I always wanted to use the word “nigh,” but the opportunity just never presented itself until now.

Oh, sure. I could have said things like, “My birthday is nigh” or, “I’ve been really sick of my job for nigh onto eight years,” but let’s get real. Those things just aren’t worthy of nighness. NABBA, however, is nigh. I’m talking NIGH, babe.

Did you ever notice that after you use a word about twelve times in a very short time, it begins to look completely strange. I’m tempted to grab a dictionary now to confirm that “nigh” is a word.

Nigh nigh nigh. Nigh. Nigh.

I can’t stop typing that.

Etch-a-Sketch time for the old gray matter.

So anyway, the GBB and I had our last rehearsal last night and fortunately spent very little time on the contest pieces (for those of you in the cheap seats, those’d be The King of Elfland’s Daughter and Resurgam). We did do a late run-through, but the majority of the rehearsal was spent on a number of other pieces that we’ll be playing in concert this Friday night at a church in Louisville, KY.

Saturday afternoon, we’ll drive about 20 minutes into Indiana to compete in the North American championships at Indiana University of the South in (I think) Albany, IN. 4BarsRest, a website that tracks this sort of thing, has predicted that we’ll finish third behind the New England Brass Band and the Triangle Brass Band (Raleigh, NC). New England won the thing last year. I’m not sure why Triangle is picked to finish ahead of us – they’re a good band, but I’ve never been overly-impressed with them.

I’m not sure what the Vegas odds are.

The winners will be announced at a gala event on Saturday night, after which I’ll probably hit the road (or not), as I’ve got a gig on Sunday night with my quintet in Atlanta.

I learned last weekend that the incredible rehearsal schedule since December has actually been quite beneficial for me. I played a couple of Easter gigs on my CC tuba – which I hadn’t touched since about January – and I must say that I kicked butt. Not back to college form, but I’m definitely better than I was when we started ramping up for the competition last December.

In other news, Maria is now firmly entrenched at Fort Bragg (I’m assuming that she’s not planning any sort of putsch against the government) and I have indeed lined up two guys to replace her as my roommates. Dennis Hamilton and Keith Ackerman have been in my circle of associates since the early 90’s and they’re scheduled to move in on April 25th. While “working” from home today, I managed to shampoo the carpets and clean out both guestrooms so that everything’s ready for them.

I also cut a hole in the bottom of my bedroom door so that I can close the door and the cats can still go in and out. They drove me crazy when Maria was here. Everytime I closed my door, the cats went crazy either trying to get in or trying to get out. So I ended up propping the door open with a sneaker while holding it shut with a box of towels. It was annoying.

A week or two ago, I bought a new refrigerator. My old one came with the house (8 years ago), and never worked right; so when I got my bonus I splurged and bought a great big brand new one. I must divulge that I got it for $600 off because it had a paint scratch. The horror.

The coolest part about it is that it’s got a beer rack built into it. I mean a soda rack.

Get it? I said “the coolest part” in reference to a refrigerator. Ha!

At this point, I have nothing more to say. This is what we call, “A boring life – nigh to pathetic.”

TWD

See when I’m publishing this? The time? See that?

Yeah. I’m at work on a Sunday morning. And not “Sunday morning” as in “just after church let out” or like “after getting out of bed but before hitting the Rusty Nail for brunch and a Bloody Mary.” Sunday morning like 1:00 AM Sunday morning. And I’ll be here until at least 3:00 AM.

Why? Because some hot-shot politico decided that we simply MUST have Daylight Saving Time for an extra month every year. He didn’t take into consideration that every damned computer on the face of the earth had the old DST dates pretty much etched in stone. Apparently the Y2K thing is a distant memory to him (and for those of you wondering – YEAH, there were some problems with systems at that point. Not the apocalypse, but some things did indeed fail), or he doesn’t recall that every systems admin and power user on the planet had to spend all night on 12/31/99 running tests. And that generally nobody showed up to work on 1/2/00 because they were all too freaking tired.

Yup. Apparently this genious who decided we had to extend DST forgot all about that.

So I’ve spent the last month patching all of my servers and now I get to sit here until 3:00 in the morning to make sure that they all roll forward an hour when they’re supposed to. And then a whole bunch of users can login between 3 and 4 and make sure that their applications work. And THEN (assuming that those applications do indeed work), I get to go home and try to get a few hours of sleep because, unlike that brilliant senator or representative or president or whoever the hell it was that just couldn’t deal with not screwing around with the natural order of things, I actually have things to do on Sundays in March. Like till the garden, vaccuum the rug, wash my car, do some laundry, and get that damned Bloody Mary.

And, come November, I’ll get to do the whole thing all over again.

Here’s a thought: Why not just roll everyone back to Standard Time forever and tell people to change the times that they work? So instead of working (for example) from 8 to 5 everyday, we’ll all work from 7 to 4. Or 9 to 6. Or however the hell it’s supposed to work. How about sunup to sundown? Would that work for you, Senator Cantstayoutofmylife?

So Maria sold her motorcycle today. For those of you not keeping up, Maria is my roommate and she’s deploying to Iraq later this month. She started going into a funk about selling the bike on Thursday night (apparently, she’s got an emotional attachment to it) and I’ve spent the last few days rationalizing to her that:

1. She’s getting a nice chunk of change for the thing.
2. It’s not like she was going to be riding it for at least the next 18 months.
3. She already had plans to buy a new Harley while she was overseas.
4. It’s taking up too much space in my garage as it is.
5. She’s a soldier and needs to stop acting like some whacked-out female.

She handled the transaction fine, thankfully, and immediately started surfing around and designing the Harley of her future. I’m not sure exactly what the deal is, but apparently she can buy the thing while she’s deployed and Harley-Davidson will give her a huge discount because she’s overseas and she doesn’t have to pay tax on it or something. I don’t know. All I know is that she can buy it cheaper than she could if she stayed in the states.

She’s heading out on Monday, by the way. By “heading out,” I mean “She’s leaving.” She’ll drive to her house in Pennsylvania for a few days, then either fly or drive to Texas after that, then fly back to Atlanta for a week – sans vehicle. Since I’m certainly not going to chauffer her around for the week she’s back here, she’s planning on staying with a girlfriend when she gets back. After a week or so here, she’ll head to Fort Bragg, then to Jordan, then back to Bragg, then to Kuwait and finally to Iraq. Fun stuff.

At any rate, she’s out of my house – and she doesn’t read this blog, but I’ve told her (and therefore don’t feel guilty about retelling you all) that it was a real pleasure having her stay with me for the last 8 months. I couldn’t have asked for a better roommate.

That being the case, I’m not sure that I want to tempt fate twice; but there’s a guy (or maybe two) coming over to “check out the house” tomorrow afternoon with an eye towards moving in in April. I’ve known both of these guys for years and, if they decide to move in, we’ll probably get along fine (and I’ll be raising my rent); but I haven’t completely decided if I want to continue renting. Life is much less complicated when it’s lived on one’s own.

Of course, cash is nice too.

So they (or at least one of them) should be rolling into my driveway at around noon tomorrow. That’d be 8 hours after I can leave work (see how I’m tying this all back together? I’m a freaking literary genious) and about 4 hours before I have to leave for Rome, GA, for a brass band rehearsal. Homey’s gonna be a tired puppy come Monday morning, and there is a good possibility that I’ll take a half-day off of work (comp time, naturally) and try to actually get some sleep.

Stupid politicians.

In preparation for NABBA, the Georgia Brass Band hired Dr. Colin Holman to rehearse with us last Friday, Saturday and Sunday. By Sunday, all I could think about was the fact that I hadn’t played so much or with such intensity since the All-State rehearsals in high school. We went from 7:30 to 10:00 on Friday night, 9:30 to 12:30 Saturday morning and 12:00 to 3:00 Sunday afternoon. Then (just for good measure), I drove to Rome, GA, immediately after the Sunday rehearsal and rehearsed with the Roman Festival Brass from 6:00 to 9:00. Don’t know if I got any better, but I do know that I broke my face. It’s almost recovered now…but I’ve got a rehearsal from 7:00-9:30 tonight during which time I’ll probably break it again.

Dr. Holman is an amazing clinician though. I videotaped each of his rehearsals and the difference in the band’s tone between when we first started on Friday night and where we were 10 minutes after he took the baton is astounding. On Sunday afternoon, while we were playing the “Elfland’s Daughter” thing, I actually liked the piece. I’ve played for some really fine directors in my life, but this guy might be the best – or at least second best. Darryl One conducted a gig I was playing when he was the assistant conductor of the Atlanta Symphony (he’s since gone on to bigger and better things). He’s absolutely brilliant.

There’s an interesting 20 seconds or so near the end of the Friday night tape, which was filmed from behind me. During one section of resting that is particularly difficult to count, the tubist next to me and I were both bobbing our heads in order to avoid getting lost. We look amazingly like two of those little cymbal-crashing monkeys as seen from behind. But the two of us sounded damned good, if I say so myself.

Anyway, the band improved quite a bit over the weekend and hopefully we can keep it going for the next six weeks and make a splash at NABBA. It’ll give me something to put on the new website that I’m building.

I noticed going to and coming back from Rome on Sunday that my front brakes sounded terrible – I also was long overdue for an oil change and for some strange reason the tires on the left side of my car were inflated to about 4 pounds PSI less than the right-side ones. So I decided to at least take care of problems two and three yesterday at lunch. Figured I’d hop over the the mechanic and get the oil changed and the tires rotated (and, presumably, inflated correctly). In and out in an hour, right?

Almost. After a few minutes, the mechanic came out and said, “Tom, you really need some new front brakes.” Since I knew that already, I said, “I know.”

Then I asked him how long it would take him to fix them. “Not long at all.”

So, in spite of the fact that it was going to cost me $475 instead of $30, I told him to go ahead and take care of the brakes. Then he proceeded to take my wheels apart and called the parts place to have the proper parts driven to him.

The truck carrying my brakes got into a accident. 5 hours later, my car was ready for me.

You haven’t really lived or experienced hell until you’ve sat in the waiting room of Kauffman Tire for 5 hours. Your magazine selection is limited to tire advertisements, newspapers of undertermined age and maybe an Ebony magazine from last summer.

And one Cosmopolitan. I eyed it a few times, but didn’t want to be seen reading it. I mean, I’m a guy and all….but I was kind of curious about the “foreplay that will blow his mind” which was apparently featured somewhere between the covers.

Fortunately, I had my iPaq with me (which always has about 12 books loaded on it), and I spent a great deal of time reading one of them (a mob thriller called The Good Guys). Even so, the chairs left a lot to be desired. As did the television, which was tuned to CNN Headline News.

Interesting thing about CNN Headline News – they might be a 24-hour station, but the news only takes about 10 minutes….and then you get 4 commercials followed by the same 10 minutes of news being shouted at you again. I’d seen coverage of the bus crash in Atlanta about 13 times before I realized that I was alone in the waiting room.

Time for the Cosmopolitan, baby.

In reaching for it, I discovered the remote control for the television. Spent the next hour watching the History Channel.

After I finally got my car back (they knocked $50 off the price because I had to wait so long), I went back to my office, packed up my stuff, and left. Oddly, nobody seems to have noticed that I wasn’t there all afternoon.

It’s good to be needed.

TWD

It is currently 1:49 on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in Duluth.

I’m still in bed.

I got up at around 7:00 to feed the cats, then got back in bed. Haven’t moved since, except to throw a load of laundry in the washer…and to move it to the dryer a half-hour later. I’ve watched three and a half movies, surfed the web, scratched a cat’s head, and finalized plans to get my taxes done.

Don’t tell me I can’t work from home. I get more done before I get out of bed than the Army gets done before 9:00. Or something like that.

I have a rehearsal in Rome, GA, this afternoon. It’s about two hours away and I’m not all that gaga about the band (a very amateur brass band), but I told them I’d play a concert with them next month and I can use the extra practice. That became painfully obvious yesterday, when the Georgia Brass Band had one of our weekend rehearsals (ramping up to NABBA) and my chops were complete shot by the time we’d finished. I have one section in one of our championship pieces that calls for me to play a very high and very loud obligato. I think I cracked every other note the last time through it.

The GBB played a concert with the Georgia Youth Brass Band last week, which went pretty well. It was the first time we’d performed “The King of Elfland’s Daughter” (NABBA obligatory piece), and we didn’t have any serious train wrecks. I did get completely lost during an early solo part and had to stop playing and look at the director with “I’m clueless” eyes – but the piece is so ungodly twentieth-century that nobody in the audience would have known just how badly I choked. The judges on April 14th will be a different story, but I should be a tad more comfortable with the part by then.

We found out the other day that we will play second in the Honors section – right behind the New England Brass Band, which won the section last year. The general wisdom in brass band circles is that the GBB and the NEBB are the top two bands in the section, so it sounds like the competition might be decided very early in the day. Unfortunately, we won’t get to see them play because we’ll be preparing to go on next, and they won’t get to see us play because they’ll be whisked off for photographs, interviews, etc.

If you’ve never been to a brass band competition (and I’m betting you haven’t), it’s an interesting albeit extremely tedious thing to watch. Every band in each section must play one mandatory contest piece, which is usually quite difficult – to play and to listen to. They can do this piece at any time during their concert, which is limited to (I think) 23 minutes. The contest piece is also usually pretty lengthy, so a band’s performance will quite often consist of just two pieces. The OTHER piece is the one that’s fun to listen to and makes the whole competition bearable. I mean, how many times can you listen to a Charles Ives work before you go insane?

Things are still up in the air at work, and I’ve started looking for jobs online a bit more seriously, although I still have no idea what I want to do. I found out last week that an assistant manager at Quik Trip makes an average of close to $50K. I could do that. Don’t laugh….I could do that.

I’m actually in a “line up potential jobs” mode, but have no intention of taking another gig at this point unless it’s just absolutely amazing. BellSouth/AT&T pretty much has everyone over a barrel at this point. We can hang in there until the end and get a pretty nice severance package, or we can find something else and hope it works out. I’ll tell you right now – I’m not leaving without the package.

A tree fell over in my backyard sometime during the past couple of months. I have no idea when, but I suspect it was during one of those monster rain storms we had in January. Shows how much time I spend in the yard, huh? Anyway, I’ve been meaning to get out the chainsaw and hack it up for the last week or so, but just haven’t. Today would’ve been a good day to do it…but I’m still in bed as I’ve mentioned, and I’ve enjoined myself from starting a chainsaw in the house.

Cy called the other night and told me that she and “T” will be at Ahmic from the 7th to the 21st of July this year, and that Chris and Jamie will be taking up all the available space from the 14th to the 21st. So I’m thinking I’ll probably take the first two weeks of July off, which allows me to use the 4th, get some camping in somewhere, and then spend 5 or 6 days of the second week at the lake. Looking forward to it, but I haven’t decided where to camp. Maine is on top of the list once again. I haven’t been there in two or three years and I want a lobster.

Speaking of driving 8 billion miles, my car has been acting funky lately. It likes to stall when I push in the clutch. Probably need my injectors cleaned, but that’s expensive…and the mechanic that I’ve been using for the last twenty years recently closed the shop. I’m 2000 miles overdue for an oil change and I have no idea where to get it done. Maybe I’ll do it myself. Assuming I get out of bed. Which is where I am.

That’s about all. Hope everyone is warm and happy and looking forward to March 4th. That’s Vermont statehood day, you know.

TWD

Wow.

January is seventy-five percent gone, and I still have a job. I supposed that’s a good thing. If I had a job that I enjoyed, it’d be a better thing; beggars can’t be choosers. So what’s been going on in my little life since I last got bored enough to post an entry to this thing? Not a great deal. With a title like, “Stuff Nobody Reads,” that’s pretty much a given for this blog; but I probably should try to think of something. I mean, I’m assuming that this thing will be a vital tool for the hordes of biographers who are certain to be researching my life in 10 years or so – after I’m rich and famous.

Beats the hell out of having to read the backs of envelopes to find, say, The Gettysburg Address, or trying to interpret really poorly-drawn paintings of stickmen killing stickbison on some cave wall in France in order to establish that “Bob Neanderthal was here.” Biographers and historians of the future probably will have no idea how easy they’ve got it.

But I digress.

Last Friday we had a conference call during which we were informed that we’re basically working for no reason. Can’t say much about it (with my luck, the entire legal staff of every telecommunications company in the world reads this daily in order to see if I divulge any proprietary information), but it boils down to this: we can continue our market trial for the next year or so, but our product will never actually go on the market. Begs a couple of questions, right? Like, “Why?” and “Come again?” And the ever-popular, “What the hell am I doing here?” Eh bien. Having spent the last 16 years of my life navigating fairly stormy corporate waters, I guess I can sit back and wait for the maelstrom to start up again later this year. What else would a gadabout like me do for fun?

I had a concert with the Georgia Brass Band last night at a church in Lawrenceville. It was the 4th or 5th time we’ve played there. Always a good crowd (in terms of quantity and appreciation), so it was fun. There was a minor downside to it: I had a solo. Actually, it was a duet between me and a baritone, but it was still far too exposed for me. Made my way through the first half of it somewhat shakily and only cracked one note on the back half. I got a bit of a pick-me-up after the concert when our lead cornet player admitted to me that he gets extremely nervous when playing solos (not that you can tell when he plays). I realized that I don’t really get jittery playing in front of crowds anymore. My nervousness when playing exposed passages with the GBB is due to the fact that I realize that everyone else in the group is better than I am. It’s one thing to play for 1000 people who wouldn’t know if you played a wrong note or had thin tone. It’s quite another to play in front of 27 instrumentalists who know exactly how badly you suck.

But they were all nice about it and I enjoyed the concert. Our encore was from the William Tell Overture and the folks in the church really got into it.

Don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before or not, but my roommate is most definitely being deployed to Iraq at the end of March. She is understandably somewhat nervous about the situation. She’s also looking forward to the extra bucks she’ll get. Her orders, received a couple of weeks ago, imply that she’ll be in country for 18 months; but thanks to a recent rules change, there’s really not a limit on how long she’ll have to stay. As she put it, “Great. I’m being sent to work with a bunch of disgruntled soldiers.” Still, she’s taking everything in stride and doing a great job of getting organized (packing her storage building up to be put in Army storage, arranging for the care and upkeep of her houses in PA and TX, spending time with her kids….updating her will). Her boyfriend, currently in Pennsylvania, isn’t faring so well. After two tours in Kuwait himself (at least one of which left him with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), he is quite upset with the whole situation – which isn’t really helping her nerves.

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently recreating my flagship website. This time, I’m putting it on a Linux server (have never done anything other than Windows) and basing it in PHP (have never done anything other than ASP). It seems to be going rather well, and I’ve got about 30 folks testing it out for me. Hopefully I’ll be able to launch it for real in about a month. Until that time, I’ve got a really steep learning curve to deal with. PHP absolutely baffles me. So does MySQL (the database that runs the site – I’ve never used anything other than Microsoft Access). Fortunately, there’s a host of online support forums and prepackaged code out there, so I should be able to get some sort of product working before I really need to start customizing it for my own purposes. And the experience will certainly help me should I decide to start looking for new employment in the IT field.

My XM radio continues to be a wonderful little thing for my nerves. I find myself spending most of my in-car time switching between the 70’s station and the Broadway station. Don’t know if that means I’m a disco freak or gay; it does make the traffic jams seem a trifle less aggravating.

It has been quite chilly in Duluth for the last several days. Chilly for the deep south, at least. The nights have been in the high twenties and we’re getting afternoon highs in the high thirties to low forties. Last night we had a fantastic amount of wind. Naturally, I had to open my bedroom window when that started up (I love wind), but was forced to close it after about 5 minutes, when the thermostatically-controlled space heater in my room started having convulsions. I toyed with the idea of just shutting it off, wrapping myself in a blanket and sleeping with the window open; but nixed that idea because 1)I’m sure my furnace would’ve had to kick on if I left it open (furnace is currently set to 57 degrees), and 2)I figured my roommate would freeze (she’s in a separate room, people. Enough already!). Anyway, it was nice to listen to it through the window.

That’s about all I can think of at this point. Taxes are coming due so that’ll be fun. And my bonus this year (the last one I’ll get, probably) is going to be the highest ever awarded in the history of BellSouth. Maybe I’ll write something after I get it. Like, “Hey. I need a new job.”

TWD

It is now 2007.

I became acutely aware of this at midnight last night, in spite of the fact that I went to bed at 10:30. I learned it in much the same way that I have for the last 8 years: the people who live in the house behind mine fired off enough explosives to destroy South Dakota.

After the bombardment subsided (approximately 15 minutes – and this is in a state where fireworks are illegal), I reassured myself that my house was not on fire and tried to go back to sleep. I’d almost managed to do that when my cell phone rang.

By the time I’d managed to locate it and answer it, the caller had hung up. It turned out to be my roommate, who I’m sure was calling to say, “Happy New Year.” I did not attempt to call back; but at 2:45, said roommate sent me a text message: Happy New Year and Happy Birthday. I did respond to that – then went back to sleep. People my age need their rest.

For those of you keeping track: 41. Isn’t that the answer to everything?

My trip north was quite enjoyable, in spite of the fact that Vermont had no snow and the temperature seemed to approach tropical numbers. It was still nice to be home, and I made a pretty decent haul from under the tree. Cy surprised me with a Danske kettle that I’ve coveted for several years, and that was sandwiched among t-shirts, socks, chocolate, books, and a varied assortment of other cool stuff.

Cy, “T,” and I were entertained by “T’s” sons, Chris and Jamie, on the 25th and 26th. After Chris departed, Jamie pulled out the poker chips and the four of us (joined on the 28th by Karl and Diane Neuse) spent every evening attempting to recreate the World Series of Poker in front of a roaring fire. I also got to visit quite a few towns in Vermont – Middlebury, Brandon, Whitehall, Leicster, Rutland, Ferrisburgh, Shoreham, Vergennes…to name a few.

On the way to Vermont, and also on the way back from same, I stopped in Lansdale, PA, to visit with a friend. We managed to take in a nice Chinese dinner, play some pool in a tiny little bar in North Wales, PA, act as chaperones (or so it seemed) at a club which catered to the fake ID crowd, watch some television and just catch up on each other. Good times.

It was actually while we were at the pool pub that I received word that the AT&T/BellSouth merger was approved. Let the countdown begin. Reading a follow-up story yesterday, I learned that 10,000 jobs will be lost over the next three years due to the merger.

I just hope I get a decent severance package. Let me get out of debt and I’m moving north, dammit.

Greg and Lisa and their angry pack of children are expected to arrive at my house late this morning in anticipation of a visit to the Titanic exhibit in downtown Atlanta. Should be fun, but I have no idea where everyone is going to sleep tonight. My roommate and her boyfriend are also expected by this evening. It’ll be Thanskgiving all over!

Rehearsals with the GBB kick off again tomorrow night, and we’re into our NABBA schedule. 31 rehearsals between tomorrow and the end of March. That’s basically every Tuesday, every Thursday, and a few weekends.

More than likely, I’ll also have some Wednesday night sessions with a brass quintet and I’ve pretty much promised the church that hires me a few times every year that I’ll start playing with them on Sundays. I’ll be playing more than I did in college.

Maybe when AT&T drops the hammer I’ll finally be able to live out my dream of gigging for a living.

The weather right now is a rather balmy 50 degrees and clear – quite a change from yesterday’s offering of 40’s with anything from drizzles to downpours. I have no idea what the forecast is, but I’ll roll with it.

Kind of like the year in general. Here’s hoping it’s good for everyone who reads this – and for the guy who wrote it.

TWD

No really. It is. NABBA Night.

I’m willing to bet that you all have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, so I’ll explain. NABBA is the North American Brass Band Association; and the GBB (Georgia Brass Band), of which I am a member, is a member in NABBA. As such, the band will compete in the NABBA Championships next April; performing, among other selections, a rather dull and stupidly-difficult piece entitled, “The King of Elfland’s Daughter.”

Why it wasn’t called “Elfland’s Princess,” I do not know. But it wasn’t.

In any case, the GBB has completed its Fall concert schedule, and so tonight is the first night that we’ll look at the Elfland piece and begin preparing for the competition. Instead of practicing for two hours or so each week, our rehearsal schedule will probably swell to at least twice a week and closer to three hours each time. Sectionals will be in order. Personal practice time will be expected. And until April, we’ll be focusing on that insidiously boring song.

Oh joy.

I should mention that the band actually WON the competition last year (without me, damn them) in their innaugural entry. Well, they won their “section” anyway. The competition is broken into 5 different levels: Explorer, Youth, Challenge, Honors, and Championship. The GBB, having no idea how good they were last year, opted to enter the “Challenge” section, two flights below the big boys of brass banding.

They were the last of 8 bands to compete in that section, and they so completely humiliated the other 7 (winning by nearly 30 points), that they were told that they could only enter this year’s competition in the Honors or Championship sections.

Honors it is. The main competition will probably be the New England Brass Band, which won the honors section last year.

By the way, you can read all about NABBA and the competition at www.nabba.org

On to other things. I bought a satellite radio today. I hated to do it – paying for radio just seems wrong, somehow – but I finally got so sick and tired of commercials that I decided it was worth it. I just kept thinking to myself, “You’re driving to Vermont and back in a couple of weeks, you go to Canada every year….hell, you’ve put nearly 120,000 miles on the car in three years. Get the damned satellite.”

So I did. 170 commercial-free stations, about 30-40 of which I think I’ll enjoy. Finally I can get the CBC in Atlanta. That’s worth the price of admission right there.

On the social front – there’s not one. I have, however, been spending a lot of time with a friend (a male friend) who likes to play pinball as much as I do. And we’ve discovered that we both REALLY like playing this thing called, “Big Buck Hunter,” which is a video game that lets you kill animals for points. Not a completely sick concept – I mean, some people kill real animals for trophies. We kill fake animals for nothing.

There is one facet of the game that I don’t really understand. It seems that you can kill a fully-grown bull moose with a single shotgun blast to the head – but that same gun must shoot a frog FOUR TIMES before it dies. Does that seem just a tad illogical to you (assuming you can get your head around the idea that you’re moose hunting with a pump-action shotgun, that is)?

Don’t know if I’ve mentioned previously that I’m now running Windows Vista on my laptop. Seems to be a really nice OS – an improvement over XP Pro, which I didn’t think was possible. I have found a couple of quirks and there are some hardware drivers that need to be updated, but overall I give it an A-.

That ought to have everyone all caught up. I’ll probably be a year older before I update this again (unless something really cool happens at Christmas), so everyone have happy holidays and hoist a pint to me on New Year’s Eve.

Taking the day off today at the request of my boss.

Well, she didn’t actually request it. No. What really happened is that our president sent out a memo a couple of weeks ago telling us that we had to use all of our vacation before the end of the year. No carry-over to 2007.

At the time, I had about 10 days left. Therefore, I’m pretty much working short weeks for the rest of the year, plus taking off a week and a half around Christmas to see how cold it can get in Vermont. So I’ve got today off. And next Friday. And next Monday. And last Friday. And that week around Christmas. And I think some other time that I’m forgetting.

This does not mean that I can just RELAX: work gave me a Blackberry a couple of weeks ago, and it never stops going off. I was up at around 6:30 this morning talking to a guy at work because someone else had paged me about a server problem.

Gotta love technology.

After fixing the server, I spent some quality time taking about about 4 billion bags of trash, which were generated last Wednesday, Thursday (Thanksgiving) and Friday. Those were the days during which my roomate and I hosted her son, daugther, boyfriend, brother, friend and friend’s son at the house for two-and-a-half days of non-stop eating. We had turkey, ham, squash, apple pie, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, potatoes, stuffing, gravy, beer, wine, rum, cranberry sauce, broccoli, asparagus, salsa, chips, cheese, pickled okra, coke, and pizza. And seconds.

And that was just Thursday.

Friday, I took off to spend some long-overdue time in the woods where I hurt myself (more on that shortly), while the others – except for the son – prepared to make tamales; but they ended up making menudo (some sort of weird Mexican chitlins concoction that I have yet to try). The refrigerator is currently completely full, there are still about 4 bottles of wine and a case of beer on the deck; and, as I said, I got rid of LOTS of trash this morning.

I also said that I took off on Friday to go camping. Hooked up with a couple of friends of mine who work at the CDC (always a good thing to bring with you when you camp, right?) and we headed up to the Sylco wilderness area in the mountains of Tennessee.

More specifically, we hooked up when we all got there. I got there first and managed to set up my 800,000 square-foot tent by myself (always wondered if I could do that) before either of them showed up. Okay….in reality, the tent is just over 200 square feet. Since it was supposed to drop down into the 30s each night, the plan was to put a heater in the tent; and, since three or four guys would be sleeping in it, it would stay warm. Bad plan, as it turned out. One guy slept in his truck and I never did get the heater set up. But hey…MY sleeping bag was nice and toasty. I can’t help it if the other two guys don’t understand cold-weather camping and spent the whole weekend crying about how cold it was.

At any rate, after everyone had arrived Friday evening, we set about collecting firewood. While breaking a decent-sized stick in half by jumping on it, I managed to really screw up my left knee, which I believe houses a chronic bowling injury (no joke), so I spent the rest of the night supervising the other two guys and drinking bourbon.

Saturday, while limping around, I managed to fall over and wrench my right elbow and left wrist. So I spent most of the day drinking bourbon and supervising.

Oh – and occassionally playing with my chainsaw (maybe I should have used that instead of my knee on Friday night….).

The three of us ate pretty well, although an early attempt at chili never did pan out, in spite of our best efforts to “rescue” it over the course of the weekend by pouring more and more stuff into it, heating it, tasting it, and saying, “Nope. Still sucks.”

Yesterday morning, we packed up the cars, made sure the campsite was in better shape than when we’d found it, and made the two-hour trip back to Atlanta.

Back at my house, my roommate had scoured my kitchen floor, cleaned stuff that I didn’t realize could be cleaned, and successfully kept my cats alive; so I thanked her by taking a bunch of leftovers from my camping trip and from thanksgiving and making two FANTASTIC Shepherd’s Pies (made with ground beef and venison sausage if you’re interested – and what a great combination for a Shepherd’s Pie).

We demolished one of the two last night, and I fully intend to take care of at least half of the other one today. Also need to do some laundry. But it’s only noon. I don’t want to strain myself.

All in all, the Thanksgiving weekend was a real treat and I hope everyone reading this had as nice a time as I did.

You’ll be hard-pressed to top it at Christmas, Cy; but I’m sure you will somehow. 🙂

TWD

My my my.

It has been quite a while since I decided to put anything in this spot, and I sincerely apologize to those of you who throng eagerly to your computers each day in order to drink at the fountain of wisdom that is this blog.

I must particularly apologize to those of you who were waiting for the second installment of the great American novel. Maybe later.

I’m technically in training this week, but needed to actually get some work done today, so I cut class and stayed home. Makes a lot of sense, huh? Actually, it does. I can get more work done from home than I can at the office.

Not that I’ve actually DONE that today. I’ve spent most of the day watching election analysis, reading newspapers online, and doing laundry….although I did check my email.

In order to tick my mother off, I must now reveal that I didn’t vote yesterday. This does not mean that I don’t get to whine about politicians. To the contrary, it means that I take my politics seriously enough to realize that I’m so independent that I border on being an anarchist. I didn’t care who won yesterday. Seriously. I fully expect the outgoing bunch of incompetent crooks to be replaced with a new bunch of incompetent crooks who color their states with a different color.

I could, of course, have voted Libertarian; but I’ve been told by Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, my mom, etc., that a vote for a Libertarian is a wasted vote. Since I don’t like to be wasteful…

Anyway, what’s seriously going to change? Well, Rumsfeld finally got the boot. It took W getting kicked in the gut to figure it out, but it’s a start. I have a military friend who is currently quietly celebrating.

Bill Clinton probably had the best line yesterday. “Republicans will have you believe that Democrats will tax you into the poor house and that you’ll meet a terrorist around every corner and trip over an illegal immigrant on the way there.”

That’s not too far off base. How long will it be before someone says, “Man, the Democrats have only been in power for a week and they’ve already gotten us stuck in an unwinable war?”

Changing subjects abruptly, it’s a beautiful day in Duluth right now. The sun is out, there’s a great breeze blowing, temperature is hovering right around 60. If there was a football game going on in my back yard, I’d be in heaven. As it is, there’s a bunch of leaves that need to be raked in my back yard and the football game isn’t until Saturday. In Greenville. Fortunately, it’s the last one (of the regular season), and I won’t be obligated to go to any more after it.

I still MIGHT. I just won’t be obligated.

Last week was the fourth time this season that I had to leave very early and got home very late because of games. I’ve had to drive to Chapel Hill, NC (U. of North Carolina), Boone, NC (Appalachian State U.), Myrtle Beach, SC (Coast Carolina U.) and Elon, NC (Elon College). Elon was the easiest – I got home at around midnight. App State was around 2 am. UNC and CCU were both close to 6 am – and I had to play at church on the Sundays after each of those games. Color me sick of football season.

Today I discovered a plethora of little tiny ants trooping around on my kitchen counters. I have no idea where they came from or what they’re after, but I cleaned the living crap out of the counters and they’re still not gone. Anybody got any advice on that one? I put out a couple of ant traps, but they seem to have done nothing.

Last night, I made Banana bread. I’m told it was good – I haven’t actually had any yet. I’m assuming that it and the ants are not related.

A couple of months ago, I got a new self-cleaning litterbox for my cats. It works wonderfully. Problem is that they’re both scared of it. Boo (the female) will use it if I pick her up and put her in it. Bo (the male – and the one more likely to use anything that has litter in it) will have nothing to do with it. Sigh.

And that’s all for now. Hope everybody likes the new look of the blog.

TWD

“It was a dark and stormy night,” he penned, knowing that it was a monstrous cliché and a guaranteed way to stop any potential readers from continuing; but he had to start somewhere, and the night before had indeed been stormy – and dark, for that matter. His two cats, Bo and Boo (named more for alliterative purposes than anything else) had been restless all of the previous day. When the storm actually hit, threatening to down trees and tear off shingles, they’d gone berzerk, tearing around the house like banshees of old and creating for him a sort of moving obstacle course when the power invariably failed and he was forced to navigate his way to bed by the glow off the screen of his PDA. Ever-prepared (he’d been a Boy Scout, after all), he’d spent nearly $200 on groceries and supplies earlier in the week, but had neglected to pick up a couple of flashlight batteries.

It seemed, therefore, pre-ordained that he’d trip over one of the animals (it turned out to be Boo) while making his ascent to the second-floor bedroom. The last thing he remembered before waking up at the base of the stairs the next morning was the eerie arch of light that his PDA made as it flew over the bannister and crashed on the hall floor, some eight feet below.

When he regained consciousness, however, he felt better than he had in months. He was ready to do something with his life. Something that would make him famous and rich, but something that (at least he believed this at the time) would require very little effort on his part.

He was going to write the next great novel.