocute myself. Actually, no, I didn’t do that. But I DID finally change out a 3-way light switch in our closet for a single-pole switch and removed the other 3-way from the kitchen. Have been meaning to do this for about 6 months, but I’m happily ignorant about anything involving electricity, and I didn’t want to do something that would burn the house down. Thank God for YouTube.’

So after I got that done, I put in a motion detector instead of a switch (in the closet) and began building some shelves that Sandie’s been asking for.

The Doldrums

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It has been extraordinarily hot for the last couple of weeks. I entertained the thought (briefly) of pressure washing parts of the driveway over the weekend, but with the mercury hitting the 90s by 8:30 in the morning, the idea just didn’t appeal to me once it was late enough to get out there with 1}a leaf blower and 2}a pressure washer. Yeah, I could start at 7AM, but I think the neighbors might take issue with that.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in the shop (air conditioner blasting) over the last couple of weeks putting together a workstation for my table saw. For the most part, I finished it up on Saturday, although I’m still waiting on a couple of parts to complete the crosscut sled that will be an accessory for it. The workstation itself consists of a box that holds the saw (a Dewalt contractor saw), a foldable extension wing on the left, retractable infeed and outfeed support, and a fairly substantial drawer for extra blades, jigs, etc. It also has open slots for a crosscut sled and the braces for the extension (or extensions if I decide to make one for the right side (which I might do if I decide to also use it as a temporary workbench).

When fully opened, the extensions allow me to safely cut a full 4’x8’ sheet of plywood (although those puppies are HEAVY, and getting them started is kind of a bear), but when everything is retracted, the whole thing has a footprint of about 2’x2’ and sits on casters, allowing me to move the thing out of the way when I’m not using it. It’s probably the most complex thing I’ve built, and I like it a lot. In truth, I’ve been meaning to build something like this for years, but never thought I could do it. When I saw an ad for birch plywood sheets for $25 each about a month ago, I jumped at the price, had 8 of them delivered, and figured, “What the heck. No excuse not to build it now.”

Table saw workstation, retracted
Table saw workstation, extended

It works well, and I just need to put the rail on the back fence of a crosscut sled that I built for it before I can pretty much call it done. One really nice thing about it is that the board that the saw actually sits on is micro-adjustable by means of four bolts under it – so I can always make sure that the top of the saw is exactly even with all of the extensions.