Today began inauspiciously but ended up being very pleasant.  I woke up, thinking that it was probably between 6:30 and 7:00, and discovered that it was 9:15, overcast, quite chilly, and vaguely depressing.  I later learned that I was not the only person who slept late – in fact, everyone else did as well.

Because of the chill, I forewent the morning plunge, opting instead to brush my teeth and hair, throw on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt (not sure what I was thinking there), and head up to the main cabin for a bagel, coffee, and email check.

After an hour or so, I went to watch “T”, Dad and Don attempt to finish their two-day flagpole-raising project.  While attempting to bold the pole-box to the dock, Dad managed to drop the ratchet into the relatively shallow water near the dock, and – because I was the only one in shorts – I attempted to ease myself into the water to pick it up with my foot.

You all see this coming, right?  Yeah.  I completely lost my balance and fell into the water.  In doing so, I managed to stir up all of the gunk on the bottom of the lake, making it impossible to see the ratchet.  After a couple of dives, I gave up and relegated myself to shivering on the dock with a towel wrapped around myself while the three elder statesmen continued their labors with a different ratchet.  As far as I know, the original is still on the bottom of the lake.  Maybe I’ll find it tomorrow.

After drying and changing into jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, I took a long walk around the area, visiting Camp Ojibwe on one side of of and “Greenwich on Ahmic” (the late Billy Rouse’s camp) on the other.  I also spent a lot of time with my tripod trying to get decent pictures.  Failed miserably on that front.

All was not lost, however, as the sun came out during my walk, the temperature went up by about 15 degrees, and the rest of the afternoon turned into a beautiful day.

Took a nap for about 90 minutes during the afternoon and then drove into town to get ingredients for dinner – I was the chef, Dad was my assistant.  We made jambalaya, roasted beets, corn on the cob and salad.  Quite tasty.

After dinner, the 7 of of completed the Oh Hell game that we’d started a couple of days ago.  Don ended up winning by a narrow margin over yours truly.  Julie, Cy, Dad, “T” and Dianne rounded out the field.

Going to bed fairly early tonight (it’s 10:05 and I’ve already had my evening dip).  Not sure how long I’ll sleep tomorrow, but if I sleep as well as I did last night, I might just opt to stay in bed all day.

Unless I can get a tennis game going.

TWD

The weather was pretty much all over the place today, but for the most part it was beautiful.  I woke up at around 8:00 this morning when Dianne, apparently attempting to ease herself into the lake, made a splash big enough to scare fish.  After listening to podcasts for an hour or so – giving her enough time to go running or do whatever it is that motivated people do in the morning when they’re on vacation, I made my way to the dock and jumped in the drink myself (sans trunks, of course).  The water was a delightful 72 degrees and I spent about 15 minutes taking a bath before getting dried and dressed and making my way up to the main cabin for coffee and conversation.

By about 11 this morning, it was looking for all the world like it was going to be a perfect Ahmic afternoon, so I grabbed a camera and drove to the one cemetery that I know about in town (actually, just outside of town – near the dump, ironically) to see if there was anything there of photographic interest.  After about 20 minutes of shooting, I found myself in the middle of a complete downpour and came back to the camp.

Tried to have a bit of a chat with Betsy via the internet, but apparently the storm – which by that time was approaching Biblical proportions – was messing with the camp’s DSL.  I kept losing my connection while trying to determine exactly when she was planning to meet me in Grand Rapids, MI, for the brass band board meeting next week.  We finally worked things out via text message – not exactly the best option, as I have a very limited number of said messages on my plan (while in Canada) before I start getting charged out the wazzoo for them.

Finally gave up on any online business and had a lunch of grilled cheese and meatloaf sandwiches, then went to the boathouse for quiet time – which consisted of a brief nap followed by about an hour of tuba practice.  I still sound good.  Gotta love it.

By about 3 in the afternoon, the rain had left and the sun came out, giving us the perfect day that the morning had teased.  While everyone else gathered on the dock for reading and sun, I took a walk down Thompson Road and Langford Lane, looking for pictures.  Didn’t see much of anything, although I took my obligatory shots of the roads.  Also walked to the Rouse camp, where I’m told that Edward Norton and his significant other have been staying for a couple of weeks – she (I can’t remember her name) actually came to Ulvik yesterday with her little pug dog, but I have yet to meet the movie star.

Got back to the main cabin an hour or so later and was reading email and generally doing nothing when Don and Julie Peddy showed up, bearing two dozen ears of sweet corn, tomatoes, wine, bagels and cookies.  Guess I’ll be serving sweet corn when it’s my turn to cook on Thursday.

Dinner tonight was prepared by “T” and I, and consisted of basically all of the leftover vegetables we could find, sauteed and served over spaghetti.  I also put together a garden salad and “T” made some garlic bread.  Good eats.

After dinner, we started a game of Oh, Hell!, which – after 16 of the required 20 rounds – Don is winning.  I’m in second, about 5 points behind him.  At this point, nobody else is close.  We’ll finish the game tomorrow, I’m sure.

It has clouded over again tonight, but the temperature is still in the high 60s or low 70s and the water temperature is still at about 72.  I know this because 1. I looked at the water thermometer and 2. I jumped in the lake shortly before I began typing this.  There is something amazingly freeing/sexy/cool/comfortable about swimming naked in nearly pitch-black conditions.   The breeze is also quite strong tonight, which is not common.  It generally dies down after dark.

Not sure what tomorrow will bring, but I have no problem with the weather so far.  Just give me that breeze off the lake and the cool temperatures and I’m happy.  I do hope I can find another cemetery, however.

TWD

And it can’t be gone fast enough, if you ask me.  It has been unbelievably hot in Georgia this year.  I think – don’t quote me on this – that today marks the 35th day in a row that the temperature has crossed the 90-degree threshold.  Prior to this streak, we had an 18-day stretch of 90+ days.  In case you’re wondering, Atlanta normally has 32 days a year of 90+ and to say I’ve been uncomfortably hot this year is an understatement.

At the moment, I’m sitting (NOT naked) at the Audi dealership, waiting for my car to come back from its 95K service, a front-end alignment, and various and sundry other things that will, once again, push my service bill above $300.  I love my car, but sheesh.  Except for warranty work, I never get out of this place with any money left.

The brass band is nearing the end of our CD project.  We had an extra 3-hour rehearsal last Saturday morning, we’ll have our last regular rehearsal tonight, and the actual recording sessions are scheduled for Thursday and Friday nights and all day Saturday.  I don’t remember exactly how many tunes we’re recording, but it’s somewhere around 20.  I love playing with the group, but I’m more than ready to take a few weeks off after Saturday’s session.

My vacation plans are finally starting to gel.  I’ll be leaving for Magnetawan probably on the afternoon of September 4th and plan to arrive at the camp sometime on the 5th.  After chilling for a week or so on the lake, I’ll head west in Canada and cross back into the US at Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario sometime around the 14th or 15th.  I still haven’t decided exactly how I’m going to waste one or two days before I’m due for the meeting in Grand Rapids, MI, on the 17th, but I’ll have a tent with me and I should be able to find someplace to set it up in northern Michigan.   After the meeting on the 18th, I’ll probably take two days to get back to Atlanta, and I’m scheduled to be back on work on the 21st. 

To say that I’m ready for vacation would be another understatement.  Normally, I’d have taken off during the first week of July, and waiting the extra two months this year has been mentally draining.

At work, I’ve been fighting with the CFGRID tag for the last two weeks.  I got a relatively benign request to keep a “timeline” of user-entered comments for trouble tickets and figured it’d be a quick fix.  Silly me.  I’ve tried to set it up about 12 different ways since receiving the request, and I keep getting killed by little things in ColdFusion that don’t work the way I expect/want them to work.  I did make some huge strides on the project yesterday, however, and am very much hoping to wrap things up today.  Just in time, because I’ve got a meeting about a new (huge) project on my calendar for tomorrow morning.

This past Sunday was “Feed the Players” day at Furman.  It’s a pretty cool idea, amazingly allowed by the NCAA.  Basically, fans can volunteer to host small groups of football players for one home-cooked meal before school starts.  It was a tradition at the school for quite a long time, but died out for about 10 years before being resurrected last year.  Last year and this, I imposed myself on a good friend and his wife by joining them and four players for the dinner.  It’s a fun time, allows me to get to know a few of the kids on a more personal level (which helps immeasurably in my photography during the season, believe it or not), and lets them get to know me so that Ihey won’t wonder who that weird guy with the camera is who shows up at all of their games.

Speaking of shots from the games, I think I’ll be using SmugMug this year to host and sell the photos.  Still playing around with it to make sure it will work as well as the system that I set up for myself a few years ago.  Hope so, as it will be A LOT easier to maintain things.

Also on Sunday, I discovered a huge cemetery in downtown Greenville that I never knew was there.  Spent a few hours wandering around it and taking pictures before dinner, and I’m definitely planning on going back up there some morning and exploring a bit more.

Oh!  I forgot to mention that I’m typing this on my new Dell Inspiron Mini, a netbook that I got last week.  Basically, I went looking for a new GPS unit for my car before I started driving all over the country in September.  After looking at a number of models and determining which ones would best meet my needs, I figured out that, for an extra $100, I could just pick up a netbook (a tiny laptop with a long-lasting battery) and install Streets and Trips on it.  So I did.  And it works great.  Good call for me!

Well, my car should be just about done by now, so I’ll wrap this up.  No pictures in this entry at the moment.  Maybe I’ll add some later.

TWD

After throwing together that short little update yesterday, I decided to do things.

Specifically, I decided to go to the Kennesaw Mountain battlefield, which is about 20 miles from my house, and see if there was anything there worth photographing.  It turned out to be more of an adventure (I use the term loosely) than I’d anticipated.

I was originally planning to go to the main visitors’ center and climb to the top of the mountain and look at things and yada yada yada; but – I don’t know why I do things like this to myself – I decided to try getting there by just driving west from the house until I recognized something. 

Needless to say, I got completely lost and spent about 2 hours just driving around and wondering where the hell I was.  Found a tiny little cemetery and stopped to take a few pictures.  It didn’t really yield anything impressive, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to find it again, but it was something to break up the monotony of being totally clueless about my whereabouts.

Shortly after that, I pulled into a strip mall’s parking lot and got out the iPhone, figuring that I’d go ahead and use the maps app to actually get to the battlefield.  Unfortunately, I’ve recently “upgraded” the software on my phone, and (thanks, Apple), performance has been so degraded that the mapping ability is pretty much crippled.  Normally, I’d have just used my TomTom (GPS) at that point.  That piece of equipment, however, died about a month ago. 

Which reminds me that I need to get a new one before I head to Canada at the end of August.

So I continued driving and finally found US 41, which led me to an outlying part of the battlefield – the Dead Angle – about 4 miles from the actual visitors’ center.

History lesson time.  On June 27th, 1864, during a campaign in which Sherman’s troops were slowly but surely moving from Chattanooga to Atlanta (after the fall of which, Sherman began his famous “March to the Sea”) a large number of Illinois troops attempted to move a similarly large number of troops in the Army of the Tennessee off of Cheatham Hill, which is part of the Kennesaw Mountain area.  The confederates had erected earthworks on the hill for a couple of days before the union army arrived; and, after charging up the hill and being decimated, the Illinois troops found themselves in the unenviable position of being unable to advance and similarly unable to retreat.  So they hunkered down at a little swell in the hill about 20 yards below the confederate lines, dug what trenches they could (using bowls, forks, spoons and anything else they could find), and basically hung out there, sending and receiving fire, until the rebels evacuated (still concerned with the defense of Atlanta) on July 2.  It is difficult to imagine what it must have been like to hide between two-foot-high earthworks – while being shot at – for a week.  Particularly in late June in Georgia.  The heat (and the smell of decomposing bodies) must’ve been unreal.

I can speak to the heat a bit, because – God knows why – I decided yesterday to walk the path from Cheatham Hill to the visitor center, which is a distance of about 4 hilly miles.  Not being incredibly smart at times, I honestly didn’t think about the fact that I’d have to walk those same 4 hilly miles BACK to my car….

So, after marching 8 miles in 97-degree heat and high humidity (I’m told that the heat index was 105), I was pretty much dead.

Being dead, I thought it appropriate to drive to the Marietta National Cemetery, where, appropriately enough, a great many of those Yankee troops who died during the Kennesaw Mountain campaign are buried.  I’ve been told that the citizens of Marietta sort of freaked out at the thought of having union soldiers buried in their cemetery and moved their own dead to another cemetery a few miles away.  At any rate, the Marietta National Cemetery is dedicated to the union troops who died there, which is sort of bizarre.

It’s a beautiful place, though, and the turf is amazing.  I wish I could make the grass in my own lawn grow like it does at the cemetery.

After wasting all morning and half of the afternoon with the above-told story, I did some grocery shopping and also picked up a cassette tape recorder that will allow me to convert all of my tapes to .mp3 files, which is totally cool.

I also discovered that I’ve got three kittens, the offspring of one of the numerous feral cats that have been living in my backyard since I bought the house 11 years ago, living on my deck.  They (the kittens) are all completely adorable, but quite skittish.  I left them some water and food last night, which they seemed to appreciate.

Yeah, I know.  I shouldn’t encourage it, right?  Well, they’re not hurting me and they’re hopefully controlling the rodent population in the yard.  I’ve got no problem with kitties in the backyard.

This morning I networked a couple of my computers (I’ve been rebuilding laptops and desktops like a maniac over the last month) and started copying photos and converted cassettes to my main storage drive.  Haven’t decided what I’ll do later, but I do need to clean those dirty dishes that I mentioned yesterday – and do some more grocery shopping for stuff that I forgot in my heat-induced delirium yesterday.

Or maybe I’ll go to a baseball game.

TWD

I realized this morning that I’ve once again let two weeks slip by without posting anything here.  That being the case, I’m posting something here, but it’s going to be short.  There just hasn’t been much going on. 

It’s been unbelievably hot in metro Atlanta for the last two weeks (thermometer in the car hit 101 yesterday afternoon while I was diving home), and sleeping has been fitful at best.  A couple of days ago, I bit the bullet and cranked the A/C down to 73 for one night.  It probably cost me $800 for one night of relatively comfortable sleeping, but it had to be done.

I forgot to mention in my last entry that I got the living room, foyer, stairway and upstairs landing painted a few weeks ago.  A guitar-player friend of mine paints on the side, so I hired him to come do what I can’t – namely, paint walls without getting paint all over the floors, ceilings, cats, my car, and the neighbor kids.  Don’t know that I’m all that thrilled with the colors (pebblestone mostly, with 2 darker accent walls); but I’m really not a visual person, so I don’t know.  I know that the walls don’t look as crappy as they did before being painted.

Chris (yup, she’s still around) is talking about moving again – either this year or next – which is traumatic but not unexpected.  I covered all the roller-coastery stuff when she was thinking about it last winter, so I’m not going to write it all down here again. 

I got a new battery for my robotic vaccuum cleaner yesterday, which was nice.  The old battery had stopped holding a charge about a month ago, and – though I borrowed Jenny’s vaccuum cleaner while she was on vacation – my carpets were getting grungy.  This morning, after letting the Roomba run around for several hours last night, everything’s shiny and clean again.

Except the dirty dishes, which I need to wash today.

Told y’all it was going to be short.  That’s it for now!

TWD

So it’s been several weeks since I added anything here, and I must apologize profusely for that.  In my defense, I spent several days over the last week attempting to make a video of myself in order to post it here and bore all of you in living color.  For various reasons, I gave up on that idea after several attempts.

Making the video was easy.  Editing it was a bit more time-consuming, but doable.  Getting it to upload turned out to be more trouble than it’s worth.

So what have I been doing since the Great American Brass Band Festival?  Really not a great deal of note.  The GBB played the closing concert for the 2010 International Euphonium Institute, which is an annual camp for young euphonium players held at Emory University.  I don’t remember exactly how many times our band has played the closing concert, but it’s been at least the last 4 or 5 years.  I have a feeling that we won’t be doing it next year.  There’s not a great deal of enthusiasm for the gig among the band members (why that is, I’m not sure), and I don’t think our regular director has actually done the gig with us yet, as it always seems to happen when he’s on vacation.

Sticking with the playing theme for a minute, I put together  brass quintet for three gigs over the July 4th weekend (David Klausman hired me to do this), and it was a blast.  We played one rehearsal on Thursday, a service Saturday night and two Sunday-morning services – all at the (very large) Perimeter Church in Duluth.  In each case, we played a bunch of Chicago-brass type stuff behind a praise band (which was fun as hell…wait…can I say that?) and were featured during the offertory, during which we played an arrangement of John Williams’ Summon the Heroes.   We also played Shenendoah and America the Beautiful as pre-prelude music.

Summon the Heroes was selected by the church after I sent them a list of patriotic-type music that I have in my library.  I didn’t actually bother to look at the charts when I sent them the list and therefore didn’t realize that … um …. this was not an easy arrangement.  Fortunately, the folks that I recruited to play with me are all very solid and, after a somewhat-shaky run-through during the rehearsal, we knuckled down and gave three pretty nice performances of the piece, which garnered praise from the regular band and from several parishioners – not to mention a pretty nice paycheck for all of us.

Wish I could just get 4 folks who are that good and who are also interested in putting together a regular quintet.  In spite of what my music-for-a-living friends try to tell me, I could indeed play that type of stuff every day.

The actual company holiday for the 4th was on the 5th (last Monday), so I went ahead and scheduled the whole week off, figuring somewhere in the dark recesses of my brain that I’d sit at home and catch up on work.   I didn’t do that.  I’ve done absolutely nothing that is work-related since last Friday.  I’m not looking forward to going back to work next week at all.

Instead of working, I’ve done a lot of sleeping in; I’ve gone to a couple of baseball games in Macon, where  a new 4-team rookie league is playing this summer; I’ve watched a lot of television (I’m working my way through 6 seasons of the series called Lost); I’ve played a bit with my cameras; and I’ve tried to keep my two cats from killing each other.

I also got a nice email from Dad, who informs me that he likes to sit naked in his basement and read.  Dad…I love you and all, but I didn’t need to know that, dude.

Jenny’s been cruising above the Arctic Circle for the last couple of weeks (no joke!), so I’ve been taking care of her cats every couple of days.  I went to her place this morning and hung out for about an hour, much to the delight of Bailey, who we got as a kitten shortly before we divorced.  He crawled all over me and purred and generally made me feel happy, which was nice.

I don’t know if I mentioned it earlier, but I did indeed put my name in the hat for the NA Brass Band Assoc. board of directors and was elected into it in the middle of June.  The first board meeting that I’ll be attending in an official capacity (I audited one in April) will be on September 17 & 18 in Grand Rapids, MI; and, since Cy and T will be in Ontario during the first week of September, I’ll be taking another vacation to cover both of those events.  I’ll hang in out Magnetawan for a week, then figure out how to kill a week, then do the meetings in Grand Rapids, then drive (quickly) back to Atlanta to resume work on the 20th.

The worst part about the meeting is that it conflicts with a football game that I’ve been looking forward to shooting for – literally – five years.  Furman will be at South Carolina on the 18th, which is the first time SC has agreed to the game since losing (badly) in 1983.  A number of people – both from NABBA and from my football website – have suggested that I blow off the board meeting and shoot the game, but I just don’t feel good about doing that.  If it wasn’t the first meeting, I’d certainly think about it, as I think I could probably make about $1,000 selling pictures from the Carolina game.

But hey.  I knew what I was getting into, so I’ll do what I’m supposed to do.

And what I’m supposed to do now is throw some pictures into this thing, publish it, and go waste the rest of the day.  Talk at y’all later.

TWD

Okay, so – technically – summer doesn’t arrive until 7:28 tomorrow morning; but, as far as I’m concerned, it’s been here for a while.  My brain gets fooled when every day features 100-degree heat and humidity approaching that of the inside of a tea kettle.

On this glorious Sunday morning (Fathers Day, for those of you in North America), I’m sitting in my office naked at 7:25 in the morning, already sweating, trying to determine what I’m going to wear to a baseball game this afternoon.  Do I go for the “so sweaty it looks like I’ve been swimming in brine” look by donning jeans and a tee-shirt, or do I shoot for the “my legs have been painted with mercurochrome” badge by sticking with shorts and hanging out in direct sunlight for several hours?  Right now, I’m leaning towards the sweaty look, but anything could happen between now and the time that I’m supposed to meet Rich, John and Betsy for lunch.

Last weekend, I attended the Great American Brass Band Festival in Danville, KY – or at least as much of it as I could stand before the incessant heat forced me to ditch it for the relative comfort of sitting in my air-conditioned car for the 6-hour drive home.  I drove up to Kentucky on Friday morning, got set up in the worst campground ever imagined (the Pioneer Playhouse Campground, if you need to avoid it), and then went to a nearby airport where there was to have been a hot-air balloon race to kick off the festival.

Unfortunately, high winds grounded the balloons.  I spent about two hours walking around the airport taking pictures of a clown band out of Indiana and a brass quintet out of Tennessee before heading back to my campsite to read, make some ravioli and suffer.

Was up early on Saturday, thanks to a brief rain shower at around 6:00.  After a tepid shower in the campground’s disgusting shower room, I went to downtown Danville and took a quick walking tour.  Not a great deal to see.  Danville is a small college town (Centre College).  At one end of Main Street, there was a gazebo.  At the other end, there was a large stage.  Since the bands that would be playing in the morning were scheduled to do so at the gazebo, I grabbed a seat there and waited until 9:00, when the Saxton’s Cornet Band out of Frankfurt, KY, kicked the weekend off.  They’re a period band (Civil War), which generally doesn’t appeal to me, but they were quite good and highly entertaining.

Also at the gazebo, I saw a ragtime quintet and the Fountain City Brass Band.

There was a parade down Main Street at around 11:00, by which time it was getting uncomfortably hot.  After the parade, I went back to my tent to change into clothes that weren’t sweat-soaked and scarf a couple of sandwiches.  Then it was back to the main stage to catch the afternoon & evening performances.  I caught bits of the Millenium Brass quintet, the Southern Stars Symphonic Brass Band and the Canadian Staff Band of the Salvation Army before the heat just got to be too much for me.  After hastily throwing my tent and gear into the car, I hit the road for home.

This past week was sort of a rotten one.  My renter became severely ill on Wednesday, which prompted me to learn where the nearest emergency room to my house is (it was not necessary to go there).  I worked from home on Thursday and noticed in the afternoon that I was also getting a tad sick.  By Friday morning, I was feeling bad enough to call in sick and I spent most of the day in bed, although Chris lit up my world late in the afternoon by bringing me some matzah ball soup, cookies and nyquil.

I spent most of yesterday doing nothing and trying not to get any sicker.  Woke up this morning with a chest cold, but I’m hoping the worst is past.  I guess I’ll find out while I’m sitting in the oven that is the Braves’ stadium later this afternoon.

Happy Dads Day, Dad!  Wish I were in New England with ya.

TWD

So I said I’d post again quickly to catch you all up on what I did in the week before the morons tried to break in.

I lied.

Basically, I did nothing in the week prior to that august event.  The brass band played a concert at a church in Chamblee the Sunday before then.  That was pretty much it.  I goofed around with my new camera during the concert and shot some pictures when I should’ve been counting rests, but they aren’t all that interesting.

So…you’re all caught up now.

For the last week, I’ve been extraordinarily unbusy.   Betsy and I went to Andersonville National Cemetery on the morning of the 28th and then wasted much of the rest of the day doing touristy things on the way back to her house.  Stopped in Montezuma, GA, for about an hour’s worth of picture taking.  Old houses, a broken-down gas station, a confederate memorial…all the usual tripe that one would expect to find in a small town in middle Georgia. 

After that, we made a brief stop at the Lane Packing Company, which is a large peach distributor in Fort Valley, GA.  The idea was that we’d eat there, but the cafeteria frankly didn’t look all that appetizing.  Instead, we took a self-guided tour of the peach processing room, played on the tractors in the playground outside, and headed to Warner Robins, GA, where we ate at a Cuban place before spending a couple of hours at the WR Museum of Aviation and then driving around the WR Air Force Base.

I had the day off for Memorial Day on the 31st and basically slept for the entire day.  The rest of the week was a typical short work week.  I accomplished very little other than watching some training videos that I’m required to watch (I’m about three months behind in this task).

Wednesday night found me poking around the Marietta National Cemetery before gorging myself on Sicilian pizza at the Marietta Pizza Company, and Thursday night I headed back to Marietta to frolic in a pool and have dinner with Chris prior to a rehearsal that she had. 

Worked from home on Friday and watched a movie on Netflix Friday night.  Fun week, eh?

Yesterday, I left the house at around noon looking for some gravesites in two cemeteries that I didn’t know about.  The first one, Union Hill Baptist Cemetery in John’s Creek, GA – about 15 miles from my house – was very pretty and quite depressing.  It has been either vandalized (I suspect) or hit by severe storms or both.  60% of the stones are pushed over or broken.  Why anyone would get their jollies by doing that is beyond me, but it does make for interesting pictures.

The second cemetery, Kirkland, is located right across the street from one of my old watering holes and – as far as I can tell – is completely inaccessible. I *think* I drove past it, but saw no way to get my car to it.  If what I saw is indeed the cemetery, I’ll try parking down the street and walking to it later today.  A couple of the requests in that graveyard are for members of the Medlock family.  I’m wondering if they’re related to the family which lent its name to Medlock Bridge Road, near my house.

This evening, I’ve got the next-to-last concert of the season with the brass band.  We’re playing at a Methodist church which has hosted us at least twice previously.  Very cramped stage, but the room sounds okay.  We’ll be doing mainly fluff pieces as we wind down the season, but will be premiering a work by Stephen Bulla called (I think) Decade.  We commissioned the thing about 18 months ago in the hope of premiering it last September – 10 years after the band was founded.  Unfortunately, we didn’t receive the piece until about a month ago.  So we’ll still get to premiere it during our 10th season – just not our 10th year.   The piece’s main little motif (if it can be referred to as such) is “G-B-B” (get it?  Georgia Brass Band?  Ha!) and, though it’s not something that I’d want to run out and purchase were I a brass band music director, it’s nice enough and it’s a new addition to the brass band repertoire…and it’s ours, dammit.

In a couple of weeks, we’ll finish the season with a performance at the International Euphonium Institute and then take a week or two off before resuming rehearsals with the hope of recording a Christmas CD in late August.

My plans for next weekend are to travel to Danville, KY, to get a little camping in and to hang out at the Great American Brass Band Festival, which I’m sure I’ve mentioned in these pages previously.  Those plans could change if Chris is available and wants to do something; barring that, I’m Kentucky-bound next Friday.

I think that pretty much covers everything of non-interest for the moment.  If anything world-shaking happens in the near future, you know I’ll rush to write about it here.

TWD

Three teenaged idiots tried to break down my back door last Saturday afternoon.  Fortunately, my renter was in the house at the time.  He heard the noise from upstairs, though it was me, and walked down to check things out.  The kids, standing on my deck wearing bandanas over their faces while attempting to kick down a door (which is 90% glass, yet they were trying to break the deadbolt rather than smashing the glass), saw him and ran. 

Most excellently, one of them apparently busted his ass during the flight.  I hope it hurt.

Scott (the renter) immediately called 911 and then me (I was in middle Georgia shooting cemeteries – more on that later).  From what I’m told, three sets of cops were out the house within about 90 seconds.  No sign of the punks, though.  I’m guessing that they saw my laptop sitting on my living room table and figured they could accomplish a smash-and-grab manoeuvre; but I guess nobody ever told them that glass breaks easier than wood and metal does.  The did manage to crack the core of the door, which pisses me off. 

Not as much as the fact that they were in my back yard to start with, mind you, but it does piss me off.

I suppose I should consider myself lucky that I’ve lived in this hellhole of a metropolis for the last 20 years and this is the first time anybody’s tried to make me the victim of a home invasion.  Some loser did indeed break into my car about 15 years ago, though.  Did $300 worth of damage in order to steal a $10 equalizer.

Lesson learned.  Laptops now stay upstairs in my room – as do my wallet and keys.  But enough about all that.  As I said, I spent most of Saturday driving around middle Georgia shooting cemeteries and trying to fill requests for FindAGrave.com.  Betsy and I hit something like 9 graveyards between 7AM and 5PM and managed to get some pretty decent shots in spite of a couple hours of rain and an inability to find a couple of the smaller cemeteries we were looking for.  I also go to see Griswoldville, GA, for the first (and probably last) time.  If G’ville is famous for anything, it’s the fact that, during Sherman’s march from Atlanta to Savannah during the Civil War, a bunch of GA “militia” attempted to engage some of the union troops there.  After Sherman’s guys basically destroyed the rebs at Griswoldville, they were rather shocked to learn that this “militia” was comprised entirely of very old men and very young boys.  It was a clear sign that the confederacy was running out of soldiers.  This link gives a bit more background, though from a decidedly pro-southern point of view.

After driving through parts of Jones and Twiggs Counties, shooting at 5 or so cemeteries, we went to Macon and spent some time at the Old City Cemetery, the Jones Chapel Cemetery (a truly bizarre experience) and Evergreen Baptist Cemetery.   The Old Cemetery, located pretty close to downtown Macon, was in use from 1825-1840.  It has a rather odd feel to it, because it’s basically a raised hunk of land – about one city block square – surrounded on all sides by industry.  I’m not sure if it was never very popular or if headstones have just been stolen from it, but it’s mainly just a large open field, containing few graves.  In fact, the entire listing of the cemetery can be read here.  Still, it’s a pretty place.

After seeing the old cemetery, we went looking for the Jones Chapel Cemetery because Betsy had a couple of names from there on her FindAGrave list.  I said above that this place was bizarre, and I’m betting that whatever pictures of it that I include here cannot convey just how strange it was.  For starters, the Jones Chapel in question – the church to which this cemetery was presumably once attached – is no longer there.  As I understand it, it was moved several miles away.  On the spot where the church stood, there is now an abandoned house which – to me at least – looked as if it were being used as a crack house. 

The cemetery itself is so overgrown that we very nearly missed it, in spite of knowing exactly where it was and driving around three sides of it looking at it.  After parking the car (in what amounted to an alley across the road from section 8 housing), we made our way across a weed/briar barrier into what was basically a jungle.  Kudzu, vines, thorns, trees, trash….and every now and then, we’d stumble across a gravestone or a decrepit old wrought-iron fence surrounding what one must assume must’ve been a family plot at some point.

And I’m not saying that this was an OLD cemetery.  The latest graves there, I’m told, are from the 1970s.  The graveyard is in the shape that it is simply because the city of Macon turned its back on it.  We ran into a man and his son who were doing their best to clear the brush and clean things up, and they weren’t at all pleased with the lack of service the city was providing – things like sending a truck to pick up the piles of trash and debris that those two people had collected.   The son, probably about 13 years old, turned out to be somewhat of a genealogy buff who is an active member on FindAGrave.com. He knew exactly where one of the graves that we were seeking was.

On the Sunday following the cemetery tour, I spent a few hours at the 5 Seasons Brewpub near Buckhead watching “Mercury Orkestar,” a Balkan-style band that, honestly, I don’t much care for.  Several of my friends play in it, however, and I like hanging out with them and, potentially, networking.  Just because I don’t like *listening* to something doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to *play* it, after all.

And now, in spite of really not putting much of interest down, I think I’ve spent enough time writing in this for today.  I do actually have some real work to do.  I’ll try to get another entry added pretty quickly to catch you up on the wee BEFORE the idiotic moron loser jerks tried to smash my door down.

TWD

I couldn’t think of a decent title for this entry, but that seems to work.  I went on a redneck holiday recently, I’ve got a couple of brass band gigs coming up, and one of the original names for the GBB was (no kidding!) “Rednecks with Horns,” so….there it is.

Work for the last two weeks has been mostly annoying, but punctuated by moments of pleasantness when I actually got things to work that I hadn’t known how to do before.  I’ve been working pretty much exclusively on a “ticket scrubbing” system, which gives users the ability to edit information in trouble tickets, generate reports on those tickets, etc.  I’ve been using the <cfdiv> tag in my coding a lot lately and writing *a lot* of javascript functions (recall that that was one of my goals this year).  Add to that my recent experimentation with FusionCharts, and there have been days that I’ve really enjoyed coding. 

The annoyances have been caused mainly by an inept project manager who doesn’t have a clue about managing projects and continually lets the end users email me with requests for “aesthetic” changes to the program (yes, it’s a program – we’ve gone far beyond “webpages” here), which are generally “minor tweaks” that destabilize the entire project and cause me to have to rewrite numerous pages, resulting in unforeseen errors to other pages and yada yada yada.  These same users also have an extremely annoying habit of changing formulae on me. 

I can deal with their changes.  Users have never known what they want.  But scope-creep (and this project is the poster child for that phenomenon) is *supposed* to be contained by the project manager.  As I said, the PM on this project is clueless and I wish she’d just get out of the way, rather than calling for conference calls every three days and constantly pinging me to ask how things are going.

After the brass festival at the beginning of the month, the GBB took a week off from rehearsing, which was nice but left me absolutely bewildered about what to do with myself one Tuesday night. 

Betsy Jones and I went to two redneck staples near my house last Saturday afternoon: Stone Mountain Park and The Yellow River Game Ranch.  The former is (I believe) the largest slab of exposed granite on the planet and features a huge carving of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson on its face.  During the warm months, this carving is the backdrop for a nightly laser and fireworks show, which hasn’t changed much in the last 20 years.  What at one time was a pretty amazing technological display has become a fairly passé way to waste an hour while listening to diehard confederate sympathizers burst into rebel yells while listening to patriotic music and watching a laser trace out illustrations of a reunited north and south.

The rest of Stone Mountain Park is given over to your usual tourist-trap “country” stores, a campground (which I really need to check out sometime), various walking trails, a skylift, a train, a very small museum (which used to be free but is now, I learned last weekend, something that you must pay to see) and various other attractions that can only be found where one has access to the world’s largest exposed hunk of granite.  Betsy and I spent probably 4 hours walking around, taking pictures, and laughing at people. Prior to that, we went to the Yellow River Game Ranch, which is quite near the park and contains a menagerie that can only be thought of as a redneck zoo.  The YRGR’s tagline is (I’m not making this up), “Like a zoo.  Only better.”

One must assume that they chose this line of advertising because 1.the animals contained in the place are not what one would generally expect to find in a zoo, and 2.visitors are generally encouraged to feed said animals just about anything that they (the people) can think of.  It would not be considered odd, for example, to throw marshmallows at caged coyotes in the YRGR.  Other attractions of the YRGR include chickens (some caged, some wandering around free); rabbits; peacocks; a supposedly “talking” crow in a cage; a number of extremely bored black bears; a large enclosure wherein one is encouraged to pet rabbits; a cage containing approximately 9000 racoons; a toothless mountain lion which gums a hung of round beef once or twice a day; a herd of 100 or so deer (which wander around and have absolutely no fear of the people who attempt to feed them everything from peanut butter to steak); several donkeys, goats, pigs and sheep; some bison; some bobcats; turtles; geese that apparently enjoy French fries; and – the crown jewel of the whole place – a woodchuck named General Lee who annually prognosticates on the nearness of Spring (a la Puxatawney Phil).

I’ve been to the YRGR several times in the last two decades and I have to laugh and cry simultaneously each time I go.  It’s so pathetic it’s funny.  But let’s face it: who doesn’t want to see what happens when a gray fox is tempted by, say, a handful of Sugar Frosted Flakes?

On Sunday, I drove up to Travelers Rest to hang out with Dad, Cy, Greg (and his family) and Dianne for Mothers Day.  Greg fired up the grill at Di’s house and we chowed down on burgers, dogs, coconut, corn on the cob, and various other summer cookout foods.  Had a nice afternoon just hanging with the family and not thinking about anything.  Dianne’s got a really nice little chunk of the planet.

This past week at work was a repeat of the previously-outlined week, and seemed to last about 12 years, in spite of the fact that the GBB resumed rehearsals on Tuesday and my life – at least for that one night – resumed normalcy.  Friday finally came, however, and I left work early to go walk around some cemeteries and grab dinner with Chris in Macon.  I must say that her face was a most welcome sight.

The forecast is calling for rain all weekend, but as I sit here (naked, in bed, at 10AM Saturday), the weather outside is nearly perfect.  I’m told that there’s a balloon festival in NW Georgia today and tomorrow, and I’m considering driving up there today for some photographing fun.  Tomorrow, however, I’ve got a concert in Chamblee with the band.  Looking forward to that.

Hope everyone has a great time until I next update this thing.  Don’t put no beans up your noses.

TWD