The snow and wind stopped sometime during the night and I woke up (late – nearly 8:00!) to bright sunshine and crisp temperatures outside. Have not gotten above 25 today, but the lack of wind has made things much more hospitable than they were yesterday. My weather app tells me that tomorrow will also be sunny and that the thermometer will reach to nearly 40, which will feel like shorts weather after the last few days.

As planned, the fire had nearly gone out by the time I woke up, so I made some coffee and then shoveled a bunch of ash out of the stove, which I deposited into the trash can designed for such stuff outside. Feeling the housekeeping bug, I then proceeded to do some furniture rearrangement – moved my table and wood pile, pushed some chairs out of the way, redesigned the way that I hang my sink, set up a better coat rack, then swept out the entire cabin and the front porch.

After doing so, I brought in two loads of wood and completely filled my inside wood rack. Note to self: do that BEFORE sweeping the floor next time.

Took stock of my food for a bit next. Down to 6 beers, no chips left. Sure, I have other foodstuffs, but let’s be serious here. I was taking stock of the important food. Having determined that I was running low on the vitals, I determined to drive in to Cheboygan and restock. This turned out to be somewhat of a hassle, as my car has been sitting idle since last Friday and was covered in 3 inches of snow and ice. I brushed off most of the loose snow (did I mention that, yes, I have a snow brush and scraper in my car?), then remembered that I needed to add a quart of oil to the thing. Managed to get the hood open, but could not loosen the oil cap until I got a couple of logs from the woodshed and banged on it for a while. Got the oil put in, then climbed in and cranked her up to warm up the windows before scraping off the ice.

For a horrible moment, I thought the car wasn’t going to start, but it caught after a couple of attempts (this car has never sat out for a week in sub-freezing temperatures) and warmed up everything nicely. Drove to the Marathon station in town (about 5 miles) and filled up with gasoline, then picked up a 12-pack of brew, a couple bags of chips, a gas station sandwich – which I had for lunch, along with a pack of three-pepper sauce that I found in my brain – and a big bottle of Gatorade. Needed that last not so much for the drink, but because my current pee bottle needs to hold more, if you know what I mean.

Arriving back at the cabin, I shoveled some more ash out of the stove, then put in a couple of new logs, started listening to a podcast, and promptly fell asleep. I’ve been dozing on and off for most of the day since, and – now 4:20 in the afternoon – the sun is on the way down. I plan to hit the sack fairly early tonight (sleeping is what I do best on my solitary vacations), and maybe take a walk tomorrow, in between naps.

The picture for this post is of one of the two lighthouses that I have guarding the east-west channel alongside of which I’m camped. This one is right offshore to the west – it gives its name to the Lighthouse Cabin – and there’s another about a mile or two down to the east. I haven’t taken any pictures of them this year, but there are some BIG ships heading past every day, and the sounds of them chugging along and sounding their horns, along with the sounds of the horns from the lighthouses at night, is pretty amazing.

It is a dreary morning here on the shore of Lake Huron. It’s been snowing for a few hours now, and that shows no signs of stopping. Not a heavy snow, but enough to fill in my footprints after 20 minutes or so.

The wind completely died away sometime after midnight last night, and the most immediate result of that is that it has become uncomfortably warm inside the cabin. I’ve got two windows and the front door open and I’m still sweating through my tee shirt. Maybe I’ll take a dip in the lake. Ha!

It was wonderfully cold outside last night. Sounds strange, I know, but there is something about a northern cold that I really like. I know that I complained a few months ago that it had been relentlessly cold in Georgia last winter – and I meant that – but I guess because of the humidity the cold in Michigan or Vermont or Canada just feels different, and I like it. There was also a break in the cloud cover last night and I was able to catch a look at the night sky away from city lights. Beautiful.

I’ve been listening to podcasts this morning, but will probably take a walk in a little while. Might also shovel the sidewalk (I didn’t get to that yesterday), and will definitely bring in another load of wood. It’s warm in here now, but I know how fast this cabin will reach the twenties if I let the fire die.

Other than the walk, the wood, and the shoveling, I have no plans for today. Might be a day for reading or napping.

So, yes.  It’s been a while since I updated this thing.  Truth be told, I just don’t feel like looking at a computer screen after I get home from work.  Don’t feel like doing much at all, honestly.  Free time is a luxury these days, with the relatively long commute to and from the office and the little projects around the house that never seem to go away.  So I wake up, I do or don’t take a walk, I drive to work, I work, I drive home, and I generally go to bed.  On the weekends, I flip a coin to decide whether to stay home and accomplish something (or sleep) or to go out and not accomplish anything.

On this fine Saturday morning, I haven’t flipped the coin yet.  Instead, I pulled out the laptop, paid some bills, did a little administrative work on my football website, and decided to add a new post to this story of my mid-life.

Today’s featured photo is of the mess that is called “the network closet” at the J. D. Frost CPA firm in Chattanooga.  That closet and that firm is where I kicked off the month of June by onboarding them during the week of Memorial Day.  The week went extremely well (hey, I was the lead on the project – a first for me – and I expected it to go well) and one other X-Company employee and I got the firm set up and working pretty much on the first day.  The rest of the week was spent fixing little problems that popped up (the same stuff we’d normally do over the phone for clients) and getting to know the 30-some CPAs in the office.  Great group of people, by the way – even though a bunch of them were UTC grads.

I stayed at the Read House on Market Street in Chatty, which I would’ve thought would be a lot nicer, considering how much it costs to stay there.  No refrigerator or microwave in the room.  No free breakfast (not even coffee, except for the little in-room coffee maker).  Small room with a view of an alley behind a parking deck.  Tattered carpeting in the halls.  They say that they’re doing a $25 million restoration until this summer, so maybe I should look again in the fall.  As it is….well…kind of a dump.

The hotel was about two miles from the office.  Two miles DOWNHILL from the office.  I know this because I walked to the office every morning and got to really hate that hill.  Also got rained on pretty much every day.  The rain, however, did little to bring the temperature down; so in addition to walking up that two-mile-long hill every morning (and back down every evening), I generally had to wear my North Face rain gear and a Tilly hat in the sauna that was Chattanooga in the rain.  Didn’t enjoy that a lot.  I did find a good pizza place though: Community Pie.

The Friday night that I got back from that job, I hosted Dianne and one of her friends at the house.  They’d come down to run a 5K race in Atlanta to raise money for the aquarium or something.  Good to see her, although I really have to question her sanity.  Who wants to run in the Atlanta heat?

We had a post-race meal with Jenny and her father at Mad Italian, during which I got the details on a trip that Jenny was taking to London the next week (last week).  When she does things like that, I’m supposed to feed her cats and occasionally check in with Herb to make sure he hasn’t fallen down his stairs or something crazy like that.  I’ve only actually done that a couple of times, and both times he’s kind of laughed at me, which I can understand.

So Jenny texted me last Saturday afternoon about something (I think I’d sent her pictures of her cats) and asked if I’d called her dad yet.  I said, “Not yet,” and didn’t think much of it.

Got a text from Jenny on Tuesday morning of this past week that said, “Call me.  Dad’s in the hospital.”  Also got a voice mail from Herb’s neighbor.  Herb had fallen down the stairs.  On Saturday afternoon.  And had lain there, literally in a pool of his own blood, until 11AM Tuesday morning.

Needless to say, I felt like the world’s biggest horse’s ass for not calling to check on him over the weekend; but after considering it, I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that if I’d called and he didn’t answer, I’d have left a message and not really worried about it.  I don’t have a key to his house or anything.  I may have called again and – perhaps – have driven over to the house if I hadn’t heard back from him by Sunday.  I honestly don’t know.

What I know now, though, is that Herb has a fractured skull, a broken wrist, a bit of pneumonia,  a slight brain bleed, and is eating through a feeding tube since his epiglottis isn’t working normally (possibly because when he arrived at the ER on Tuesday, he was understandably incredibly dehydrated and malnourished).

He spent Tuesday through Thursday in the ICU before moving to a regular hospital bed Thursday night.  Doug flew in from California early Wednesday morning, and Jenny cut her London trip short and came back Wednesday evening.

The good news is that his physical improvement since I first saw him in the ER on Tuesday morning is incredible.  His right eye had been completely swollen shut, but is now looking almost normal.  His speech, which had been slurred and often confused (he wasn’t able to distinguish between reality and the hallucinations that he’d been having since Saturday afternoon) is pretty much back to normal, although he’s obviously tired and was still a bit taciturn when I went to check in on him yesterday morning.  His wrist will not require surgery, nor will his skull.

The somewhat “iffy” news is that his throat still isn’t working properly and he can’t really swallow, so the feeding tube remains in place and doctors yesterday were talking about surgically implanting a stomach plug so that he can get nutrition that way.  One doctor apparently said that “he doesn’t have an epiglottis,” which sounds like a load of hooey to me.  The man is 85 years old.  If he didn’t have an epiglottis, I can’t believe that he wouldn’t have been hospitalized about 100 times for pneumonia before now, and someone during those times would’ve figured out that he’s been aspirating crap into his lungs since he was born.

More likely, his throat muscles atrophied for 4 days and he needs to learn how to swallow again, but assisted living places don’t like to (or can’t) take patients with feeding tubes, so the stomach plug is a quick way to discharge him.  Of course, that would put an end to things like enjoying food (and wine, which he loves).  Doug is gathering information and he and Herb and Jenny will decide how to proceed.

At any rate, he’s much better than he was on Tuesday and, though there is still much to be decided about where and how he’s going to live, live he will.  That he managed to survive is, to me (and to the doctors and nurses that I met during the week) almost unbelievable.

Tough old bird indeed.

I’m writing from the Tires Plus near the house today.  The Subaru has started to make ominous squealing noises when I turn left, and I’m wondering if I may be up for some brake work.  It actually began several weeks ago, and I was more than a little concerned last weekend when I was tooling down twisty mountain roads in NC and TN and wondering – not for the first time – what I could do if my brakes failed.  I think I’ve mentioned that the car doesn’t have a mechanical emergency brake.  It’s got a button that electronically turns on the parking brake, and it doesn’t work if the car is moving.

I really wonder who’d design something like that.

So I’m sitting here and letting them figure out what the problem might be.  Might also need a tire or two.  Or four.  Who knows?  At any rate, camping.  Brett and I drove up to Joyce Kilmer last Friday morning and spent the night in one of our favorite spots on the Santeetlah, giving me a chance finally to try out my new car camping setup.  It worked very well.  I’ve got a Napier Sportz Cove for the car, which is a great size for short trips (maybe longer ones if I combine it with my Noah’s Tarp).  With the Cove installed and two “don’t let the sun hit my kids” pantyhose over the rear windows, the car is essentially turned into a large screen room.  I also picked up a nice thick memory foam mattress for the back of the car.  Everything together worked great, and I slept like a dead man on Friday night.

Saturday, we’d planned to hike up to Bob Bald and spend the night there, but Brett wanted to check out Whiggs Bald first, so we drove up to it.  A terrible, horrible, very bad drive indeed, which lasted for a bit more than 6 miles – and had me really thinking about those brakes – but we finally pulled into a clearing near the bald (the end of the road), and it was incredible.  After a very short hike (maybe 200 yards), we found a fantastic place to set up tents and settled in.  360-degree views from the bald, creeks, a pond, and a very nice portion of the Benton McKay trail make this place a must-go-again destination for me.

Saturday was beautiful, weather-wise.  Bright sun (I got burned), but not too hot, and a non-stop breeze that developed into pretty strong winds by Saturday night.  Slept very well in the tent, though I have to admit that, once the sun went down, it got a bit chilly.  Brett, assisted by a healthy dose of Jamison’s, curled up in his sleeping bag on the ground and slept in the open all night.  Not sure how he didn’t freeze to death, but it probably helped that his new puppy, Luke, was in the bag with him.

I awoke fairly early on Sunday morning and took a nice walk on the BK trail.  Walked down the mountain for two miles or so, then turned around and went back to the campsite.  Got me thinking that I may be able to find a more car-accessible trailhead and get to the bald by hiking up from below on the BMT.

…..later…..

It is now Saturday, May 19th, and I’m just getting back to this post that I began at Tires Plus two weeks ago.  The problem with the car ended up with me needing new brakes, tie rod ends, and (I think) rotors.  Set me back about $850, which wasn’t at all thrilling.  I was no more thrilled when, a few days later, half of the outlets in my master bedroom – as well as that room’s ceiling fan – stopped working after I unplugged and then re-plugged my television.  Not a breaker situation, and I don’t mess with wires inside the walls, so I had my first experience with an electrician.  He was a nice kid, knew what he was doing, and ended up replacing all of the outlets and switches in my bedroom and bathroom (and did something so that they’re not tied to each other any more) and happily lightening me by another $750.

That tax refund was fun while it lasted.

The GBB played a concert with the Atlanta Wind Symphony, a group with which I once played, last Saturday – both groups did well, although the gig was in Kennesaw, so it was pretty much an all-day thing for me.  On Sunday (Mothers Day), Jenny and I went to a AAA baseball game here in Duluth with her Dad and one of her neighbors.  It was a nice day and the game was pretty good.  It also took most of my day, though.  I’d hoped to get a bit more work done around the house.  I need to finish clearing out my guest bedroom so that Dianne can use it in a couple of weeks, and I’m still emptying out my garage and music room.  Will be taking up those projects again this weekend, although we’ve gotten so much rain in the last week that I also need to mow the lawns again (if it doesn’t rain today).

I did finally reserve a hotel in Chattanooga for the week that I’ll be working up there (Memorial Day week).  Another $700, but at least I’ll get reimbursed for that.  It is months like this one that make me really miss the checks that I was getting from AT&T.  I have indeed learned to live on 50% of what I was making, but little surprises are no longer “little” when they happen.

And I guess that that’s all the news that’s fit to print for now.  Have a happy day.

Today’s featured image is – what a surprise! – my cats.  It’s not often that I can get all three of them in a photo together.

February has arrived.  As far as I’m concerned, that just means that the year is about 1/12th over, and I’m good with that.  Work has been a disaster since late December and the closer we get to the end of tax season, the happier I’ll be.  I’m actually updating this on this lovely Saturday morning while I’m also working at home.  I’ve got a huge client in Chattanooga & Memphis (surely you remember the story about setting THEM up) which has been having nothing but trouble since things started ramping up for the season several weeks ago.  As usual, someone made a major chance to their environment a few days ago.  Didn’t document it.  Apparently didn’t test it.  The result being that, since Thursday morning, a high percentage of the users at this particular client can’t get any work done.  So they’re losing tens of thousands of dollars daily, they’re yelling at me, and I’m saying, “Not much I can do to help you.”

Oddly enough, in the middle of all of this, I was indeed approached about taking a level 1 lead role, which will put me into more of an administrative/teaching capacity.  I interviewed for it – seemed to go okay.  Waiting for an offer letter to see what kind of salary bump we’re talking.  If nothing else, it will take me out of the first line of fire from clients like the one I mentioned – but it will also put me into the middle of problems with a lot more firms, as the L1s on my team will start sending their problem children to me.  I figure, “What the hell?”  If I don’t like it…well…I don’t like what I’m doing now, but I’ll be making more.

GoDaddy has once again managed to destroy a few years of my life.  They did something to my website early last week – said they were moving my source files and it would only take a day or two.  Most importantly, they swore that they weren’t moving the database.  After several days of not having database access, I called and asked them what the deal was.  They said they’d take care of it.  Yesterday, connectivity to the database was restored – only the database in question was missing about a year’s worth of data.  This includes not only messageboard posts, but also statistics, custom code, forum modifications, vital links….the site is pretty much dead in the water.  I put up a message last night to tell my users what’s going on and today I’ve been contemplating what to do next. Starting over is the logical step, as it would take – literally – a year or more to get things back to where they were last week.  I still have two years left on my contract with GoDaddy, but I’m honestly not thrilled about the chance of this happening again, so I’m looking at alternatives.

Should you be wondering, THIS site is also hosted on GoDaddy.  Don’t be suprised if it just disappears one day.  I’m trying to keep local backups of the database with this, at least.  Doing so with the football site was nearly impossible due to its size.

Jenny and I are slated to take in a minor league hockey game tonight.  Truth be told, I’d really rather sleep; but it should be fun.

Today’s featured photo is one of Boo, who never gets enough computer time.  I took it a month or so ago while she was looking cute.  And she’s got a remote control next to her, which is a good place to kick things off.

Televisions have gotten cheap while I wasn’t paying attention.  I think I mentioned a while back that I was considering getting a new TV after Mary moved out to put downstairs in the living room.  I had just about convinced myself not to do that when Mary finally did move a couple of weeks ago, but when I got my television back from her (I’d let her keep it in her room while she was here because her much bigger one was downstairs), I discovered that the remote control didn’t work with it.  Changed the batteries, tried one of my old universal remotes on it, bought a new universal to try…nothing.  Apparently, the television’s remote receiver gave up the ghost at some point.

Now I know what you’re thinking.  “Back in my day, we got up and changed the channels by ourselves, and we watched whatever was playing, and we were happy.”  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever.  I did exactly that for about a week before deciding to put the thing back upstairs in my office and use it as a large monitor – which is what I’m currently looking at as I type this.  Then I went out in search of a new television.  And ended up getting a 50″ monster from LG with a built-in internet connection (for Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Tablo, etc.).  For less than $300.  I paid more than that for the little thing that is now my monitor!  Wow.   The new one also does a better job of picking up over-the-air channels, so in addition to the three streaming channels that I use most often, I also get 200 internet channels and 88 over-the-air.  That amazes me.  Anyway, that was my Christmas present to myself and I like it.

Christmas itself was pretty laid back.  Spent the day doing a bit of housecleaning, watching football, called Dad, went out for Chinese with Jenny and Herb.  Had a short week at work – culminating last Friday with a marathon of a day that began at 7:30 and ended at 7:00.  What a way to end the year.  At least I think I fixed the problem that I was working on for the last four hours of the day.

So…it’s the first day of 2018, and I figured I’d take a quick look back at 2017.

At this time last year, I’d just lost my job and didn’t have another one lined up.  I did take care of that, accepting a job with the X-Company the second week of January and starting work on the 23rd.  The salary was just under half of what I’d been making, so I lined up a renter, Mary, who moved in in March.  While I figured that I’d be able to live on the new salary, I wanted a buffer just in case.  As it turned out, it took me a couple of months to curb my spending, but I never actually went overdrawn, and I’ve settled into the new lifestyle fairly easily.

In April, the Georgia Brass Band went on a miniature tour through Alabama (Jacksonville and Huntsville) and Tennessee (Chattanooga).  This was shortly after Easter.  I know this because I worked on Good Friday.  Apparently, that’s normally a company holiday, but since I worked I got a comp day, which I used to leave for the tour.  I hadn’t built up much vacation time by then and didn’t want to use is, so the comp day was nice.

When I asked for time off in July to go to Canada, however, my request was denied.  I think it was also around that time that I put my name in the hat to be a data specialist and pretty much got blindsided by my two bosses, who told the guy with my resume that I had a bad attitude and ruined any chance I had at the job.  I went a few rounds with the bosses over that and got things straightened out, but it took a while for the hard feelings to pass.  Truth be told, I can’t say that I’m not still holding a small grudge.

In August, my buddy Brett and I drove up to the mountains of North Carolina, near a place called Big Fat Gap, to watch the eclipse – and we ended up finding an old hunting camp, at the end of a horrible road, which is one of the nicest places that we’ve ever found.  The bugs were a little bad, and the stream could be bigger; but the solitude is fantastic.  The eclipse was also pretty cool, and I took a few pictures of it after hiking up a mountain to get a good view of it.

At some point – I don’t recall if it was before or after the eclipse – I went on a project to Maryland to set up a new client.  It was on that trip that I learned how completely disorganized such projects are, but apparently made a name for myself, because after coming back, I was given a few new clients – including one known for being tough to work with – and taken out of the phone queue.  I didn’t complain.  At about the same time, people that I’d been working with since January – most of whom had been at the X-Company for longer than I – started asking me for help.  That has continued to this day, and I’ve somehow gotten a reputation as the guy who knows systems (imagine that…after 20 years administering systems, somebody finally noticed that I might understand them).  After the more recent project in Memphis and Chattanooga, the questions have been coming with greater frequency and I’ve found myself helping other people out, sometimes at the expense of my own numbers.  More on that in a bit.

In October, I finally got some real time off and spent it visiting with Dad, Diane, and Dianne in Myrtle Beach and then heading north to Cheboygan, MI, where I spent a week in a campsite and a cottage and realized that I wanted to retire.  To that end, I visited a friend of mine who bought some land in SC last year and, together with another friend, has put up a couple of very small cottages (sheds, really), drilled a well, brought in electricity and internet, and has plans to build a small house sometime this year (to comply with some sort of county rule).  I visited her last week, too (Christmas Eve), and we talked about me buying an acre or so from her and putting my own little shed on it in a few years.  Since she and her friend will have built an actual house on the property (about 5 acres) by then, I won’t have to.  Also won’t have to dig a well or put in electricity or internet.  Pretty sweet.

Also went to a Furman game in October.  Furman did surprisingly well this year, nearly winning the conference and gaining a spot – and a single win – in the FCS playoffs.  Good for them.  Hope then can continue to improve and get back to the dominance that they enjoyed in the 80s.

The end of November and much of December were taken up with the Memphis/Chattanooga project, which – as I’ve pointed out previously – was a complete disaster and ended up with me buried in tickets.  I also gained a measure of respect, however, by handling the client during and after the on-site visits.  My boss asked me if I wanted to do more projects (I said not really), then told me that, because there isn’t a Level 2 position open right now, he’s put my name in to be a Level 1 lead.  Might be a little more money, which will be nice, but the real upside to such a move is that I won’t have primary clients anymore.  I’ll be in more of mentor/clean-up position, which is fine with me.  Hopefully, I’ll also be in a better spot to move to Level 2 at some point, which will give me yet more cash and – most importantly – more interesting problems, as well as the rights necessary to actually solve them.

So I’m waiting to hear about the L1 lead spot.  Will hopefully know something this month.

And that, in a nutshell, was 2017.  It was not my finest nor my favorite year – I’d put it pretty far down the list…let’s call it #45 out of 51, as I’m sure I must’ve had 6 worse years – but I can’t recall them at the moment.

Am very much looking forward to a better 2018 – and the countdown to retirement has begun!  I just have to figure out how I’m going to do it.