Just testing the Jetpack app on my iPad.
Author Archives: Tom's Brain
Wilderness State Park – 2024
As the title would imply, I’m at Wilderness State Park in Petosky, MI, this week. I arrived yesterday afternoon, late enough to take everything out of the car, put it in my cabin (the Sturgeon Cabin), drink some bourbon, and go to bed.
This morning, after a breakfast of granola and berries (I’m hillbilly like that), I drove to the Walmart in Cheboygan and picked up 3 new lanterns. The cabin is DARK. Got back, got things organized, and I guess my vacation can now REALLY begin. On Election Day, no less.
Wilderness State Park? I found this place last year, when I was trying to book a week at Pictured Rocks and discovered that Michigan is now closing a lot of its parks (yes, Pictured Rocks is a national park, but I group them all together) on October 15th. This did not sit well with me, since I like for my Michigan sojourns to be at least a bit chilly, so I went on the hunt for the northern-most park in Michigan that I could reserve in November. I found Wilderness. And I spent a week last November living at the park in a tent.
It was glorious.
On one of my walks last year, I stumbled upon the Sturgeon Cabin, and instantly fell in love with it. It’s a log cabin that’s about 3 miles from anywhere, right on the shore of Lake Michigan. No power. Hand-pumped (tannin-filled) water out front. A vault toilet about 100 yards away. Wood crib that holds about a two cords of wood. So secluded that you almost don’t see it if you drive past on the “road” (literally a couple of dirt ruts) that goes past it. When I saw that I could reserve it for the second week of November, it was a no-brainer to grab it. I’ll have some pictures up in a future post.
This is smaller than the cabins I’ve stayed in at Cheboygan State Park. It’s probably 18×22 inside, with two bunk beds and another single bed, a table and benches, a counter with two shelves, and a wonderful little wood stove. Behind the stove is a stonework that looks like it may have been an actual fireplace at one time, but it is now just a great place to store wood – and whoever was here before me left me a good supply, so I probably won’t have to go to the wood crib before I leave.
Behind the cabin is a short path through some trees and shrubs to a private beach on Lake Michigan. I say “private” because – due to the way the land lies – you’d have to REALLY want to get to this beach from anyplace other than the cabin. On the other three sides of the cabin are fairly thick woods. This is the type of place that I’ve fantasized about retiring to for the last 30 years. I may never (let’s face it, I’ll never) get to realize that dream, but I can live it a couple of weeks every year.
So that’s a description of where I am. Over the next week, I’ll try to get daily entries in – with photos – so I can remember what I did this week in November of 2024.
Wilmington Trip
Sandie and I took a long weekend and drove up/over to Wilmington, NC, last Friday. She lived there for about 14 years and wanted to show me around a bit and reconnect with some old friends.
We tried to go to a seafood place at Wrightsville Beach for dinner Friday, but the line to get is was so long that we bailed on the idea and got Mexican food instead.
Saturday, we went to the historic district, took a walking tour, and got some seafood at a bar and grill (which was actually really good). Saturday night, we drove past Sandie’s old house and she spotted a neighbor “kid” (now with two kids of his own) that she recognized from her time there, so we wound up spending an hour at their house. Not overly thrilling for ME (shoot, I didn’t know anybody), but she had a good time.
That evening, we went to one of her old hangs – a pool/dart bar – and hung out with some of her old friends while being filled with bourbon by one of her old bartenders.
Fortunately, we got an Uber driver for that last, because the bourbon was pretty freaking good.
Wilmington has an extraordinary history as one of the earliest, largest, and most influential towns in North Carolina – Cornelius Harnett, for example, was a signer of the Articles of Confederation and a native Wilmingtonian – but it also has a pretty dark period which was nearly forgotten until just the last 10 years or so. I’m speaking, of course, about the Wilmington Massacre of 1989. During a few days in November of that year, a group of White Supremacist Democrats not only completed the only successful coup d’etat in American history, but also exiled the majority of the city’s prominent blacks (and a good number of sympathetic whites), and murdered between 10 and 200 other blacks (nobody seems to have a good grasp on the actual number). As a result, huge numbers of blacks fled the city, flipping it from majority black to majority white literally overnight, draining it of skilled and unskilled labor, and pretty much handcuffing it economically.
The massacre can in some ways be considered to be the spark that spread Jim Crow throughout the south, as it became a blueprint for Southern Democrats on how to disenfranchise blacks without also losing the poor/illiterate whites. One enduring legacy – in 1898, blacks made up 56% of the population in Wilmington. Today, that number is 16%. This is not a spurious relationship – Wilmington today is still seen by many blacks as somewhat of a sundown town.
If you’d like to learn more about this, check out Wilmington’s Lie – a well-told and well-researched tome covering the event itself, the political causes of it, and the political fallout from it. I found it to be eye-opening, depressing, and fascinating – and quite relevant to today’s political and racial climate.
Rain…
The post title pretty much says it all. It has been raining here every day for what seems like 6 months. Okay, maybe two weeks. Point is, it’s hot, humid, wet, and I’m just waiting for a tree to fall on either the shop or the house. Sitting on the porch is uncomfortable because it’s so humid. Sitting inside is uncomfortable because Sandie keeps the thermostat at 12 below 0. So I just keep calm on carry on.
The shop reorganization continues. After pulling a 12-foot-long cabinet off of one side wall, I moved a cabinet from the floor of the back wall to the side, mounted my radial saw inside of it, put a layer of plywood on top, and I’ve now got a bench stretching basically the entire side wall (with a radial saw in one end). I’m planning on taking the existing (kitchen-type) countertop off of the remaining cabinets at the back wall and replacing it with plywood to give myself more useable bench space there. First, though, I’m moving my glue cabinet from one side of the shop to the other – to hang it over the space at the end of the “new” bench on the side wall. It’s a corner cabinet, and I’ve cut it down to just the part containing the lazy Susan. Just trying to figure out the best way to hang it on cleeats now. Trickier to keep it level than I’d anticipated, but I’ll figure it out.
On the “other” home front – my house in Duluth – the water bill has been steadily creeping up over the last few months, and I’m now convinced that I’ve got a leak somewhere, but haven’t been able to find it. I asked Terry, my renter, to put some food coloring in the toilet tanks the other day to see if we can spot a leaky toilet, but I haven’t heard back from him yet. Planning on going over there this weekend to see what I can find (and also to collect rent). I’m really hoping it’s just a leaky toilet. Not looking forward to having to hire a plumber to find and fix a hidden leak.
Dog Days
Mojo (Sandie’s little dog) went to the vet yesterday. He (the dog) wasn’t particularly thrilled about this, but he had (probably still has) an ear infection that looked nasty, smelled disgusting, and was obviously bothering him. Sandie spent some time Monday night torturing him by pulling hair out of his ear, and I couldn’t stand listening to him yelp, so I insisted that he go to the vet.
Ear looks better and doesn’t smell anymore. And I didn’t have to hear him scream.
In other news, it has been hot and rainy since we returned from Canada last week. The yard is slowly growing into a jungle because it’s always raining – or when it’s not it’s like walking into a steam room whenever you go outside, so nobody has felt much like mowing. I’ve been spending some time in my shop redecorating. Pulling cabinets off of walls, reconfiguring them, planning in my mind how I want things to look. It’s a slow process, but should give me a lot more bench space when all is said and done.
Work is beginning to really bore me. I feel more sorry for the folks that I used to supervise every day, because doing tech support is just so uninspiring. You fix one thing and there are 10 more lined up to look at. Half of the questions seem to be variations of “Why doesn’t report A match report B?” My knee jerk response has always been, “Because they’re different reports,” but that wouldn’t fly, so I end up going into the database and comparing the reports on a line-by-line level until I can pinpoint exactly which record is missing from one report or the other, and it’s always because, for whatever reason, that record shouldn’t BE on report A or B and the user has done something stupid. I can’t explain this to them in technical terms, and I don’t understand it in accounting terms, so I usually end up finding the issue and then asking a teammate to translate for me. It’s just…boring. I like having projects that have endings. This type of support just doesn’t have those. Don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to do it.
Got a call from a group of doctors who stick cameras up your butt a few days ago. Seems that my doc REALLY wants them to do this to me. I’ve avoided it for nearly 60 years, but I guess I’ll bite the bullet and get it done, if only to get Sandie off of my back about it. Not something that I’m looking forward to, although I am a bit curious about how much weight I’ll lose during the purge process before I do it. That could be interesting.
Football season is only a month or so away. So that’s nice.
Not much else to say today. Maybe something amazing will happen tonight.
To Canada and Back
Sandie and I got in the car two Fridays ago (July 5th) and pointed it north for our third annual sojourn to Magnetawan, Ontario. Stayed in Perrysburg, OH, Friday night and arrived at Camp Ulvik mid-afternoon on the 6th.
We spent a week there, doing what people do for a week at The Mag – sitting on the porch or our cabin, jumping in the lake, eating great food, drinking good bourbon (or, in Sandie’s case, wine), playing cards, visiting Parry Sound and Huntsville, eating pierogis from the snack bar in town, and generally relaxing with friends and family. The group this year was composed of Cy, “T,” Jamie Tall and his partner Alee (pronounced “Allie”), Trude and her friend Wayne, and Sandie and myself. An older group (Alee, at 29, was the baby by far), we may have done more sleeping and less “athleting” than in years past, but Jamie, Sandie, Cy, “T” and I did get a couple of hours in on the tennis court late in the week. The fence around the court was replaced (at ridiculous expense) sometime between last summer and this, and it seemed a shame to waste the opportunity.
It did rain a couple of times. For the most part, however, the weather was phenomenal. It was pretty drizzly for most of the day Monday or Tuesday, so we all went to Parry Sound and – except for Cy and “T” – we took a 2-hour cruise around the Georgian Bay on the Island Princess. I’d never done that before. It was interesting and a good way to kill a couple of hours. Not something I’d put on a “must do” list by any means. Particularly at $56/person.
There were at least 11 loons in the cove near our cabin, which was pretty sweet. I only heard them a few times, but it’s nice to know that the population is doing okay.
Last Saturday (July 12th), we packed up and hit the road by about 10AM. Crossed back into the States at Port Huron, MI, (the Blue Water Bridge there is terrifyingly high and narrow), and stayed in Lima, OH, Saturday night. Got home at around 7 Sunday evening, much to the joy of Mojo, Sandie’s little dog – and hopefully Joshua and Chamberlain were also pleased to have me back. They were not as ebullient in their happiness as was Mojo.
I wasn’t thrilled to get back to work on Monday morning, but fortunately I got another respite on Tuesday. The big boss came over from England, so the service team met him out our office (yes, there’s actually an office in Atlanta), where he went over our new application with us for a few hours and then took us all out for an afternoon of lunch and bowling, It was the first time that I’d ever met three of my 5 co-workers, including my immediate supervisor. The bowling alley SUCKED (after two rolls, I didn’t even try to shoot well), but being able to see people who I’ve only known from Teams meetings for the last two years was nice.
Interviews and Shop Renovations
I was working in my shop last weekend (on the aforementioned closet shelves) and started looking around and seeing wasted space and other inefficiencies. When Sandie bought the house, the shop was outfitted with what were obviously cabinets that had at some point been in a kitchen. There was a long rank of cabinets along the back wall with a kitchen sink in the middle of it. Two ranks of overhead cabinets were mounted on the side walls. Another floor rank ran along one of the walls. And there were a few of basically stand-alone cabinets scattered here and there. They weren’t in the best places, but I guess they were fairly functional, the sink notwithstanding.
Sandie had a long workbench that her father had made, so we put that in the shop as well.
Then Sandie decided to remodel her kitchen….and I added most of THOSE kitchen cabinets to the shop. Took the kitchen island, added some casters, made it a mobile workbench. Moved the other stuff around against the walls. Made a little “L” on one wall. There was, to put it mildly, a lot of counter/bench space – and not a lot of room for anything else.
Over the past couple of years, as I’ve tinkered around with the shop layout, I’ve come to the conclusion that probably 50% of the cabinets are completely unused. And this weekend, I noticed that the long rank of overheads that had been there from the start (in which I’ve been storing lots and lots of paint) are most decidedly bowing in the middle. Add to that the fact that the paint is not very organized, making it difficult to find what’s needed, and I decided that it was time to make some changes.
I haven’t really figured out what those changes will be, but I’m sure that at least THAT set of overheads is coming down and probably being relegated to a pile of scrap wood or a dumpster. First, though, I need a place for the paint. So I build a couple of simple shelf sets out of plywood, which will hang on cleats on the wall. That was my Sunday project. Came out pretty good, and each unit holds 16 gallons of paint. Now all I have to do is figure out where I’m going to hang them. Once I’ve done that, I can commence with taking down that set of cabinets. I have NO idea how I’m going to do that without hurting myself, but it needs to be done, and it will start the process of making a great workshop.
In other news, we interviewed 5 folks for the director of the GBB job last week. One more to go (next week, when I’m in Canada). No clear leader at this point, and it’s going to be tough to whittle the 6 down to three finalists, who will each take a concert series this year to help us (and the band) decide who gets the gig. Some have very strong administrative skills, others have strong brass band experience. I’m kind of hoping we can get one of the latter as the primary director, and one of the former as an associate.
Wrap for the GBB Season
The GBB finished up our 25th season last night by performing at the annual Euphonium and Tuba Festival (IET). We’ve done this many times before, and IET’s creator is currently one of the applicants to replace Joe. He’s a superb musician and has done a great job over the last 25 years or so at getting his name out there and developing contacts in the brass world, which has Simone wondering if he’s looking at the GBB job as a chance for more self-promotion. I wonder that about several of our applicants, but it’s not a showstopper for me. We need somebody who’ll be able to bring the best out in the band – particularly in terms of dynamics. If they can do that, I don’t care if they’re in it for the band or for themselves, to be honest. As long as they’re committed to actually being there and following through on band commitments, I’m good. One of the applicants let us down a few years ago – bailing as our conductor for personal reasons about a month before we were to compete. Granted, it was a big deal for him. He was to receive the GA teacher of the year award of some such on the same weekend as the competition; but it had us scrambling to find an alternate conductor, and the guy we ended up with really didn’t understand the music. One of the adjudicators was the composer. As the piece was extremely personal to him (the music dealt with an unexpected stroke that he had which left him struggling to do anything, much less compose, for a few years), he was not happy with our lack of interpretation.
At any rate, that applicant will not get my vote.
In other news, yesterday was Juneteenth, which is now a federal holiday, and my company gave us the day off.
I celebrated by attempting to electrocute myself. Actually, no, I didn’t do that. But I DID finally change out a 3-way light switch in our closet for a single-pole switch and removed the other 3-way from the kitchen. Have been meaning to do this for about 6 months, but I’m happily ignorant about anything involving electricity, and I didn’t want to do something that would burn the house down. Thank God for YouTube.’
So after I got that done, I put in a motion detector instead of a switch (in the closet) and began building some shelves that Sandie’s been asking for.
The Doldrums
It has been extraordinarily hot for the last couple of weeks. I entertained the thought (briefly) of pressure washing parts of the driveway over the weekend, but with the mercury hitting the 90s by 8:30 in the morning, the idea just didn’t appeal to me once it was late enough to get out there with 1}a leaf blower and 2}a pressure washer. Yeah, I could start at 7AM, but I think the neighbors might take issue with that.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in the shop (air conditioner blasting) over the last couple of weeks putting together a workstation for my table saw. For the most part, I finished it up on Saturday, although I’m still waiting on a couple of parts to complete the crosscut sled that will be an accessory for it. The workstation itself consists of a box that holds the saw (a Dewalt contractor saw), a foldable extension wing on the left, retractable infeed and outfeed support, and a fairly substantial drawer for extra blades, jigs, etc. It also has open slots for a crosscut sled and the braces for the extension (or extensions if I decide to make one for the right side (which I might do if I decide to also use it as a temporary workbench).
When fully opened, the extensions allow me to safely cut a full 4’x8’ sheet of plywood (although those puppies are HEAVY, and getting them started is kind of a bear), but when everything is retracted, the whole thing has a footprint of about 2’x2’ and sits on casters, allowing me to move the thing out of the way when I’m not using it. It’s probably the most complex thing I’ve built, and I like it a lot. In truth, I’ve been meaning to build something like this for years, but never thought I could do it. When I saw an ad for birch plywood sheets for $25 each about a month ago, I jumped at the price, had 8 of them delivered, and figured, “What the heck. No excuse not to build it now.”
It works well, and I just need to put the rail on the back fence of a crosscut sled that I built for it before I can pretty much call it done. One really nice thing about it is that the board that the saw actually sits on is micro-adjustable by means of four bolts under it – so I can always make sure that the top of the saw is exactly even with all of the extensions.
Been A While
So, yeah.
It’s been three-and-a-half years since I updated this. I guess not much has happened?
Let’s see…
For starters, I moved in with Sandie a couple of years ago. She bought a log cabin in Lawrenceville on a few nicely-wooded acres and we decided that it was easier for me to just move here than it was for us to continue in separate domiciles. As it turned out, the move was pretty well timed, because a mutual friend found himself homeless shortly after I vacated my place, and he’s been renting from me ever since.
The boys, Joshua and Chamberlain, weren’t especially thrilled with the ride from my house to the cabin (particularly Josh, who managed to rip out a couple of claws in his panic during the ride), but they’re settled in nicely with their “cousin” Mojo (a Shih-Tzu dog) and have adjusted to the new things that come with a new place. Chamberlain loves nothing more than to sleep on the screened-in porch (at home, the closest he could get to being “outside” was to sit by an open window), and Joshua spends most of his time sleeping upstairs in my office. He’s had a rougher time of it – including falling from a catwalk that spans the main room of the house (scaring the hell out of me) – but he seems on the whole to be relatively content.
I quite my job at the X company in November of 2022. Mainly because my director moved to a different job, I couldn’t stand his replacement, and when a newly-created position opened up for an overall service manager, it went to a colleague of mine who I could never see myself respecting. The story I gave them was that I wanted to “get back into tech,” and move away from a supervisory role, but the simple fact was that I couldn’t stomach the thought of reporting to either of those guys. My new job is, to put it mildly, difficult. As far as the “tech” goes, it’s fine – I work almost entirely with SQL servers, which is no big deal – but the questions that I get from the accounting companies that I support might as well be in another language. 18 months into it, I’m still constantly asking my teammates, “What exactly are they saying the problem is?” There are plenty of days that I think I regret making the jump, but then I try to imagine doing my old job and taking direction from two morons, and I wind up feeling better about the decision again.
My woodworking hobby has taken off since moving here, also. The previous owner had setup a detached garage on the property as his workshop, and Sandie and I continued that. At first, we both had workbenches in the place, but she slowly moved most of her tools and projects to a corner of the in-house garage (she calls it “the SPA” – small projects area), and I’m slowly filling the bigger shop with some serious hardware. Planer, jointer, laser engraver, router table….all the fun stuff that I would have loved to put in my garage at home, but for which there just wasn’t space. Don’t know that my woodworking has gotten any better, but at least I’m willing to try things that I would not have considered previously. Sandie, as is her wont, is methodically remodeling the house, and she’s asked me to try building things for it – benches, closet space, cabinets and the like. I practice for things like that by making shop furniture, and I do see some improvement. Maybe if I can ever retire I can make a bit of money on the side as a carpenter.
Speaking of retirement, Sandie took that plunge a year or so ago. She’s younger than me, but when her father passed away a few years ago, he did so as a pretty wealthy guy. Sandie’s mom set her and her sister up with pretty decent allowances and they’re both living the retired life. She’s told me to make the plunge a few times, but I’m not ready yet. I want that sweet government insurance. And I want to have some structure. I think when I actually do take the leap, I’ll be looking for a part-time gig within a year just to stay somewhat focused (and also have a bit of extra scratch coming in).
I continue to play with the Georgia Brass Band, and continue to act as the librarian for that group. During the Covid lockdown in 2020, I started scanning all of our music and estimated that it would take me 6-12 months to have everything digitized. 48 months later, I’m maybe a 10th of the way through it. Granted, I had a move during that time (there are currently 11 file cabinets full of music in the basement), but my original idea was vastly underestimated – and I don’t spend as much time scanning as I probably should. The group sounds good, though. We’ve gone back to NABBA a few times (competing in the Championship Section) and haven’t embarrassed ourselves yet. May do it again in 2025. The jury is still out on that, but our director – who founded the band – is retiring after 25 years at the helm (on Sunday), and he was not into competition at all. The new guy, who hasn’t been selected yet, may be more excited about it.
So that’s a (very) brief rundown of what’s been happening for the last 3 years. I’ve said this (many times) before, but I’ll try to be more diligent about keeping this thing updated going forward.