Well, we’ve had some very nice (cool) days in Duluth, some extraordinarily hot ones, and a bit of rain over the last week or so.  This has made sleeping either very nice, very difficult, or pretty fantastic, respectively.

This past weekend, the Georgia Brass played at The Deep South Brass Band Festival in Pine Mountain, GA.  This is the festival’s second year and we were once again the “big name” band.  The festival’s unstated goal is to try to generate as much interest as The Great American Brass Band Festival gets (an annual shindig which has been going on in Kentucky for a loooong time), and Pine Mountain has a big hill to climb to get there; but it’s a fun gig and the crowds this year were definitely larger than they were last year – at least for the night portion of the festivities.

We played three gigs in Pine Mountain.  The first was in the center of town at three in the afternoon on Saturday.  It had been raining off-and-on for much of the day, so the audience was rather small, but very appreciative.  Our second concert was on the beach at Callaway Gardens, just outside of town, at nine in the evening.  By that time, the weather was beautiful (if a bit muggy) and we entertained quite a large crowd.

We wrapped things up on Sunday morning (Callaway provided hotel rooms for everyone in the band) by playing at a special service at the Pine Mountain Methodist Church.  Rather than having a sermon, the church did sort of a “praise through music” type of thing and we played a variety of Salvation Army arrangements and other sacred stuff.  We played it very well, too.  In fact, we got a standing ovation after the service.  I really wish we’d do that sort of gig more.  The arrangements are usually very well done, and our band plays them so nicely.  Our music director is a bit leery of the sacred stuff, though.  I think he’s concerned that we’ll get a reputation as being a Salvation Army band instead of just a generic brass band.

Because we had several hours between the Saturday gigs, I got on FindAGrave.com (it’s a real website) and looked for cemetery requests in and around Pine Mountain.  Oddly enough, I found a fairly large number of requests in three cemeteries within about 3 miles of the town, and I managed to locate about 17 graves for which pictures had been requested.  Before anyone asks, I can’t really tell you what exactly the draw is for me.  It’s just sort of fascinating to locate a grave that somebody from God knows where has been looking for.  I told Chris the other night that it’s like finding a bottle with a message in it – or like geocaching (a sort of high-tech meets camping scavenger hunt).  At any rate, I enjoy it and the people who request the photos are generally effusive in their thanks when you provide them with one or more shots.

Last week at work, my boss called a special staff meeting and announced that the four developers on our team (of which I am one) have been traded to a different affiliate.  I’m not sure exactly what this will mean going forward.  I know I’ll have to start learning a new set of systems, there will be some on-call time (oh joy), and everybody seems to think my new boss is the greatest guy ever…so we’ll see how it goes.

I also brought my car into the shop last week and discovered that a crankcase valve cover was loose or something, which had been causing my engine to lose vacuum or something, which had resulted in my car acting funny for the last month.  Thankfully, the repair was less than $200, and it has made a dramatic improvement to my daily commutes.  Also noted on my repair order was, “Slow leak in rear tire.  We found a nail in it.”  They didn’t FIX it, however…so I guess I’ll be going to a tire place near my house in the next few days.  I’d noticed the hiss before, but the tire never seems to get any softer.  I figured maybe it was just the noise of water steaming on the exhaust.  Oops.

The band has a concert coming up in a couple of weeks, then another concert a few weeks after that.  Then I think we’re taking a short break before trying to lay down some tracks for a long-overdue CD project so that, hopefully, we’ll have an album of Christmas  tunes ready for sale by, say, Christmas.   Lots of playing this year, which I like.  Many people don’t.  I don’t understand those people.

Still haven’t decided on the brass band association board thingy, and I’m running out of time to make up my mind.  I think I’ll probably have done so by the next time I update this blog.

Most of the pictures that I’ll throw into this entry will be from the Deep South festival.  Nothing particularly photographically appealing, but the shots have all already been resized and are sitting on this laptop waiting to be used for something, so it makes sense to use them here, right?

TWD

The 2010 North American Brass Band championships are history and the Georgia Brass Band, for the third time in four years, placed second in the first section, falling once again to the Central Ohio band.

That’s a hell of a sentence, that is.  Let me try to explain it for the brass neophytes out there.

The North American championships are held annually (they were in Raleigh, North Carolina, this year) and there are a number of different divisions, called sections, in the competition.  I think that in Europe a band is assigned to a section based on their previous competing success (correct me if I’m wrong on that, Al); but in North America, each band that goes to the annual championships (which is basically the only competition we have) chooses which section they want to be in.  Most bands try to be realistic about this choice. 

The top bands compete in the Championship Section.  These groups are often made up of college music professors and graduate students, professional or semi-pro musicians, and generally people who make their livings musically.  Fountain City, out of Kansas City, MO, won the Championship section – for the fourth year in a row.  The FCBB (BB=”brass band”. I’m not going to type it after the name of every band I mention, so just assume that it’s there) was only founded about 8 years ago, but has stormed onto the brass band scene in a major way.   Along with their (I believe unprecedented) four straight wins at the NABBA championships, they’ve also won the US Open three years running (different sort of championship); and a few months ago, they became the first American band EVER to win a major European competition when they took the Scottish Open and shocked everyone.  Coming in second in the Championship section were the kids in the James Madison University band.  A new band, Potomac, made up of a lot of folks who play in the Washington, D.C., service bands, took third. My favorites – Chicago – came in a disappointing fourth place.

Just below the Championship section is the First section, in which the Georgians have competed for the last 4 years.  Bands in this section are comprised of a smattering of musically-dependent people (maybe 50% of our number are music teachers or army bandsmen) along with a generous number of people like me – the unlucky dorks who, for whatever reason, didn’t pursue a career in music but manage to do alright for themselves in that area through a combination of talent, luck and an overabundance of low-paying church gigs.  Three years ago, Georgia took second (behind Central Ohio) by three points.  Two years ago, Central Ohio took second (behind Georgia) by three points.  Last year, Georgia took second (behind Central Ohio) by three points.  And last weekend, Georgia fell again to Central Ohio – this year by only one point.  Coming in third was Massanutten, a band out of Virginia, I believe.

Below the First section is, quite naturally, the Second section.   These bands are normally either relatively new to the genre (Georgia competed in the second section the first time we competed) or are made up of mostly regular joes with real jobs who get together once a week or so just to play.  The Spires band – out of Maryland, I think – won the section.  I honestly can’t tell you who took the other trophies.

The Third section is, as you might expect, on a slightly lower plane than the Second.  I think the main difference between Second and Third is that the Third section bands don’t necessarily have to have the right horns.  They can use trumpets instead of cornets, French Horns instead of Tenor Horns, etc.  Don’t quote me on that.  I could be completely wrong, as there’s also an “Open” section (I have been corrected on this point since writing this entry.  The 3rd section must use “real” brass band instruments.  Non-standard instruments may only be used in the Open Section). This year, there was only one band “competing” in the Third section, Oakland (out of Detroit, MI).  They sounded great and I enjoyed listening to them.

I heard more bands this year than I have in previous years, partly because Betsy Jones convinced me to take pictures of the bands for the NABBA newsletter.  While doing that, I got to watch Tri-State, New England, Chesapeake, Oakland, Massanutten, Spires, and one or two other bands that I don’t recall.   Later in the day, after Georgia had done our bit, I had to do some volunteer work for the competition, and I ended up leading several bands from the case storage room to the rehearsal room to the stage.  Luckily, that allowed me to listen to some of the really great bands (Fountain City, JMU, Chicago and Atlantic) from backstage.

I must say, for the record, that I’m quite disappointed with our second-place finish.  I heard about half of Central Ohio’s performance from backstage.  They are a very good band.  I think we were better.  The thing that bothers me the most is that the third place band (Massanutten) came in .2 (that’s two tenths of a point) behind us.  I heard them play.  There is absolutely no way they were that close to us musically.  I can almost swallow the judges scoring COBB higher than the GBB until I realize that those same judges putt MBB in the same general area as the GBB.  Georgia and Central Ohio were clearly head-and-shoulders above all of the other First section bands.

But enough about that.  What else have I been doing?  Well, a lot of driving.  As I said, the championships were in Raleigh – about 400 miles from where I live.  I drove up last Thursday morning, arriving at about 5 in the afternoon, got checked into my hotel, and went to audit a NABBA board meeting (to see if I’m really interested in applying for a spot on the board).  The meeting went on until nearly 11 that night, accomplishing little of import other than determining where the competition will be held in 2012 and 2013.  I still haven’t decided about applying.

Anyway, I got back to the hotel late but woke up fairly early on Friday.  Spent most of that day watching soloists and small ensembles perform (the competition isn’t just for full bands), and then went to a performance/mini-concert that the GBB gave on Friday night.  Got home relatively late again, but again awoke early on Saturday.  Went to a cemetery in downtown Raleigh before beginning the full day of banding, which ended near midnight.

On Sunday, I drove back to Atlanta in time to go to a brass quintet rehearsal in the afternoon.  Monday morning, I drove to Macon to shoot at a cemetery, then cruised up to South Carolina to play a concert with the Southern Wesleyan University Wind Ensemble, which is directed by my brother Greg. 

Ran into an old friend from Furman there, Dana Malone, and we might try to get together for dinner or something in the near future.  She’s apparently a writer who does a lot of speaking tours, keeps a strange schedule, and cruises through Atlanta on a regular basis.

After getting home (late again) on Monday night, I went back to work yesterday, got caught up on a week’s worth of emails, then had a GBB rehearsal last night (we’re playing the Deep South Brass Band Festival in a couple of weeks, so rehearsals haven’t stopped).  Needless to say, my chops are shot, and I’m not touching the horn today.

While in Raleigh, my favorite laptop bit the dust.  I wasn’t pleased.  Upon returning to Atlanta, however, I remembered that I had Jenny’s old laptop, which had died a couple of months ago.  I ripped apart my machine, took the system board out of it, put it in Jenny’s, and have managed to build one working laptop out of two previously dead ones.  I’m typing on it now, as a matter of fact.

And that’s pretty much where things are right now.  Hoping to see Chris on Saturday and maybe tour Kennesaw Mountain or catch a movie or just laze around – it all depends on the weather.  I’ve got a church gig Sunday morning – the last one for the music minister, who announced his retirement out of the blue a few weeks ago.  Not sure what that’s going to do to my Easter and Christmas gig schedule.

Need to scatter some pictures throughout this tripe and do some real work.  Everybody take care of themselves.  I’ll try not to let this go for three weeks without an entry in the future.

TWD

Well, it’s been a couple of weeks and I’ve had a chance to internalize things and get the tears out of the way and get my head back into everyday things like work and brass and bills and other similarly riveting things.

After playing Mom’s memorial service a couple of Tuesdays ago, I jumped back into the banding world by returning to Atlanta in time for a rehearsal that night.

I’d planned to return a tuba that I’d been play-testing to the middleman who was trying to sell it, but he told me to hang onto it for a while, so I kept it for another week.  During the week, I offered the owner $4500 for it. He counter-offered $5000, but before I had a chance to respond, he put the thing up for sale in an eBay auction, effectively pissing off me and the guy who’d been acting as the middleman.

I immediately bid $4000 for it on eBay (not enough to meet his reserve price), and the sale ended last night with nobody else going over $2000.  I’m hoping that the seller goes back to the middleman to tell him that my offer of $4500 is now acceptable…at which point I’ll say that I saw the horn on eBay and he couldn’t get $2000 for it, so my offer is now $3000.

Jerk.

On Friday night, the band rehearsed with Dr. Joe Parisi, director of arguably the best brass band in the states – and one of the best in the world.  For about 3 hours, he put us through our paces on the two pieces that we’ll be playing at the championships next month.  Yesterday, we resumed rehearsing with Joe, this time for 7 hours.  Not sure how much we’ve improved as a result, but my chops are sore today.

That’s not a particularly good thing, because we’ve got a concert tonight.  I’m looking forward to it anyway.

Must get some shopping done (I’m completely out of food), and then figure out how to waste 5 hours before I head to the concert.

TWD

This one’s going to be tough.

Mom did exactly what I thought she’d do.  She waited for Cy to see her on Wednesday night, and then decided that she’d done all she had to do.

I got a call at work from Greg at about 3:20 Thursday afternoon, telling me that I needed to get to South Carolina quickly.

I wasn’t quite quick enough. 

At around 4:40, I got another call from Greg, this time telling me that there was no need to hurry.  She was gone.  The next twenty or thirty miles of highway were strangely blurry.  It was almost like there was water in my eyes or something.  Apparently, my phone also started to freak out a little bit, because people who called me had a very hard time understanding what I was trying to say.

Stupid cellular networks.  You’d think they could compensate for sobs.

So let’s talk a bit about my mother, who graced us with her presence for about 74 and one-quarter years before moving on to do whatever it is that we’ll all do eventually.

She was born on November 16th, 1935.  I can’t tell you a great deal about that day – or about any of the 11,004 days between that one and the one when I made my screaming, squalling, wrinkled and red entrance in 1966.  Neither can I tell you much about any one of the 16,133 days between that historic event and the one when she decided she’d seen enough of me.

What I can tell you is my overall impression of this lady who gave life to me and to my 4 siblings and who made life better for the last 57 years of my dad’s life.

She was short.  She loved my ex-wife a great deal, not only because my ex-wife is quite loveable, but also because my ex-wife was the only person in the family who was shorter than Mom was.  Even after my ex-wife put on her shoes, gaining that all-important inch that relegated Mom back into the “shortest” category.

She was a conservative to a fault, but she somehow managed to love me in spite of my failings in that area.   She knew that she couldn’t change my mind and I knew that I couldn’t change her mind and neither one of us gave a damn about that anyway.  She put humanity above republicanism, people above party, family above faults, and love above everything.

She was religious, although I honestly didn’t know how much until about 5 years ago.  I count that as a plus.  She worried about me and she prayed about me and she no doubt managed to mix those two things together; but she didn’t beat me over the head with her faith and she loved me in spite of my lack of it.

She was, as you may have deduced from my recent postings, not a lady with whom you’d want to tangle if she thought you were wronging one of her children.  I don’t know how she did it, but she managed to make things right for me against the odds on too many occasions to blow them all off as luck or pluck or general bitchiness or outright fear.  She stuck up for me (and I’m sure she did the same for my brothers and sisters) and won.

She was born with what I believe is referred to as “a tin ear” yet she still raised five musical children.  I heard her say many times (and I heard her sing a few times, so I believe her) that she only played the radio and the blender.  When I was young, she proved this countless times by playing the tune of the day while making cookies – by adjusting the speed of the cookie batter beaters.

Several years ago, she gave all of her kids a book containing a large number of the recipes that we’d all grown up with.  I don’t know how many meals I’ve made out of that book since I received it, but I don’t think I’d be exaggerating if I said that I’ve used it 20 or more times a year since getting it.

She reveled in my accomplishments and she gave me the benefit of the doubt on my failures, regardless of how big or how small each was and regardless of how I viewed them myself.  If I was ecstatic, she kept me humble; and if I was humiliated, she kept me proud.

I could go on for hours telling you all about what a wonderful lady my mom was, but most of you already know it – and those of you who don’t will no doubt think that I’m just getting caught up in my grief.  You might be right about that, but if you think I’m embellishing, then you’d be wrong. She was not a perfect person – but she set the bar for everyone else I’ve known.

So I’ll end this entry now.  Those of you who didn’t know my mom might know her a bit better now.  Those of you who did might know a bit better how I feel about her now.  The present tense there is intentional.  She’s gone, but she’s still Mom.  My feelings will never change.

Goodbye, Mom.  I love you.

TWD

I guess “morning” might be somewhat of an understatement.  It’s currently about 5:00 AM (that’d be 10 in the morning for you, Al) and I’m awake for the third time after initially going to bed at around 10 last night.  The first time didn’t count – I hadn’t really fallen asleep yet and spent a few minutes at 10:30 trading a few texts with Chris.  I woke up again at around 1:00 this morning for no reason other than an inability to sleep.  Read a bit and went back to sleep until about half an hour ago.

This is starting to become sort of a trend lately, and it’s tough to say precisely what’s causing it.  God knows I like to sleep.  The last time I couldn’t was a few years ago – reference a recent “Momery” of my incoherent phone call to her at 2 in the morning – but we won’t relive that, okay?

I’m sure that, this time around, Mom is again involved with my insomnious ways, though in a markedly different aspect. I’m equally certain that a romantic interest is also wreaking a good amount of havoc with my normal circadian rhythms.  The current economic climate probably is contributing to sleeplessness as well.  Throw in a healthy dose of old-fashioned midlife crisis, complete with questions like,”What have I done with my life?” and, “What can I do with my life?” and, “Why can’t I start over knowing what I know now?” and I’d say I’ve got a great start on stumbling through the next several months on an average of, say, 4 hours of actual sleep per night.

So I guess I’ll just ramble here for a while and try to purge some of the numerous thoughts from my head by leaving them here to be perused at some future date when I’m more ready to deal with them.  Then maybe I’ll be able to catch another 20 minutes of slumber before dragging my dragging ass to work.

Cy is supposed to be in South Carolina this afternoon or tonight, and I do hope that Mom has some energy left and is lucid enough to have a chat with her.  I must admit that I’m somewhat astonished at the speed with which cancer has taken its toll.  My most recent basis for comparison was the demise of my friend David Willard, who carried on for over a year after his initial diagnosis and who was up and about right up until the day he checked in to the hospital and summarily checked out.  Granted, David was being treated during that year, rather than just choosing a hospice situation; but I think I still had it in the back of my mind, after seeing her in December and January, that Mom would be around until April or May at least.  After my visit last Saturday, I realized that my calendar was remarkably optimistic.  I don’t know how long a mind can will itself to carry on after its body has pretty much thrown in the towel, but I’d guess it has a lot to do with how much the mind thinks it has to accomplish.  My thoughts regarding Mom’s mind in this scenario are that she wants to talk to each of her kids, make sure we know our assignments going forward, and then she’ll decide the best time to call it a life.  If that’s the case, then her to-do list is just about completed.  She talked to me last weekend.  She’ll talk to Cy today. 

We were the last two kids on the list.

To Dad and my siblings, I apologize if the above comes across as cold or unfeeling or matter-of-fact or callous.  It is not meant to be any of those things.  I love my mother and, as the baby of this clan, it’s rough to think that her moribund state is probably the first of several that I’ll be witness to within my own family.

If anyone else who’s reading this thinks my thoughts border on the reptilian, well…bite me.

What else, what else?

Oh.  That romantic thing.  Yeah.  Spoke to Chris last night after two relatively tacet days over the weekend and a series of obviously distracted responses to my messages yesterday and heard that she wasn’t deliberately blowing me off, but that she was busy with applications for her grad school.  Guess that cockroach-infested university she visited made a favorable impression after all. 

Now I know I’ve been saying since revealing her existence that it wasn’t going to last and nobody should get too excited about it and yada yada yada…but I think I also mentioned recently that I’m a very hopeful person at heart. I had hoped (hell, I still do) that the two of us had a future together.  That hope dims a bit more each day and I’m not foolish enough to think that I’m going to hold on to a woman like her after she’s moved out of the range of, say, a spontaneous dinner date – particularly when she’ll have scads of buff young graduate students clamoring for her attentions; so I’ll just say this to her and let whatever chips are going to fall do so: You amaze me, I love you and I wish you the best in your endeavors.  I know you’ll do well.

And if you don’t get in, give me a call.

And while you’re waiting to find out if you get in, give me lots of calls.

Which brings us to midlife crises and finances.  God.  Those two seem to be fairly intermingled.  They say money can’t buy happiness, but it can sure as heck buy a lot of stuff that helps get there.

I don’t know if I am, was, or ever will be good enough to get a degree or a career in music, but I’m slowly coming to the realization that I’m probably never going to find out.  I’d love to be able to take a couple of years and practice and learn and perform and practice some more – in other words to be an undergrad music student again – but little things like mortgages and car payments and groceries and gasoline and other assorted expenses necessitate that I actually hold a job; and I’ve yet to find one of those where I’ll get paid to show up for an hour or two a day.  Paid enough actually to be able to take care of those bills, at any rate.

The lessons with Bernard have been fun and somewhat helpful (also somewhat distressing); but I don’t know that they’re actually preparing me for anything.  Perhaps if I had the time (and the funds) to do them for two hours a day, 5 days a week, I’d be more inspired.  An hour a week, however, along with whatever practice I can squeeze in on my own, is all I’m going to be getting for the foreseeable future; and I have to wonder if maybe that’s $200 a month that would be better-spent on an extra credit card payment or on home repairs or (let’s be honest here) a few bottles of scotch.

There must come a point in one’s crisis when one simply throws up his hands and says, “Enough.  This is all bullshit.  You’re fooling yourself.  Suck it up, forget about dreams and realize that you made your decisions too many years ago to back out of them now.”

I’m not at that point yet.  I’m just beginning to understand that that point does indeed exist.  Actually, I think I’m seeing it coming over the horizon.   To wax philosophical, maybe that’s the real crisis: when you realize that your crisis is, in fact, a fact.  That you can’t get a do-over of your life simply because it didn’t work out the way you’d hoped.

Well, everyone should now thoroughly be depressed.  If not, I can mark myself down as a failed epistolean along with everything else.  Considering that my initial plan was to be a writer, that’d be the most delicious irony, huh? 

As it is now 6:45, I guess that idea about additional slumber was a tad optimistic.  Methinks it will be a long day of coding.

Hug your parents, spouses and significant others today.  It might not make you feel better, but it’s sure to spread germs of one sort or another.  That’s an accomplishment.

TWD

Hi, Al.  Welcome to the extremely small club.  I see that you’re quite a bit more prolific with your postings than am I, which is a good thing.  It’ll give me something new to read at work.

It is a rather beautiful day in ye olde Duluthe, with temps in the 50s, a slight breeze, and a sun that doesn’t want to quit.  Bo is quite happily sitting in my lap as I type this, keeping my legs warm and hypnotizing me with his purrs.  He’ll have to get over that (as will I) fairly shortly, as I need to take a shower, get my tax stuff over to Jenny’s place, and go to a quintet rehearsal.

So I’ll type fast and try to catch everybody up on the carnival that was my most recent week of life.

Chris hit the road last weekend for the dreaded visit to one of her possible schools.  Yeah.  One of.  The one she visited was about 9 hours away, but now she’s also looking at one that’s about 9 million miles away.  She got to the place last Sunday, got her visiting and other things done on Monday, drove halfway home Monday night, and ended up at my house Tuesday afternoon, where she choked down some of my jambalaya and promptly fell asleep on my couch.

I haven’t heard much about her impressions of the place, and I’m not going to spend a lot of time asking about them.  I’m too busy trying to convince her that the whole school is infested by extremely large cockroaches and that doctoral candidates there are generally considered to be socially inept and never get jobs and are the butts of very bawdy jokes.

Anyway, while she was doing that, I was doing very very little.  I practiced my horn a bit on Sunday, got a call cancelling my Monday-night lesson, and began rearranging my music room in order to make room for a number of bookcases which had been in my bedroom.

I later reorganized the bedroom as well.  Also took all of the photos off of the wall in the living room in preparation for painting at some point.

On Monday – everybody take note of this – I GOT MY ROOF FIXED!  Kent, one of the trumpet players in my quintet, is a landlord with several properties and he set me up with “his man, Juan,” who apparently enjoys fixing holes in roofs.  Somehow, Juan convinced me to actually climb to the very top of my roof (a first for me), where he very diligently tried to point out to me the 5 cracked boots and various loose shingles.  Between his broken English and my sheer terror, we set the price at $270, and a few hours (and a trip to Home Depot) later, he was done.

Since then, naturally, it hasn’t rained.  For all I know, he made the holes bigger.

The rest of the work week was pretty much a blur.  I took care of a few outstanding projects (got kudos for one of them during a team meeting), completed three or four mandatory training things, filled out administrative crap for salary treatments for this year, etc.  I’ll have plenty to keep me busy this week.

Thursday night, I had a pretty nice dinner at a Greek place in downtown Macon with Chris.  After dinner, we walked around a very chilly Macon and then hung out at a Starbucks for about an hour before I hit the road back to Atlanta.  During the drive back, I got a somewhat disturbing call from Dad, who wished to make sure that I planned to visit him and Mom on Saturday.  She apparently was semi-coherent that evening, and Dad was obviously shaken – as, I must admit, was I.

I left for SC early yesterday morning and managed to grab breakfast with Greg before heading the the ‘rents house, where I had a couple of nice chats with Mom.  She is extremely thin (hell of a diet plan) and jaundiced (we’ll call her “bronzed”), but otherwise very much in control and referring to herself as, “The Queen.”

Jenny and her parents came up later in the afternoon, and by some miracle I’d managed to convince Mom that she was most certainly not a hideous-looking person – she broke her rule about “family only” and spent an hour or two chatting with Herb and Andi and Jenny.

I got home at about 7:00 last night and was emotionally and physically exhausted, so I hit the sack by 8:00 and slept until 10:00 this morning.

Cy is due in South Carolina this Wednesday, so I’m planning on going up again next Saturday to see her and the folks.

As it is now very nearly the time I told Jenny I’d bring her my tax stuff and I still haven’t taken a shower, I think I’d better wrap this up and do that.

One of the things Mom and I talked about yesterday was a Carolina Youth Symphony east coast tour that we took in 1983.  I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but Mom was one of the chaperones for the trip.  She scored extremely high marks with the girls in the woodwind section (two of whom I would later date – 1 of whom I began dating on that trip, actually), and also made her presence known in Washington, DC, when she insisted that the bus stop to let me and a trombone player out so that we could tour the senate office building rather than doing whatever stupid thing that had been planned for the rest of the orchestra. I remember that day quite clearly – she’d forgotten all about it, and seemed shocked that she was such a pit bull during my high-school days.

TWD

Sitting naked on my bed on a Saturday morning, wondering what I’ll do today.  The zoo has sort of a siren song to it, as does driving up to SC.  Chris is supposed to be working across town today, so maybe she’ll want to do something tonight.

Or not.  Our relationship has been somewhat strained lately.  I keep telling myself that she’s under a lot of stress.  Or that I’m just really uninteresting.  One of those.  I told you it wouldn’t last, remember?

Last weekend I ended up going down to Macon to spend a beautiful Sunday afternoon shooting pictures at the Rosehill Cemetery.  I had the afternoon free (no church rehearsal) because I played a service in the morning.

Prior to the service, I had breakfast at IHOP, which was nice.  I think I’m in love with cheese and corned beef hash omelets.  And pancakes.  In fact, I was making out a shopping list this morning and I included eggs, corned beef hash, and Bisquick on it.

Had a pretty good tuba lesson last Monday night.  I’m still very nervous about playing soloistically in front of anyone – I feel like a complete retard when I inject vibrato into stuff – but I managed to suck it up for an hour and made some pretty good sounds. Because of other students’ cancellations, I got to start at 6:30 instead of 8:30.  I have a feeling that that helped me immensely.  It’s tough to sound good after you’ve worked a full day, taken an hour off, then fought your way through traffic to get to a lesson where you know you’re going to be verbally abused (it’s okay!  I want that!).

The week at work was, for the most part, pretty good.  I knocked out a bunch of projects on Monday, including one that I’ve been trying to finish for about a month.  Did the ColdFusion demo phone call on Tuesday and represented myself quite well on that.  Completed a few more projects on Tuesday and Wednesday before turning my attention to a huge item which has been on my plate for about two months.  It really doesn’t interest me, but it’s too big to just do it and forget it.  I wish I could give it to someone else. But I digress. 

As soon as I decided to focus on the report from hell, I completely lost interest in coding and pretty much wasted Thursday.  Yesterday I got back on track somewhat and wrote a couple of queries  to populate part of the hateful thing, then put it aside and smashed a new, interesting, request out of the park.

I also took a long lunch yesterday and got in a solid hour of practice on my horn, using a mouthpiece that’s quite a bit larger than the one I normally use.  The borrowed tuba that I’m playing tends to be extremely sharp in the low register.  After some discussion with my cohorts in the GBB tuba section, I figured I’d give the larger mouthpiece a shot rather than giving up on the horn completely.

 
I spent some time updating the brass band’s website this week as well.  Nothing earth-shattering, but I figured it could use some new content even if nobody except me ever reads it.  I posted a blurb about our director and got some background information for a short article I’ll be writing about an upcoming weekend rehearsal and concert.  Maybe I’ll do that today.

Ooh!  I sold a bunch of pictures yesterday!  The season has been over for nearly four months, but I got two different orders out of the blue in one day.  So I’ll be editing photos sometime this weekend.  It’s a lot more fun when you’re getting paid for it.

Mom wanted me to play the saxophone.  Can you believe that?  I think it was my greatest and most blatant act of disobedience when I chose trombone instead.

Sax.  Please.

TWD

Yep.  We got a halfway-decent amount of snow in The ATL last night.  “Halfway decent” meaning, of course, about 2 inches.  From what I hear, there was the requisite run on the grocery stores and I’m certain that, today, there will be no bread, milk, beer or batteries on the shelves of those institutions. 
The roads weren’t at all bad during the storm, but the drivers were – as usual – complete morons.  I can understand not wanting to drive 45 MPH on a twisty secondary road when it’s snowing out; but come on, people.  FIVE MPH is taking things a bit to extremes, don’t you think?

I’m not sure how cold it got last night, so I have no idea about driving conditions today.  If things are okay, I’m toying with the  idea of going up to SC to see the folks and maybe take in the football banquet.  Failing that, I’ll probably grab the camera and go somewhere to shoot snow scenes.  Maybe that stupid cemetery that I spent two days trying to find a couple of weeks ago.

As I mentioned in my last entry, my quintet played at the Southeastern Horticultural Society flower show last weekend.  We’ve done this just about every year for the last 10 or so, and it’s always a traumatic experience for me.  The other four folks would rather sit around and talk than actually play, which is embarrassing.  This year, we had the added bonus of not having our regular first trumpet player, and the guy who subbed for him was…well…not good.  And I learned that our regular first trumpet player covers up a multitude of mistakes made by our second trumpet player.  In a nutshell, the only thing more embarrassing than sitting around not playing this year was – you guessed it – sitting around playing.  Glad that’s over.

Work this week was, for the most part, sort of fun.  I started playing around with a new tag in ColdFusion that allows me to include inline HTML in my code.  What that means is, for example, I can show a summary listing of servers at all the locations in the country – Atlanta has 30, Dallas has 22, Denver has 12, whatever.  The user can then click on any of those locations and I can display the details for that location on the same page with the summary, rather than opening a new page.  It makes things a lot cleaner for the user, which is always a good thing.  It also makes things a lot more interesting for me, which is always a better thing.  That (CFDIV) tag, plus my continued experimentation with javascript, actually held my interest for most of the week.

Also had my annual performance rating meeting with my boss (who I still have never seen), and was graded out as someone who “meets and may exceed” expectations.  I’ve never really understood that concept.  These reviews are…well..reviews.  We’re looking back at the previous year.  Either I *did* exceed expectations or I *didn’t* exceed expectations.  There’s no *may* about it.  Yet I’ve been described on my reviews for the last 12 years in just that manner.  People wonder why I don’t understand big corporations.
I was supposed to teach a class (via conference call) on ColdFusion and Dreamweaver yesterday afternoon, but it was rescheduled for next week.  The most interesting part about that is that I really don’t know much about ColdFusion or Dreamweaver.  I spend most of my time “coding” pages in ColdFusion by copying stuff that has been written by someone else and tweaking it to fit my purposes.  I couldn’t tell you, from memory, 75% of the tags that I use.  As far as Dreamweaver goes (it’s a program in which one writes code), I rarely use it as it’s too slow.  I prefer to code in notepad.  You know – that little text editor that has been a part of Windows since about 1990?  That’s my primary tool at work.  Dreamweaver, for me, is worthless.   The class I teach next Tuesday should be interesting.

When I was very young – I’d guess 5 or 6 – Mom brought home a Tupperware toy that was called, I think, a Pop-a-Lot.  It was a yellow funnel-shaped thing with a red screw-on bellows-type thing on the narrow end.  The way it worked was fairly straightforward.  You dropped a hard blue plastic ball into the funnel, pointed the fat end of the funnel away from yourself, and slammed your hand on the bellows thing.  That compressed the air behind the ball, which subsequently exploded out of the funnel, to be caught (one would hope) in another Pop-a-Lot that somebody else had.

As I was saying, Mom had at least one of these things at home and I was small and I naturally thought that the proper way to use the Pop-a-Lot was to put it between your legs and bounce around on the bellows thing while trying to avoid getting bashed in the face by the ball, which, as you can imagine, would furiously try to escape from the funnel every time my 5-year-old butt slammed the bellows thing into the ground.

So I was doing that in the dining room in Shoreham.

Mom saw me from the kitchen at about the same time I saw her.  Let me rephrase that.  Mom saw me stopping what I’d been doing at about the same time I saw her and figured I’d better stop what I was doing.  And you know how moms are about things like this.

“What were you just doing?”

“Nothing.”

“I saw you doing something.”

“I wasn’t doing anything.”

Somehow, she managed to convince me that I wasn’t in trouble, and so I showed her what I’d been doing, thinking all the while that I was in deep shit for doing it (not that my Congregationalist-Church-Raised-Fiver-Year-Old mind would ever have thought of it in those terms).

As it turned out, she thought the whole “Riding the Pop-a-Lot” idea was a wonderful thing to use at a Tupperware party that night.

I’m not sure how many of the ladies present managed to win door prizes doing it, but I like to think my creativity was worth at least one or two sales for Mom.

TWD

Good:
I got to work early this morning for a change.  That might have something to do with the fact that I’ve had a pretty good week at work so far.  I’ve been playing a lot with javascript and completed a page yesterday that used it heavily (and successfully) as well as a few more advanced concepts of ColdFusion.  Before I left last night, I sent a note to my boss saying, basically, “This stuff is actually interesting again.”  Let’s hope today goes as well as the last four have.

Got to spend some time with Chris on Tuesday and Wednesday, and might even go see her tonight if our schedules allow.  Don’t think I have to explain why that’s good.

I got an email from David Klausman last night and I’ve been booked to play a high-paying Easter gig with a kick-ass quintet.  Really looking forward to that.

My own (very mediocre) quintet will be playing at the Atlanta Lawn and Garden show in Cobb tomorrow night.  I guess that’s a good thing.  It’s a chance to play in front of people, at any rate.  We’re not that good, but we’ve been doing the flower show for the last 5 or 6 years now and it’s a nice low-stress gig that nets us dinner.

Bad:
I took my car into the shop on Tuesday to have them figure out what was causing a rattle underneath the passenger floor.  They worked on it for about 2.5 hours and apparently managed to find the culprit, as the rattle is gone.  They did this for free. Why is this bad?  Because they handed me a sheet when I was leaving describing in detail all the things that they found wrong with the car which need to be addressed quickly.  Little things like brakes and split seals.  So my bonus, which I’ll get on March 6th, is basically already spent.  Total cost is looking to be $2K-$3K.

It continues to rain every time I have an opportunity to do things that require that it not be raining.  I refer, of course, to the leak in my roof.  I have *got* to get that thing fixed, but – seriously – everytime I leave my office, it starts raining.  I’m not going to try to get on my roof in the rain.  I just won’t do it.  Still trying to figure out how to just go ahead and put on a new roof.  I’m thinking a 401K loan might be in order since my insurance company doesn’t want to get involved.  I’m also thinking that I might get involved with a new insurance company.

Really freaking ugly:
I can’t really go into much detail about this because it involves the GBB.  One of our tuba players did something stupid and was asked by his section to take a leave of absence for the rest of the concert season because of it.  Our reasons for asking this of him vary – some liken it to an intervention, others to outright punishment (I’m with the latter).

Because this was a personnel issue, I thought the the personnel manager of the band should be informed about the act of idiocy.  Because of potential embarrassment to the idiot, the rest of the tuba section over-ruled me.  As it turned out, the personnel manager found out anyway and was/is extremely pissed about the situation.   The entire board has now been informed of the details – several different versions of the details, actually – and a regular old shitstorm of emails has been flying for the last couple of days.

The sentiment of many on the board is that the half-wit was treated unfairly by the rest of the section and “forced out of the band.”  I disagree with this attitude, but as far as I can tell, my credibility with the board has been destroyed and I have offered to resign if anyone would like for me to.  I still am not sure if that’s what I *want* to do, but the actions of 1 total imbecile and 3 other idiots, who didn’t want to take the simple step of informing the personnel manager, may have taken the decision out of my hands.

Remember in my “Disturbed” post when I talked about how, in spite of a lot of work that was put into a code of conduct several years ago, the band still has no code of conduct?  Ironically, such a document would have saved a lot of bad feelings in this situation.  I guess I should have pushed harder to get it done.

And that’s enough about that.

At the end of my sophomore year in college, I won a lottery and was one of the very few people who lived on campus who was awarded a coveted single room.  The school didn’t have many singles, preferring instead to put two people in each room (or three or more in some cases), and I was pumped about getting one.  Juniors being awarded singles was extremely rare – the rooms usually were snapped up by seniors in the weighted lottery – so I was thrilled.

During the summer, I procured a couch, built a loft for the bed, and did various other things so that I’d be ready for my wonderful private dorm room.  And then I got a message from the school saying, “We made a mistake.  TWD shouldn’t have been given that room.  We gave it to someone else.  Tough luck on that.  Maybe next year.”

Mom basically blew a gasket.  I’m still not sure exactly who she talked to or what she said to them, but she was over-the-top livid mama hen in fully involved “I will eat you for breakfast” mode.  In about a week, I was informed that the school had magically found ANOTHER single room that I could have.

I got the room that I’d originally wanted for my senior year – making me one of the very few people who ever had a single for two years.

Thanks, Mom.

TWD

Yesterday after typing all that stuff, I had a relatively uninteresting but pleasant day.  I watched a Matthau/Lemmon movie (Bon Voyage or Sailing Away or Off Shore or something along those lines) while eating chex mix and hot dogs, then went in search of the elusive Vinings Cemetery.

I managed to find it after cruising through Vinings about 4 times, and – though I didn’t stop there yesterday – it looks to be completely boring.  The entire cemetery is about the size of a good-sized house and it’s surrounded by high-rise office buildings.  Not sure how you’re supposed to see downtown Atlanta from that spot, but I’ll check it out sometime when I’ve got an hour free.

After locating the dead people, I decided to go bowling.  Went to the lanes where I played on league (many years ago), and learned that I’d have to wait an hour to get a lane.  So I opted to take Rich and Betsy up on the offer to hang at Rich’s house as it was fairly close to the bowling alley.

As I was driving to the house, it started snowing (“Great,” I thought.  “I’m going to get stuck at his house for the next 48 hours”).  Picked up some coffee for the two of them and a bone for the dog and stayed there, watching Planet Earth and chowing down on some really amazing snacks (oatmeal cookies, homemade chex mix, and some sort of unbelievable cake named Tres Leches cake or something) until 11 pm.

The dog (a Great Dane) made things interesting for the last hour by somehow managing to get her butt and about half of her torso on my lap as I sat on the couch.  She kept her front feet on the floor and basically went to sleep.  Strangest thing I’ve ever seen, but quite adorable.

It was chilly when I left, but the roads were clear and I made it home by midnight, listening during the ride to a hilarious story about a young obituary writer.  It was being read on Selected Shorts if you’re interested in finding the podcast.

Today, as I said, I’ve got a church orchestra rehearsal followed by a brass quintet rehearsal.  As of now, I’ve done basically nothing except watch another Matthau movie (The Survivors) and wonder where I’ll get the energy to get out of bed and shower.

TWD