Author Archives: TWD

Christmas Vacation

Posted on by

Well, there’s not a lot going on these days, but I thought I should update this thing anyway. I got the 24th-26th off from work (today being the 26th, of course), and I really haven’t done a thing in the last 5 days. Watched a bit of football on Saturday and sat at home watching television from Sunday until today. I did go over to Jenny’s place for dinner with her and her dad last night, which was nice. Some sort of a crabmeat casserole and some scallops, and a bit of catching up with Herb, who’s having more trouble getting out of a chair than he used to – and he’s not as light as he thinks he might be; I can attest to that having helped him up a few times. As he said when I was helping him into the car, “It’s amazing how fast your strength goes, and how much you don’t even realize you used to use it,” to do things like get into a car. Speaking of Herb and cars, Jenny and I are going to try to get his started and sold on Saturday. He’s also been talking to a realtor, so I guess he’s finally letting go of the house in Dunwoody.

Found out from my boss sometime last week that I’ll be getting a $750 bonus in my next paycheck, which is nice. Also getting a 4% raise starting with the January checks. Still nowhere near what I was making a couple of years ago (example: my last bonus at AT&T was just a bit over $9,000), but it’s a nice gesture and I do appreciate it. Got to give almost all of my direct reports raises for next year, too, which was great. The X-company just doesn’t pay their level 1 employees enough – which is probably why we can’t keep the good ones.

The photo for this post, should you be wondering, is of my buddy Brett during a trip we took to Huckleberry Knob in, I think, Tennessee, in July of 2009. I was going through some old hard drives today and found a bunch of old photos. Spent quite a bit of time reminiscing about everything from football games to camping trips to band concerts. It’s hard to believe how much time I spent with a camera in front of my face for the first 15 years of this century. Maybe I’ll pack one of the Canons the next time I go camping.

I toyed with the idea of going in to the office today to play around with a script that I’m trying to write for our infrastructure team, but that idea lost its luster over the last couple of hours, and now I’m thinking more about getting my hair cut and going to play trivia in a bar and watch whatever sports are on today. I just don’t feel like coding – or sitting in the office – before tomorrow.

And now I’ll dig into one of those old hard drives a bit more and see what other interesting things I can find. Sounds like a good way to waste a morning.

End-of-the-year Crunch

Posted on by

Yes, indeed.  The year is coming to a close and I’m in the middle of my “must get everything done before January” month.  There are many reasons that I like the fact that I was born when I was, but the December crunch is not one of them.

I got my driver’s license renewed last weekend.  Also received the letter to renew my tags, which I put off dealing with until today.  Other fun things included paying my auto insurance, renewing a couple of domains, doing year-end reviews for all of my direct reports (save one, who’ll get to go through that on Monday), and I don’t know what else.

As I said, I pulled out the registration letter today and logged on to pay for my 2019 registration, only to realize that I’ve forgotten to get my emissions checked (must do that before registering).  So I guess that’s on the docket for later this morning.

The X-company Christmas party was last Monday.  I did not attend.  Not a fan of 1}hanging out with the people from work, 2}hanging out with the people from work when there’s an open bar.  Not to worry, though.  The X-company gives out really nice Christmas presents to everyone – even those of us who don’t go to parties – and I scored a drone yesterday.  This is cool, because I’d been thinking about buying one anyway to take camping.  From what I can tell, the company saved me about $700.  I’ve been there for nearly two years and I’m not a huge fan of the job, but there are perks.

The GBB has a Christmas concert next Tuesday night, which should be fun.  After that, we’ll take a couple of weeks off and then start getting serious about NABBA rehearsals (we’re going in the Championship Section this year) and about the inaugural Southeastern Brass Band Festival, which was the idea of our board last summer and which – surprisingly – is shaping up to be a pretty good event.  I believe we’ve got 6 bands signed up for it and a great hall in which they can all perform.  That takes place in, I think, May.

It has been rainy and quite cool for the last month, and I must sing praises to my Nest Learning Thermostat.  Picked it up in late summer and have nothing but good things to say about it.  Since switching over from cooling to heating, it’s done a really good job of keeping the house comfortable and – from what I can see – saving me quite a bit of the green stuff.

Forgot to mention that I had my own annual review at work last week.  The first one I’ve had since I’ve been there, and I got “exceptional” marks all the way down the board.  First time that’s happened in about 30 years.  Granted, I think it’s the first time the X-Company has even done reviews, I’m in the first class of Team Leads they’ve ever had, my boss is the first-ever Director of Service in the company’s history, and I don’t think anyone really knows what they’re doing…but still – I got perfect scores and a raise and I’ll take it.  Also had a talk with my boss about restructuring going forward and there’s a decent possibility that I’ll get a bump up to some sort of capo di tuti capi role (floor lead/lead of leads) in the next year.  It will take my one level further away from technology and one step closer to full-time people administration, which is not an idea that I relish; but it is sort of what I had in mind when I took the job and told the hiring manager that I guess I’d start a completely new career with the X-Company.  

I’m getting more comfortable with my current role as lead – kind of shocks me at times to realize that I’m basically doing the job that my bosses used to do, but I also have the ability to take a step back if I need to clear my head and just work on technical problems.  I have two seniors on my team, one of whom I’m grooming to be a lead himself, so when I want to work on computer problems, I just tell my team to go to Matt with their questions for a while.  It’s working pretty well.

And I guess that’s about all I’ve got to say for right now.  The featured image for this post is of my kitchen in the Cheboygan Cabin last month.  I’d meant to use it for one of the posts that I wrote while in the cabin, but my phone apparently never uploaded the shot.  See how rustic I am!

a terrible horrible very bad day

Posted on by

Note: I found this in my “drafts” folder today.  I’m assuming that it’s from somewhere in 2015, when I was dating Amy from Waukegan.

Monday was driving day.  The return to Atlanta from Waukegan.  It began at about 4:30 AM – and I should’ve just stayed in bed.

Remember when truck drivers were among the best drivers on the road?  Yeah, well, they’re not anymore.  I started to notice this probably 10 years ago, and it just seems to be getting worse with time. With that in mind, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me that I came to a less-than-screeching halt 90 minutes after I set out on my trip Monday morning.  Feeling good about things after making it through downtown Chicago without any significant slowdowns, I found myself basically sitting still on I-94, in the rain, for the better part of two hours – caught in the backup created by three trucks that had somehow managed to tangle with each other on I-80, some 5 miles down the road from me.

After finally getting past the scene of the accident, I spent the next 13 hours in basically non-stop rain, fog,  and the mist kicked up by trucks whose drivers insisted upon driving next to other trucks, blocking both lanes and throwing up walls of water behind them.  I got a bit of a break just south of Nashville, when the rain stopped and, briefly, the sun came out.  By the time I approached the mountains north of Chattanooga, however, Mother Nature had thrown down the gauntlet.  The rain increased steadily for the remainder of the trip, which ended at around 8:00 Monday night.  By then, my neck and shoulders were in agony from the hunched-forward attitude that I’d been holding in the car for the majority of the day.  It’s now two days later, and I could still use a massage.

I did make it home, however – managed to take just over 5600 pictures during the trip (the GoPro was set to snap one every 10 seconds) – and yesterday was back to the grind.  It’s amazing how I can miss two days of work (three if you count the few people who go in to waste time on Saturdays) and end up with over 400 emails to go through upon my return.  I spent a couple of hours trying to pay attention to them yesterday before figuratively throwing up my hands and deleting the whole lot of them.  Probably not the most prudent thing to do, but I just wasn’t in the mood to deal with it anymore.  If there was anything in there that was actually worth reading, I’m sure it will be resent about 40 more times before I need to actually pay attention.

Spent the rest of the day dealing with obstinate workstations and working on some new code ideas.

After work, I went to a brass band rehearsal – which was nice.

There were no truck drivers there.

TWD

Back to the Grind

Posted on by

So I did make it back from Michigan at just about midnight on November 16th.  It was a white-knuckle drive for the first few hours, as snow had been falling for most of Thursday night and plows had not been sent out by the time I left the cabin.  75 south comprised a couple of tire tracks that everyone more or less stayed in, with the exception of the random idiot who jumped into the left lane to try to pass everyone – without the benefit of any road markings at all.  I saw a number of cars that had spun off of the road and laughed a bit at all of them.

By the time I got back down to Toledo, the snow was pretty much gone, but it was bitterly cold whenever I had to stop for gasoline.  The Subaru did a great job overall.

Had a Thanksgiving dinner with Jenny, her neighbor, and Herb at Herb’s assisted living place on Saturday.  The food was good and the company was pleasant and I think everyone had a good time.  I also scored one of Herb’s old office chairs – we’d taken it to him, but because it has wheels, it’s not a good idea for him to try to use it – and I’m sitting in it as I type this.  I’ve never had a decent office chair at home, which is the main reason that I don’t take advantage of the fact that I could work at home a couple of days each week if I choose to.  I may choose to in 2019.

The next week, which contained Thanksgiving, was a short one at work.  We got Thursday and Friday off and I spent those two days recovering from the drive back – sleeping a lot, doing laundry, cleaning out the car, watching football.  Jenny and I had tentative plans to sell Herb’s car last Saturday, but they fell through so I spent the weekend watching more football, getting more sleep, doing more laundry.  Then it was back to work for a full week, which was not pleasant.

We had system outages on Monday and Tuesday – raised everyone’s blood pressures – and my problem employee was AWOL on Wednesday.  I sent him a number of texts and tried to call – no response until very early Thursday morning, when he sent a text to me to tell me that he had to take his kid to the hospital, that he’d tried to email me and my boss, but the email was stuck in the outbox, and that he didn’t have his phone with him.  Since he was supposed to be working at home all week – the result of a dead car, which he was to replace on Friday – I stewed a bit on Thursday before letting him know that I got his text and he really needs to confirm that his messages are received when he sends them to me.  On Friday, he sent me an instant message that he had to clock out at 1:00 in order to get a new car, which he had to do on Friday or it wouldn’t be done until Monday.

That kinda tore it.  On Monday, he and I and my boss and and HR rep will be meeting first thing in the morning, and he’ll be getting official written notice from me that he is not to miss any more days or he’s looking at getting fired.  I didn’t want to go there.  I’m a laid-back boss.  I’m also not a good guy to screw with on a regular basis.

So I’ve got that to look forward to tomorrow….

Was good to get back to the band last Tuesday night.  We’re rehearsing for a Christmas concert on the 18th (I think), and playing some good stuff.  My chops were a bit rusty after having three weeks off, but I acquitted myself well, I think.  Looking forward to the concert.

Yesterday, I found 14 forms of identification and drove over to the DMV (in the pouring rain) to get my license renewed.  I was worried that I might have to take an eye test (probably would’ve failed without my reading glasses), but everything went smoothly and I managed to get everything taken care of in under two hours.  Got my temporary replacement and should have the new license in a month or so.  So that’s out of the way.  I also paid my car insurance this week – no more of that until June.  Last thing I need to do with the car before 1/1 is get the registration renewed, but I can do that online.

I might make it through this year after all – two years at the X company.  Hard to believe.  I’ve pretty much settled into the salary.  Still miss the old one, but I can afford everything on what I make now and even splurge every now and then.  I’m kind of resigned to the fact that I hit my peak in 2016 and I’ll probably never make it back there, salary-wise, but I’m moving on and just trying to learn how to be an effective manager of people.  Got a nice boost from my boss on LinkedIn last week – he sent me a recommendation for my profile, which was completely unexpected and very much appreciated, and made me feel like I might just be making a good impression in my new position.  Small victories.

And so we’re all caught up.  Should you be wondering, the photo at the top of this entry was taken on the Thursday afternoon before I left Cheboygan.  The sun was on its way down, the wind had picked up, and a storm was just starting to make an appearance over the lake.  It was incredibly cold and gorgeous and I just kept running out into it to experience it, then running back to the cabin to get warm.  All in all, a great way to spend an afternoon.

Ahmic 2018

Posted on by

Yep.  I made it back to Camp Ulvik this year after not being able to do it last year.   What follows are notes as I wrote them in notepad while waiting for the WiFi to be turned on.  I’ll just update this post over the next few days rather than make new posts.

6:03 AM 7/8/2018
A gorgeous morning, with a slight breeze coming into the guest cabin from the lake. I arrived in camp at around 7:30 last night after driving up from Lima via Sault St. Marie. I took that route, though it is longer, because the crossing is so much easier than it is in Detroit and because the drive is much prettier. Saw a herd of bison, and a heron, in the Upper Penninsula of Michigan. Just Cy, T, and I in camp last night and we had burgers and a pasta salad for dinner. In bed by 9:30 and I got nearly 8 hours, though my watch tells me that only 3 of those were deep.

2:03 PM 7/8/2018
Took a fairly long walk this morning – down Langford Lane to the Rouse camp, then back up Thompson Road until I saw an interesting 4-wheeler track off to the right. Followed that into the woods for a while, then came back out, continued the walk up to Nippissing, and came back to the main cabin here. Got my 10K steps in, which I think is around 4.5 miles. When I got back, it was about 11:30 and Cy and T were heading into town to refill their propane tank, so I relaxed in the guest cottage. Sat on the porch in my underwear after taking a dip in the lake and listened to the wind chimes. Walked back up to the main cabin at around 1 and chatted with the two of them while they ate lunch. T is now in his cottage reading and I think Cy’s gone to the dock to try to steal WiFi from Whit and Ellen’s place (the phone lines are down here – wire snapped and T and I were unable to get the two ends close enough to splice, so the telephone guy is supposed to be here tomorrow to try to fix it). I stole T’s wireless keyboard for a while, since the “T” on my own keyboard has stopped working (along with a couple of other keys, I think). That’s on my surface pro. Guess I’ll need to get a replacement for it if I’m going to continue to take this little computer camping with me. For dinner tonight, we’re planning on going to Tanner’s British Pub. Have never been.

7/9/2018
We did indeed go to Tanner’s for dinner.  Everyone else had prime rib.  I opted for Shepherd’s Pie.  Wasn’t all that great – generally isn’t, from what I’ve learned by ordering it in restaurants.

Dianne arrived during the early afternoon and got settled into the near side of the boathouse.  There’s a new shower on that side this year, which is pretty cool.   Took the boat into town for a few things (I needed ingredients for a chicken/rice thing that I made for dinner – somehow managed to lose the can of soup that I got there….).  I spent much of the rest of the day trying to snooze in my cottage, but didn’t really sleep much.   Rolled myself up to the main cabin to make dinner somewhere between 5 and 6.  In addition to the rice chicken (which was pretty good), we roasted some beets (also pretty good).  Played team cribbage until about 10:00 (Di and Cy smoked T and I), then we all crashed.

7/10/2018
I slept in this morning – didn’t wake up until after 7, then stayed in bed for another hour before going up to the main cabin for coffee and conversation.  Took another long walk after that, dressed in a manner that covered every inch of exposed skin to keep the flies and mosquitos off (jeans, pullover, netting over my hat, and gloves).  Worked okay, but the little bastards bit my hands through the gloves anyway.  Got back to the camp and jumped in the lake a couple of times.  Cleaned the windows in the boathouse, fixed the drain on the fish sink, and had a bologna sandwich for lunch.

7/11/2018
Dianne made dinner on Tuesday night – hot dogs and some sort of macaroni salad (good stuff) – and the four of us played Oh Hell until about 10 o’clock.  I held a lead for most of the game, but fell apart late and Dianne kicked everyone’s butt.  Chris and Jamie still hadn’t arrived by the time it was dark, so we all went to bed.

7/12/2018
Chris and Jamie got here shortly after we had all retired on Tuesday, so it was great to see them first thing in the morning.  It was a beautiful day all day – lowest temps of the weeks (high 70s) – and we got some chores done before Cy and I went to Huntsville for groceries and to look for souvenirs.  That latter part was a complete bust for me.  Huntsville is no longer the nice little downtown area with cool mom and pop shops, but a built up tourist trap with very little other than restaurants.

Once we got back to the camp, I did a bit of reading and took a nap before heading back out to go to the Cornball Store for croissants and to the bait store for gasoline.  Cy made stuff peppers with leftover rice from Monday and some sausage that she brought from Vermont – fantastic!

The 6 of us played a variant of Pitch until it was dark.  Didn’t really keep score because we weren’t completely sure how to play, but it was fun.

7/13/2018
I slept until almost 7:30 this morning!  This is my last day in camp, so I’m planning to clean out the guest cabin today and get ready to hit the road as soon as I wake up tomorrow.  Plans for today are nebulous, but it’s supposed to be very hot and overcast (bugs will be bad!), so I see a lot of reading, swimming, and sleeping in my immediate future.

The croissants are amazing, by the way.

trips and falls

Posted on by

So, yes.  It’s been a while since I updated this thing.  Truth be told, I just don’t feel like looking at a computer screen after I get home from work.  Don’t feel like doing much at all, honestly.  Free time is a luxury these days, with the relatively long commute to and from the office and the little projects around the house that never seem to go away.  So I wake up, I do or don’t take a walk, I drive to work, I work, I drive home, and I generally go to bed.  On the weekends, I flip a coin to decide whether to stay home and accomplish something (or sleep) or to go out and not accomplish anything.

On this fine Saturday morning, I haven’t flipped the coin yet.  Instead, I pulled out the laptop, paid some bills, did a little administrative work on my football website, and decided to add a new post to this story of my mid-life.

Today’s featured photo is of the mess that is called “the network closet” at the J. D. Frost CPA firm in Chattanooga.  That closet and that firm is where I kicked off the month of June by onboarding them during the week of Memorial Day.  The week went extremely well (hey, I was the lead on the project – a first for me – and I expected it to go well) and one other X-Company employee and I got the firm set up and working pretty much on the first day.  The rest of the week was spent fixing little problems that popped up (the same stuff we’d normally do over the phone for clients) and getting to know the 30-some CPAs in the office.  Great group of people, by the way – even though a bunch of them were UTC grads.

I stayed at the Read House on Market Street in Chatty, which I would’ve thought would be a lot nicer, considering how much it costs to stay there.  No refrigerator or microwave in the room.  No free breakfast (not even coffee, except for the little in-room coffee maker).  Small room with a view of an alley behind a parking deck.  Tattered carpeting in the halls.  They say that they’re doing a $25 million restoration until this summer, so maybe I should look again in the fall.  As it is….well…kind of a dump.

The hotel was about two miles from the office.  Two miles DOWNHILL from the office.  I know this because I walked to the office every morning and got to really hate that hill.  Also got rained on pretty much every day.  The rain, however, did little to bring the temperature down; so in addition to walking up that two-mile-long hill every morning (and back down every evening), I generally had to wear my North Face rain gear and a Tilly hat in the sauna that was Chattanooga in the rain.  Didn’t enjoy that a lot.  I did find a good pizza place though: Community Pie.

The Friday night that I got back from that job, I hosted Dianne and one of her friends at the house.  They’d come down to run a 5K race in Atlanta to raise money for the aquarium or something.  Good to see her, although I really have to question her sanity.  Who wants to run in the Atlanta heat?

We had a post-race meal with Jenny and her father at Mad Italian, during which I got the details on a trip that Jenny was taking to London the next week (last week).  When she does things like that, I’m supposed to feed her cats and occasionally check in with Herb to make sure he hasn’t fallen down his stairs or something crazy like that.  I’ve only actually done that a couple of times, and both times he’s kind of laughed at me, which I can understand.

So Jenny texted me last Saturday afternoon about something (I think I’d sent her pictures of her cats) and asked if I’d called her dad yet.  I said, “Not yet,” and didn’t think much of it.

Got a text from Jenny on Tuesday morning of this past week that said, “Call me.  Dad’s in the hospital.”  Also got a voice mail from Herb’s neighbor.  Herb had fallen down the stairs.  On Saturday afternoon.  And had lain there, literally in a pool of his own blood, until 11AM Tuesday morning.

Needless to say, I felt like the world’s biggest horse’s ass for not calling to check on him over the weekend; but after considering it, I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that if I’d called and he didn’t answer, I’d have left a message and not really worried about it.  I don’t have a key to his house or anything.  I may have called again and – perhaps – have driven over to the house if I hadn’t heard back from him by Sunday.  I honestly don’t know.

What I know now, though, is that Herb has a fractured skull, a broken wrist, a bit of pneumonia,  a slight brain bleed, and is eating through a feeding tube since his epiglottis isn’t working normally (possibly because when he arrived at the ER on Tuesday, he was understandably incredibly dehydrated and malnourished).

He spent Tuesday through Thursday in the ICU before moving to a regular hospital bed Thursday night.  Doug flew in from California early Wednesday morning, and Jenny cut her London trip short and came back Wednesday evening.

The good news is that his physical improvement since I first saw him in the ER on Tuesday morning is incredible.  His right eye had been completely swollen shut, but is now looking almost normal.  His speech, which had been slurred and often confused (he wasn’t able to distinguish between reality and the hallucinations that he’d been having since Saturday afternoon) is pretty much back to normal, although he’s obviously tired and was still a bit taciturn when I went to check in on him yesterday morning.  His wrist will not require surgery, nor will his skull.

The somewhat “iffy” news is that his throat still isn’t working properly and he can’t really swallow, so the feeding tube remains in place and doctors yesterday were talking about surgically implanting a stomach plug so that he can get nutrition that way.  One doctor apparently said that “he doesn’t have an epiglottis,” which sounds like a load of hooey to me.  The man is 85 years old.  If he didn’t have an epiglottis, I can’t believe that he wouldn’t have been hospitalized about 100 times for pneumonia before now, and someone during those times would’ve figured out that he’s been aspirating crap into his lungs since he was born.

More likely, his throat muscles atrophied for 4 days and he needs to learn how to swallow again, but assisted living places don’t like to (or can’t) take patients with feeding tubes, so the stomach plug is a quick way to discharge him.  Of course, that would put an end to things like enjoying food (and wine, which he loves).  Doug is gathering information and he and Herb and Jenny will decide how to proceed.

At any rate, he’s much better than he was on Tuesday and, though there is still much to be decided about where and how he’s going to live, live he will.  That he managed to survive is, to me (and to the doctors and nurses that I met during the week) almost unbelievable.

Tough old bird indeed.

Back at the Shop

Posted on by

I’m writing from the Tires Plus near the house today.  The Subaru has started to make ominous squealing noises when I turn left, and I’m wondering if I may be up for some brake work.  It actually began several weeks ago, and I was more than a little concerned last weekend when I was tooling down twisty mountain roads in NC and TN and wondering – not for the first time – what I could do if my brakes failed.  I think I’ve mentioned that the car doesn’t have a mechanical emergency brake.  It’s got a button that electronically turns on the parking brake, and it doesn’t work if the car is moving.

I really wonder who’d design something like that.

So I’m sitting here and letting them figure out what the problem might be.  Might also need a tire or two.  Or four.  Who knows?  At any rate, camping.  Brett and I drove up to Joyce Kilmer last Friday morning and spent the night in one of our favorite spots on the Santeetlah, giving me a chance finally to try out my new car camping setup.  It worked very well.  I’ve got a Napier Sportz Cove for the car, which is a great size for short trips (maybe longer ones if I combine it with my Noah’s Tarp).  With the Cove installed and two “don’t let the sun hit my kids” pantyhose over the rear windows, the car is essentially turned into a large screen room.  I also picked up a nice thick memory foam mattress for the back of the car.  Everything together worked great, and I slept like a dead man on Friday night.

Saturday, we’d planned to hike up to Bob Bald and spend the night there, but Brett wanted to check out Whiggs Bald first, so we drove up to it.  A terrible, horrible, very bad drive indeed, which lasted for a bit more than 6 miles – and had me really thinking about those brakes – but we finally pulled into a clearing near the bald (the end of the road), and it was incredible.  After a very short hike (maybe 200 yards), we found a fantastic place to set up tents and settled in.  360-degree views from the bald, creeks, a pond, and a very nice portion of the Benton McKay trail make this place a must-go-again destination for me.

Saturday was beautiful, weather-wise.  Bright sun (I got burned), but not too hot, and a non-stop breeze that developed into pretty strong winds by Saturday night.  Slept very well in the tent, though I have to admit that, once the sun went down, it got a bit chilly.  Brett, assisted by a healthy dose of Jamison’s, curled up in his sleeping bag on the ground and slept in the open all night.  Not sure how he didn’t freeze to death, but it probably helped that his new puppy, Luke, was in the bag with him.

I awoke fairly early on Sunday morning and took a nice walk on the BK trail.  Walked down the mountain for two miles or so, then turned around and went back to the campsite.  Got me thinking that I may be able to find a more car-accessible trailhead and get to the bald by hiking up from below on the BMT.

…..later…..

It is now Saturday, May 19th, and I’m just getting back to this post that I began at Tires Plus two weeks ago.  The problem with the car ended up with me needing new brakes, tie rod ends, and (I think) rotors.  Set me back about $850, which wasn’t at all thrilling.  I was no more thrilled when, a few days later, half of the outlets in my master bedroom – as well as that room’s ceiling fan – stopped working after I unplugged and then re-plugged my television.  Not a breaker situation, and I don’t mess with wires inside the walls, so I had my first experience with an electrician.  He was a nice kid, knew what he was doing, and ended up replacing all of the outlets and switches in my bedroom and bathroom (and did something so that they’re not tied to each other any more) and happily lightening me by another $750.

That tax refund was fun while it lasted.

The GBB played a concert with the Atlanta Wind Symphony, a group with which I once played, last Saturday – both groups did well, although the gig was in Kennesaw, so it was pretty much an all-day thing for me.  On Sunday (Mothers Day), Jenny and I went to a AAA baseball game here in Duluth with her Dad and one of her neighbors.  It was a nice day and the game was pretty good.  It also took most of my day, though.  I’d hoped to get a bit more work done around the house.  I need to finish clearing out my guest bedroom so that Dianne can use it in a couple of weeks, and I’m still emptying out my garage and music room.  Will be taking up those projects again this weekend, although we’ve gotten so much rain in the last week that I also need to mow the lawns again (if it doesn’t rain today).

I did finally reserve a hotel in Chattanooga for the week that I’ll be working up there (Memorial Day week).  Another $700, but at least I’ll get reimbursed for that.  It is months like this one that make me really miss the checks that I was getting from AT&T.  I have indeed learned to live on 50% of what I was making, but little surprises are no longer “little” when they happen.

And I guess that that’s all the news that’s fit to print for now.  Have a happy day.

The Taxman Leaveth

Posted on by

Today’s featured image is one that was obviously taken quite a while ago.  The boys were still babies – I’d guess in the 4-months-old range – and Boo was still the biggest kitty in the house.  She is now dwarfed by them.

I was going to feature a panoramic shot that I took at Lake Huron last year, but it was just too large to be considered, so I’ll embed a smaller version of it here:

Now that that’s out of the way….what have I been doing with myself lately?  The answer to that is, basically, not a lot.  Settling into my life as an L1 lead at the X-Company is a bit challenging, having not had direct reports in over 10 years.  Last week, I completed three annual review with members of my team; somewhat awkward, considering that two of the three have been at the company longer than I have.  The toughest ones are still ahead.  I get to sit in judgement of two guys who basically trained me.  One of them can be confrontational at times.  Not looking forward to that, but it’s part of the gig.   I’ve also been doing a number of interviews every week – the L1 teams are going to be growing pretty dramatically, and we’ll probably end up hiring 20-30 new folks over the course of the year.  At least I’ve got a say in who the new people are, which is nice.

I’ve also been doing quite a bit more coding (which is what I really want to do anyway), putting together some scripts for my team.  I have to keep all of them on the down-low, as we’ve got a petty tyrant in an L3 role who doesn’t like for anybody to automate anything if they don’t report directly to him.  That being the case, I’m just very quietly writing, tweaking, and perfecting a few bullet-proof scripts for everyday tasks and letting a few of my folks use them until they become so engrained in the daily grind that it’ll be hell for the person who tries to take them away.  The new idea going around the L1 community is that the tyrant will say that my scripts are not allowed in our environment before magically releasing his OWN scripts a week later that do exactly the same thing.  Apparently, he’s done that in the past.  Should it happen, I will call him out on it.  Publically.

Tax season ends on the 17th, and everyone at the X-Company is looking forward to that.  With our growth and the merger and our infrastructure and development teams’ bad habit of rolling out changes without fully testing them, the last several months have been a long nightmare.  My main problem client (the one who sent at least two letters from their lawyer to complain) have formally announced that they will be leaving after the season (and the people praised the Lord), so I’m really looking forward to the 18th.  In the immediate aftermath of the season, the vast majority of CPA firms go on vacation for at least a few weeks, which means we’ll have the chance to clear out all of our old tickets, regroup, and get ready for the next season, which starts around August.

We’ll also be entering “project season,” which is when people like me go on the road and set up new clients.  The only project that I’ve volunteered for so far is one in Chattanooga (not THAT firm in Chattanooga…a different one) on the week of May 28th.  I didn’t realize when I signed up for it that that week includes Memorial Day, so I’m honestly not sure how that’s going to work.  I don’t know if I’ll have a day less to set things up or if I’ll get a comp day for working on the holiday or what.  In any case, I’ll be in Chatty for 4-5 days, away from the office and hopefully enjoying myself.

The GBB competed at the North American championships last weekend – and got thrashed.  It definitely didn’t help that we were scheduled as the second band to play in our section – the early bands generally get screwed by the judges, who are hyper-sensitive first thing in the morning and have to leave room for higher scores for later bands.  It also didn’t help that, frankly, we’re just not as good as we have been in the past.  We ended up coming in 12th out of 13 bands.  It was the first time since we started competing in around 2007 that we didn’t win or place 2nd – and we’re planning to move up to the highest section next year, so it was a bit of a wakeup call for the folks who were really pushing for that move.  Scores, should you be interested, are posted here.  Interestingly, the San Antonio Band, which won the section with a phenomenal score, was founded by two former members of the GBB who moved to SA several years ago.  They benefitted, I am told, from their late-in-the-day performance.  Since we played so early on Saturday, I hit the road almost immediately after our performance and didn’t hear any of the other bands.

So that was last weekend.  The week before that was devoted to rehearsals every night – preparation for the competition – and the weekend prior to that was Easter.  I had an Easter gig; that’s nice, but it pretty much spoiled any weekend plans I may have wanted to have.

So this weekend is really the first time in quite a while that I can relax a little bit.  Not much, mind you.  I need to mow the lawns and do some housekeeping, and I’m also in the middle of a long-term project of cleaning and organizing my garage.  So I’m going to do all of that stuff and get some sleep.  Next weekend, however, I’m headed to the woods.  Have already taken off next Friday in anticipation of this.  It will probably rain, of course, but just being able to kick back and sleep in the woods next to a stream will be fantastic.   And I might finally get to test out the car camping setup that I came up with late last year.

The Amazon Echo Dots that I mentioned in my last post have continued to be a source of fun for me.  I updated a number of the rooms in the house – and the garage – with Phillips Hue lights, and the Hue and the Amazon systems work really well together.  One cool thing about Hue is that it is aware of my phone location – so it will automatically turn off all of the lights in the house when I leave, and will turn on the garage and kitchen lights when I come home.  Since my garage door light gave up the ghost a couple of years ago, I’ve been coming home to a completely dark house.  It’s so much nicer to drive into a lit garage – and having the house light up for me is also pretty excellent.

That’s just the Hue system.  With Amazon/Alexa, I’ve also setup a number of routines – for example, the system turns on various lights in the morning and begins broadcasting NPR and the weather for me, then tells me what’s on my calendar for the day – and I’ve have had some fun playing “Jeopardy!” every night after work.  Also put in a couple of bluetooth speakers, and – thanks to my Amazon Prime account – I can tell the system to, for example, “Play Yorkshire Building Society Band,” and it’ll just kick off a random selection of that band playing throughout the house.

Being able to say, “Alexa, add toilet paper to my shopping list,” is pretty nice, since I have a terrible habit of forgetting what I need three seconds after I think of it.  Same with to-do items (“Alexa, put clean the garage on my to-do list”).  Definitely helpful for an old fart with a spastic memory.

The best things, however, are the various sleep sounds that I can have it play.  Not surprisingly, “Wind in the Trees” and “Icy Snowstorm” are my favorites, though I have over 50 white noises that I can tell it to play while I’m lying in bed (or, to be completely honest, when I’m not lying in bed); and I know – by checking my sleep patterns – that running those sounds at night is helping me sleep better, if not for longer.  My typical night used to consist of 2-3 hours of “restful” sleep and 4-5 of “light” sleep.  Those numbers have reversed since I started playing sleep sounds.  Also, if I concentrate, I can come close to believing that I’m in the woods when I play the “Wind in the Trees” sounds.

At any rate, I plan to add at least two more Phillips Hue lights (outside the front door) and am considering replacing the fluorescent tubes in my kitchen with some sort of recessed Phillips lights, and I’ll continue to experiment with gadgets and IFTT scenarios for the Dots.

So I guess I’ve kind of caught up with things, and I must now go tackle the lawn.  After that, I might do some shopping, then start in on housekeeping tasks – or maybe I’ll just go to a bar and play video golf.  It’s the weekend, dammit.

Finally.

 

It’s Finally Saturday

Posted on by

I percolated some coffee last night.  I’m not positive, but I think that was the first time I’ve ever done so when I wasn’t camping.  While I do love the speed and convenience of my little pod-based coffee machine, there’s something about percolating that I’ve always like; and something nudged me to brew a pot when I got home last night.  It was good.  It’s also good this morning.

Spent some quality time lying in bed with the cats this morning.  5:15 came incredibly early, so I got up to feed the cats (Ocean Whitefish today – Boo was not pleased), then went back to bed for a few hours.  I would dearly love to spend most of the day there – checked my sleep activity yesterday, and I haven’t gotten more than 7 hours in two weeks – but I’ve got a concert with the brass band at Kennesaw State this afternoon.  Next weekend is also booked with band stuff, all NABBA-related rehearsals.  Friday night, Saturday morning, all day Sunday.  I suppose I should be looking forward to that.  To some extent, I am; but I really just want a weekend with nothing planned.  Preferably a sunny one (it’s raining again today and is forecast to do the same tomorrow) so that I could head for the woods and try out the new car-camping setup that I put together several months ago and have yet to try.  I’ve got a new Napier rear-gate cover, similar to the tent that I’ve used for a few years, but without the tent.  It just slips over the back of the car, and provides a screen window and a very shallow awning.  Also picked up a couple of door window condoms – I think they’re supposed to be used to keep sun off of babies or something, but they also function as fast and sturdy door screens (to replace the netting & magnets that I’ve been using).  The only thing I’m still looking for, to have what I think will be the perfect car-camp setup, is a kid-sized memory-foam mattress.  The air mattress that I normally use is great, but I’d like to get something a little firmer and less prone to leaking.

Had a pretty decent day at work yesterday, although I learned in the late afternoon that the client who had previously sent a letter from their lawyer has now sent another.  They’re unhappy.  I get it.  They want to get out of their 5-year contract.  I get that, too.  I really sort of hope that we just let them go.  I’m tired of hearing their complaints, and I’m tired of them blaming me for stuff that I can’t control.  I’m told that I’m not mentioned by name in this second legal missive.  That’s a good thing, I guess.

Still thinking about retirement and how to go about it.  It’s dawning on me that I may have to postpone it for a bit – mainly because of the cats, although if I can put up a big enough shack, they should be fine.  Questions about pooping (mine, not the cats’) have me vexed for the moment.  I know I’m hiking & camping guy, but I really don’t want to just have a composting toilet as my primary john.  I’d be completely happy with a pit toilet in a separate shack, but if I do go to the place in SC that I’ve been thinking about, I don’t know if that would be allowed.  If it would be, I’d have to find out how much it would cost to put it up.  Understand that I don’t want just a hole in the ground with a wooden one-seater over it.  I’d want a cement vault, as you might find in some decent wilderness campgrounds.

I’ve also decided that I want a hot shower, which my friends who’ve retired early have so far forgone.  They’ve been bathing in a tub resembling a small horse trough and heating the water with a huge heating element.  Yeah.  No.  I want hot showers on demand.  Propane could do this, I guess.  Or a tank-less water heater.

It’s basically all coming down to “what am I allowed to do, and what will the start-up costs be?”  I’ll continue to work it out in my head and then start putting things on paper before deciding if and when I can actually take the plunge.  It’s always in the back of my mind.

Today’s featured image, by the way, is – I think – one that I took during a weekend in Waukegan a few years ago.  Amy and I spent a good part of an afternoon at a little coffee shop and took a shot of the wall.  Or maybe it’s a stock photo, but I don’t think so.  I can’t imagine why I would save it if it is.  Nah.  Pretty sure that I took it.

Since mentioning a few weeks ago that I intended to start walking in the mornings again, I have yet to actually do so.  I’m usually dog-tired in the mornings.  I guess that getting out of bed and walking for 45 minutes or so would help with that, but I just don’t have the energy or the desire to bundle up and go out into the (relative) cold.  Maybe next week.

Well, I must do something productive before getting ready for the gig.  Still working on the football site, and I have to figure out why the images from my migration blog aren’t showing up in my media library on this one.

Need to start taking back my guestroom, too.  It’s still full of boxes that got thrown into it when Mary moved in.  Really want to clean that room out and make it usable again. It’s a nice room.

 

more all-night blues

Posted on by

Seems like as good a time to update this as any, since I’m once again sitting a work doing absolutely nothing while waiting for an upgrade to commence.  For some unknown reason, I was informed that I had to get here 6 hours early for today’s upgrade – scheduled to begin at 11:00 tonight and to run for 4 hours or so (and once again, I’ll have my own little 5-minute part to play).

Seriously.  6 freaking hours early.  And people wonder why I despise my job.

Theoretically, my boss and I will be chatting on Monday about another job opening that I spotted yesterday.  It’s the second of the two potential jobs that I mentioned a few posts back – the one that is basically systems administration, and the one that I really really want.  I know that I’m qualified.  The guy posting the job knows that I’m qualified.  My boss knows that I’m qualified.  The only question is whether or not my boss will once again block me from moving to another job, as he did last month (a move that – he knows – severely pissed me off).  When I mentioned this new job posting to him yesterday and requested that we talk about it, I basically told him that I’m at the breaking point and he’s going to lose me one way or another – either because I start working for someone else and supporting his team or because I start looking for a job with another corporation.  May 10th is coming up, after all….

Last weekend was the North American brass band championships in Cincinnati, and the contest, by and large, went pretty well.  There were the regular complaints about the venue, and there were the regular complaints about the judging (I kind of agree with those), but we had 23 bands and a couple hundred soloists show up and stayed pretty close to our schedule.  I got a serious work-out over the two days of competing by running up and down 12 flights of stairs to take as many pictures as possible.  My little pedometer told me that I cleared 5 miles each day and around 95 stories.  My feet were, not surprisingly, pretty tired by Sunday.  Got to spend some time with Amy, however.  That was nice, as was her cornet solo (“I’d Rather Have Jesus”).  She also got picked up as a ringer by the band that ended up winning the First Section, and the band that hired her to work with its cornet section a couple of weeks ago ended up taking 1st in the Championship Section – which *nobody* saw coming – so I’d have to say that she acquitted herself pretty well on the weekend.

Yard work began in earnest today with the mowing of the back yard.  A few weeks ago, I trimmed the holly in the back yard and pruned a couple of trees that were trying to grow through the side of my house, but I’m not counting that work.  The front yard is scheduled for tomorrow if the weather cooperates (and it looks like it will be another gorgeous day).  I also need to trim the front hedges pretty drastically.  I hate doing that because they look completely dead for the first month after I cut them back, but they’re encroaching on my sidewalk, so…..

Not much else to talk about.  Every day is sort of smashing into the next recently.  Get up, go to work, go home, watch some television, go to bed early.  Jenny and I nearly went to a minor league hockey game last night, but agreed – at around lunch time – that we were both too tired to do it.  We could possibly reschedule that for tomorrow.  It depends on how much sleep I can get tonight and how the lawn work goes tomorrow.

Hope everybody else is having a good spring.

TWD