Well, it’s about 12:30 AM on Monday, July 6th, 2009, and I guess I should get started on what I’ve been doing on my vacation so far. Not a great deal to tell, but experience has taught me that if I don’t put the stuff down – minutiae as well as anything of import – I’ll forget it all before I get the chance to sit down and write about it.

Early on Friday morning (the 3rd), I got myself and all of my necessary belongings packed into the Audi and hit the road – exactly at 5AM, which – oddly enough – had been my plan. I had a pleasant drive of a bit over ten hours and checked into my hotel in Maumee, OH (just outside of Toledo) at somewhere between 3 and 3:30 on Friday. On Friday night, I made good on a promise I’d made to myself about 10 years ago and had dinner at Tony Packo’s Famous Hot Dogs in Toledo proper. Dinner consisted of a plate of Tony’s chili cheese mac, about which I had heard very good things, along with one of the aforementioned famous hot dogs.

Tony’s was founded in the 1920s by a Hungarian who apparently thought his version of the all-American dog was the best in the world. Apparently, Toledoans liked the things enough to allow Mr. Packo to stay in business until the 1970’s, when an actor from Toledo named Jamie Farr ad libbed a few lines in an episode of a little known situation comedy called “M*A*S*H and said something about how the best hot dogs in Toledo came from a place called Tony Packo’s. The writers of M*A*S*H liked the reference so much that Packo’s was written into about 4 more episodes (in one, the sausage casings from TP’s are shipped to Korea to be used in a heart/lung machine or something); and, virtually overnight, Tony Packo’s morphed from a local spot where Toledoans in search of a dog went into eat to a full-blown tourist attraction where rich and famous people go to eat hot dogs and (I’m not making this up) autograph hot dog buns – hundreds of which are prominently displayed on the walls of the two or three Tony Packo’s restaurants now in business in the Toledo area. Being a purist, I went to the ORIGINAL Tony Packo’s, of course.

The highly-touted chili cheese mac was…well…it was okay. I think it might have been better had I doused it liberally with hot sauce, but it wasn’t bad. Sort of bland, if I’m to be totally honest, but not disgusting or anything. And the world-famous dog? I’d give it a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. For starters, it wasn’t a hot dog. It was more like a kielbasa. And it was cut in half. Rather tough, somewhat pungent. I opted to have it covered in the (world famous, naturally) Tony Packo’s hot dog chili, which helped it tremendously; but, like I said, I’m a purist. I wanted a hot dog, not a kielbasa covered in chili.

The PICKLES, however, were extraordinary. Thick-cut dills which had been marinating with peppers and had a fantastic zing to them. I bought a jar of them before leaving the place and had some on my sandwiches at Ahmic this afternoon.

After dinner, it was back to the hotel by way of a meandering route (I was lost), which took me past First Third Field, home of the Toledo Mud Hens minor league baseball team. I must say that it’s a lovely little park nestled smack in the middle of downtown Toledo. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, actually. The field is surrounded by the city on all four sides from what I could tell, and it’s not so much in a stadium as in a sunken city block. Should one want to watch the Mud Hens play, one could literally do so by standing on the sidewalk (yes, seats are available – it looked like it could hold about 5000 paid spectators).

Back at the hotel, I played on the computer a bit and then crashed. Got up at around 10:00 Saturday morning (Independence Day), with a vague idea of checking out the Toledo Zoo, but I was sort of stoked about getting to Canada and opted to hit the road by about 11:30.

The drive from Toledo to Magnetawan was relatively uneventful. Customs was a breeze (“Where are you from? Where are you going? How long are you staying? Okay, have a nice day”), and the 401, 407 and 400 highways were all pretty traffic- and construction-free, which was nice. I did get stopped in a DUI checkpoint just outside of Parry Sound, but the OPP guy who talked to me was really more interested in my car than in anything else (“Nice wheels! You lease or buy? Drive good? You like it? Okay, have a nice day”). In spite of that short slow-down, I made it to Ulvik at shortly after 7:00 Saturday night and was greeted with hugs from Cy and “T”, Karl and Diane Neuse, and Don and Julie Peddie; all of whom I’ve spent time with previously. Dinner on Saturday, prepared by Dr. and Mrs. Peddie, was lamb, potato salad and corn on the cob.

A peahen (female peacock for the cretins among you) apparently took up residence at the camp a day or two after Cy and “T” got here last week, and she’s fairly tame. Diane has been feeding her cheerios, which the bird seems to enjoy, and putting water out for her – which she also appreciates. We were also treated to the arrival of a mother raccoon and 5 little balls of fur known as “baby raccoons” during dinner. I attempted to get some pictures of the babies – they were beyond cute – but didn’t do the best job of it. After dinner, the older crowd stayed up to play dominos, while I opted to take a quick jump in the lake and go to bed. I’m staying in the boathouse this year.

Woke up at around 8 this morning and had another lake-bath (complete with Dr. Bronner’s Magical Peppermint Soap), then walked up to see what was going on in the main cabin. Not much, as it turned out. The old folks were eating sticky buns and drinking coffee (I partook of the latter, turned my nose up at the former). After breakfast, Karl, Diane, Julie and Don took off to play golf, leaving Cy and “T” and I to listen to the Wimbledon finals (Federer beat Roddick in a fantastic match) and work on a devilishly difficult jigsaw puzzle that Diane apparently started a few days ago. I took a couple of photography walks later in the morning and spotted at least one fox (have not seen one of those here before) along with the aforementioned peahen, some deer tracks, about a jillion wildflowers, birds and the like.

The golfing foursome got back just in time for lunch, for which I had a couple of cheese sandwiches stuffed with, as previously mentioned, Tony Packo’s peppered pickes. Spent some time on the internet this afternoon chatting with a cute lady from back home and then took another walk (didn’t see anything more interesting than a couple of joggers who I didn’t recognize). Came back from the walk to find Karl, Cy and “T” batting balls around on the tennis court and opted to photograph them rather than participate.

Dinner, prepared by Diane and Cy, was comprised of a fantastic beet salad with feta cheese; a mixture beet greens and grilled chick peas; and fried turkey kielbasa with barbecue sauce – amazingly good.

Dr. Peddie retired shortly after dessert (strawberries, cherry pie and ice cream) and the remaining 6 of us played 10 games of Oh Hell. I was destroyed, naturally. Karl won. Also naturally.

That pretty much wrapped up the evening, and we all totterred off to our beds at around 10:30. I’ve spent the last 2 hours (before starting this) trying various ways to get network access in the boathouse (no luck there) and messing around with low-light and lunar photography (am making HUGE strides in those areas, I’m happy to say).

By the way, the weather today was phenomenal. I’d guess that the temperature hovered around 72, thanks in part to a wonderful western breeze coming off of the lake. Tomorrow (today) is still somewhat of a question mark as far as the weather goes; but if it looks like rain, we’re probably going to head into Parry Sound. All of us need some Canadian cash (I’m currently walking around with five American $100 bills, which I’m certainly not going to spend up here), and the Sound is always a nice place to grab a good lunch, browse in the used book store, pick up any necessary supplies, and buy touristy stuff. From what I understand, the rest of the week is supposed to be as gorgeous as it was today – no surprise there. It’s always beautiful at Ahmic, in my experience.

Guess I should try to grab some sleep now, since it’s 1:15. Will update this blog some more tomorrow night.

TWD

ell, I promised at the end of my last incredibly geeky entry that I’d write another one soon and fill y’all in on the fascinating details of my non-geeky life. 8:25 on a Wednesday evening seems like as good a time as any to do that. I just hope I can remember *anything* even slightly interesting to write about.

I guess I can start with the Deep South Brass Band Festival. Sometime around May of 2008, I think, the GBB was approached by the organizers of a new brass festival which was being planned in Pine Mountain, Georgia, as a sort of competition for the well-established “Great American Brass Band Festival,” which has been held annually since 1989 in Danville, Kentucky.

We were pleased to accept their offer to play a couple concerts – on May 1 of this year – for a number of reasons. Exposure, $5K, and the chance to get in on the ground floor of a new brass festival in our own backyard were the primary ones. We were treated very well by the festival organizers, who arranged for free hotel rooms for anyone in the band who wanted to spend the night (Pine Mountain is about 2 hours from Atlanta), gave us lunch, and had some nice things to say about us:

2008 NATIONAL CHAMPION BRASS BAND TO PERFORM AT PINE MOUNTAIN’S BRASS BAND FESTIVAL

Friday Evening. Reception Tickets and Saturday Concert Tables are Available.

An impressive list of brass bands are lining up for the first annual Deep South Brass Band Festival in Pine Mountain, Georgia. Topping the list is the 2008 National Champion Brass Band – the Georgia Brass Band.

(From The Calloway Gardens Website)

In addition to the GBB, the festival featured performances by the Midtown Brass (a 5tet out of Atlanta comprised primarily of GBB members and althernates), the Eighth Regiment Band (a civil-war reenactment band out of Rome, GA), the Jericho Brass (a standard brass band from Chattanooga), The Atlanta Brass (a jazz/rock band from Atlanta with – forgive me – a saxophone), and one or two other groups that, among other things, marched in a parade on Saturday morning.

Our afternoon concert, on the town green in Pineville, was fairly well-received by a relatively sparse crowd (maybe 200 people out for a picnic on the lawn). After a few hours of down time, we took the stage again, this time on the beach at Calloway Gardens. What a difference a few hours and a change of venue can make. The evening crowd was larger than the afternoon set, packed a bit tighter, and feeling quite a bit tighter, too – if you get my drift.

Between heckling our director (good-naturedly, it seemed) and yelling for “Freeeeebiiiiiird!” (which our solo cornetist provided for them), the audience was enthusiastic, attentive and an absolute joy to play for. The band seemed to feed off of the crowd’s adrenaline. The video below (randomly chosen from several available on YouTube.com) doesn’t really let you hear how good we sounded, but it might give some idea of the atmosphere.

To make a long story longer, the GBB was a hit with the crowd and with the organizers, and we’ve already been asked to provide repeat performances in 2010 – and perhaps do a concert by ourselves sometime before then.

At around the same time as the Deep South Brass thingy, I decided to save a bunch of money by not drinking. Don’t get all freaky, Mom: I’m not doing one of those, “Oh crap, I’m out of control and must abstain before I die or wind up begging for spare gum” things. Just decided that I needed some new computer stuff and wanted to get more agressive with my debt, so I more or less gave up the booze. Went 30 days before I had anything stronger than a Diet Coke (wait – is “near beer” stronger?), and discovered that being completely sober all the time does have some benefits.

I also discovered that being completely sober all the time plays absolute HELL with one’s dart game. I may be saving money on bar tabs and gasoline, but I think I’m losing considerably more than that on darts bets. Overnight, I went from being one of the strongest two or three players on the north side of Atlanta to a complete laughingstock. People who used to be my whipping boys are phoning me everyday to ask if I want to come be humiliated by them. Damned lucky I’m such a laid-back, non-competitive guy, huh? Right.

I did notice after several weeks, however, that my blood pressure had dropped significantly. So that’s pretty cool.

In mid-May, a group which has been quietly putting together plans to improve Furman’s football stadium started feeding me details about said plans, which are exceedingly cool. I’m not allowed to get too specific here (this blog is, after all, searchable. It has been found by Furman people who know me); but suffice it to say that this group, led by former Furman star Jeff Blankenship, will be doing a great many necessary things which – for reasons I won’t go into – Furman’s administration has not done. For starters, the 2009 football season will see the the unveiling of a 360-square foot video screen on the (new) scoreboard. Fans have been screaming for a “jumbotron” for a few years now, and the group doing the upgrades decided to go ahead and start with that just to prove that they’re serious. In future years, they also plan add a new fieldhouse, which will help with recruiting; and to rebuild/remodel the pressbox (something that is DESPERATELY needed).

I know that Dad and Cy are now shaking their heads and muttering about how college is supposed to be for learning and it’s a complete shame that Furman is spending so much money on a stupid game and yada yada yada; but I must say two things:

• One – Furman isn’t spending anything. This is a privately-funded effort.
• Two – some of us like football, so be quiet.
• Three – it’s MY blog, dammit. I can say three things instead of two if I want to.

Speaking of Cy, it certainly looks as though I’ll be in Canada again this summer! What is this? 17 straight years? Anyway, I know I’ll be a be able to at least schedule two weeks off (whether I get to actually take them depends largely on whether or not AT&T’s western labor force goes on strike – they’re currently working without a contract, and the eastern force’s contract ends in a couple of months). I haven’t completely decided on when exactly those two weeks will be, but the tentative plan is from July 3-20. There is a possibility that I’ll move everything up a week (taking the last week of June and the first of July), but the chances of that happening are dropping as we get further into June. I’d really like to do that (schedule for June) because there are some things going on in Kentucky during the last week of June that I’d like to see, but I just can’t figure out how to get that in AND get to Canada AND feel relaxed when it’s all over. Such is the life of a guy with a vast array of interests – none of which involve writing metrics for AT&T.

I’ve now mowed the lawns three times so far this year and we’re still 15 days away from the start of summer. I suppose that the grass wouldn’t grow so fast if it didn’t rain every day….

I still haven’t gotten to do any serious camping/hiking this year, and it’s starting to make me mildly crazy. Thought I was going last weekend, but my hiking buddy apparently doesn’t own a calendar and told me at the last minute that he had to stay in town to watch his niece graduate from college. What a dork.

And that pretty much catches you up on the highlights of the last month or two.

Oh – the title thing up there? The bit about the bubbles and the pirate? It’s really quite simple. I met this girl, see. She’s sort of cool. Kind of. In a weird way. Okay, she’s really cool. Stop nagging already.

At any rate, we were talking on the phone the other day and she was describing a computer game that she was staring at which involved virtual bubbles that explode, causing other virtual bubbles to explode, which make other virtual bubbles explode…I assume the game ends when the world is sucked into a virtual black hole if everything is carried to its logical virtual conclusion, but I didn’t ask. I told her that this game sounded just….um….fascinating, and then suggested that she take up boxing or something.

Saying this reminded me of a time when I was about 7; and Greg, after convincing Mom that boxing gloves were actually soft and fluffy (and that being hit with one was akin to being playfully swatted with a smiling baby bunny), proceeded to pummel me until I was a sobbing, bloody shell of a boy in the Weirs’ side yard in Vermont. Now that I ponder it in more detail, I think that’s also the day that Mr. Weir let me try a sip of his beer for the first time. Humiliated, bleeding, bruised on every inch of my head and hitting the sauce. What a great memory for a 7-year-old.

Naturally, I told this story to the exploding bubble girl. I told her that Mr. Weir was (I thought) Dad’s best man and that he lived in Underhill. As a sort of mnemonic device (who knows? I may test her on her knowledge of my 7th year of life at some point), I pointed out that Underhill, VT, was also the hometown of Captain Richard Phillips. You’ll recall that the good Underhillian captain saved his ship (the Maersk Alabama) and all aboard it by offering himself as a hostage to Somali pirates – most of whom were summarily shot by Navy SEALs a couple of days later. Neat, huh? They’re going to make a movie about it. No kidding.

Exploding bubble girl – who is unbelievably smart about a great many things – was momentarily silent after I gave her this fantastic bit of my boxing history and the equally-fantastic mnemonic device with which to remember where it all happened.

She then inquired of me, “So your uncle was a pirate?”

Just think: without that question, we’d have no title for this month’s blog entry. And I’d have missed out on a really good laugh.

TWD

When I first moved to Atlanta in 1990, ostensibly to make my way in the world as some sort of journalist, I did so with a Zenith computer system – complete with two (count ’em, two) 5 1/4″ floppy drives, a rocking 640K of memory, no hard drive and a totally kick-ass VGA monitor. Microsoft Windows was, at the time, not a true operating system, but an “operating environment” which ran on top of MS-DOS and was largely ignored because it was as quirky as MS-DOS itself. My Zenith system, on the other hand, ran CP/M DOS (which preceded – and was eventually stolen by – Microsoft’s OS) and I had very little need for anything that didn’t come on my collection of floppy-based programs. I had a rudimentary spreadsheet, a database, a word-processor…I even had a couple of desktop publishing things (I don’t recall their names), which allowed me to put out an annual “Tomarama” (I use the word “annual” in the loosest possible way) and a weekly newsletter for my darts team which was released under the banner of “The Thermonuclear Arrow.”

My first long-term job in Atlanta consisted of me using an IBM PS2 running MS-DOS, but I rarely had any need to play with the operating system. I wrote the occasional batch file and tweaked my autoexec.bat and config.sys files (what was all this “HIMEM” stuff about?), but primarily my workstation was a window into NYNEX’s mainframe and something upon which I was eventually allowed to run Lotus 1-2-3.

My boss had a really hard time with that, by the way. She did everything she could to make sure that my two co-workers and I were not allowed to do anything that she didn’t understand, and she had no clue when it came to spreadsheets.

At some point over the next year, Microsoft’s Windows 3.0 came onto the scene at NYNEX, and I took the first tentative steps on the road upon which I’ve fashioned a 20-year career – one that has involved working with, troubleshooting, managing, programming in, supporting and administering Windows systems.

That may be changing. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those people who are going to bash Microsoft and talk about how unsecure and quirky and buggy and worthless and terrible Microsoft Windows is compared to any other OS, up to and including pen and paper. I like Windows. I like Microsoft. I prefer PCs over Macs, and I will never understand why Steve Jobs has been so adamant about keeping everything related to Apple secured behind proprietary software and – for the most part – hardware. People bitch and moan about Microsoft being a monopoly, but the fact is that Bill Gates’ empire has created more jobs and done more to computerize the world than Apple has ever even dreamt about. And it’s all because Gates opened up his software and let programmers do what they do best. Why are viruses most prevalent on Windows-based systems? Two reasons: There are (a lot) more of them than any other OS, and the software is accesible to programmers, for good or evil. Shit happens. Deal with it.

Windows has done a few things lately that I really don’t like, however. First, it’s gotten more and more bloated with each new release. Windows XP Pro is a fantastic operating system, and it was a great follow up to Windows 95, NT, 98 and (God help us all) the miserable failure known as “Millenium Edition.”

Windows Vista is also a very nice OS, and I don’t understand why so many people seem to despise it. I’ve run it for several years on one of my laptops (I actually installed it when it was still in Beta) and I’ve never – not once – gotten a blue screen with it. I never had any real problems with it, other than the occasional hardware conflict (why Microsoft didn’t build in support for older hardware is beyond me) and the always-annoying, “Are you sure you want to do this?” question that pops up anytime you try to do anything with it. That seems to me to be an over-reaction to viruses on the part of Microsoft, but I can deal with it.

The main problem with Vista – and now with the soon-to-be-released Windows 7, which I’m running on my desktop computer at home – is bloat. When it takes 45 minutes to install an operating system, there’s too much in it. When the OS includes programs that no sane person would ever use, there’s too much in it. When older workstations have trouble running at a decent speed, even when they were top-of-the-line systems just a year or two ago, there’s too much in the OS.

My second problem with Windows lately is that, in addition to applying new patches every 24 hours, they’re also coming out with completely new operating systems every 18 months. That’s positively Mac-like. Since 1996 or 97, when Windows 95 finally hit the streets (uh, you missed the deadline, dudes), there have been at least 9 new Windows OSs, and God knows how many different flavors of each. Improvement is nice, but not when you’ve got to shell out $200 and do a complete system upgrade all the time. I’m lucky – my job has allowed me to get all of Microsoft’s software for free – but I still get annoyed by the constant changes. That’s the main reason I got out of the programming gig: I got tired of having to learn a (basically) new interface every year.

Then I got the iPhone, and I’m starting to see that – at least as far as phones go – Apple’s slowing coming around. They released the Software Development Kit (SDK) to programmers everywhere, and – though they still keep too tight a leash on what can be put on the phone – people started using the SDK to create, at last count, somewhere around a quarter of a million approved applications for the iPhone. Most of these apps are free. Software is good. Free is good. Free software is great.

So last weekend, I finally got off my lazy butt and purchased a new hard drive for my Dell Inspiron 8600 – a laptop that I had had custom-built and which had been my favorite machine for about three years before the original drive died about 18 months ago.

Obviously, it’s an older machine. So I didn’t want to put the latest and greatest Microsoft OS on it. I opted instead to go a completely different route – one that my final position at BellSouth (a UNIX administrator, remember?) put me in a position to try. I installed Linux on my 8600 (hereafter to be referred to as “Kramer,” because that’s the nickname it was given when I bought it….mainly because it has a wood veneer and it reminded people of the crazy weird character named Kramer on the Seinfeld sitcom).

Specifically, Kramer got outfitted with Fedora 10 (and I’ll probably upgrade him to Fedora 11 when it’s officially released in a week or so). After a few normal growing pains (*nothing* is simple in a UNIX-based system), I’ve gotten Kramer to the point where he will do just about anything that my Vista or XP or Windows 7 systems will do. True, there are few high-quality games written for Linux, but I do most of my gaming on my Playstation. Also, once football season rolls around, I’m going to have to do my photo editing using the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) rather than with Photoshop, which will be a challenge unless I start doing some serious practicing with the GIMP; but that’s about all. I have a complete office suite, compatible with Microsoft Office. I have programs to play movies, synch my iPod, play tunes, burn CDs and DVDs. I can surf the web, maintain my email, keep a calendar, write programs and have instant message conversations with all of my existing contacts. I can maintain my websites. I can pay my bills. I can put up a webcam. I have access to wireless networks, bluetooth and all of my printers. How much did I have to pay for all of this? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Linux is free, and so are 99.5% of the programs written for it.

And the installation took about 5 minutes. So, at least on Kramer, I have finally cut all ties with Microsoft.

I was going to continue on to other news and recent happenings here, but I think I’ve written enough for one morning. That’s right, all you lucky people. Look for another entry, with totally non-geeky stuff, in just a day or two. How exciting is that?

TWD

Wow.

I haven’t posted anything in how many months?

I really should update this more often, so I don’t wind up having to figure out what I’ve been doing. Since January, for example, I’ve played with the GBB in Savannah, Louisville and Atlanta; I’ve had an Easter gig in a church about 8,000 miles from my house; I’ve jettisoned a roommate; I’ve gotten sucked into writing reports for a different service group, using two different databases and dealing with a new set of administrators; I’ve seen dead Egyptians and dead Chinamen; I’ve glued a robot together; I’ve discovered a very intriguing expansion to an old haunt; I’ve nearly been crushed by a computer desk; I’ve joined the hordes of iPhone fanatics; I’ve learned that catfish don’t particularly like liver.

And I’ve used more semi-colons in the last five minutes than I’ve ever used in my entire life up until 5 minutes ago. Don’t care if they’re grammatically accurate or not.

Let’s get started, shall we?

In late January (or maybe early February), the brass band played for the GA Music Educators’ Association conference in Savannah. This, theoretically, was a big deal for us, as it put the band in front of several hundred high school (and, I guess, college) music teachers – so if we didn’t screw up too badly, we could potentially generate some interest for our peculiar kind of music and land some gigs.

We didn’t play particularly well (and the recording of us totally sucks), but the comments from those in the audience were generally positive and we did, in fact, land a sort of quasi-gig at Pope High School in Atlanta a couple of weeks later (sort of an open rehearsal for interested students and others).

Savannah was quite lovely. I hadn’t been there in probably 20 years, and I spent the morning (a perfect Georgia spring morning, I must say) after the GMEA concert walking around by the river and looking at old stuff. This was an excellent way to shake off the lack of sleep caused by rooming with four twenty-something guys the previous night. One of whom (I swear I am not making this up) apparently decided that the best way to avoid a hangover was to sleep in the hotel tub with the shower running. All night. Tubists are strange people.

A few weeks after the Savannah concert, the band competed in the NABBA championships in Louisville and came in second in our division. Our performance was (again) relatively uninspired, but we only lost by 3 points to the Central Ohio band.

Days after the NABBA performance, we did a concert with a cornet stud named Richard Marshall in Atlanta. That one seemed to go very well, and I’m looking forward to hearing the recording of it.

The week after next, the band will be playing in some southern brass band festival or something in a podunk town in middle Georgia. After that, I think we get to take a break for a while – though the board of directors is supposedly ramping up to get worked into a lather over planning to maybe do important things dealing with stuff that might affect the general direction of the band at some yet-to-be-determined time. So, I’ve got that going for me.

Pardon my cynicism. These things happen. Enough about the band already. Let’s talk fishing.

The weekend before the NABBA contest found me and two other tubists sitting in a boat in the middle of a lake in Buckhead, Georgia. Three guys, 12 fishing poles, about 4 different kinds of bait, lots of beer. Two days and about 13 boat-hours after we started, we’d landed a grand total of two fish. And the second one very nearly stole a pole before I noticed that it (the pole) was trying to jump off of the boat.

Before the trip began, Robert – who is an excellent tubist and pipe organ builder – had assured me that catfish love chicken livers. I’ve come to the conclusion, however, that chicken livers are catfish kryptonite. From what I could tell, catfish fall all over themselves trying to avoid chicken livers. Write that down.

I did, however, get a new fishing pole; so maybe I’ll bring it to Canada this year and practice casting. I also scored a tub of pimento cheese spread (which is still in my refrigerator a month later). Pimento cheese spread, it seems, is the sandwich filler of choice for Georgia anglers.

Sometime in late February, my roommate Julie got laid of from her job as a graphics artist (along with most of the people with whom she worked). As a result, she moved up her plans to move back to Minnesota (which had been planned for around July) and headed out one very early morning in March. She sounds like she’s enjoying herself quite a bit since moving back, as she can now hang out with her kids, grandkids, mother and – from what I gather – an old flame. “Wah wah wah,” as Chachi would say.

She got a job at a grocery store in Minnesota almost immediately, by the way, and from what I’ve heard she’s also fielding other offers closer to her area of expertise. Some people have all the luck, huh?

Julie actually moved in last year while I was playing with the brass band at NABBA, so it’s only fitting that she moved out shortly before I played with the brass band at NABBA this year. The GBB played the required piece (“Trittico”) along with “Talis Variations” for our free-choice selection and we did rather well, but just didn’t have the spark necessary to give us our second straight Honors Section championship. We lost by about three points to the Central Ohio Brass Band. Interestingly, we knocked off the COBB by about three points last year. The year before that, COBB beat us…by about three points. Budding rivalry? Not really. Both bands have eventually made their collective way to a nearby brewpub each of the last three years, and congratulatory pints are way more fun than rivalries.

At work, I found myself suddenly thrown into the position of having to write some reports for Microsoft. This wouldn’t have been such a traumatic experience were it not for the fact that Microsoft maintains their own database (separate from the Metrics team’s), which is on a SQL server (rather than Oracle); and, they being Microsoft, their procedures are all over the place and a pain in the ass to navigate. Enough about that. I’m surviving. Tearing my hair out on some days and hating the hell out of my job on most others, but I’ll get by.

After Julie moved out, I started rearranging my house and turing it back into a regular old bachelor pad. This involved dragging a lot of heavy furniture my my stairs, and I managed to break my bannister (and nearly die) while moving my (rather large and unwieldy) computer desk from my piano room to the room that had been lived in by Julie. That room is now a computer office with a guest bed in it.

The other upstairs guestroom (now and forever to be referred to as “the formal bedroom” instead of “the satan room” – long story…), is starting to look really nice. The walls are a very nice shade of maroon and I’ve installed basically all of my old stuff in there. A bed that was (I think) my great-grandmother’s, a desk that was (I think) my great-grandfather’s, a chair that was (I know) Jenny’s grandmother’s, an end table/humidifier that was (I think) Jenny’s great-grandfather’s, and probably some other stuff that I’ve forgotten about. It looks nice, at any rate.

After (almost) getting the house back in order, just shortly before NABBA, I was treated to a visit by Mom, Dad and Cy, the three of whom trekked to Atlanta to check out a King Tut exhibit at the Civic Center and a display of the Terra Cotta Warriors at the High – and, one would hope, to see their bouncing baby boy/sibling, too. I was not overjoyed by the Tut thing, but did enjoy the Chinese stuff quite a bit. Of course, it was also nice to see the folks and the always-amazing big sister. The three of them also made it down in time on Saturday morning to catch the GBB in our last serious rehearsal before the championships. They tell me they were impressed.

The sidebrush on my Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner kept falling off as I cleaned up for the fam’s visit, so I finally just glued it in the spot where it’s supposed to be. It’s worked fine ever since.

And a few weeks ago, I took the plunge and upgraded my cellphone to the iPhone 3G, I have to admit it: I’m hooked. I’ve avoided getting one for the last couple of years because the applications available to it were limited. In particular, it had no book reader app; I figured why should I buy something to potentially replace my iPaq if it doesn’t have the one thing that I’d use more than anything else. When Apple finally opened the thing up to developers and apps began showing up, I figured it was time. I’m glad I waited. The thing is amazing. I can listen to tunes (as I’m doing now), read my books (which are stored online rather than on the phone), check all of my email, chat with friends, get the titles and artists of songs that happen to be playing on my radio, surf the internet, take pictures, login to Facebook, get directions and GPS guidance to restaurants (and go directly from the directions to reviews, menus, phone numbers, etc)…all I can say is, “Wow.” I really do understand all the hype now.

I think that pretty much covers everything I mentioned in my initial list of things, except for the intriguing expansion of an old haunt. And the Easter thing. For the latter, I had an Easter gig. It was a long way from my house. But it paid well.

The intriguing expansion, however. I’ve got to admit, I started typing this entry about 4 days ago and I can’t for the life of me remember what I was referring to when I said that. Apparently, whatever expansion has happened to whatever old haunt just wasn’t that intriguing. I am completely clueless.

But most of you knew that already.

TWD

When I get really really bored at work, I tend to do a couple of things: Read about people in historical groups on Wikipedia (like all the kings of England or civil war generals or prime ministers of Canada or whatever), and use google earth to look at the places that I’m reading about.

You read that King Philo the 3rd once killed a rabbit at Bugs Woods, Kent, Ireland, and you look it up on google earth and see if you can get a street level view, etc. Makes sense, right?

So the group I’ve been reading about for the last few weeks is, of course, The Mafia. Always been sort of a Roy DeMeo fan, but that’s neither here nor there.

Anyway, so I was reading about Carlo Gambino last week and saw that he had a house at 2230 Ocean Blvd in Brooklyn so I flipped over to Google to see what the house looks like today.

After doing one of these virtual drive-bys, I generally tend to scale back so I can get a better feel for where things are (Paul Castellano, for example, lived nowhere near the ocean, but Roy DeMeo was right there on it – in a house near one of Carlo Cambino’s other houses…and that girl who was murdered in NY a couple of years ago was found in basically the same place where a bunch of mafia hits were also dumped….but none of that is anywhere near where the Islanders play hockey. You see how my mind works here?).

So I’m pulling back on Gambino’s house and just sort of scoot over to the eastern end of Long Island because it looks cool and I wonder what it’s like over there and the satellite images always look neato. And I see Block Island Sound, which makes me immediately think of Billy Joel’s “Alexa,” but that has nothing to do with this story.

I also see Oyster Bay (more Billy Joel stuff and even less to do with this story because it’s not even near the end of the island. It’s actually closer to the Mafia guys).

Then I notice that, right near Block Island Sound, there’s an island – catchily named “Block Island.”

I don’t know why I never thought of that before, but I didn’t. And even though it’s right off the tip of Long Island, it’s part of Rhode Island (which isn’t an island at all, as far as anyone knows). And the satellite pictures of Block Island are just toooooo cool. So I decide to learn interesting stuff about it.

Like, “Can I camp there this summer?” And,”If I can’t, can I get a job there?” And, “If neither of the above, what CAN I do there?”

Turns out I can hike and eat and ride bikes and get a job on a lobster boat: http://www.blockislandinfo.com/

So I’m all jonesing to like move to this island (which would be sweet anyway, but this one’s got a HUGE ocean inlet and an active nature conservancy that aggressively keeps the whole place rural); and then I find out that the entire island is actually a single town…and that it’s the smallest town in Rhode Island…which is the smallest state in the US….which is the smallest country in North America (if you don’t count Mexico).

And the name of the town?

New Shoreham.

I am SO moving there.

It gets very tiring to work for a company that constantly says things like, “We will begin laying off many thousands of employees beginning tomorrow. This round of cuts is expected to be over by June of 2042. We hate to have to do this right before Christmas, but our CEO really wants that new backyard Jumbotron.”

Yes, indeedy. My love affair with AT&T is being tested yet again by the announcement (yesterday) that about 12,000 more of us are getting canned between now and next Summer. I say “canned” only because my sainted mother would be ashamed of me if I said, for example, “shit-canned.” Employees in the video operations sector are probably not going to be cut (in fact, that area of the business will probably grow); but you may recall that I am no longer with video ops – I’m with metrics. I’m the guy in metrics who writes the reports for video ops, and I work in the video operations center (VOC) in Georgia, but my paycheck comes from the metrics people in Texas. I’m also the newest employee in metrics, although I have seniority over just about everyone (including my boss) if you go by years in service.

So, to answer the question that I’ve heard from about 50 people who presumably were trying to cheer me up by reminding me that I could be living in a dumpster eating tennis balls and salsa next month, I have no idea if I’m getting fired anytime soon. Actually, it’s not just that I don’t know. I don’t care, either. If I were to get worked up every time NYNEX or Vanstar or BellSouth or AT&T said that they were having a firing party, I’d never have any fun. It used to bother me, but about 5 years ago I just got so sick of it that I stopped caring.

I take that back. I care in the sense that I wish that the top executives in all major companies would have to live with the idea that bad things might happen to them. Things over which they have no control. Things from which they may never recover. I wish that all the CEOs in the country were informed by their pediatrician – tomorrow if possible – that their angelic little 4-year-old daughter, who won the “Best Li’l Miss in Texas” talent show as recently as last July, had possibly been infected by a rare solar burst virus last month and that there’s a chance (although not one that can be quantified) that she will become magnetic sometime between now and next July and – should that happen – she stands an excellent chance of being crushed to death by the next large metal object she sees.

Let ’em try to sleep with THAT for a while.

But enough bitching for one day. On to other things.

There’s something about this time of year. For 6 or 8 weeks every year, everything takes on a sort of finality for me. A sense of ending or change or pointlessness or something. I don’t really know how to describe it, but it always kicks in around the middle of November and it generally goes away in early January. It’s the feeling that you might have had (I know I did) near the end of a school year. There are still classes to go to and there are still tests to take and you still have to eat and sleep and shower and do everything that you always do; but, in the back of your mind, you know that you’re just going through the motions. It’s the end of the school year and you can hear people just outside of your classroom window talking about their summer plans and you can’t concentrate on anything the teacher is saying to you because it just doesn’t matter what she’s saying.

You know what I’m talking about? That feeling of, “Just let me get to the last day. I didn’t get the grades that I should have this year because I didn’t really try, but next year I’m making the dean’s list.”

I’ve always suspected that this “conclusion consciousness” in the real world has something to do with the combination of an approaching new year (when we all make resolutions, whether we want to admit to them or not…and when, within 6 hours, we’ve failed to uphold 90% of them) and the fact that everyone tends to take a lot of vacation days between Thanksgiving and January 1 – which means that no real work gets done and those few brave souls who do manage to make it to the office generally spend 75% of their time there chatting among themselves and making coffee. You take long lunches. On occasion, you get a huge burst of energy and compose (I almost said, “pen”) an email to your boss to bring him up to speed on all the glorious things that you intend to accomplish by the end of the week.

You, of course, mean every word of your email. You do intend to get a great number of things done by the end of the week; but then you hear some folks just outside of your office window talking about what they’re going to do on their Christmas vacation or what they’ve just done on their Thanksgiving holiday and you can’t concentrate on any of the things that you said you’d do because it just doesn’t matter if you actually do any of the things you said you’d do.

And let’s face it: your boss doesn’t care if you do them, either. He’s too busy trying to figure out what he’ll do if his daughter becomes magnetized to worry about whether or not you rearrange the filing cabinets.

That’s the sort of mindset that I have at the end of every year. Scary, isn’t it?

On the work front, I’m getting better every day with ColdFusion and Oracle. I’ve managed to locate and correct a number of problems that my predecessor had in his code, and I’m slowly rewriting all of the metrics pages so that they can take advantage of a single query (rather than having a different query for everything). It’s odd that nobody in metrics seems to have grasped the incredibly simple concept that all metrics are basically manipulations of the same three or four numbers. You’ve got dates. You’ve got events (phone calls or broadcasts or sales or whatever). You’ve got failures. All anybody cares about, when it comes right down to it, is one thing: “How many failures did I have for how many events during what time span?” It’s baseball. George Brett went 109-for-347 with 6 homeruns and 23 strikeouts during the 89 games that he played in 1981. His batting average (BA) was .314. Or, U-Verse broadcast for a total of 79,248 hours on 608 channels and had 1.43 hours of downtime during the first week of November. The defects per million (DPM) rate was 216.

It’s all the same thing, people. There’s nothing fancy about statistics. That’s why I enjoy them.

In football, Furman finished the season at 7-5 and didn’t make the playoffs for the second straight year. Folks on my website are calling for the firing of the entire coaching staff, the public caning of the school’s administration, and the symbolic castration of the starting quarterback.

A few of them are also buying my pictures, which is nice.

Over Thanksgiving, I took Julie up to Dianne’s new house in Travelers Rest, where we were treated to some excellent cooking and a nice visit with Mom, Dad and Trude. I then drove back to Atlanta and promptly slept for about 19 straight hours. I enjoyed that quite a bit.

I still have about two weeks of vacation left, which I’m supposed to take by the end of the year. I have no idea when I’ll be able to schedule that – or what I’ll do if I’m not at the office. I guess if those are the worst problems I’ve got, then I’ve got no right to complain.

I’ve now wasted a good 30 minutes of my workday. I guess I’ll stop writing. Buh-bye for now.

TWD

How the time does fly, eh? Seems like it was only about 6 weeks ago that I was posting something here about having a shaky job situation and here it is 6 weeks later and I’ve got a slightly less shaky job situation, although it still has a sever case of the jitters.

Enough about that for now. It’s still football season. My team, though having some shaky Saturdays of their own, are now 5-2 on the season – much better than most people thought they’d be by now. After the opening week warm-up against a fairly weak opponent, they travelled to take on Virginia Tech, a ranked BCS team (that means they’re better than us), and really gave them all that they could handle in a 24-7 loss. Really. It was 3-0 at halftime.

The following week, we flew to Colgate to take on the Raiders. Very pretty little town (Hamilton, NY), and the college reminded me of Middlebury. Also got to spend about an hour at the baseball hall of fame in nearby Cooperstown, which was interesting. Oh, yeah. We won that game. That was one that many had predicted we’d lose.

Entertained the University of Delaware in Greenville the following week and beat them in a sloppy game. Another one that had been a predicted loss. Next up was the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Another sloppy game, but another win.

Then came Elon, which hadn’t beaten us in 8 years. They demolished us, but we rebounded with a win over Western Carolina, and The Citadel is up next.

There you have it. Your football season in a nutshell. My best pictures of the year probably came from the Colgate game. It was beautifully overcast all day and I really couldn’t take a bad picture. Adding to that was the fact that Colgate plays on one of these “flubber” fields – fake grass over a bed of rubber pellets. The pellets on these fields tend to fly up when a shoe or a knee or a face gets rubbed across them, and it really adds some nice motion to the photos. Most of the other games were shot in very bright sunlight, which leads to massive overexposure. And lots of sweat.

The days are definitely getting cooler in Atlanta, however, and the nights are approaching those temperatures that happen for about 1 week out of the year and make sleeping a wonderful thing.

Anyway, on to the job situation. After being told that I shouldn’t reinvent the wheel, I was sort of in a dead zone for about a month. My boss couldn’t really tell me what to do, because he wasn’t sure how to go about it, and HIS boss didnt’ really know, either. I spent most days surfing the internet, channel scanning, and putting out the ocassional fire.

Then about a week ago, I was informed by my new boss in Kansas that I’d been traded to a new boss in Texas – the group that I’d initially contacted about doing work for my new boss in Kansas (everybody still with me?). I had a brief chat with my new Texas boss about what was expected and learned the following:

I need to create metrics reports from an Oracle database using a ColdFusion server located in Plano., TX.

No problem, right? Except that I didn’t have any real specs for the reports (still don’t, but I’ve got a meeting scheduled for tomorrow), I have *extremely* limited exposure to Oracle, I’ve never used (or seen) ColdFusion in my life, and I could not navigate the corporate network to get to the resources that I need in Texas. Oh, and the big boss (who is requesting the reports) wants to see some progress by the end of this month.

Great.

I have finally managed to get to the Texas servers, but it appears that I can only do so via a VPN connection (sort of like a souped-up dial-up connection) from my house. I have managed to attach the the ColdFusion servers and can see the existing documents on it using Dreamweaver software. I still don’t know how to write CF code, but I’ve been told that I can learn it. I have not been able to connect to the Oracle databases yet, but I’m getting closer.

The biggest problem with a VPN is that it’s very slow. I’ve been downloading the Oracle client for about three hours so far. Which is why I’ve got time to be typing all this drivel while I’m presumably working.

I am very VERY ready for a weekend off and have tentatively scheduled a trip to Standing Indian Mountain, NC, for the weekend of November 8th. It appears to be a beautiful place to hike along the NC/GA border in the Nantahala forest, and I’m looking forward to it.

Also recently joined Facebook.com – something that I’d pretty much sworn I’d never do. It’s a social networking site where you can see what old friends are doing. I joined it because I got a note out of the blue from the wife of a guy I knew in college, so I set myself up an account to see how he was doing. I then promptly forgot both my account name and password. This was on a Friday.

On the following Monday, my email was jammed with “Friend Requests” – people from Facebook who had seen my account and wanted to be able to converse with me. Turns out that half of the people I knew in high school and college – along with several members of my family – use facebook. There are also some decent discussion forums setup so folks can talk about, for example, camping and hiking. Or the Furman band in the 1980s. Or the Georgia Brass Band. It’s sort of interesting.

What else, what else….

We’ve almost completed the third season of the in-house Rusty Nail Dart League, and my team will not win for the second time in those three seasons (we did win the first one). Hopefully, we won’t come in last, either. That remains to be seen, as we battle for next-to-last next Monday. This league is interesting in that it’s the only one I’ve seen where players all come from (and go to) the same bar. No travelling, which got so ridiculous in the Atlanta leagues that I had to quit. And no strangers. We all know each other and have been playing against each other for years.

Julie is now looking at moving to Minnesota around next April, I think. Hopefully, she’ll stick around long enough to finish painting all of the rooms in the house. She did a WONDERFUL job on my second guest room (and I’m not just saying that because I know she reads this), and is now ripping the wallpaper out of my half-bath. Maybe I’ll help her on one of these rooms, but she does such a nice job by herself….

I had scrambled egg whites for breakfast this morning. I’m so healthy.

And I’m obviously out of things to write about. You’uns have a good day, now, ya hear?

TWD

That picture should give you a clue that I’ve been on vacation. I took it on July 5th in Magnetawan at about 10 o’clock at night. There are lots more like it in this slideshow.

Due to some insane thinking by my boss, I wasn’t allowed to use a full two weeks of vacation this year and only got to take a week, so I took the week of July 7th and snuck out of work early on Thursday, July 3rd. For some strange reason, I decided to take the eastern route up to Canada (Niagra Falls). It’s only about 30 miles longer than taking I-75 to Detroit, and I figured it’d be a nicer drive.

I can’t say that it sucked, but it did rain for most of the night and I pulled into a rest area in PA at about midnight on the 3rd, totally exhausted. Slept for about three hours and then continued north, arriving at Ahmic Lake at around lunchtime. A cheese sandwich thus began my week of bliss with Cy, “T”, Dad, Dianne and – briefly – Diane Neusse, Billy someone and his fiance, Faryn, and another lady who’s name I can’t remember.

It was a typical Ahmic vacation, with dominoes and cards and beer and reading and sleeping and beer and tennis and bears and swimming and cocktails and great food and staining the deck and beer and sunsets and baby birds and boating and walks and beer and laughs and fun. All this for $75 (if you don’t count the $400 in gasoline). Thanks as always, Mr. and Mrs. Tall.

Far too quickly, it was the folloing Saturday morning and I had to head for home. I took the western route this time and it rained for most of the early part of the trip. That had stopped by the time I was on the outskirts of Windsor, Ontario – and so had the traffic. Completely. As in people were getting out of cars, walking around on the highway, meeting other people, trading vacation stories…we had a ball for about 45 minutes.

I stayed that night in Lima, Ohio (my traditional halfway point) and made it home Sunday night. In the rain again. Another vacation gone, but I’ve still got ten days left to burn later this year.

As I mentioned in the previous entry, I was painting my deck before I left for Canada. Julie and I did manage to finish that project on about July 2. For the most part. As I type this, I still need to apply a second coat to the floor of the thing, but it still looks pretty good and I hopefully won’t have to do that again for a couple of years.

When she wasn’t helping me with the deck, Julie amused herself by swabbing primer all over my spare bedroom, assuming that I would finish painting it while she was in Minnesota on vacation. Well, she’s been up there since last Friday and she gets home in two days and I haven’t done a thing. Ha!

It appears that I will indeed continue to receive a paycheck from ye olde AT&Te for the forseeable future. I just got the call this morning and, barring catastrophe, I’ll be working for a guy in Mission, Kansas. While I’m not entirely sure of my job duties, they will involve creating metrics reports from a number of U-Verse databases and making them availalable via a web interface. This is something that’s been in the works for the last month or so, and I was never sure if I’d get the job or not; so it was kind of a relief to finally get the voice mail today.

Yes, I said my boss will be in Kansas. I, however, will be at our U-Verse operations center right here in Tucker, GA. Most of my team is already there – has been for a year – but I’ve managed to sit tight in the BellSouth building where I’ve been working for the last 6 years, although I do have a desk at Tucker and most of my stuff has been there for several months. I’m not anti-social or anything. I just don’t want my current boss to realize that I have virtually nothing to do. Shutting down a company is BORING, people. I’d guess that I do actual work-related stuff for a total of about 45 minutes a day. The rest of the day is spent surfing the net, watching movies, listening to music, walking around a nearly-empty building….not the type of stuff you’d want to have your boss see.

I do come up with little projects for myself (inventorying the basement, building webservers for shared documents, cleaning the crud off of mouse balls….) but if I really WORKED at doing those things, I’d be done in about 4 hours. I have to spread these tasks out over a couple of weeks to keep from gnawing my arms off.

Tomorrow, morning, I get to play at the DCI Southeastern Championships with the GA Defense Force band. Oh joy. I’ll get to stand up there in front of 30,000 people who know what a brass band is supposed to sound like and play the national anthem with 13 other people who seem to care more about the fuzz on their army berets than on intonation.

But it’s a free ticket into the competition, which is basically the only reason I agreed to do it.

On Sunday, as I said, Julie gets back into town. I’m supposed to be picking her up at the airport sometime…I’ve lost the itinerary she gave me. Then, at midnight Sunday, I go on call until midnight next Sunday. So there’s two weekends shot. I’d hoped to go camping the following weekend, but – wait for it – I’m on call AGAIN that weekend, filling in for a guy who took my on-call July 6th so that I could go to Canada. After that, we’re starting to get close to football season and all of my weekends will be shot for a few months. Guess hitting the woods is going to have to wait.

Speaking of football, I get to fly to another game this year. Oh joy. I do so love to fly. But Furman’s playing at Colgate and I’m not willing to drive there. The guy who I work for in the sports network (I’m now the official radio photographer…you didn’t even know radio people needed photos, did you) called me yesterday and told me he’d booked me on the charter. I was really sort of hoping to miss that week. This year is going to be a bear, much like two years ago. We’ve got away games at Boone and Elon (NC), Blacksburg (VA), Hampton (NY) and Birmingham. That Birmingham trip will actually be the shortest for me (remember, my “home” games are still 150 miles away). I don’t think I’ll be doing a whole lot of sleeping during the football season. I do think a number of my shots from last year might be in this year’s programs, however. That’s sort of cool.

Well, I just realized that it’s pushing 10 and I’ve got to be downtown at 9 tomorrow morning for the DCI thing, so I think I’d better get some sleep. Hope everyone’s having a happy whatever. I’ll try to update this thing in a few weeks if anything exciting happens.

TWD

The year 2008 continues to chug along and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that.

On the one hand, it’s been an incredibly boring year. On the other, the date when my company closes (and I, presumably, am looking for a job) continues to creep ever closer. We still haven’t been given any sort of drop-dead date, but our president has announced his retirement effective June 30. I doubt we’ll go on for much longer than that. The big question for me remains the same: Is there a job for me in U-Verse?

Be that as it may, I’d finally had enough of taking my car to the shop every three months, so I bought an Audi A3 Turbo Wagon about three weeks ago. It’s “brilliant black” (whatever that means) and – horrors! – an automatic transmission. It still gets slightly better mileage than my PT Cruiser did and it’s a solid car with low mileage. I’m looking forward to seeing how it performs on the way to Magnetawan next month.

Having purchased a German car, I felt somewhat guilty and so decided to help out a paramilitary group catchily named the Georgia State Defense Force when they called me a few weeks ago and asked if I’d play in a Memorial Day parade with them. After I’d agreed to play, the gig calendar changed quite quickly. It went from one parade to a change of command ceremony and two parades a week later. In for a penny, in for a pound, huh?

The change of command thing was on Sunday of last week in Forsyth, GA. I had a church gig that morning, but figured I could make it to the National Guard HQ by 2:00 (that’s 1400 in Army talk) easily enough. I’m never going to learn.

After the church thing, I changed into ACUs and hit the road by about 11:00 AM (1100). I made great time to downtown Atlanta…and then inched forward for close to an hour (60) through a 5-mile (8-click) section of the downtown connector which was being repaved. I ended up getting to the National Guard place at about five minutes before two (1355).

The head guy what’s in charge of the band (“Command Sergeant Major”) met me by the band (“musical unit”), shook my hand (“saluted”), warmly thanked me for being such a great help to them (“gave props”), and informed me that he’d forgotten to bring my music (“screwed up”). What he wanted me to do, he explained, was improvise (“wing it”) for about 45 minutes.

Uh. Yeah. Wing it for 45 minutes on pieces that I did not know with a band that…well…let’s just say that their center of pitch is actually a circle of pitch with a radius of about 90 cents. If you know what I mean.

So I bravely “winged it.” The highlight of the day for me was the playing of The Stars and Stripes Forever. Some of you hopefully know what I’m talking about when I mention the dogfight in the piece – where the low brass plays a series of decending 16th’s very loudly and obnoxiously. It’s a quite recognizable part of the piece.

Funny thing, though. I was the only guy playing that part. And I was the only one who didn’t have music. And nobody seemed to notice.

At any rate, I got through that debacle okay and made plans to meet up with the band the following Monday for the parades. Then I went home and started painting my deck.

Actually, I didn’t start painting until the following Saturday, but I did a heck of a job once I got started. Worked on it all day Saturday and managed to get a very stiff back, a great start on a sunburn – and about a third of the deck covered with primer. On Sunday, I managed to do the same thing. Monday, you’ll recall, was Memorial Day.

So it was Julie who actually got to finish covering the deck (and part of the sidewalk) with primer while I went off to defend America against invading hordes of parade watchers.

First stop was in Fairburn, GA, about 30 minutes south of Atlanta. I made it there in plenty of time for a 9:30 (0930) start. Problem was, nobody else did. After an hour or so, however, various people started dribbling toward a common area – looking like stragglers in, say, The Red Badge of Courage.

We marched the parade. A mile. Maybe two. I had music. I made (“asked” might be a better word) a colonel to take my picture. This was something that I had to do, because 1}It was the second time in my life that I’d been in an Army uniform and 2}It was the first time in two decades that I’d been reduced to carrying a sousaphone.

After the parade, we got some free foodstuffs from a kind-hearted local (who, no doubt, felt a great deal safer thanks to our visit) and then set off for Senoia, GA, which is about 30 minutes even further south.

The Senoia parade turned out to be a lot shorter (about 1/2 mile), a lot hotter and A LOT better attended. The town, with a population of around 12, somehow managed to pack 30K folks on the sidewalks to watch a great many bands, cars, tractors and soldiers walk down the main street.

I also got to play a different sousaphone – this time a silver Conn 20 with quick-action valves. The thing weighed a ton, but MAN…the bell on it rang like a gong. I have no doubt that I covered up the entired band in front of me. Power like that is hard to come by. And quite a bit of fun. And a great way to cover up a wildly-gyrating circle of pitch.

We finished up that parade by about 3 (1500) and I made it home by 4 (1600), which was just in time to get changed out of the uniform and head back downtown for a quintet rehearsal at 5 (5:00. My military bit was done for the day).

My little CC tuba has never so much fun to play. It felt like I was playing a trumpet or a clarinet or some other sub-standard instrument. I think I frightened my quintet.

But hey, I’ve done my part for America now. And don’t go thinking that it was all just fun and games. When I got up yesterday morning, my calves were on fire for several hours. And I still haven’t caught up on my sleep (I was on call all weekend).

So I think I can now safely say that my military sacrifices are equal to – or greater than – those of Dubya.

So there.

TWD