I’m mildly disturbed this morning.

Not in the usual, “there’s something not quite right about the way I think, act and feel” way; but in the “WTF is the deal?” way.  Like when you’re driving along and you stop behind a line of cars at a red light and the light turns green and the guy who is in the first car just sits there for 5 seconds before moving, and the chick in the second car waits another 3 seconds; and by the time the car directly in front of you finally starts to move, your green light has turned yellow and only 4 cars have gone through.  That kind of disturbed.

See, I went to a sort of informal meeting with a couple of GBB board members last night because one of them wanted to talk to the other one about the fact that our music director is a tyrannical dictator who refuses to let the members of the board do anything that will affect the band unless  he (the musical director) has his fingers in it.  This has been going on for years.  Since the band’s creation, actually.  The board member who wanted to talk about it last night is relatively new to the board, while the board member who was listening/commenting has been on the board of the band almost since its inception.

The above paragraph was not disturbing to me.  The above paragraph was simply setting the scene.  If this blog were a play, we’d refer to the above paragraph as a “roadie” or “a can of paint” or as “fluff.”  We would not refer to it as “a fluffer” unless this were the type of play that children under 18 should not be watching.

What distrubed me was something that happened during our soirée.  See, the three of us are all on a temporary committee of the board which is tasked with putting together a membership handbook and code of conduct.  This is something that the board started discussing a year ago.  The need for a set of written guidelines for membership, guidelines for the revocation of membership, etc.

I’m  a big proponent of this sort of thing.  In fact, do any of you remember posts from a year or two ago when I referred to being on a “planning committee” for the band?  If not, let me rehash.  The planning committee (PC) was group of 6 guys who were apparently hand-picked by the band’s tyrannical music director and told (I’m paraphrasing, but it’s pretty close to a direct quote), “The band is now entering its 10th season, and it’s time that we put some sort of a structure and long-range goals in place.”

Now, I’m not going to say that the PC spent every waking moment thinking about the needs of the band, but we (or at least “I”) did give up a number of Saturday mornings to meet.  We did do research into the legal status of the band in the eyes of the state of Georgia.  We did perform limited cost-benefit analyses on everything from band uniforms to tours to necessary hardware to the commission of a piece of music.  And we did try to put together a membership handbook and code of conduct.  Because I was a founding member of the band, I recalled that – way way way back in the day – we had been given a short list of rules during one of our rehearsals; and I asked various people who would have been associated with the creation of that memo if they had a copy of it.  Although being told by several people, “Yes,” the PC never did get to see that little one-page guidebook.

In fact, the PC didn’t get to see or accomplish much of anything because of the tyrant, and what we finally suggested to the tyrant, after discovering that the band was only barely a legal entity and that it could be facing trouble with the IRS, was that the band needed an actual “Board of Directors.”  After making this suggestion, the PC dissolved itself.  Three of the six members of the PC wound up on the BOD.  Two of them, along with one of the “original” BOD, were at the quasi-meeting last night.

All of that was just a little bit more background; but it touches on what disturbed me, as you will see shortly.

At some point during the quasi meeting, the “old timer board guy” (OG) responded to some comments by the new board guy (NG)  – who wanted to talk about how to do end runs around the music director (MD) – by pulling out a sheaf of papers.  These papers were beautifully typed up, in outline form, and addressed many of the concerns of NG.  Apparently OG and a couple of his friends had spent months putting together suggestions for the structure and long-range goals of the band at some point.  That “some point” was several years ago, in fact.  Their efforts had produced documents that dealt with the political structure of the band, the various committees that might be good to have, the audition processes for being in the band, the rules that members needed to obey to stay in the band, the ways in which members could be removed from the band, ideas for promoting the band, ideas for encouraging fellowship within the band….in short, they’d put together a nearly-complete members handbook and code of conduct and had codified many of the issues that the PC had attempted to attack.

I have been made aware over the last year that a group of people (“this group”) – some on the original board, some not – had spent time discussing plans for the band several years ago; and that “this group” was, while not openly hostile, less than thrilled by the formation of the PC.  “This group” put together the documents that I mentioned above.   While knowing that the PC was trying to implement structure, “this group” chose not to share the structure that it had already spent months preparing.  “This group” basically knew that the PC was doomed to fail.  Frankly, it sounds like “this group” really wanted the PC to fail.

That disturbs me in principle.  It disturbs me more because, with maybe one exception, nobody on the PC knew that “this group” had ever existed.  We didn’t know that it had already discussed and debated issues that we were discussing and debating.  We didn’t know that it had put together a road map for the band. We didn’t know anything about it – even after we openly asked the general membership of the band for input.  

The PC wanted to make things happen, but we didn’t really have a starting point and we didn’t know that the MD was a tyrant.  “This group” had already dealt with everything the PC was dealing with; yet none of “this group” clued us in.

I’m over the failure of the PC.  I got over it when the PC’s main suggestion – the formation of a new BOD – was acted upon.  The new BOD began meeting nearly a year ago with the goal of putting together structure and long-range goals for the band.

Yes, I know I’ve been repeating myself.  It’s called a literary construct.

Three members of the PC ended up on the new board.  Three members of “this group” ended up on the new board.  The new board began discussing the need for a members handbook and code of conduct, and it had a few lively and time-consuming discussions regarding what needed to be in such a document and how it should be worded.  Finally, after several board meetings spent way too much of the board’s time on the subject, it was decided to farm the job out to a committee.  Said committee is made of up two old members of the PC (myself and “NG”) and two old members of “this group” (“OG” and another guy who won’t be mentioned again, but who needs a code word and will therefore be known as “Mr. X”).

And so last night, OG innocently pulled out the documents that “this group” had put together YEARS AGO and which directly, succinctly and competently address most of the issues that the PC and the new BOD have been trying to deal with for the last 18 months.

Yeah.  I’m disturbed.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m not sure if I want to stay on the board.  Shit like this doesn’t make the prospect any more appealing.

So right after promising that I’d update this thing once a day or so, I lapse for five days.  Typical me, eh?  Sorry about that.  Quite a few things happened in those five days, so I’ll just jump right in.

On Friday, 12/11, I played my tuba with a small group from the brass band to help out the Salvation Army’s “Red Kettle” deal that they do every December.  You know the drill.  You go into a grocery store (or department store or mall or hardware store or automotive store or massage parlor) and, in doing so, you pass a woman dressed in a Salvation Army uniform and ringing a bell so furiously that you’re tempted to knock it out of her hand and tell her that you need 6 more minutes of sleep.  Suspended next to her, by a chain attached to a red tripod, is a red plastic pail with a hole in the cover.  After you’ve done your shopping or gotten your massage, you emerge from the store and you guiltily stare at the ground while walking past her as quickly as possible, hoping that some other decent person will put money in her bucket, thereby drawing attention away from the fact that you’re not putting money in said bucket because you used a debit card to pay for everything and you don’t have any change.

At least that’s what I do.

For the last several years, however, the GBB has allowed me to feel a bit less guilty by grabbing a tuba or euphonium or trombone or alto horn, standing right next to the bucket lady, and playing Christmas music with 4 or 5 of my closest brass-playing friends.  The idea being, of course, that we can guilt more people into putting money into the bucket.  From what I’ve been told, it actually works.

So that’s what I did on Friday evening outside of one of the Sam’s Warehouse stores in Dekalb County.  Our little ensemble was comprised of cornet, alto horn, trombone, euphonium and, as I mentioned, my tuba and me.  We played until about 8 O’Clock.  Although it was quite nippy, I had a great time.

Doing these gigs in the cold never fails to remind me of caroling with my trombone in Middlebury or Shoreham in the 1970s, invariably having to go inside a store or house at some point in order to unfreeze my slide, and finishing things up by quaffing hot chocolate at someone’s house.  I always enjoyed those relatively impromptu performances, and I still do.

Betsy Jones was the euphoniumist for the Red Kettle gig.  She’s from Warner-Robins, south of Macon, GA, and she was also playing a couple of church services with me on Sunday – with a rehearsal on Saturday morning – so she spent Friday and Saturday at my house.  After the Saturday rehearsal, we’d been planning to  maybe walk around historic Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta or go to the zoo or maybe even just take our horns and a Tuba Christmas book and hang out by a mall and play for change; but because the weather was so dreary (rainy and about 30 degrees), we opted instead to watch movies, make stuffed pasta shells and pumpkin bread, and play Scrabble for most of the day.

She kicked my ass in the Scrabble portion of those activities.

The Sunday services went fairly well, and we collected our checks and spent the rest of the afternoon (still dreary) eating the aforementioned pasta shells and listening to a very cool modern mass called “The Armed Man,” composed by Karl Jenkins.

Now I’m going to jump back to Friday evening.  Hate to confuse everyone by getting things all out of order here, but I didn’t want to plug what follows into the middle of an ongoing ramble as it’s kind of significant.

A few weeks ago, I got a text from Greg informing me that a doctor had found a growth on Mom’s pancreas and some spots on her liver.  I called Mom to get more details about this and she told me that she’d be getting a biopsy done last Monday (the 7th) and would have some results on Thursday (the 10th).  So while driving home from the Red Kettle gig, I called her to find out what was going on.

The news is not good.  She tells me that she’s in the final stages of incurable pancreatic cancer and she’s got somewhere between 6 months and a year in which to correct my manners, pass on bits of republican indoctrination, give me cooking tips and the like.

Our conversation on Friday night was quite naturally not a short one and I am, also I think quite naturally, a bit weirded out by the news.  That doesn’t sound quite right, but “devastated” isn’t the right word.  It’s hard to internalize the fact of your only mother’s ultimate demise after she’s very calmly laid everything out for you and when she sounds healthy enough and when your brain rarely attempts to deal with anything that is more than a day removed from right now.  Add to that that I’m a naturally hopeful person (I really am), and you’ll understand why I just don’t know how to feel.  Nostalgia, I guess, is my primary emotion right now.  I’ve been continually tripping over memories of Mom that had, for the most part, been stored on the cobweb-covered shelves in the basement of my brain.  I thought I’d try to put some of those down in this blog over the next several weeks – partly to help myself cope and partly because, if Mom still reads this, she might be made aware of some of the little things that she’s done or said over the last 44 years that had effects on me.

I’d have to say that the strongest memory at this point is of a phone call that I made to her at about midnight on a December night in 2004.  I’d broken up with Audrey a couple of weeks earlier, had done everything I could to repair the damage – without success – and I was inconsolable.  I’m quite certain that mothers aren’t trained in how to take phones calls from their sobbing, unintelligible, 38-year-old sons; but my Mom did an admirable job of just listening to me cry, giving me a number of much-needed hugs from 150 miles away, and convincing me that – in spite of my certainty that it was – the world was not ending.  I’m sure that she had much better things to be doing (like sleeping) for the hour or two that it took for me to calm down, but she hung with me and made me understand that I could get past things and that, someday, I’d be able to smile again.

She was right, of course.  Except for her crazy political ideas, she has usually been right.

TWD

I shouldn’t admit it in writing, of course, but I left work early today. Really early.

Man.

I haven’t updated this thing in 6 months. And I left the Canadian monologue unfinished. Just wow. I’m sort of a slacker.

Let me just gloss over everything by saying this: A lot has happened in the last 6 months. Some of it’s probably interesting. A lot of it isn’t.

I’m not going to bore myself or you by trying to remember much of any of it. As a summary since July:

• I’ve played a few concerts with the GBB
• I’ve gone to 11 football games, taken about 10,000 photographs, and sold about 30 of them.
• I’ve quit drinking and smoking.
• I’m contemplating going back to school for a masters in music in a few years.
• I’m trying to figure out how in THE hell I can afford to do that.
• I’ve started taking tuba lessons.
• I’ve gone camping once or twice.
• I’ve totally fallen in love with a woman, but I expect nothing to come of that.
• I’ve refinanced by second mortgage.
• I’ve launched about 4 other blogs for various reasons under various names and I’m not going to tell you what they are.

That pretty much covers it.

Now as far as THIS blog goes, I’ve decided to make it one of those “normal” blogs, which I will attempt to update on a much more regular basis (like once a day or so) with items of very little interest to anyone. Along the lines of “this is what I did today, this is what I’m thinking right now, this is what the big picture of my life looks like at this point,” and garbage like that.

It will be incredibly boring to everyone except myself (who will go back over it in a year or two and see just how screwed up my life was in 2009 and 2010); but hey…this is called “Stuff Nobody Reads” for a reason.

So to kick things off for today, I overslept (slightly) for the second time in two days. This is because, also for the second time in two days, I stayed up until about 2 o’clock this morning chatting online with the aforementioned woman (I’ll call her Chris for now), who is once again talking about moving far far away to pursue her doctorate.

More power to her. Doctorates are good. However, seeing as how I didn’t tell the last woman who moved away and left my ass pining for her, I vow that I will tell Chris, in no uncertain terms, that I don’t want her to leave. Hopefully she’ll read this and acknowledge it and I won’t actually have to tell her. Because, you know, I don’t want to be seen as standing in the way of anybody who’s going after an advanced degree.

Had a tuba lesson with Bernard last night and it went okay. I’m still fluttering around the third-line D – I think because my chops are just weak – but I think I’m getting a tad better at controlling it when I’m fresh. At the end of the lesson, however, I was having a terrible time trying to center a C# in the Persichetti solo, and I finally told Bernard, “Look, I’m trying, but I’m just tired. I practiced for 90 minutes before I got here.”

He was astonished, and told me quite earnestly that I wasn’t supposed to be practicing on the days when I studied with him. I was like, “You told me to practice every day. That’s what I’ve been doing.” His response was, “Don’t you remember practicing for auditions? You didn’t practice on the day of the audition, right?”

“Bernard,” I said, “I told you when we first started doing this that I’ve never practiced. I don’t know how to do it. You said every day, I was doing every day. If you don’t want me to do it every day, you’ve got to tell me not to do it every day.”

So he had a nice laugh over that and told me not to practice on the days I take lessons. He also said that the revelation that I had been doing so cleared up some questions for him. I’m guessing he means the question, “Why isn’t this guy getting any better?” I can answer that. My chops are shot to hell by the time he gets to hear me play.

In other news, I’ve started researching the NA Brass Band Assoc in a serious way because I’m thinking I might nominate myself to be on the board of directors of that group. I’m on the board of the Georgia Brass, but am quite disillusioned with that post. The GBB “board” is basically an attempt by the founder/music director/president to legitimize all of his decisions. Board members at large have very little ability to conceive of, plan, finance, or implement anything unless the f/md/p wants to do the same thing and has complete control over it. I don’t need that. My term on that body is supposed to end on January 1. I am completely torn. I hate wasting my time with it, but I have this deep-seated hope that, just maybe, I’ll get to actually contribute to something great.

So anyway, thinking about throwing my hat in to ring for the nabba board (which has also been disappointing lately), and I’m doing a lot of research about the association and its history in order to 1}make sure I want to do this, and 2}be able to present myself as someone with a knowledge of our history and plans for our future if I do.

Wednesday, July 8, did indeed turn out to be a gorgeous Ahmic day.  It began auspiciously enough with a pancake breakfast eaten under overcast skies.  After this feast, Diane and I swept and vacuumed the main cabin.  Much of the rest of the morning was taken up with various maintenance activities, consisting of everything from cleaning the Wigger’s porch to scraping crud off of a guesthouse doc, but I must admit that most of the morning and afternoon are a complete blank to me.

Sometime during the afternoon, the owner of the peahen was located and he arrived at the camp with a hastily-constructed trap for the animal – basically a large wire cage which had been jury-rigged with a mousetrap  (on the outside of the cage), which supposedly  would be triggered by the bird tugging at some grapes inside the cage, causing a stick to be pulled out from under the cage door, thus trapping the peahen (alternately known as Francis by the women in the camp and Cher by me) and allowing her to be safely transported back to the farm where she belongs.

This, of course, did not work.  After watching it for 30 minutes or so, I decided to go for a walk and the bird’s owner decided to leave the trap overnight and go home.

I didn’t see anything overly interesting on my walk, which led me down Langford Lane to the Billy Rouse camp; but did take a number of road shots.  I don’t know why I’m so fascinated with roads, but I am.  Deal with it.

Upon my return from the walk, I trudged to my boathouse home with the intention of taking a nap.  Don Peddie had other ideas.  I became aware of these when he came charging towards the boathouse, saw me on the balcony, and screamed, “Get your biggest lens and come with me!  There are loons on the lake!”

Being an old loon hand, I wasn’t overly excited, but Don was; so I decided to humor him.  Good call on my part.  He’d found two adult loons and a chick – something I haven’t seen before.  I learned later that there were actually two chicks, but I only saw the one.  That was enough for me, and I ended up taking about 80 pictures of the three birds.  We then screamed back to the camp, where Don exchanged me for Julie and took off again, apparently opening a new “Peddie Nature Cruises” company or something.

After the loon excursion, I ran into Cy and T, who were just about to hit the tennis court – something I’d wanted to do since last weekend, so I horned my way into their game.  We played several sets of Canadian doubles (rotating 2-against-1); and, for the first time that I can remember, I actually won.  Final score was 4 for me, 3 for T and 2 for Cy.  My plan is to never ever ever never ever let T forget it.

Flush with my victory, I ran to the main cabin to fulfil my duties as assistant cook for Karl.  He didn’t really need my help as he threw together a fantastic creamed corn casserole to go along with a very cool “salad” (tomatoes with mozzarella slices, basil, oil and vinegar), and the main course of chicken breasts grilled in the big green egg.  For dessert, he came up with grapes mixed with sour cream, which were topped with cinnamon, brown sugar, and triple sec.  Good stuff.

After dinner activities were fairly tame.  The ladies worked on the puzzle for a while before a game of team cribbage broke out.  I spent the evening getting my butt kicked in Dominion (an online card game).

Then it was off to bed for us all, where we fell asleep listening to the laughter of the loons.

Next up:  Thursday! 

TWD

Yeah, baby!  The moon was HUGE over the Rouse’s boathouse last night!

Okay…of course the picture over there is photoshopped.  I think it looks pretty cool anyway, and it is indeed made up of two photos that I took on Monday night.  The shot of the moon was actually sort of fun.  I set my camera to the “bulb” setting, which means that the shutter will stay open for as long as my finger is on the button.  In order to cut down on vibration, I also used a remote shutter-release cable; and to cut down on the vibration caused by the shutter itself, I turned off off the lights in the boathouse, held a magazine over the front of my camera’s lens (camera was on a tripod), opened the shutter, waited for several seconds (in order to let the shutter-caused vibrations stop), and then quickly moved the magazine away from the lens and then back in front of it (picture Matthew Brady taking pictures during the civil war).  It took quite a few attempts, but I finally started to get the timing down, resulting in the fairly clean moon image that I used for the above manipulation.

You’ve got to admit that it’s more interesting than the actual shot of the Rouse boathouse, which came out like this:

 
Anyway,  back to the narrative.  Monday did indeed start out to be sort of a blah day, weatherwise.  It rained in the early morning (before I was awake) and then turned quite cool.  Cy, “T,” Karl, Diane, Don and Julie decided to head to nearby Huntsville to do some shopping and act like tourists.  I opted to hang out at Camp Ulvik, largely because I slept until nearly 10 and the old folks were ready to leave by the time I made my way to the cabin.

After treating myself to a hot shower (because of the cool air, I couldn’t convince myself to jump in the lake), I walked for about 45 minutes with my camera, hoping that some enterprising wild thing would be out and about in the overcast day.  The only thing I saw were mosquitoes, who happily ate away at my ears, neck, hands and any other exposed skin they could find.  When it started to rain, I headed back towards the camp probably more quickly than I had to, considering the fact that my camera was quite safe inside a plastic bag.

I spent most of the rest of Monday afternoon sitting on the Wigger’s porch and chatting on my computer.  The old folks got home shortly before cocktail hour (the hour or two preceding dinner), and Don happily started a fire in the main cabin’s large fireplace.  When I say it was “cool,” perhaps I should define what I mean.  It was in the high 40s.  A fire was quite welcome.

Dinner, put together by “T” and Julie, was barbequed pork ribs, leftover chickpea stuff, and some sort of salad; and was – by and large – not bad.  I have this thing about messy food, though:  I don’t eat much of it.  It’s too much work, much like peel-n-eat shrimp.  So later, after the old folks had all gone to bed (no cards or anything Monday, due largely to the fact that T’s sister and brother-in-law showed up after dinner), I sort of gorged on peanuts while playing on my computer and listening to Chicago Public Radio.  I did this until the fire had died away and mosquitoes began invading the main cabin, then headed to my bug-free boathouse, where I slept like a brick.

Tuesday was warmer than Monday, but the rain really arrived.  “T” and Don went out fishing after breakfast (I was invited, but really didn’t feel like getting soaked), and the skies opened up while they were gone.  I spent the morning playing on my computer and looking at pictures while Karl looked at his fantasy baseball stats and the ladies in the camp combined their efforts on the jigsaw puzzle (which is currently about 85% done, but is still incredibly difficult).

The happy fishermen got back by noon or so – drenched and fishless – and Don immediately got to work building a fire.  Since I still had no Canadian money and  since the rain showed no sign of stopping and since it was getting extremely crowded (and, might I add, LOUD) inside the cabin, I decided that a drive to Parry Sound was in order.  Actually, I decided that a drive to anywhere was in order, and originally started towards Burke’s Falls and/or Huntsville before literally turning around in someone’s driveway and heading the opposite direction to Parry Sound, which is located on Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay.

The village of Parry Sound (birthplace and current hometown of Bobby Orr for the sports fans among you) is dominated two things: a town dock and a railroad trestle.  The trestle is the longest in Ontario (something like 1,700 feet long) and celebrated its 100th anniversary last June.

The town dock is a public dock run by the Parry Sound chamber of commerce and can accomodate just about any size boat.  Anybody who can afford the docking fee can dock there and it’s not uncommon to see a normal ski-boat moored with a $10M yacht on one side and a tall ship on the other.  The dock is also the point of departure for about three different cruise companies, all of which take passengers out among the thousands of islands in the Georgian Bay, stop for lunch at one of the islands with a restaurant, and then come back.  In the last 20 years or so that I’ve been coming to Ahmic, I’ve taken these tours three times – twice on a tugboat called “Cambrian,” and once on a larger cruise boat named “Island Princess.”  I prefer the tugboat, but kind of hate to waste an entire day out on the bay.

The village of Parry Sound itself is, unfortunately, rather hokey.  There’s an excellent used book store there – I spend an hour or so there every time I visit the village – and a couple of touristy knick-knack stores, but (I remembered this too late) Huntsville is an infinitely better place for picking up souvenirs.  The weather was pleasant enough, however, so I spent most of the afternoon hanging out on the dock, visiting the book store and sifting through the aforementioned tacky stuff before heading back to Ahmic.  Upon arrival, I fired up the computer, caught up on Facebook and chatted with a friend in Macon while Karl and Julie threw together some truly amazing hamburgers along with something that I assumed was beet greens, but have since been informed was actually Swiss Chard (never heard of it).

The sky during dinner indicated that Wednesday might be a beautiful day.

For whatever reason, last night’s after-dinner activity became “Inside Vermont Politics,”  the game wherein “T” and Karl  throw out stories about anything local to Vermont and Di and Cy and Don and (to a much lesser extent) Julie attempt to comment on those items before “T” or Karl loudly change to a completely different subject.  It is a common game, often played at Ulvik, and I admit that I’m not very good at it, as it contains very little of interest to me.  So I hung in there for only an hour or so (Julie didn’t even do that much, as you can see) and then waddled to my boathouse to, once again, have a wonderful and restful sleep.

More tomorrow or Friday.

TWD

Well, it’s about 12:30 AM on Monday, July 6th, 2009, and I guess I should get started on what I’ve been doing on my vacation so far. Not a great deal to tell, but experience has taught me that if I don’t put the stuff down – minutiae as well as anything of import – I’ll forget it all before I get the chance to sit down and write about it.

Early on Friday morning (the 3rd), I got myself and all of my necessary belongings packed into the Audi and hit the road – exactly at 5AM, which – oddly enough – had been my plan. I had a pleasant drive of a bit over ten hours and checked into my hotel in Maumee, OH (just outside of Toledo) at somewhere between 3 and 3:30 on Friday. On Friday night, I made good on a promise I’d made to myself about 10 years ago and had dinner at Tony Packo’s Famous Hot Dogs in Toledo proper. Dinner consisted of a plate of Tony’s chili cheese mac, about which I had heard very good things, along with one of the aforementioned famous hot dogs.

Tony’s was founded in the 1920s by a Hungarian who apparently thought his version of the all-American dog was the best in the world. Apparently, Toledoans liked the things enough to allow Mr. Packo to stay in business until the 1970’s, when an actor from Toledo named Jamie Farr ad libbed a few lines in an episode of a little known situation comedy called “M*A*S*H and said something about how the best hot dogs in Toledo came from a place called Tony Packo’s. The writers of M*A*S*H liked the reference so much that Packo’s was written into about 4 more episodes (in one, the sausage casings from TP’s are shipped to Korea to be used in a heart/lung machine or something); and, virtually overnight, Tony Packo’s morphed from a local spot where Toledoans in search of a dog went into eat to a full-blown tourist attraction where rich and famous people go to eat hot dogs and (I’m not making this up) autograph hot dog buns – hundreds of which are prominently displayed on the walls of the two or three Tony Packo’s restaurants now in business in the Toledo area. Being a purist, I went to the ORIGINAL Tony Packo’s, of course.

The highly-touted chili cheese mac was…well…it was okay. I think it might have been better had I doused it liberally with hot sauce, but it wasn’t bad. Sort of bland, if I’m to be totally honest, but not disgusting or anything. And the world-famous dog? I’d give it a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. For starters, it wasn’t a hot dog. It was more like a kielbasa. And it was cut in half. Rather tough, somewhat pungent. I opted to have it covered in the (world famous, naturally) Tony Packo’s hot dog chili, which helped it tremendously; but, like I said, I’m a purist. I wanted a hot dog, not a kielbasa covered in chili.

The PICKLES, however, were extraordinary. Thick-cut dills which had been marinating with peppers and had a fantastic zing to them. I bought a jar of them before leaving the place and had some on my sandwiches at Ahmic this afternoon.

After dinner, it was back to the hotel by way of a meandering route (I was lost), which took me past First Third Field, home of the Toledo Mud Hens minor league baseball team. I must say that it’s a lovely little park nestled smack in the middle of downtown Toledo. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, actually. The field is surrounded by the city on all four sides from what I could tell, and it’s not so much in a stadium as in a sunken city block. Should one want to watch the Mud Hens play, one could literally do so by standing on the sidewalk (yes, seats are available – it looked like it could hold about 5000 paid spectators).

Back at the hotel, I played on the computer a bit and then crashed. Got up at around 10:00 Saturday morning (Independence Day), with a vague idea of checking out the Toledo Zoo, but I was sort of stoked about getting to Canada and opted to hit the road by about 11:30.

The drive from Toledo to Magnetawan was relatively uneventful. Customs was a breeze (“Where are you from? Where are you going? How long are you staying? Okay, have a nice day”), and the 401, 407 and 400 highways were all pretty traffic- and construction-free, which was nice. I did get stopped in a DUI checkpoint just outside of Parry Sound, but the OPP guy who talked to me was really more interested in my car than in anything else (“Nice wheels! You lease or buy? Drive good? You like it? Okay, have a nice day”). In spite of that short slow-down, I made it to Ulvik at shortly after 7:00 Saturday night and was greeted with hugs from Cy and “T”, Karl and Diane Neuse, and Don and Julie Peddie; all of whom I’ve spent time with previously. Dinner on Saturday, prepared by Dr. and Mrs. Peddie, was lamb, potato salad and corn on the cob.

A peahen (female peacock for the cretins among you) apparently took up residence at the camp a day or two after Cy and “T” got here last week, and she’s fairly tame. Diane has been feeding her cheerios, which the bird seems to enjoy, and putting water out for her – which she also appreciates. We were also treated to the arrival of a mother raccoon and 5 little balls of fur known as “baby raccoons” during dinner. I attempted to get some pictures of the babies – they were beyond cute – but didn’t do the best job of it. After dinner, the older crowd stayed up to play dominos, while I opted to take a quick jump in the lake and go to bed. I’m staying in the boathouse this year.

Woke up at around 8 this morning and had another lake-bath (complete with Dr. Bronner’s Magical Peppermint Soap), then walked up to see what was going on in the main cabin. Not much, as it turned out. The old folks were eating sticky buns and drinking coffee (I partook of the latter, turned my nose up at the former). After breakfast, Karl, Diane, Julie and Don took off to play golf, leaving Cy and “T” and I to listen to the Wimbledon finals (Federer beat Roddick in a fantastic match) and work on a devilishly difficult jigsaw puzzle that Diane apparently started a few days ago. I took a couple of photography walks later in the morning and spotted at least one fox (have not seen one of those here before) along with the aforementioned peahen, some deer tracks, about a jillion wildflowers, birds and the like.

The golfing foursome got back just in time for lunch, for which I had a couple of cheese sandwiches stuffed with, as previously mentioned, Tony Packo’s peppered pickes. Spent some time on the internet this afternoon chatting with a cute lady from back home and then took another walk (didn’t see anything more interesting than a couple of joggers who I didn’t recognize). Came back from the walk to find Karl, Cy and “T” batting balls around on the tennis court and opted to photograph them rather than participate.

Dinner, prepared by Diane and Cy, was comprised of a fantastic beet salad with feta cheese; a mixture beet greens and grilled chick peas; and fried turkey kielbasa with barbecue sauce – amazingly good.

Dr. Peddie retired shortly after dessert (strawberries, cherry pie and ice cream) and the remaining 6 of us played 10 games of Oh Hell. I was destroyed, naturally. Karl won. Also naturally.

That pretty much wrapped up the evening, and we all totterred off to our beds at around 10:30. I’ve spent the last 2 hours (before starting this) trying various ways to get network access in the boathouse (no luck there) and messing around with low-light and lunar photography (am making HUGE strides in those areas, I’m happy to say).

By the way, the weather today was phenomenal. I’d guess that the temperature hovered around 72, thanks in part to a wonderful western breeze coming off of the lake. Tomorrow (today) is still somewhat of a question mark as far as the weather goes; but if it looks like rain, we’re probably going to head into Parry Sound. All of us need some Canadian cash (I’m currently walking around with five American $100 bills, which I’m certainly not going to spend up here), and the Sound is always a nice place to grab a good lunch, browse in the used book store, pick up any necessary supplies, and buy touristy stuff. From what I understand, the rest of the week is supposed to be as gorgeous as it was today – no surprise there. It’s always beautiful at Ahmic, in my experience.

Guess I should try to grab some sleep now, since it’s 1:15. Will update this blog some more tomorrow night.

TWD

ell, I promised at the end of my last incredibly geeky entry that I’d write another one soon and fill y’all in on the fascinating details of my non-geeky life. 8:25 on a Wednesday evening seems like as good a time as any to do that. I just hope I can remember *anything* even slightly interesting to write about.

I guess I can start with the Deep South Brass Band Festival. Sometime around May of 2008, I think, the GBB was approached by the organizers of a new brass festival which was being planned in Pine Mountain, Georgia, as a sort of competition for the well-established “Great American Brass Band Festival,” which has been held annually since 1989 in Danville, Kentucky.

We were pleased to accept their offer to play a couple concerts – on May 1 of this year – for a number of reasons. Exposure, $5K, and the chance to get in on the ground floor of a new brass festival in our own backyard were the primary ones. We were treated very well by the festival organizers, who arranged for free hotel rooms for anyone in the band who wanted to spend the night (Pine Mountain is about 2 hours from Atlanta), gave us lunch, and had some nice things to say about us:

2008 NATIONAL CHAMPION BRASS BAND TO PERFORM AT PINE MOUNTAIN’S BRASS BAND FESTIVAL

Friday Evening. Reception Tickets and Saturday Concert Tables are Available.

An impressive list of brass bands are lining up for the first annual Deep South Brass Band Festival in Pine Mountain, Georgia. Topping the list is the 2008 National Champion Brass Band – the Georgia Brass Band.

(From The Calloway Gardens Website)

In addition to the GBB, the festival featured performances by the Midtown Brass (a 5tet out of Atlanta comprised primarily of GBB members and althernates), the Eighth Regiment Band (a civil-war reenactment band out of Rome, GA), the Jericho Brass (a standard brass band from Chattanooga), The Atlanta Brass (a jazz/rock band from Atlanta with – forgive me – a saxophone), and one or two other groups that, among other things, marched in a parade on Saturday morning.

Our afternoon concert, on the town green in Pineville, was fairly well-received by a relatively sparse crowd (maybe 200 people out for a picnic on the lawn). After a few hours of down time, we took the stage again, this time on the beach at Calloway Gardens. What a difference a few hours and a change of venue can make. The evening crowd was larger than the afternoon set, packed a bit tighter, and feeling quite a bit tighter, too – if you get my drift.

Between heckling our director (good-naturedly, it seemed) and yelling for “Freeeeebiiiiiird!” (which our solo cornetist provided for them), the audience was enthusiastic, attentive and an absolute joy to play for. The band seemed to feed off of the crowd’s adrenaline. The video below (randomly chosen from several available on YouTube.com) doesn’t really let you hear how good we sounded, but it might give some idea of the atmosphere.

To make a long story longer, the GBB was a hit with the crowd and with the organizers, and we’ve already been asked to provide repeat performances in 2010 – and perhaps do a concert by ourselves sometime before then.

At around the same time as the Deep South Brass thingy, I decided to save a bunch of money by not drinking. Don’t get all freaky, Mom: I’m not doing one of those, “Oh crap, I’m out of control and must abstain before I die or wind up begging for spare gum” things. Just decided that I needed some new computer stuff and wanted to get more agressive with my debt, so I more or less gave up the booze. Went 30 days before I had anything stronger than a Diet Coke (wait – is “near beer” stronger?), and discovered that being completely sober all the time does have some benefits.

I also discovered that being completely sober all the time plays absolute HELL with one’s dart game. I may be saving money on bar tabs and gasoline, but I think I’m losing considerably more than that on darts bets. Overnight, I went from being one of the strongest two or three players on the north side of Atlanta to a complete laughingstock. People who used to be my whipping boys are phoning me everyday to ask if I want to come be humiliated by them. Damned lucky I’m such a laid-back, non-competitive guy, huh? Right.

I did notice after several weeks, however, that my blood pressure had dropped significantly. So that’s pretty cool.

In mid-May, a group which has been quietly putting together plans to improve Furman’s football stadium started feeding me details about said plans, which are exceedingly cool. I’m not allowed to get too specific here (this blog is, after all, searchable. It has been found by Furman people who know me); but suffice it to say that this group, led by former Furman star Jeff Blankenship, will be doing a great many necessary things which – for reasons I won’t go into – Furman’s administration has not done. For starters, the 2009 football season will see the the unveiling of a 360-square foot video screen on the (new) scoreboard. Fans have been screaming for a “jumbotron” for a few years now, and the group doing the upgrades decided to go ahead and start with that just to prove that they’re serious. In future years, they also plan add a new fieldhouse, which will help with recruiting; and to rebuild/remodel the pressbox (something that is DESPERATELY needed).

I know that Dad and Cy are now shaking their heads and muttering about how college is supposed to be for learning and it’s a complete shame that Furman is spending so much money on a stupid game and yada yada yada; but I must say two things:

• One – Furman isn’t spending anything. This is a privately-funded effort.
• Two – some of us like football, so be quiet.
• Three – it’s MY blog, dammit. I can say three things instead of two if I want to.

Speaking of Cy, it certainly looks as though I’ll be in Canada again this summer! What is this? 17 straight years? Anyway, I know I’ll be a be able to at least schedule two weeks off (whether I get to actually take them depends largely on whether or not AT&T’s western labor force goes on strike – they’re currently working without a contract, and the eastern force’s contract ends in a couple of months). I haven’t completely decided on when exactly those two weeks will be, but the tentative plan is from July 3-20. There is a possibility that I’ll move everything up a week (taking the last week of June and the first of July), but the chances of that happening are dropping as we get further into June. I’d really like to do that (schedule for June) because there are some things going on in Kentucky during the last week of June that I’d like to see, but I just can’t figure out how to get that in AND get to Canada AND feel relaxed when it’s all over. Such is the life of a guy with a vast array of interests – none of which involve writing metrics for AT&T.

I’ve now mowed the lawns three times so far this year and we’re still 15 days away from the start of summer. I suppose that the grass wouldn’t grow so fast if it didn’t rain every day….

I still haven’t gotten to do any serious camping/hiking this year, and it’s starting to make me mildly crazy. Thought I was going last weekend, but my hiking buddy apparently doesn’t own a calendar and told me at the last minute that he had to stay in town to watch his niece graduate from college. What a dork.

And that pretty much catches you up on the highlights of the last month or two.

Oh – the title thing up there? The bit about the bubbles and the pirate? It’s really quite simple. I met this girl, see. She’s sort of cool. Kind of. In a weird way. Okay, she’s really cool. Stop nagging already.

At any rate, we were talking on the phone the other day and she was describing a computer game that she was staring at which involved virtual bubbles that explode, causing other virtual bubbles to explode, which make other virtual bubbles explode…I assume the game ends when the world is sucked into a virtual black hole if everything is carried to its logical virtual conclusion, but I didn’t ask. I told her that this game sounded just….um….fascinating, and then suggested that she take up boxing or something.

Saying this reminded me of a time when I was about 7; and Greg, after convincing Mom that boxing gloves were actually soft and fluffy (and that being hit with one was akin to being playfully swatted with a smiling baby bunny), proceeded to pummel me until I was a sobbing, bloody shell of a boy in the Weirs’ side yard in Vermont. Now that I ponder it in more detail, I think that’s also the day that Mr. Weir let me try a sip of his beer for the first time. Humiliated, bleeding, bruised on every inch of my head and hitting the sauce. What a great memory for a 7-year-old.

Naturally, I told this story to the exploding bubble girl. I told her that Mr. Weir was (I thought) Dad’s best man and that he lived in Underhill. As a sort of mnemonic device (who knows? I may test her on her knowledge of my 7th year of life at some point), I pointed out that Underhill, VT, was also the hometown of Captain Richard Phillips. You’ll recall that the good Underhillian captain saved his ship (the Maersk Alabama) and all aboard it by offering himself as a hostage to Somali pirates – most of whom were summarily shot by Navy SEALs a couple of days later. Neat, huh? They’re going to make a movie about it. No kidding.

Exploding bubble girl – who is unbelievably smart about a great many things – was momentarily silent after I gave her this fantastic bit of my boxing history and the equally-fantastic mnemonic device with which to remember where it all happened.

She then inquired of me, “So your uncle was a pirate?”

Just think: without that question, we’d have no title for this month’s blog entry. And I’d have missed out on a really good laugh.

TWD

When I first moved to Atlanta in 1990, ostensibly to make my way in the world as some sort of journalist, I did so with a Zenith computer system – complete with two (count ’em, two) 5 1/4″ floppy drives, a rocking 640K of memory, no hard drive and a totally kick-ass VGA monitor. Microsoft Windows was, at the time, not a true operating system, but an “operating environment” which ran on top of MS-DOS and was largely ignored because it was as quirky as MS-DOS itself. My Zenith system, on the other hand, ran CP/M DOS (which preceded – and was eventually stolen by – Microsoft’s OS) and I had very little need for anything that didn’t come on my collection of floppy-based programs. I had a rudimentary spreadsheet, a database, a word-processor…I even had a couple of desktop publishing things (I don’t recall their names), which allowed me to put out an annual “Tomarama” (I use the word “annual” in the loosest possible way) and a weekly newsletter for my darts team which was released under the banner of “The Thermonuclear Arrow.”

My first long-term job in Atlanta consisted of me using an IBM PS2 running MS-DOS, but I rarely had any need to play with the operating system. I wrote the occasional batch file and tweaked my autoexec.bat and config.sys files (what was all this “HIMEM” stuff about?), but primarily my workstation was a window into NYNEX’s mainframe and something upon which I was eventually allowed to run Lotus 1-2-3.

My boss had a really hard time with that, by the way. She did everything she could to make sure that my two co-workers and I were not allowed to do anything that she didn’t understand, and she had no clue when it came to spreadsheets.

At some point over the next year, Microsoft’s Windows 3.0 came onto the scene at NYNEX, and I took the first tentative steps on the road upon which I’ve fashioned a 20-year career – one that has involved working with, troubleshooting, managing, programming in, supporting and administering Windows systems.

That may be changing. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those people who are going to bash Microsoft and talk about how unsecure and quirky and buggy and worthless and terrible Microsoft Windows is compared to any other OS, up to and including pen and paper. I like Windows. I like Microsoft. I prefer PCs over Macs, and I will never understand why Steve Jobs has been so adamant about keeping everything related to Apple secured behind proprietary software and – for the most part – hardware. People bitch and moan about Microsoft being a monopoly, but the fact is that Bill Gates’ empire has created more jobs and done more to computerize the world than Apple has ever even dreamt about. And it’s all because Gates opened up his software and let programmers do what they do best. Why are viruses most prevalent on Windows-based systems? Two reasons: There are (a lot) more of them than any other OS, and the software is accesible to programmers, for good or evil. Shit happens. Deal with it.

Windows has done a few things lately that I really don’t like, however. First, it’s gotten more and more bloated with each new release. Windows XP Pro is a fantastic operating system, and it was a great follow up to Windows 95, NT, 98 and (God help us all) the miserable failure known as “Millenium Edition.”

Windows Vista is also a very nice OS, and I don’t understand why so many people seem to despise it. I’ve run it for several years on one of my laptops (I actually installed it when it was still in Beta) and I’ve never – not once – gotten a blue screen with it. I never had any real problems with it, other than the occasional hardware conflict (why Microsoft didn’t build in support for older hardware is beyond me) and the always-annoying, “Are you sure you want to do this?” question that pops up anytime you try to do anything with it. That seems to me to be an over-reaction to viruses on the part of Microsoft, but I can deal with it.

The main problem with Vista – and now with the soon-to-be-released Windows 7, which I’m running on my desktop computer at home – is bloat. When it takes 45 minutes to install an operating system, there’s too much in it. When the OS includes programs that no sane person would ever use, there’s too much in it. When older workstations have trouble running at a decent speed, even when they were top-of-the-line systems just a year or two ago, there’s too much in the OS.

My second problem with Windows lately is that, in addition to applying new patches every 24 hours, they’re also coming out with completely new operating systems every 18 months. That’s positively Mac-like. Since 1996 or 97, when Windows 95 finally hit the streets (uh, you missed the deadline, dudes), there have been at least 9 new Windows OSs, and God knows how many different flavors of each. Improvement is nice, but not when you’ve got to shell out $200 and do a complete system upgrade all the time. I’m lucky – my job has allowed me to get all of Microsoft’s software for free – but I still get annoyed by the constant changes. That’s the main reason I got out of the programming gig: I got tired of having to learn a (basically) new interface every year.

Then I got the iPhone, and I’m starting to see that – at least as far as phones go – Apple’s slowing coming around. They released the Software Development Kit (SDK) to programmers everywhere, and – though they still keep too tight a leash on what can be put on the phone – people started using the SDK to create, at last count, somewhere around a quarter of a million approved applications for the iPhone. Most of these apps are free. Software is good. Free is good. Free software is great.

So last weekend, I finally got off my lazy butt and purchased a new hard drive for my Dell Inspiron 8600 – a laptop that I had had custom-built and which had been my favorite machine for about three years before the original drive died about 18 months ago.

Obviously, it’s an older machine. So I didn’t want to put the latest and greatest Microsoft OS on it. I opted instead to go a completely different route – one that my final position at BellSouth (a UNIX administrator, remember?) put me in a position to try. I installed Linux on my 8600 (hereafter to be referred to as “Kramer,” because that’s the nickname it was given when I bought it….mainly because it has a wood veneer and it reminded people of the crazy weird character named Kramer on the Seinfeld sitcom).

Specifically, Kramer got outfitted with Fedora 10 (and I’ll probably upgrade him to Fedora 11 when it’s officially released in a week or so). After a few normal growing pains (*nothing* is simple in a UNIX-based system), I’ve gotten Kramer to the point where he will do just about anything that my Vista or XP or Windows 7 systems will do. True, there are few high-quality games written for Linux, but I do most of my gaming on my Playstation. Also, once football season rolls around, I’m going to have to do my photo editing using the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) rather than with Photoshop, which will be a challenge unless I start doing some serious practicing with the GIMP; but that’s about all. I have a complete office suite, compatible with Microsoft Office. I have programs to play movies, synch my iPod, play tunes, burn CDs and DVDs. I can surf the web, maintain my email, keep a calendar, write programs and have instant message conversations with all of my existing contacts. I can maintain my websites. I can pay my bills. I can put up a webcam. I have access to wireless networks, bluetooth and all of my printers. How much did I have to pay for all of this? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Linux is free, and so are 99.5% of the programs written for it.

And the installation took about 5 minutes. So, at least on Kramer, I have finally cut all ties with Microsoft.

I was going to continue on to other news and recent happenings here, but I think I’ve written enough for one morning. That’s right, all you lucky people. Look for another entry, with totally non-geeky stuff, in just a day or two. How exciting is that?

TWD

Wow.

I haven’t posted anything in how many months?

I really should update this more often, so I don’t wind up having to figure out what I’ve been doing. Since January, for example, I’ve played with the GBB in Savannah, Louisville and Atlanta; I’ve had an Easter gig in a church about 8,000 miles from my house; I’ve jettisoned a roommate; I’ve gotten sucked into writing reports for a different service group, using two different databases and dealing with a new set of administrators; I’ve seen dead Egyptians and dead Chinamen; I’ve glued a robot together; I’ve discovered a very intriguing expansion to an old haunt; I’ve nearly been crushed by a computer desk; I’ve joined the hordes of iPhone fanatics; I’ve learned that catfish don’t particularly like liver.

And I’ve used more semi-colons in the last five minutes than I’ve ever used in my entire life up until 5 minutes ago. Don’t care if they’re grammatically accurate or not.

Let’s get started, shall we?

In late January (or maybe early February), the brass band played for the GA Music Educators’ Association conference in Savannah. This, theoretically, was a big deal for us, as it put the band in front of several hundred high school (and, I guess, college) music teachers – so if we didn’t screw up too badly, we could potentially generate some interest for our peculiar kind of music and land some gigs.

We didn’t play particularly well (and the recording of us totally sucks), but the comments from those in the audience were generally positive and we did, in fact, land a sort of quasi-gig at Pope High School in Atlanta a couple of weeks later (sort of an open rehearsal for interested students and others).

Savannah was quite lovely. I hadn’t been there in probably 20 years, and I spent the morning (a perfect Georgia spring morning, I must say) after the GMEA concert walking around by the river and looking at old stuff. This was an excellent way to shake off the lack of sleep caused by rooming with four twenty-something guys the previous night. One of whom (I swear I am not making this up) apparently decided that the best way to avoid a hangover was to sleep in the hotel tub with the shower running. All night. Tubists are strange people.

A few weeks after the Savannah concert, the band competed in the NABBA championships in Louisville and came in second in our division. Our performance was (again) relatively uninspired, but we only lost by 3 points to the Central Ohio band.

Days after the NABBA performance, we did a concert with a cornet stud named Richard Marshall in Atlanta. That one seemed to go very well, and I’m looking forward to hearing the recording of it.

The week after next, the band will be playing in some southern brass band festival or something in a podunk town in middle Georgia. After that, I think we get to take a break for a while – though the board of directors is supposedly ramping up to get worked into a lather over planning to maybe do important things dealing with stuff that might affect the general direction of the band at some yet-to-be-determined time. So, I’ve got that going for me.

Pardon my cynicism. These things happen. Enough about the band already. Let’s talk fishing.

The weekend before the NABBA contest found me and two other tubists sitting in a boat in the middle of a lake in Buckhead, Georgia. Three guys, 12 fishing poles, about 4 different kinds of bait, lots of beer. Two days and about 13 boat-hours after we started, we’d landed a grand total of two fish. And the second one very nearly stole a pole before I noticed that it (the pole) was trying to jump off of the boat.

Before the trip began, Robert – who is an excellent tubist and pipe organ builder – had assured me that catfish love chicken livers. I’ve come to the conclusion, however, that chicken livers are catfish kryptonite. From what I could tell, catfish fall all over themselves trying to avoid chicken livers. Write that down.

I did, however, get a new fishing pole; so maybe I’ll bring it to Canada this year and practice casting. I also scored a tub of pimento cheese spread (which is still in my refrigerator a month later). Pimento cheese spread, it seems, is the sandwich filler of choice for Georgia anglers.

Sometime in late February, my roommate Julie got laid of from her job as a graphics artist (along with most of the people with whom she worked). As a result, she moved up her plans to move back to Minnesota (which had been planned for around July) and headed out one very early morning in March. She sounds like she’s enjoying herself quite a bit since moving back, as she can now hang out with her kids, grandkids, mother and – from what I gather – an old flame. “Wah wah wah,” as Chachi would say.

She got a job at a grocery store in Minnesota almost immediately, by the way, and from what I’ve heard she’s also fielding other offers closer to her area of expertise. Some people have all the luck, huh?

Julie actually moved in last year while I was playing with the brass band at NABBA, so it’s only fitting that she moved out shortly before I played with the brass band at NABBA this year. The GBB played the required piece (“Trittico”) along with “Talis Variations” for our free-choice selection and we did rather well, but just didn’t have the spark necessary to give us our second straight Honors Section championship. We lost by about three points to the Central Ohio Brass Band. Interestingly, we knocked off the COBB by about three points last year. The year before that, COBB beat us…by about three points. Budding rivalry? Not really. Both bands have eventually made their collective way to a nearby brewpub each of the last three years, and congratulatory pints are way more fun than rivalries.

At work, I found myself suddenly thrown into the position of having to write some reports for Microsoft. This wouldn’t have been such a traumatic experience were it not for the fact that Microsoft maintains their own database (separate from the Metrics team’s), which is on a SQL server (rather than Oracle); and, they being Microsoft, their procedures are all over the place and a pain in the ass to navigate. Enough about that. I’m surviving. Tearing my hair out on some days and hating the hell out of my job on most others, but I’ll get by.

After Julie moved out, I started rearranging my house and turing it back into a regular old bachelor pad. This involved dragging a lot of heavy furniture my my stairs, and I managed to break my bannister (and nearly die) while moving my (rather large and unwieldy) computer desk from my piano room to the room that had been lived in by Julie. That room is now a computer office with a guest bed in it.

The other upstairs guestroom (now and forever to be referred to as “the formal bedroom” instead of “the satan room” – long story…), is starting to look really nice. The walls are a very nice shade of maroon and I’ve installed basically all of my old stuff in there. A bed that was (I think) my great-grandmother’s, a desk that was (I think) my great-grandfather’s, a chair that was (I know) Jenny’s grandmother’s, an end table/humidifier that was (I think) Jenny’s great-grandfather’s, and probably some other stuff that I’ve forgotten about. It looks nice, at any rate.

After (almost) getting the house back in order, just shortly before NABBA, I was treated to a visit by Mom, Dad and Cy, the three of whom trekked to Atlanta to check out a King Tut exhibit at the Civic Center and a display of the Terra Cotta Warriors at the High – and, one would hope, to see their bouncing baby boy/sibling, too. I was not overjoyed by the Tut thing, but did enjoy the Chinese stuff quite a bit. Of course, it was also nice to see the folks and the always-amazing big sister. The three of them also made it down in time on Saturday morning to catch the GBB in our last serious rehearsal before the championships. They tell me they were impressed.

The sidebrush on my Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner kept falling off as I cleaned up for the fam’s visit, so I finally just glued it in the spot where it’s supposed to be. It’s worked fine ever since.

And a few weeks ago, I took the plunge and upgraded my cellphone to the iPhone 3G, I have to admit it: I’m hooked. I’ve avoided getting one for the last couple of years because the applications available to it were limited. In particular, it had no book reader app; I figured why should I buy something to potentially replace my iPaq if it doesn’t have the one thing that I’d use more than anything else. When Apple finally opened the thing up to developers and apps began showing up, I figured it was time. I’m glad I waited. The thing is amazing. I can listen to tunes (as I’m doing now), read my books (which are stored online rather than on the phone), check all of my email, chat with friends, get the titles and artists of songs that happen to be playing on my radio, surf the internet, take pictures, login to Facebook, get directions and GPS guidance to restaurants (and go directly from the directions to reviews, menus, phone numbers, etc)…all I can say is, “Wow.” I really do understand all the hype now.

I think that pretty much covers everything I mentioned in my initial list of things, except for the intriguing expansion of an old haunt. And the Easter thing. For the latter, I had an Easter gig. It was a long way from my house. But it paid well.

The intriguing expansion, however. I’ve got to admit, I started typing this entry about 4 days ago and I can’t for the life of me remember what I was referring to when I said that. Apparently, whatever expansion has happened to whatever old haunt just wasn’t that intriguing. I am completely clueless.

But most of you knew that already.

TWD