So let’s backtrack a bit and pick things up with the survey that went out shortly before the looming “ultimatum lunch.”

As I think I’ve already shared, the main beef that most of the “Players Committee” had was with the band’s director.  In order to save myself keystrokes, said director will henceforth and forever be known as “Joe,” and to really understand a lot of what is to follow, you need to know a bit about him.

Joe is exactly 11 months older than I am, is also a transplanted New Englander, has an extremely quirky sense of humor, and has been intimately involved with brass bands for at least 30 years.  He got his start playing with Salvation Army bands, but oddly isn’t a big fan of sacred music.  In spite of being an employee of the S.A. to this day, he’s much more interested in and educated about more technical pieces.  He once regaled me with a story of how he and his college roommates would sit on the couch under the S.A. flag in their apartment all day – blasting contest music on the stereo while binge drinking and watching silent porn.

I guess that sentence could give you the idea that Joe is somewhat of a character.

In the summer of 1999, Joe and one of his colleagues at the S.A. went out to lunch and had a discussion about forming a secular British brass band in Atlanta.  As the story goes, they took notes on a napkin regarding where to rehearse, how to fund things, and potential players.  Actually, that’s not just a story.  I’ve got a picture of the napkin somewhere.

A few days later, I got a call out of the blue from this guy I’d never heard of asking me if I wanted to play an instrument that generally didn’t play, reading treble clef (which I did not do) and playing a type of music that I’d never before heard.

So I gave it a shot and fell in love with it within 30 seconds after the first rehearsal started.  Since Joe worked very close to my office, he and I started to have lunch together fairly often, talk about brass music, and get to know each other.  Joe told me about the competitive aspect of brass banding (I had *no* idea that that sort of thing went on), and he and I and a couple of other guys attended the championships in 2000 and 2001, at which point I told him that it would be really cool if our little band to do that type of thing someday, but that we just weren’t good enough.  He surprised me by telling me that he thought we’d probably do okay if we ever decided to try it.

In the background, Joe was basically running all operations of the band by himself.  He was involved in getting the majority of the band’s traditional instruments from Besson.  He beat the bushes for performance venues.  He bought all of the music.  He found rehearsal space.  He set up the legal corporation.  He helped land our first major donation (from The Home Depot, if you can believe that).  And when the band eventually did decide to go into competition, and the other director (the other guy who doodled on the napkin) didn’t have time to commit to it, Joe became the only director.  It’s not overstating things to say that Joe built the band from the ground up and made it successful basically on his own.

So that should be enough background to let you know that I like Joe, I respect his musical talent and I know that he knows more about brass bands than I ever will.

When I first began to realize that the “Players Committee” had it in mind to replace him and was blaming our supposed lack of competitive success on him (remember, this band has never gotten less than 2nd in competition, and has won twice), it didn’t take me very long to choose which side I was going to be on.  Any threat to Joe was, realistically, a threat to the band’s existence.

By the time the surveys were distributed, I was aware that Bob had been taking part in the “Players Committee” discussions, a fact that didn’t thrill me at all.  Bob further annoyed me (and others on the board) by sending an email to the board regarding the survey as soon as it was distributed, saying, “While I was happy to receive the questionnaire from Rich, I believe for this to be truly effective and productive for the group, this should be sanctioned by the board…”

To my mind, this was Bob jumping in to criticize the effort, largely because he had not been consulted about it.  Interestingly, I tended to agree with his sentiments.  The survey was designed and distributed with no input from the board as a whole.  It simply appeared in my mailbox one day, and I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a tool for the board to use or not.  Still, his instant criticism irked the hell out of me.

I should add now that, by this time, it was fairly general knowledge that I’d been selected to serve on NABBA’s board.  I believe that Bob took that little bit of trivia as yet another sign that he’d been wronged.  After all, I’d never even heard of a brass band 10 years earlier.  Previously, Bob and I had generally managed to ignore band-related conflicts in our dealings with each other, but there was now a definite tension in the air.

I wandered through the Duluth cemetery over the weekend, and attempted to leave my mark.

As expected, the 7 or 8 members of the “Players Committee” all used the survey to basically say one thing.  To wit, “We need a better conductor.”  While the surveys were technically anonymous, it didn’t take a genius to read various responses and know who had penned them.  Everything was blamed on Joe, and I do mean everything.  If not for Joe, the band would compete at the highest level (The Championship Section).  Joe devoted too much time in rehearsal to warm-up.  The band’s intonation was bad because of Joe.  The band wasn’t fun because Joe occasionally used profane language.  Our recording session was terrible because Joe didn’t take the time to explain the meaning of “The First Nowell” to the band (I can’t make this stuff up, folks).

When the board met to go over the survey results – along with that letter send by the “Players Committee,” there was a very clear division in the room.  On one side of the line was Bob.  On the other side was everyone else.  While discussing what was to be done, Joe made reference to the unstated ultimatum by saying, “If it comes down to they leave or I leave, I can tell you this: I’m not leaving.”  Bob, while being against open auditions for every seat in the band, wondered in an email to me later, “What makes Joe untouchable?  If I didn’t think I was contributing, I’d have decisions to make.”

In an attempt to convey that the board desperately needed to provide leadership to make it past a looming crisis, someone said, “We don’t want the inmates to running the asylum.”  Bob fixated on and took exception to this in an email to the board a few days later.  “…we also need to be mindful that these are NOT inmates. These are individuals that donate approximately 200 hours per year or more, to this organization. As such, we should all be viewed as part-owners of the organization, and as such, our actions as a board should be carefully considered to properly reflect the will of our co-owners.”  He also began to lobby vigorously for the election of a new board, proposing that 6 of the existing 9 board members step aside.  He did not volunteer to be one of the 6.

It was decided that a full rehearsal should be set aside for a band meeting to discuss the issues that had come up on the survey.  In order to keep things as civil as possible, an outside moderator was hired to run the meeting and, late in the game, a strict agenda was written up so that we could have a discussion about the issues that had gotten the most responses on the survey: The attendance policy, the goals for the band, and an audition process.  Bob’s reaction to the agenda, sent to each of the board members for approval before being sent to the band, was immediate:

While I understand the desire to control the agenda for this meeting, and to prevent a feeding frenzy, should we, as the board, be controlling it to this amount?


Given the view, even held by many board members, of the board having been less than perfectly effectual over the past two years, perhaps we should allow for a little (controlled) open commentary during the meeting?

In spite of further protests in this vein, Bob was outvoted and the agenda was passed.

The discussion then turned to competition in 2011.   Bob was adamant that the band should not bother with competition on a national scale and should instead focus on growing the local audience.  When it was pointed out that the band made its most dramatic improvements in the ramp-up to competition, he responded that the same improvement would be seen if the band concentrated on other projects.  When it was noted that basically all of the band’s promotional material was a direct result of our participation at the championships, his take on it was that that sort of promotional material didn’t mean anything to a local audience.  When the comment was made that participating allowed us to mingle with other brass bands, he asked, “…what does this do for our primary purpose?”

And he continued to push for the election of a new board, in spite of the fact that our by-laws do not allow for it.  “Surely if we want to, we as a board can change the mechanism between now and December to allow for direct election of board members.”  Eventually, the board agreed to hold such an election, with the stipulation that the sitting board would choose three officers from among itself and the remaining six seats would be open to anyone who wanted to run for them.  After an election was held, the sitting board would rubber-stamp the results – this was done in order to abide by our by-laws, which do not allow for a general election of the board.  Bob was not happy about this compromise, but he agreed with it.

A few weeks later, we had the band meeting.  It went okay.  Not a lot was set in stone, but people had a chance to comment on things that bothered them (most troubling to menu was the prospect of having to audition for their seats) and give suggestions for what would make the band more enjoyable.  It seemed as if the crisis had been averted.

Bob’s response to the meeting was in all of the board members’ inboxes before most of them had gotten home from the meeting.  “The meeting tonight was a good gesture, but a flawed one in my opinion…The agenda was….not appropriate….”  As he had also taken a veiled shot at the board during the meeting itself (when asked about increasing our exposure through mailers, Bob had volunteered – rather tersely – “I tried to do that last year, but the board voted not to fund it.”), Joe was in no mood for Bob’s negativism so soon.

Joe responded to all, “[Bob], why do I so often sense that you are an agent against the very board on which you serve? Sorry if that sounds like a personal attack. It isn’t meant to and I hope I am not violating any protocol in asking this. You seem to have separated yourself from “us” on most every issue. You are part of board discussions but seem to distance yourself from the decisions. I know not everyone gets their way all the time, but we still vote as a board and should present ourselves as a board.”

Bob responded in a typically maddening way.  “I don’t feel I am an agent against the board, but do often find myself standing alone in decisions…. When the moderator asked why the mailer idea didn’t go anywhere, the truth was the answer I gave….I also find myself being the one person on the board most often willing to ask the difficult or unpleasant questions, if this makes it seem I am an agent against the board, so be it.”

Two things have to be noted here.
One is that the few quotes that I’ve included in this post do not do justice to the actual volume of verbiage that Bob can throw out there, and those who aren’t directly involved with Bob in this business probably cannot figure out what is so infuriating about his attitude and demeanor.  You’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that Bob had pushed everyone to the breaking point.

The other thing is that, by the time Joe had sent his email, I’d already sent my own to Bob – the first of the private thread that I mentioned in yesterday’s post.  It began:

“What do you want?  Just between you and me.  What exactly are you trying to do here?”

And my next post will take it from there.

Yeah.  I’m a tease that way.

TWD

I said last night that I’d unload on the band’s board of directors today.  After I started typing this, I found myself going on and on and on, and I realized that there was no way I’d be able to get the entire story into a single post.  Therefore, if you don’t want to read about this garbage, then you won’t need to bother coming back here for a few days.  This is going to take a while.

I first joined the board, along with several other people, about two years ago.  For the first year or so, we were basically an inefficient but harmless group.  If a gig came up, we voted to do it.  If we had to spend money to bring in an outside conductor, we voted to do it.  If new players were needed, we voted to have auditions.

Basically, we did nothing except conform to the structure that the band’s by-laws demand.

Last year, however, things went sort of nuts.  As you recall, the band again came in second in the second-level (“1st Section”) of the North American championships.  We lost by a point to the same band that beat us by three points in 2009.  This finish was apparently unacceptable to a small group of people in the band.  One of those people was a member of the board of directors.  For purposes of simplicity, I’ll call him Bob.

Let me retract something.  Bob probably didn’t care at all about the fact that we got second place.  He was more upset with the fact that we competed in the championships at all.  I can only speculate about why he didn’t want to compete, which I will do now – first by establishing a few background facts, and then by rambling.

Bob, who is in his early 30s, is quite proud of the fact that he’s been involved with brass bands for 20+ years. He loved the genre and its main face in America (NABBA) so much that he applied to be on the NABBA board of directors about three years ago.  Unfortunately for him, he submitted his application shortly after he had widely distributed an email which was extremely critical of the organization and had originally been sent to a sitting board member.  How Bob got the email, I don’t know; but he wasted no time in sending it to basically everyone that he knew, urging them to complain to the existing board.  He didn’t have all of the facts of the issue, nor did he make any attempt to get them.  He simply blasted the organization.

It was not surprising, therefore, when he was not selected to serve on the board.

Shortly thereafter, he began lobbying to have our band stay out of the competition.  We went anyway,  but before doing so, the existing board of the band (consisting then of just the three officers) decided to sit a full board (you may recall that this was one of the recommendations put forth by the planning committee which I – and Bob – served on.  Perhaps it was a bad idea).

Bob and I both applied to be on the new band board, and both of us were selected.  As I said earlier, for the first year, not much was done; but Bob did manage to make it clear that he was going to attempt to run things his way – or at least make it very difficult for anyone else to do something that he didn’t want.

And, as I’ve noted, Bob didn’t want us to compete.

He nearly got his way two years ago, after nabba’s board inexplicably changed some key rules of competition in their September meeting, which caused a fairly substantial outcry from member bands.  I didn’t like the way the rules changes were handled and I was willing to vote with Bob to keep us out (and I think we might have had at least one or two other people vote with us); but the big board eventually rescinded the rules changes (and had a major shake-up of their own), and Bob ended up being the only one to vote against our participation.

Now…we’re back to where we started.  We competed, we came in 2nd, and a few people (notably a couple of the new players who joined the band as a result of the auditions) apparently began meeting at a bar after our rehearsals to complain about this.  Their main theme was one of, “We could win at the highest level if we had a better director.”   Over time, this self-named “Players Committee” came to include key personnel  from nearly all sections in the band.

It also included Bob, who didn’t bother to inform the board of directors that this group existed, or that there was general unrest, or that they were discussing the idea of hitting the director – who is also the band’s founder, and who has done more than anyone to keep it afloat for the last decade – with an ultimatum: “Either you step down or we’ll all quit.”

A few days before this proposed ultimatum was to happen, some on the board got wind of it and – in an effort to calm things down and cut the legs off of a rebellion before it started – a survey was sent to everyone in the band asking them what they liked, what they disliked, what they thought needed to change, how they felt about competing, etc.

It had the intended effect, as it’s tough to complain that you’re never consulted about anything when you’ve just been asked, in writing, for your opinions.

The board got together about a week later to discuss the survey results and to read a letter which had been drafted by “The Players Committee,” complaining about various things.  One name noticeably absent from this letter was Bob’s – he began insisting that he’d never had anything to do with the group.  He also began openly challenging anything that was brought up in board meetings or on the phone or in email and even during a special “clear-the-air” meeting that was arranged, with an outside moderator, for the entire band.

He also began insisting that he wasn’t challenging anything – he was simply “stating my opinion.”  Nothing was ever personal – “it’s just business.  My feelings don’t come into play.”  Nothing was uncalled-for, rude or hypercritical.  “I just want for us to be the best we can be.”

In a very short time, Bob managed to alienate the entire board.
Even the one board member who was usually in his corner quit abruptly, saying, “I don’t want to be involved with this drama.”

A few days after that, after I’d read one of Bob’s emails to the board which was pointlessly critical and had several people fuming, I sent him a private email and asked him point-blank what it was that he was trying to accomplish.  At that point, I considered Bob to be a friend; but I didn’t pull any punches in my email.  I told him that he was being rude and counter-productive and that his involvement with a group that was actively working against the board (the “Players Committee”) was, at best, suspect and that he needed to tone things down before he ended up tearing the entire band apart.

I expected him to see my email for what it was, which was an attempt to calm things down without embarrassing him in front of the rest of the board.  He was, as I said, a friend.

His initial response – along with all of his responses in what became a private email thread between the two of us – pretty much blew me away, destroyed whatever friendship we’d had, made me dislike other band members who I’d never really thought about before, and ultimately convinced me to quit the board myself…before I completely lost my temper and ended up in jail.

We’ll get into that tomorrow.

TWD

For the second straight night, I ended things off (before bed) by siting in a tub full of hot water – infused with some sort of oil that’s supposed to make my back less itchy in cold weather.  It worked yesterday, so here’s hoping it works today too.

I was going to write a bunch here about other things, but I don’t feel it right now.

Tomorrow, however, I’m going to vent about the brass band board of directors.

Stay tuned.

How’s it going, Al?  🙂

TWD

I have nothing to add tonight.  I’m simply typing this to keep my string of posts going.

For dinner tonight, I had jambalaya.  It really is the perfect food – particularly during No Dairy January.  The picture in this entry was taken during a game against Western Carolina in November, 2004.

The Post A Day suggested topic for today was, “Why did you start a blog?”

Initially, I was inclined to blow that topic off, as I have all of the suggestions.  Then I looked at what I’d done today (that’d be nothing, friends and neighbors) and figured I’d give it a shot.

The long and the short of it is that I started this thing because I was lonely.  I’d been divorced for about 18 months (separated for a good deal longer than that), had recently had a major falling-out with a girlfriend, was watching my best friend die a slow death, had been seeing my company shrink steadily for close to two years, and I wanted to do something to make myself feel better.

Blank pages have always comforted me.  When I was little, there wasn’t much that I liked more than a brand new notebook because it had all those clean pages just begging me to write something on them.  In high school and college, I’d quite often bring a notebook with me to orchestra rehearsals (where the tuba didn’t play much) or honor band rehearsals (where most of the work is done with the woodwinds) and pen conversations with myself.

I know that that sounds wrong, but it’s not.  I transcribed conversations between two voices in my head.  If you’re wondering, there was no plot.  There was no thought.  There was just knee-jerk writing stuff down. A typical conversation may have started off something like this:

• What are you doing here?
• Why would you ask me that?  I’m always here.  You’re the guy who’s always late!
• Well excuse the hell outta me!  I didn’t know we were punching a time clock!
• Dude, you couldn’t punch your way out of a wet diaper. 
• Oh that is SO mature of you.  What are you, 6?
• That’s not what your mom said last night.
• My mother was in church last night, you moron.

 …and so it would go for pages at a time.  The two voices never liked each other, they never actually made much sense, and only occasionally did they realize that there was a third person there – the guy holding the pen.

The men’s soccer coach and his son watch some American football. Two of his players that year are in the pros today and both have played on the US World Cup team.  One of them, a guy named Dempsey, is one of the best players in the world. 11/2/2004

Either just before or just after I got married, I managed to lose all of the notebooks with my conversations in them.  That’s always bothered me, as I had fun going back and reading some of the back-and-forth years later.  Not to mention the fact that there were other things in those notebooks that I liked.  Short stories, poems, letters that were never mailed….I even started a play at one point about a guy named Ralph Jenson.  Who he was is anybody’s guess.  I called myself Ralph Jenson for about two weeks during my junior year in high school, and the play had the character set as a knight.  He was on his way to rescue a damsel, I believe.  I don’t remember the female character’s name, but she was based on Fara Lockaby, who was my girlfriend at the time.  A number of other high school friends also had characters based on them.  I was probably 50 pages into writing the thing when I let it drop.  Like the conversations, it was never really meant to be anything.  It was just a way to pass time.

When computers started becoming fairly standard – somewhere around my junior or senior year at college – the comfort that I got from a blank piece of paper somewhat naturally evolved into a comfort that came from that blinking green cursor on a blank CRT screen.  My mother had a Kay-Pro “portable” computer that she used to type papers for college kids, and I sometimes borrowed it from her for my own papers.  More often than not, I’d end up writing essays about nothing or short stories or deliberately bad poetry – just because I liked filling up that screen.  And when I had a printer, it was a bonus.  I could fill up the computer screen first and then print out my garbage onto blank pieces of paper.  An epistolary two-fer!

Somewhere around the house, I still have some of those writings.  I used one of them as a part of my portfolio quite regularly when, in the late 80’s, I was bouncing around trying to land a journalism gig.  It (the story) was basically just a description of an evening that I spent on a sand dune at Myrtle Beach, SC.  For some reason, I thought it might show newspaper people that I could write.

After I moved to Atlanta and found out the hard way that I wasn’t going to land a job with a paper, I started writing my own.  It was called “The Thermonuclear Arrow” and was a completely tongue-in-cheek newsletter for my darts team, “The Terminators.”  Published weekly (“published” being a strong word…I usually printed out about 10 copies for my team), it chronicled the team’s successes and failures during league play, enthralled readers with stories of what the team did for fun when not playing darts, offered advice to young dart players, and even followed the harrowing story of Lex Luther, a team member who was brutally murdered by our team captain, Dan Briley….until it was discovered that Lex wasn’t actually dead.

I still have several issues of the newsletter, too.

So early one morning in June of 2005, when I was feeling sad and lonely and desperately wanted comfort, I sat down at the table in my breakfast nook, opened up my laptop, and said to myself, “Self – there are about 40 trillion blank pages on the internet, so why don’t you fill a few of them up?  Just write something.  It doesn’t have to be about anything.  Nobody’s going to read the stuff anyway.”

And there it was.  Stuff Nobody Reads.  Stuff that really was never meant to be read.  It was just stuff to make me feel better.

Generally, it still does.

TWD

Worked at home again today, thanks to very cold temperatures last night that turned most of the surface streets around metro Atlanta into skating rinks.  I drove to a convenience store to get some coffee this morning, but decided that that distance (about 1 mile total) was enough.

You think I’m kidding about the skating rinks, right?  Check it out:

The day wasn’t half bad, work-wise, though.  I got a new request from my PM asking me to use jQuery to enhance a report that I wrote late last year.  Having never used that set of tools before (though I’ve wanted to), I was a bit leery of the assignment; but an hour or so on Google and 30 minutes of experimenting did the trick.  Client’s happy, PM is happy, and I learned something new today.

One of the trucks in the neighborhood gives testimony about the recent ice storm

It certainly looks like I’ll be home again tomorrow at this point.  With the exception of about an hour today when the mercury pushed up into the mid-30s, it has been bitterly cold (for Atlanta) all day.  Temps tonight are supposed to be in the low-mid 20s, so I don’t see the roads being any better in the morning than they were today.

I heard the other day that there are eleven (11!) sand trucks in the Atlanta metropolitan area.  People wonder why a decent winter storm can knock this city on its butt for a week…

I also woke up with a cold this morning.  Have been sneezing my head off for most of the day and going through kleenex like whatever a good metaphor is for going through kleenex.  Don’t know where that came from, other than maybe the fact that I haven’t been outside for more than 30 minutes in the last three days.

Wish I had more to write about, but my house just isn’t all that interesting.

On the No Dairy January front, for those of you keeping track, I had noodles in a cup for lunch and rice….just freaking rice….for dinner.  Yum.

TWD

I’m not going to do a post today.

Oh wait.   I just did.

View out the front window at 6:30 AM

Please pardon the crappy photographs.  I took them with my iPhone this morning.  As you can see, it did indeed snow in Atlanta last night.  We got about 6″ of the stuff, which is the most I’ve seen here since about 2000, when we had a major storm that pretty much shut down Atlanta for a week.  As it is, I doubt I’ll be able to get back to the office before Wednesday.

Of course, not being able to go to the office is not a big deal for an intrepid IT guy like me.  I had my laptop at home thanks to the fact that I worked remotely last Thursday and Friday, so I just sat on the couch and did my work thing for most of the day.  Had a conference call with a client in Texas and nailed down some details for a huge dashboard that I’m working on for him, then spent half of the day trading instant messages with another guy who can’t figure out how to use another dashboard.

Also walked around my neighborhood at lunch and took a few pictures with a real camera.

Snowdrifts on the deck

I had a couple of pork chops for lunch, along with the risotto left over from a week or so ago.  No dairy there.  For dinner, I made some noodles in a cup.  Also found some old hot cocoa mix that seemed like a perfect thing to drink on a cold and snowy evening.  Betsy Jones pointed out to me via text message that the cocoa had powdered milk in it.

Dammit.  I didn’t know that.

But hey.  She’s eating eggs.  I consider eggs to be dairy, and I’ve taken them off of my menu for the month.  So pbtbtbtbtbtbt…

I felt bad for the birds and squirrels and raccoons and other critters that live in my yard, so threw a few handfuls of birdseed on the snow.  At last check, none of the ungrateful bastards had bothered to sample it.  I checked on my yard cats, though, and at least one of them was taking advantage of the little dome (actually the top of a litter box) that I put in a corner of the yard as a shelter for them.  That’s nice to know.  I like having the cats in the yard.  Hopefully, they take care of mice and other things that I’d rather not have eating my house.

The front yard

Having not much else to do, I’m already in my bed (it’s 8:00) for the night.  I’ll probably watch a movie on Netflix and maybe catch part of the BCS “National Championship” game, but should still be asleep well before my normal bedtime.

Gotta love being snowbound.

TWD

Well.

I slept until fairly late this morning (after feeding the cats, of course), and then did a bit of internetting to see if I could find some graveyards that I didn’t know about.  I found two in Dunwoody, which is a town about 12 miles from where I live.  I spent several hours wandering around those, resulting in enough pictures to make this post interesting.

At least I hope it’s interesting.

Currently, I’m watching Green Bay play Philadelphia in the NFL playoffs.  Atlanta, winners of the NFC South, has a bye week.  We’ll be playing Seattle next weekend.

Not much else to say today.  Still waiting for snow.

TWD

The pictures embedded in this entry are from a disk I found that was labelled “Desktop/My Documents, June 2004.”  Just so you know.

Bo’s first day at home – August, 2003

That post title refers to a 1983 song by Talking Heads.  It (the title) popped into my head at about 7:00 last night after I put too many duraflame logs in my fireplace.  I wanted to have a nice roaring fire going when Chris got here.  Instead, she arrived to find me standing on my deck staring at the chimney, carrying a pulse rate of about 220.  The roaring fire had been reduced, thanks to a couple of coffee pots of water, to a steaming pile of wet duraflame logs.  The living room, which had until moments earlier smelled like Christmas cookies (no, I wasn’t baking – I had a scented candle), was permeated by the festive odor of burning tires (did you know that wet, semi-burned duraflame logs smell like 18-wheelers in flames?).

After a few much-needed hugs, I calmed down.

All the excitement of the move tuckered Bo out

I must make a special explanatory foray here for any members of my family who are reading this, because our house really did burn down in 1967 – and everyone except for me probably remembers it and would rather not.  The above story is not meant to imply that I actually did set my house on fire last night.  Rather, it illustrates that I’m an incredibly cautious (probably overcautious) guy when it comes to having fires in my fireplace.  The flames got higher than I wanted them to get, so I doused the fire.  That’s it.  No real drama.  In fact, I later got everything burning again, chopped up the logs so that they’d burn faster, and sat and watched everything until I was satisfied that everything was going according to plan.   I’m paranoid about chimney fires, so when my flu starts to get too hot, I tend to freak out a bit.  No crisis, no story, no nothing. Just something to fill space in this here blog.

Bo’s first bed and his first bunkmate.

Dinner, after the smoke cleared out of the kitchen and the stench of liquified rubber lessened somewhat, was quite good, if a bit on the garlicky side.  Chris likes garlic.  I like garlic.  We had so much garlic going on that it was nearly too much for me….and necking on the couch was out of the question.

Instead, we attempted to watch the movie Final Countdown, then gave up on that and instead watched a few episodes of 30 Rock.  Later on, we did indeed make it through Final Countdown, then slept from about 1:30 this morning until 2:00 this afternoon, at which time we finished off the leftover garlic and attempted to watch the first Lord of the Rings movie.  Chris is a big L.O.T.R. fan.  I, frankly, have never really gotten into it.  Not the books, not the movies and not the books on tape.  It is interesting to note, therefore, that Chris slept through most of the movie while I fought off sleep and watched it.  I won’t say that I followed it.  I mean, it ended about 4 hours ago and I couldn’t give you a plot line right now; but I did stay awake for it.

Vermont Christmas, 2003

I’ll try again with it some night this week.  I feel at times like I’m really missing out on some of the “classic” literature that I just don’t enjoy.  Tolkien has never worked for me.  Neither has Faulkner.  I’m just about ready to give up on Emma, the first book by Jane Austen that I’ve ever tried to read.  The book 1984?  Never read it, although I did enjoy Orwell’s Animal Farm.  Other books that I probably should have read, but just never did: Fahrenheit 451.  The Iliad.  Ulysses.  Anything by Hemingway.  Anything by anyone named Bronte.

I blame Cy.  She got me hooked on children’s literature when I was a child, and that’s still my favorite genre.

Took this while camping in TN in January, 2004

Great Expectations, however,  is a major kickass book.  Does that fulfill my “classic” quota?  I’m also rather fond of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye, if that means anything.

I am now officially off of the Georgia Brass Band’s board of directors.  It was announced via email yesterday that the sitting board (which I was on) approved the election of the new board (which I am not), by a 5-3 margin.  As should be expected, even this announcement resulted in a virtual shouting match between a few folks.  I wish it to be known that I do feel bad about throwing in the towel with the BOD.  I’ll continue to do what I can for the band – I’ll run the website, I’ll pitch ideas to the director, I’ll push our CD wherever I can and I’ll do whatever I’m asked to do (within reason).  I might even still attend some of the board meetings.  Life is too short, however, for me to get my blood pressure jacked up because one or two people don’t understand that a community band isn’t the place for petty politics and ego.  What type of person thinks that arguments about nothing of substance are enjoyable?

I certainly don’t.

Jenny holds up Bo in September, 2003

Temperatures around the area were close to 60 early this afternoon, but plummeted at around 4:00.  Currently, we’re in the high 20s, and it is expected to remain cool for the next several days.  Maybe that snow actually will come.  That’s okay.  I’ve got a house.

Until I burn it down.

TWD