When I get really really bored at work, I tend to do a couple of things: Read about people in historical groups on Wikipedia (like all the kings of England or civil war generals or prime ministers of Canada or whatever), and use google earth to look at the places that I’m reading about.

You read that King Philo the 3rd once killed a rabbit at Bugs Woods, Kent, Ireland, and you look it up on google earth and see if you can get a street level view, etc. Makes sense, right?

So the group I’ve been reading about for the last few weeks is, of course, The Mafia. Always been sort of a Roy DeMeo fan, but that’s neither here nor there.

Anyway, so I was reading about Carlo Gambino last week and saw that he had a house at 2230 Ocean Blvd in Brooklyn so I flipped over to Google to see what the house looks like today.

After doing one of these virtual drive-bys, I generally tend to scale back so I can get a better feel for where things are (Paul Castellano, for example, lived nowhere near the ocean, but Roy DeMeo was right there on it – in a house near one of Carlo Cambino’s other houses…and that girl who was murdered in NY a couple of years ago was found in basically the same place where a bunch of mafia hits were also dumped….but none of that is anywhere near where the Islanders play hockey. You see how my mind works here?).

So I’m pulling back on Gambino’s house and just sort of scoot over to the eastern end of Long Island because it looks cool and I wonder what it’s like over there and the satellite images always look neato. And I see Block Island Sound, which makes me immediately think of Billy Joel’s “Alexa,” but that has nothing to do with this story.

I also see Oyster Bay (more Billy Joel stuff and even less to do with this story because it’s not even near the end of the island. It’s actually closer to the Mafia guys).

Then I notice that, right near Block Island Sound, there’s an island – catchily named “Block Island.”

I don’t know why I never thought of that before, but I didn’t. And even though it’s right off the tip of Long Island, it’s part of Rhode Island (which isn’t an island at all, as far as anyone knows). And the satellite pictures of Block Island are just toooooo cool. So I decide to learn interesting stuff about it.

Like, “Can I camp there this summer?” And,”If I can’t, can I get a job there?” And, “If neither of the above, what CAN I do there?”

Turns out I can hike and eat and ride bikes and get a job on a lobster boat: http://www.blockislandinfo.com/

So I’m all jonesing to like move to this island (which would be sweet anyway, but this one’s got a HUGE ocean inlet and an active nature conservancy that aggressively keeps the whole place rural); and then I find out that the entire island is actually a single town…and that it’s the smallest town in Rhode Island…which is the smallest state in the US….which is the smallest country in North America (if you don’t count Mexico).

And the name of the town?

New Shoreham.

I am SO moving there.

It gets very tiring to work for a company that constantly says things like, “We will begin laying off many thousands of employees beginning tomorrow. This round of cuts is expected to be over by June of 2042. We hate to have to do this right before Christmas, but our CEO really wants that new backyard Jumbotron.”

Yes, indeedy. My love affair with AT&T is being tested yet again by the announcement (yesterday) that about 12,000 more of us are getting canned between now and next Summer. I say “canned” only because my sainted mother would be ashamed of me if I said, for example, “shit-canned.” Employees in the video operations sector are probably not going to be cut (in fact, that area of the business will probably grow); but you may recall that I am no longer with video ops – I’m with metrics. I’m the guy in metrics who writes the reports for video ops, and I work in the video operations center (VOC) in Georgia, but my paycheck comes from the metrics people in Texas. I’m also the newest employee in metrics, although I have seniority over just about everyone (including my boss) if you go by years in service.

So, to answer the question that I’ve heard from about 50 people who presumably were trying to cheer me up by reminding me that I could be living in a dumpster eating tennis balls and salsa next month, I have no idea if I’m getting fired anytime soon. Actually, it’s not just that I don’t know. I don’t care, either. If I were to get worked up every time NYNEX or Vanstar or BellSouth or AT&T said that they were having a firing party, I’d never have any fun. It used to bother me, but about 5 years ago I just got so sick of it that I stopped caring.

I take that back. I care in the sense that I wish that the top executives in all major companies would have to live with the idea that bad things might happen to them. Things over which they have no control. Things from which they may never recover. I wish that all the CEOs in the country were informed by their pediatrician – tomorrow if possible – that their angelic little 4-year-old daughter, who won the “Best Li’l Miss in Texas” talent show as recently as last July, had possibly been infected by a rare solar burst virus last month and that there’s a chance (although not one that can be quantified) that she will become magnetic sometime between now and next July and – should that happen – she stands an excellent chance of being crushed to death by the next large metal object she sees.

Let ’em try to sleep with THAT for a while.

But enough bitching for one day. On to other things.

There’s something about this time of year. For 6 or 8 weeks every year, everything takes on a sort of finality for me. A sense of ending or change or pointlessness or something. I don’t really know how to describe it, but it always kicks in around the middle of November and it generally goes away in early January. It’s the feeling that you might have had (I know I did) near the end of a school year. There are still classes to go to and there are still tests to take and you still have to eat and sleep and shower and do everything that you always do; but, in the back of your mind, you know that you’re just going through the motions. It’s the end of the school year and you can hear people just outside of your classroom window talking about their summer plans and you can’t concentrate on anything the teacher is saying to you because it just doesn’t matter what she’s saying.

You know what I’m talking about? That feeling of, “Just let me get to the last day. I didn’t get the grades that I should have this year because I didn’t really try, but next year I’m making the dean’s list.”

I’ve always suspected that this “conclusion consciousness” in the real world has something to do with the combination of an approaching new year (when we all make resolutions, whether we want to admit to them or not…and when, within 6 hours, we’ve failed to uphold 90% of them) and the fact that everyone tends to take a lot of vacation days between Thanksgiving and January 1 – which means that no real work gets done and those few brave souls who do manage to make it to the office generally spend 75% of their time there chatting among themselves and making coffee. You take long lunches. On occasion, you get a huge burst of energy and compose (I almost said, “pen”) an email to your boss to bring him up to speed on all the glorious things that you intend to accomplish by the end of the week.

You, of course, mean every word of your email. You do intend to get a great number of things done by the end of the week; but then you hear some folks just outside of your office window talking about what they’re going to do on their Christmas vacation or what they’ve just done on their Thanksgiving holiday and you can’t concentrate on any of the things that you said you’d do because it just doesn’t matter if you actually do any of the things you said you’d do.

And let’s face it: your boss doesn’t care if you do them, either. He’s too busy trying to figure out what he’ll do if his daughter becomes magnetized to worry about whether or not you rearrange the filing cabinets.

That’s the sort of mindset that I have at the end of every year. Scary, isn’t it?

On the work front, I’m getting better every day with ColdFusion and Oracle. I’ve managed to locate and correct a number of problems that my predecessor had in his code, and I’m slowly rewriting all of the metrics pages so that they can take advantage of a single query (rather than having a different query for everything). It’s odd that nobody in metrics seems to have grasped the incredibly simple concept that all metrics are basically manipulations of the same three or four numbers. You’ve got dates. You’ve got events (phone calls or broadcasts or sales or whatever). You’ve got failures. All anybody cares about, when it comes right down to it, is one thing: “How many failures did I have for how many events during what time span?” It’s baseball. George Brett went 109-for-347 with 6 homeruns and 23 strikeouts during the 89 games that he played in 1981. His batting average (BA) was .314. Or, U-Verse broadcast for a total of 79,248 hours on 608 channels and had 1.43 hours of downtime during the first week of November. The defects per million (DPM) rate was 216.

It’s all the same thing, people. There’s nothing fancy about statistics. That’s why I enjoy them.

In football, Furman finished the season at 7-5 and didn’t make the playoffs for the second straight year. Folks on my website are calling for the firing of the entire coaching staff, the public caning of the school’s administration, and the symbolic castration of the starting quarterback.

A few of them are also buying my pictures, which is nice.

Over Thanksgiving, I took Julie up to Dianne’s new house in Travelers Rest, where we were treated to some excellent cooking and a nice visit with Mom, Dad and Trude. I then drove back to Atlanta and promptly slept for about 19 straight hours. I enjoyed that quite a bit.

I still have about two weeks of vacation left, which I’m supposed to take by the end of the year. I have no idea when I’ll be able to schedule that – or what I’ll do if I’m not at the office. I guess if those are the worst problems I’ve got, then I’ve got no right to complain.

I’ve now wasted a good 30 minutes of my workday. I guess I’ll stop writing. Buh-bye for now.

TWD

How the time does fly, eh? Seems like it was only about 6 weeks ago that I was posting something here about having a shaky job situation and here it is 6 weeks later and I’ve got a slightly less shaky job situation, although it still has a sever case of the jitters.

Enough about that for now. It’s still football season. My team, though having some shaky Saturdays of their own, are now 5-2 on the season – much better than most people thought they’d be by now. After the opening week warm-up against a fairly weak opponent, they travelled to take on Virginia Tech, a ranked BCS team (that means they’re better than us), and really gave them all that they could handle in a 24-7 loss. Really. It was 3-0 at halftime.

The following week, we flew to Colgate to take on the Raiders. Very pretty little town (Hamilton, NY), and the college reminded me of Middlebury. Also got to spend about an hour at the baseball hall of fame in nearby Cooperstown, which was interesting. Oh, yeah. We won that game. That was one that many had predicted we’d lose.

Entertained the University of Delaware in Greenville the following week and beat them in a sloppy game. Another one that had been a predicted loss. Next up was the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Another sloppy game, but another win.

Then came Elon, which hadn’t beaten us in 8 years. They demolished us, but we rebounded with a win over Western Carolina, and The Citadel is up next.

There you have it. Your football season in a nutshell. My best pictures of the year probably came from the Colgate game. It was beautifully overcast all day and I really couldn’t take a bad picture. Adding to that was the fact that Colgate plays on one of these “flubber” fields – fake grass over a bed of rubber pellets. The pellets on these fields tend to fly up when a shoe or a knee or a face gets rubbed across them, and it really adds some nice motion to the photos. Most of the other games were shot in very bright sunlight, which leads to massive overexposure. And lots of sweat.

The days are definitely getting cooler in Atlanta, however, and the nights are approaching those temperatures that happen for about 1 week out of the year and make sleeping a wonderful thing.

Anyway, on to the job situation. After being told that I shouldn’t reinvent the wheel, I was sort of in a dead zone for about a month. My boss couldn’t really tell me what to do, because he wasn’t sure how to go about it, and HIS boss didnt’ really know, either. I spent most days surfing the internet, channel scanning, and putting out the ocassional fire.

Then about a week ago, I was informed by my new boss in Kansas that I’d been traded to a new boss in Texas – the group that I’d initially contacted about doing work for my new boss in Kansas (everybody still with me?). I had a brief chat with my new Texas boss about what was expected and learned the following:

I need to create metrics reports from an Oracle database using a ColdFusion server located in Plano., TX.

No problem, right? Except that I didn’t have any real specs for the reports (still don’t, but I’ve got a meeting scheduled for tomorrow), I have *extremely* limited exposure to Oracle, I’ve never used (or seen) ColdFusion in my life, and I could not navigate the corporate network to get to the resources that I need in Texas. Oh, and the big boss (who is requesting the reports) wants to see some progress by the end of this month.

Great.

I have finally managed to get to the Texas servers, but it appears that I can only do so via a VPN connection (sort of like a souped-up dial-up connection) from my house. I have managed to attach the the ColdFusion servers and can see the existing documents on it using Dreamweaver software. I still don’t know how to write CF code, but I’ve been told that I can learn it. I have not been able to connect to the Oracle databases yet, but I’m getting closer.

The biggest problem with a VPN is that it’s very slow. I’ve been downloading the Oracle client for about three hours so far. Which is why I’ve got time to be typing all this drivel while I’m presumably working.

I am very VERY ready for a weekend off and have tentatively scheduled a trip to Standing Indian Mountain, NC, for the weekend of November 8th. It appears to be a beautiful place to hike along the NC/GA border in the Nantahala forest, and I’m looking forward to it.

Also recently joined Facebook.com – something that I’d pretty much sworn I’d never do. It’s a social networking site where you can see what old friends are doing. I joined it because I got a note out of the blue from the wife of a guy I knew in college, so I set myself up an account to see how he was doing. I then promptly forgot both my account name and password. This was on a Friday.

On the following Monday, my email was jammed with “Friend Requests” – people from Facebook who had seen my account and wanted to be able to converse with me. Turns out that half of the people I knew in high school and college – along with several members of my family – use facebook. There are also some decent discussion forums setup so folks can talk about, for example, camping and hiking. Or the Furman band in the 1980s. Or the Georgia Brass Band. It’s sort of interesting.

What else, what else….

We’ve almost completed the third season of the in-house Rusty Nail Dart League, and my team will not win for the second time in those three seasons (we did win the first one). Hopefully, we won’t come in last, either. That remains to be seen, as we battle for next-to-last next Monday. This league is interesting in that it’s the only one I’ve seen where players all come from (and go to) the same bar. No travelling, which got so ridiculous in the Atlanta leagues that I had to quit. And no strangers. We all know each other and have been playing against each other for years.

Julie is now looking at moving to Minnesota around next April, I think. Hopefully, she’ll stick around long enough to finish painting all of the rooms in the house. She did a WONDERFUL job on my second guest room (and I’m not just saying that because I know she reads this), and is now ripping the wallpaper out of my half-bath. Maybe I’ll help her on one of these rooms, but she does such a nice job by herself….

I had scrambled egg whites for breakfast this morning. I’m so healthy.

And I’m obviously out of things to write about. You’uns have a good day, now, ya hear?

TWD

That picture should give you a clue that I’ve been on vacation. I took it on July 5th in Magnetawan at about 10 o’clock at night. There are lots more like it in this slideshow.

Due to some insane thinking by my boss, I wasn’t allowed to use a full two weeks of vacation this year and only got to take a week, so I took the week of July 7th and snuck out of work early on Thursday, July 3rd. For some strange reason, I decided to take the eastern route up to Canada (Niagra Falls). It’s only about 30 miles longer than taking I-75 to Detroit, and I figured it’d be a nicer drive.

I can’t say that it sucked, but it did rain for most of the night and I pulled into a rest area in PA at about midnight on the 3rd, totally exhausted. Slept for about three hours and then continued north, arriving at Ahmic Lake at around lunchtime. A cheese sandwich thus began my week of bliss with Cy, “T”, Dad, Dianne and – briefly – Diane Neusse, Billy someone and his fiance, Faryn, and another lady who’s name I can’t remember.

It was a typical Ahmic vacation, with dominoes and cards and beer and reading and sleeping and beer and tennis and bears and swimming and cocktails and great food and staining the deck and beer and sunsets and baby birds and boating and walks and beer and laughs and fun. All this for $75 (if you don’t count the $400 in gasoline). Thanks as always, Mr. and Mrs. Tall.

Far too quickly, it was the folloing Saturday morning and I had to head for home. I took the western route this time and it rained for most of the early part of the trip. That had stopped by the time I was on the outskirts of Windsor, Ontario – and so had the traffic. Completely. As in people were getting out of cars, walking around on the highway, meeting other people, trading vacation stories…we had a ball for about 45 minutes.

I stayed that night in Lima, Ohio (my traditional halfway point) and made it home Sunday night. In the rain again. Another vacation gone, but I’ve still got ten days left to burn later this year.

As I mentioned in the previous entry, I was painting my deck before I left for Canada. Julie and I did manage to finish that project on about July 2. For the most part. As I type this, I still need to apply a second coat to the floor of the thing, but it still looks pretty good and I hopefully won’t have to do that again for a couple of years.

When she wasn’t helping me with the deck, Julie amused herself by swabbing primer all over my spare bedroom, assuming that I would finish painting it while she was in Minnesota on vacation. Well, she’s been up there since last Friday and she gets home in two days and I haven’t done a thing. Ha!

It appears that I will indeed continue to receive a paycheck from ye olde AT&Te for the forseeable future. I just got the call this morning and, barring catastrophe, I’ll be working for a guy in Mission, Kansas. While I’m not entirely sure of my job duties, they will involve creating metrics reports from a number of U-Verse databases and making them availalable via a web interface. This is something that’s been in the works for the last month or so, and I was never sure if I’d get the job or not; so it was kind of a relief to finally get the voice mail today.

Yes, I said my boss will be in Kansas. I, however, will be at our U-Verse operations center right here in Tucker, GA. Most of my team is already there – has been for a year – but I’ve managed to sit tight in the BellSouth building where I’ve been working for the last 6 years, although I do have a desk at Tucker and most of my stuff has been there for several months. I’m not anti-social or anything. I just don’t want my current boss to realize that I have virtually nothing to do. Shutting down a company is BORING, people. I’d guess that I do actual work-related stuff for a total of about 45 minutes a day. The rest of the day is spent surfing the net, watching movies, listening to music, walking around a nearly-empty building….not the type of stuff you’d want to have your boss see.

I do come up with little projects for myself (inventorying the basement, building webservers for shared documents, cleaning the crud off of mouse balls….) but if I really WORKED at doing those things, I’d be done in about 4 hours. I have to spread these tasks out over a couple of weeks to keep from gnawing my arms off.

Tomorrow, morning, I get to play at the DCI Southeastern Championships with the GA Defense Force band. Oh joy. I’ll get to stand up there in front of 30,000 people who know what a brass band is supposed to sound like and play the national anthem with 13 other people who seem to care more about the fuzz on their army berets than on intonation.

But it’s a free ticket into the competition, which is basically the only reason I agreed to do it.

On Sunday, as I said, Julie gets back into town. I’m supposed to be picking her up at the airport sometime…I’ve lost the itinerary she gave me. Then, at midnight Sunday, I go on call until midnight next Sunday. So there’s two weekends shot. I’d hoped to go camping the following weekend, but – wait for it – I’m on call AGAIN that weekend, filling in for a guy who took my on-call July 6th so that I could go to Canada. After that, we’re starting to get close to football season and all of my weekends will be shot for a few months. Guess hitting the woods is going to have to wait.

Speaking of football, I get to fly to another game this year. Oh joy. I do so love to fly. But Furman’s playing at Colgate and I’m not willing to drive there. The guy who I work for in the sports network (I’m now the official radio photographer…you didn’t even know radio people needed photos, did you) called me yesterday and told me he’d booked me on the charter. I was really sort of hoping to miss that week. This year is going to be a bear, much like two years ago. We’ve got away games at Boone and Elon (NC), Blacksburg (VA), Hampton (NY) and Birmingham. That Birmingham trip will actually be the shortest for me (remember, my “home” games are still 150 miles away). I don’t think I’ll be doing a whole lot of sleeping during the football season. I do think a number of my shots from last year might be in this year’s programs, however. That’s sort of cool.

Well, I just realized that it’s pushing 10 and I’ve got to be downtown at 9 tomorrow morning for the DCI thing, so I think I’d better get some sleep. Hope everyone’s having a happy whatever. I’ll try to update this thing in a few weeks if anything exciting happens.

TWD

The year 2008 continues to chug along and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that.

On the one hand, it’s been an incredibly boring year. On the other, the date when my company closes (and I, presumably, am looking for a job) continues to creep ever closer. We still haven’t been given any sort of drop-dead date, but our president has announced his retirement effective June 30. I doubt we’ll go on for much longer than that. The big question for me remains the same: Is there a job for me in U-Verse?

Be that as it may, I’d finally had enough of taking my car to the shop every three months, so I bought an Audi A3 Turbo Wagon about three weeks ago. It’s “brilliant black” (whatever that means) and – horrors! – an automatic transmission. It still gets slightly better mileage than my PT Cruiser did and it’s a solid car with low mileage. I’m looking forward to seeing how it performs on the way to Magnetawan next month.

Having purchased a German car, I felt somewhat guilty and so decided to help out a paramilitary group catchily named the Georgia State Defense Force when they called me a few weeks ago and asked if I’d play in a Memorial Day parade with them. After I’d agreed to play, the gig calendar changed quite quickly. It went from one parade to a change of command ceremony and two parades a week later. In for a penny, in for a pound, huh?

The change of command thing was on Sunday of last week in Forsyth, GA. I had a church gig that morning, but figured I could make it to the National Guard HQ by 2:00 (that’s 1400 in Army talk) easily enough. I’m never going to learn.

After the church thing, I changed into ACUs and hit the road by about 11:00 AM (1100). I made great time to downtown Atlanta…and then inched forward for close to an hour (60) through a 5-mile (8-click) section of the downtown connector which was being repaved. I ended up getting to the National Guard place at about five minutes before two (1355).

The head guy what’s in charge of the band (“Command Sergeant Major”) met me by the band (“musical unit”), shook my hand (“saluted”), warmly thanked me for being such a great help to them (“gave props”), and informed me that he’d forgotten to bring my music (“screwed up”). What he wanted me to do, he explained, was improvise (“wing it”) for about 45 minutes.

Uh. Yeah. Wing it for 45 minutes on pieces that I did not know with a band that…well…let’s just say that their center of pitch is actually a circle of pitch with a radius of about 90 cents. If you know what I mean.

So I bravely “winged it.” The highlight of the day for me was the playing of The Stars and Stripes Forever. Some of you hopefully know what I’m talking about when I mention the dogfight in the piece – where the low brass plays a series of decending 16th’s very loudly and obnoxiously. It’s a quite recognizable part of the piece.

Funny thing, though. I was the only guy playing that part. And I was the only one who didn’t have music. And nobody seemed to notice.

At any rate, I got through that debacle okay and made plans to meet up with the band the following Monday for the parades. Then I went home and started painting my deck.

Actually, I didn’t start painting until the following Saturday, but I did a heck of a job once I got started. Worked on it all day Saturday and managed to get a very stiff back, a great start on a sunburn – and about a third of the deck covered with primer. On Sunday, I managed to do the same thing. Monday, you’ll recall, was Memorial Day.

So it was Julie who actually got to finish covering the deck (and part of the sidewalk) with primer while I went off to defend America against invading hordes of parade watchers.

First stop was in Fairburn, GA, about 30 minutes south of Atlanta. I made it there in plenty of time for a 9:30 (0930) start. Problem was, nobody else did. After an hour or so, however, various people started dribbling toward a common area – looking like stragglers in, say, The Red Badge of Courage.

We marched the parade. A mile. Maybe two. I had music. I made (“asked” might be a better word) a colonel to take my picture. This was something that I had to do, because 1}It was the second time in my life that I’d been in an Army uniform and 2}It was the first time in two decades that I’d been reduced to carrying a sousaphone.

After the parade, we got some free foodstuffs from a kind-hearted local (who, no doubt, felt a great deal safer thanks to our visit) and then set off for Senoia, GA, which is about 30 minutes even further south.

The Senoia parade turned out to be a lot shorter (about 1/2 mile), a lot hotter and A LOT better attended. The town, with a population of around 12, somehow managed to pack 30K folks on the sidewalks to watch a great many bands, cars, tractors and soldiers walk down the main street.

I also got to play a different sousaphone – this time a silver Conn 20 with quick-action valves. The thing weighed a ton, but MAN…the bell on it rang like a gong. I have no doubt that I covered up the entired band in front of me. Power like that is hard to come by. And quite a bit of fun. And a great way to cover up a wildly-gyrating circle of pitch.

We finished up that parade by about 3 (1500) and I made it home by 4 (1600), which was just in time to get changed out of the uniform and head back downtown for a quintet rehearsal at 5 (5:00. My military bit was done for the day).

My little CC tuba has never so much fun to play. It felt like I was playing a trumpet or a clarinet or some other sub-standard instrument. I think I frightened my quintet.

But hey, I’ve done my part for America now. And don’t go thinking that it was all just fun and games. When I got up yesterday morning, my calves were on fire for several hours. And I still haven’t caught up on my sleep (I was on call all weekend).

So I think I can now safely say that my military sacrifices are equal to – or greater than – those of Dubya.

So there.

TWD

I finally decided that it was time to replace the fascia, soffits and gutters on the house. Since I used Taylor Construction to replace all the windows and put siding on the house about 4 years ago, I decided to go ahead and get a quote from them for the work that had to be done this time around.

Hence, the title of this post. After getting my “returning customer discount,” agreeing to let them leave a sign in my yard for a month and agreeing to let other potential customers call me to hear me say nice things about Taylor, I got the low, low price of sixteen grand.

I’d like to report that I threw the sales weasel out of my house, but I didn’t. I did tell him – very politely, of course – that there was no way in hell I was going to drop that much money for what amounts to trim. I don’t think he was happy, but he left anyway.

Got a new meeting with his sales manager a week or so later and said I could do without the gutters. The price dropped to around $7,500. Much more betterer.

So, for the last three days, I’ve had a couple of guys showing up at my house every morning at around 6:30 and banging on it with hammers. I’m assuming that they’re also replacing the fascia and soffit.

Julie has changed her plans yet again and is now moving in next weekend. Or this weekend. Or sometime. I don’t pretend to understand the schedule. I just try to stay out of the way.

I’ve got a board meeting with the GBB tomorrow, followed by a birthday dinner for Herb, who will be 75. Another rehearsal with the church on Sunday. Yippee.

NABBA is now two weeks away and I must say that I’m not feeling overly confident about the GBB’s chances in the competition. We just aren’t clicking this year. Yes, we sound awesome; just not championship calibre. We’ve decided to have a combination concert/open rehearsal on the night of the 25th. That’ll be nice, as we haven’t played an indoor concert in close to a year. I’m all for competing, but rehearsing all year for a 23-minute competition gets really boring really fast.

Heard recently that my company, scheduled to close early next year, is now on the fast track to defunctness. That’s a word. Really. The new schedule has us shutting off the last customer as early as next month. It’ll still take several months after that to get rid of our equipment, finalize billing, etc., but the bottom line is that – unless they find a REAL job for me in U-Verse, I’m looking at a severance package a lot earlier than I’d anticipated.

Did I mention that I just dropped $7,500 on my house? Yikes.

After a few days of madness, I did manage to get the week of July 7th off so I can make the trek to Ahmic Lake. Was a bit disappointed that I was not allowed to take a full two weeks off (has never been a problem before and I don’t know why it would be this year, but….). Immediately after being granted that week off, I was informed that I’m scheduled to be on call from June 30-July 6.

That’s a very very bad thing, as it effectively blows away my ability to leave Atlanta on the 3rd, using the holiday and the weekend to drive to Canada. I begged and pleaded with a few co-workers and finally convinced one of them to take my on-call from midnight on the 3rd through midnight on the 6th. In exchange, I’ll be covering his second shift on the 21st and I’ll still owe him a favor at some point.

Really don’t enjoy many aspects of this job. On-call is right up there. Yeah, I was used to being on-call 24x7x365 in my old job, but in a bad year I might have gotten called twice. With this job, you’re pretty much guaranteed that you won’t get much sleep for a week every month and a half. During the last week I had the OC duty, I think I managed to average about 4 hours of sleep a night. Don’t know how I’m going to handle football season.

This week is not moving. I feel like it should be Thursday at the very least. I thought life was supposed to go by faster when you reached my advanced age. Another lie told me me in my youth, I guess.

Still not a great deal of interest going on in Duluth and its environs. I had great rehearsals last Friday night and all day on Saturday with Dr. Holman – actually received a few kind words from the flugel player in the band who said something along the lines of, “There are at least two of us that really enjoy listening to you play and we think you sound better than the other guys back there.” I politely thanked him, told him he was insane, and blushed for about three days. He’s actually the third person in the band who’s said that to me in the last year. So the insanity is spreading, but it’s still nice to hear. 🙂

In all seriousness, I have been getting a lot stronger on the Eb horn since rejoining the band in 2006; but I have nowhere near the talent level as the 4 guys who sit back there with me and let their skills remind me on a weekly basis that I may have been the big dog 20 years ago, but I’m not anymore.

Doesn’t mean I can’t keep trying and eventually blow them out of their chairs, but I’ll wait until the time is right.

After the Saturday rehearsal, I went to The 5 Seasons Brewpub with 6 other guys (well – 4 guys, 2 girls) to talk music, drink really good beer and generally laugh at everything. I do enjoy hanging out with the bandsmen of the GBB. It’s a fun group. This is a good thing, as one of the BBb tuba guys and I are renting a car a couple of days before NABBA so we can go up to Louisville and hang around for a while before we have to play anywhere. Robert is originally from the area, so he knows the cool stuff to see. We’ll also be rooming together (with one other guy, who I don’t recall at the moment) at the Galt House in the city until Sunday. Maybe it’s the Gault House. I don’t know. It’s just a really big expensive hotel.

Found out this morning that I’m supposed to be playing a church service next Sunday. This is news to me. I’d sort of planned on going camping. Guess not. What do I have to do to get a free weekend around here? Last weekend was the Holman rehearsals, this weekend is a service, next weekend I’m on call….I just want to get some camping in, dammit!

Julie moved a lot of her kitchen stuff over to the house while I was in rehearsal, incidentally. She apparently had a ball rearranging everything that’s been in the same place in my kitchens since I was 4 years old. I will admit that she did a great job of organizing, although it took me about 4 hours to find a potholder.

Our Ad Insertion server in Florida (I think I mentioned it in the last entry) is now dead. I mean, like, REALLY dead. As in, barring a complete miracle, it’s not coming back to life. As in, we’re out of the advertising business in Florida. I hope my president takes this turn of events very poorly indeed. After all, he was the guy who said we couldn’t replace or upgrade any of the hardware or software two years ago when we told him it was going to fail. His response at the time was, “I guess if it fails, we’ll be out of the adveritising business – ha ha!”

Sorry, Don. You said it, buddy, not us. This particular server generated somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 per year. How much would it have cost to replace it two years ago? About $80,000. I guess corporate presidents have no more foresight than national ones, huh?

Ha! That should get Mom fired up, so I guess I’ve written enough for one day.

TWD

I guess two and a half months per entry is a good number.

I really should do this more often, however, as I wind up trying to figure out what exactly I’ve been doing with myself for the previous 10 weeks and I ultimately end up sounding like I have an incredibly boring life.

I don’t. Not really. Monotonous, perhaps. Dull. Colorless, unspirited, repetitious, vapid, wearisome, spiritless and bromidic.

But not boring.

Take the roommate thing (“…take my roommate. Please.”). After unloading Keith (who has, by the way, recently moved to Florida to live with his father, leaving all of his possessions except the bed (which I have) in the apartment of the poor sucker he squatted with after I threw him out), I mentioned to a friend one night that I had a room to rent. Oddly enough, she liked the idea, so Julie will be moving in sometime in March. She’s from Minnesota. She speaks like someone trapped in “A Prairie Home Companion”. She equates cosmopolitan living with owning a shack in St. Cloud.

She reads this blog. Oh crap.

Anyway, Julie and I get along famously and I’m looking forward to taking her money and listening to her prattle on in that Fargoesque accent of hers.

Keith’s bed? I still have it. I’ll be chucking it to make room for Julie’s. He had three months to claim it.

Let’s see….Christmas. I have no idea what I did for Christmas. I think I might have slept for most of the day and then gone over to Jenny’s place to have dinner with her and her folks. Lasagna, if I recall. Good stuff. I spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s sleeping in a lot (got to take vacation after all), and actually made it past midnight (awake) on New Year’s Eve – mainly because I was watching a football game that didn’t end until 11:45.

Work has been rather boring as of late, although for the last three or four days I’ve been having trouble with an Ad Insertion server in Florida. It started acting up last Friday night and has had something go wrong every day since then. I think I managed to get it back to operational status about 30 minutes ago. If not, I’ll mess with it again tomorrow. Everything else is just … well … boring. Now that I’ve learned what actually has to do what, I can pretty much do my job duties in about 12 minutes every day. The rest of the time is spent in documentation, rewriting websites, studying (read, “surfing the web”) and doing the occasional special project. I still get home late and I’m still tired most of the time.

The Georgia Brass Band is officially ramping up for this year’s NABBA championships, to be held just north of Louisville on March 29th. We’ll be playing “Journey into Freedom” by (I think) Eric Ball and “Encounters” by Philip Spark. “Journey” is a fantastic piece. “Encounters” makes me want to vomit. Not incredibly difficult. Just incredibly tedious. Anyway, we’ve had a few extra rehearsals since December and we’ll be rehearsing with Dr. Colin Holman (Chicago Brass Band) this Friday night and all weekend. Looking forward to that. The band sounds phenomenal this year and I think we’ve got a decent shot to win the Honors section at NABBA. Hope so, anyway, because we probably won’t make the trip next year.

Speaking of the GBB, I somehow managed to get myself on that board of that august institution. I’m still not sure how. Two other board members are also tubists, however. I envision some sort of special tuba rulings being made in the future….

On January 11th, Jenny and her folks and I drove up to Greenville to wish Dad a happy 75th birthday. We were met at the house by all of the Day children and a handful of grandkids. Don’t remember exactly the last time that happened, although we came close at Thanksgiving.

Heard through the grapevine recently (actually through the internet via an instant message) that the woman who last broke my heart is now engaged. I sure do know how to pick ’em for other people, huh?

I’ve started playing my piano a lot more over the last few months for some reason. Not exactly sure why, but I’m not complaining. Feels like I’m getting better, actually. For the record, Julie plays piano (quite well), so the fact that I have one in the house did not cause me to lower the rent.

Oh! My pathetic quintet played at the annual flower show at the GA World Congress Center a couple of weekends ago. So I’ve got that going for me. I also played a service with my worthless church orchestra this past Sunday and I get to play again with that sorry collection of misfits on Easter.

I have high hopes that the music minster doesn’t read this blog.

And I’ve just been informed that the server in Florida is in an alarm state again. It was a fun 45 minutes while it lasted. Everybody have fun. Everybody Wang Chung. I hate UNIX.

TWD