Category Archives: band

Fall Happenings

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I’ve almost made it to November! Yay!

Don’t know why I’ve been looking forward to that month, but I have been. I’ve got a lot going on in November, so maybe that’s part of it. It’s also nice that cooler temperatures have finally arrived in Georgia. I set up the kerosene heater on the back porch last weekend, which is pretty great. We’ve had pretty substantial precipitation for the last few days, so sitting on the porch hasn’t been particularly DRY, but it has been fairly warm with the heater – and the breezes have been fantastic.

Next Monday (11/3), we’ve got a chimney sweep coming to clean out the main chimney. Hopefully, they’ll do it the correct way, because I don’t believe that’s been done since Sandie first bought the place. We’ve got a cast-iron stove insert in the fireplace, and when she had the chimney “cleaned” prior to moving in in 2020, that person did not take said insert out – so I can’t really see how he actually cleaned anything. I hired a guy last year to come do it, but he got here, saw the stove, said, “I really didn’t want to start my morning this way,” and left. This time around, I told the folks up front that there is a stove in the fireplace – they said that wasn’t a problem. We’ll see. I’d really like to get everything cleaned correctly. I’d also like to find someone to fix the blower attached to the stove insert, but maybe – if the chimney guy does pull out the stove – I’ll be able to look at it and perhaps fix it myself. It tends to make a lot of noise when it gets going.

On Tuesday (11/4) the brass band starts rehearsing for our Christmas concerts. The director and I have been going back and forth for the last month about what tunes to include, what to leave out, what order to do things, etc., and he finally made a decision this morning. Fortunately, I’d been putting copies of everything we discussed on a shared folder, so it was easy to take out everything that didn’t make the cut, and the band should be able to get their parts without any confusion.

We started rehearsing for next year’s NABBA championships a couple of weeks ago. Made some good progress during an all-day-Saturday rehearsal, and I’m kind of pumped about our potential. We’ve got another all-day rehearsal coming up on the 15th.

Also on the 15th, I’ve got a rehearsal with Morningside Presbyterian – playing tuba in a quintet for their 100th anniversary celebration. Should be fun, although I pulled out the big horn last week and learned to my horror that I’m rustier than ever before on it. Had trouble just getting down to a G below the staff. Have been doing some wood shedding and long tones and will continue to do so up until the gig (on the 16th),

On the 17th, I head to the woods for a week. Going back to Fort Mountain State Park here in Georgia for a change. Normally, I’d head up to Michigan, but I just didn’t want to stay at Wilderness Park again, Cheboygan State Park doesn’t have the walking trails that I want, and Pictured Rocks closes for the season on the 15th of October. So I figured if I’m not going to one of those places, I might as well just save gas and stay in GA. Won’t have the Great Lake or the wind, but I’ll have a nice bunch of trails to walk – and I’ll have a campsite with electricity and running water, so it’s going to be a different kind of camping. Going to bring a coffee maker, electric cooler, an electric space heater, maybe some string lights for inside the tent, etc. I’ll still have propane-powered stuff as backups, but it might be fun to try “glamping” this time.

I’ll be getting back from the park the week of Thanksgiving, and Dad and Dianne are planning to come down and visit us on that day, which is awesome. Dad moved back to SC (from OH) about a month ago and is living with Dianne. Sounds like the two of them are getting along well, and it’s REALLY nice having him closer. Looking forward to showing him the cabin (and my woodshop) in a few weeks.

So that’s what’s on the docket. If I think of it, I’ll try to provide more details as the month progresses.

Getting Slack Again

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I got a note from Dad the other day, in which he mentioned that he’d just read my post from July. That made me realize that I hadn’t updated this thing in over a month. Again. I’m not sure how that happens so often. Actually, yes I am. My life isn’t that interesting. Not much to write about when the same things happen every day for a month. So, I have to store up all of the amazing happenings over time and then dump them all out at once.

Unfortunately, I’ve generally forgotten what happened by the time I get around to that dump. But, hey….I’ll give it a shot again. A few weeks ago, I attacked my back yard with a vengeance – and with a Ka-Bar knife that I purchased with Discover card kickbacks. I’ve been meaning to upgrade my camping knife situation for a couple of years, and finally just pulled the plug and bought a great knife – so I naturally had to see if I could hack my way through the jungle that is my south 40.

It did very well. Much better than I did, as a matter of fact, because I’m allergic some something back there. Didn’t notice until the next day, but my arms were covered with a rash (a very itchy rash), which still hasn’t completely subsided. Before you ask, no – it’s not poison ivy. No idea what it was, but I can say with some surety that it’s gone now. I hacked the crap out of that yard. Cut it down enough that I could even get my gasoline mower out and cut everything down to nubs after letting it all grow for about three years. I still have to clean up near the back fence (if only because I need to repair the fence and I can’t get close to it), but the majority of the “lawn” is now available and I can start thinking about what I want to plant back there, be it grass or trees or some kind. Have been thinking about putting in either Crepe Myrtle or Black Maple, but it would probably be easier just to kill everything off and put some sod in. I really don’t know. The most important thing is that my knife is awesome.

I also cleared off my deck. The cat house that had been there for many years is now underneath the deck, and I’ve reclaimed the entire area for, well, people. Or person, since I don’t have guests. I still need to repair the trellises on one end, but for now I’ve settled with stringing up a fly over a couple of plastic chairs at the far end of the deck, under which I can sit and drink and smoke and generally be a white trash redneck kinda guy. I noticed that, the day after I put up the fly, my neighbor (fondly known as “Martha Stewart”) installed a brand-new, huge, patio umbrella. I see it as her polite way of telling me that a bright blue tarp is not appropriate; but it’s in my back yard, it’s invisible from the street, it does the job I need for it to do, and she can get over herself. I looked at those big umbrellas, and those sumbeaches are expensive! My fly will do just fine. It also funnels the rain into a water dish for the cats who still like to lie on the deck even though their house is now beneath them.

Next week is Adam’s wedding, and it is now official that I won’t be able to make it, as I have to go on a project in North Carolina. This was not my idea – I actively campaigned against going – but it’s a huge project, with consultants onsite in 6 locations in four different states, and when the client comes on board, it’s going to be my team’s client; so in the end I relented and agreed to take one of the offices just so I could get a better idea of how things are set up – and also because my team has been extremely short-handed for the last 6 weeks and I figured that I was the “consultant” who could leave for a week and cause the least disruption to my other clients. I still handle the big problems, but I really don’t do much of the day-to-day client support anymore, so I’m expendable from that standpoint.

So, Adam – if you or your family is reading this – I wish nothing but good things for you and your bride, and once you’ve gotten settled into married life and have a stable household, I’ve got an awesome wedding present for you.

I’m supposed to be setting up about 30 workstations for a firm in Florida today, and I got started on that project at about 6:00 this morning. Literally 4 minutes after I started, my primary scripting engine – which I use for doing everything from joining the machines to the domain to adding shortcuts to the desktop – went down. Along with a number of other servers at work (including those that run the portals that all of our clients use). It’s now coming up on 3.5 hours since everything went balls up, and I’m starting to wonder if I’m going to have to waste all day doing something that I could have done in about 30 minutes with my scripts. Hope not, because I really kinda wanted to go bowling today.

I may join a bowling league in a couple of weeks, but I want to be sure that I still know how to roll a big ball down a lane towards pins.

Band started back up this week, after a summer break of about 6 weeks. Lots of new faces, including a new solo horn player – who showed up 5 minutes late. I think that’s just a requirement of playing solo horn. He sounded okay, I guess. Still think Andrew and I should’ve double-teamed the part and we should have brought in a newbie to play 2nd horn. Instead, I’ll be doing that for at least another year. Nothing wrong with the part – it just gets boring. Sort of like 2nd baritone. Occasional flourishes of music, surrounded by lots and lots of long tones and off-beats. Yawn.

On the home front, I’ve embarked on an experiment in minimalism. I’m trying to get rid of stuff that I don’t need and to limit myself to as few redundancies as possible. Example: 1 plate, 1 coffee cup, 1 fork, 1 knife, 1 cooking pot, etc. Yes, I have about 70 coffee cups, enough plates and flatware settings for a dinner with 8 guests, and more than enough pans to use a different one every day for two weeks before washing any of them. But c’mon. What’s the point? If I can just wash the dishes as I use them, I don’t need multiples. We’ll see how it goes. Am also finally throwing stuff away that I brought with me from my office when AT&T canned me – notebooks, textbooks, desk knickknacks, cables, charges, etc. No need to have all that stuff cluttering up my living room. Ideally, I want to get down to having, basically, an empty house. When it’s time to pick up and move on, it won’t take any time.

Ah! I almost forgot that I also bought a gimbal for my phone a few weeks ago. I haven’t done more than play with it for about 20 minutes, but it’s going to be a lot of fun particularly when I’m out in the woods. From what I’ve seen with my experiment, it does a great job of tracking an object, stabilizing a moving camera, and allowing for easy camera manipulation (panning, zooming, etc.), and it’s cool to watch it do its thing: it’s like having a little robot in your hand who’s doing all of your photography for you. Looking forward to taking it out camping soon.

And that’s about all the news that’s fit to type for now. I’ll go see if I can do any more work on my workstation setups, and, if not, I’ll figure out what I’m going to do today while waiting to be able to work.

TWD

Welcome to Summer

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So I’m a month older than I was the last time I sat down to write something here – and a couple of pounds lighter thanks to renewing walking and cutting out as much processed sugar as possible. Don’t get me wrong: I’m still a fat bastard, but I’m a little less so now.

At work, we’re in the doldrums after tax season, and so it’s interview season. I’ve done a bunch in the last month, and they’ve been a pretty good crop, actually. I think offer letters have been sent out to two and we’ve got two others going through background and drug tests. Hoping to have them on board in the next 10 days or so. I’m also promoting my one Junior Consultant to a salaried Level 1 position on or about July 1, which is nice. She’s been a junior for longer than I would’ve liked, but I had a talk with her at the beginning of last month and told her I needed her to step up. She did. Assuming she did okay on the test I gave her yesterday, she’s ready to move up and I won’t have any juniors on the team….until the newbies come in.

Need to mow half of the front lawn today, and I’m hoping I can actually get my edger working so I can edge everything. The stupid thing just sort of died on me a couple of weeks ago, so I’ve got one half of one side of my driveway edged at this point. I’ve tried on three occasions to get it to start and keep running, but so far it’s been good for about 5 minutes before it quits. If I can’t keep it running today, I guess I’ll be making a trip to Home Depot for a new one. It’s amazing how much better my lawn looks when it’s been edged.

The band played a concert at Reinhart College (hope I spelled that right) a week and a half ago. It’s in Cherokee County, well north of Atlanta, and at about 20 minutes before downbeat our solo horn player sent a message that he wasn’t coming. Needless to say, there were some bad words following that. A couple of the pieces on the concert had fairly exposed solo horn parts, so our 1st horn learned those as quickly as possible and I learned the 1st horn part as quickly as possible. Another exposed part had to be transcribed for the flugel player, since all three horn parts were needed. Made it through the performance okay.

A couple of days after that, we had a board meeting, in which it was pretty much unanimously decided that the solo horn player won’t be returning for the 2019-2020 season. The big question is who’ll play that part. The 1st horn player and I have both said we’d like to play it at times, but not exclusively – it’s a painful part to play if you haven’t developed a high-range embouchure. I’m sort of hoping that Andrew (1st horn) will bite the bullet and do it, so that I can move back to 1st horn – which has always been my favorite horn part. Then we can recruit somebody to take my spot on 2nd.

Or if they want to try me on solo, I’ll do that, too. It’ll hurt for a few months, but might be a good learning experience for me, and could force me to deal with the stage fright that I’ve always had when playing solos.

Have plans to do some housework this afternoon – cleaning out my master bedroom, primarily. I’ve had a twin bed in there for the last few months (moved my queen to the guest room before Cy and “T” visited), and at first I was getting great sleep in it because the cats didn’t fit on it and pretty much left me alone. That’s changed in the last couple of weeks. They still don’t fit, so they just jump all over me and make sleeping pretty much impossible. Time to bring the queen back into play.

It is now officially summer in Georgia, and it’s been officially HOT for several weeks. Temps today should be in the mid-90s, which makes the thought of cleaning my room a bit more palatable than the thought of mowing the lawn.

But they’ve both gotta get done, so I guess I’ll go get started.

…And Two More Months Have Passed

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This whole work/life balance thing is out of whack, I guess. I come home from work, eat some dinner, watch a video or two on YouTube, and hit the sack. Get up, feed the cats, take a shower, and go to work. On Saturdays and Sundays, I sleep in as much as possible, watch a couple videos, maybe mow the lawn (caveat: sometimes I mow the lawn after work), go play trivia at a pub, do some grocery shopping, eat dinner, go to bed.

This has to stop. I’m getting out of shape, I’m bored, and I’m accomplishing nothing.

So, yesterday and today, I started walking again. Hiked up to Jenny’s house (4-mile round trip) to feed her cats. And I’m going to force myself to start walking in the mornings again. To that end, I’ve rolled my wake-up routine back a half an hour (to 5:25). Did that on Friday, because I had to go to work early, and the cats have already adjusted by walking all over me at 5:30 yesterday and 5:20 this morning.

My wake-up routine, you ask? It’s not really an alarm, as I prefer to be woken up by kitties, but it gives them clues when to do it. At 5:20, the kitchen light comes on. At 5:25, my bedside lamp comes on. At 5:26, the theme from Silverado plays on my Alexa speaker. Rarely do I make it to the music, as the cats take their cue from the kitchen light and pounce on me in search of breakfast.

Call me crazy, but it’s a much nicer way to be awoken than using some sort of alarm clock.

Anyway…

Last weekend saw the first of what we in the Georgia Brass Band hope is an annual Southeast Brass Band Festival. Our board started kicking the idea around last year, and – miracle of miracles – it came together pretty well. We had bands from Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama in attendance (6 total, including us), hired a long-time friend of the band (Dr. Ronald Holtz, who is huge in the brass band movement) to give comments on each band’s performance and award caption prizes (best soloist, most entertaining performance, best hymn, best march), and coordinated with a local high school with a phenomenal band program to use their facilities and let them sell concessions for their band program. It was actually a pretty rousing success, and (another miracle) the GBB came out in the black financially. As treasurer, I’d been thinking that we were going to take a bath on the thing, but we managed to make somewhere between $600 and $1000 for the day through t-shirt and CD sales and band registrations (we’re still waiting for one band to pay up, which is why I can’t say exactly how much we took in).

Our band was not eligible to win any of the awards, but we did get some excellent comments from Dr. Holtz and he confided to our director that, had we actually been competing, we would’ve blown the other 5 bands off of the stage – which we had kind of figured, hence we removed ourselves from consideration.

Originally, we’d ruminated on having the festival move around with different bands hosting each year, but now we’re leaning towards keeping it in Atlanta at least for a few years. Not to be immodest, but it’s hard to believe that any of the other bands in attendance could have better facilities, plus we’ve now got some insight on how to put on this type of event, and we think we can improve going forward.

All in all, it was a good day. I’m glad we did it and I’m looking forward to trying again next year.

At work, I had one of my direct reports leave a couple of weeks ago. He found another job that pays more (I’ve been saying that we need to improve our L1 salaries for over two years), and I was happy to see him moving on – not because he didn’t do a reasonable job for me, but because I’m always genuinely happy to see my directs move up. To that end, I also traded away two of my other directs, last week, to another team. One of them was one of my senior consultants, and I thought he’d come out of his shell a bit more with a younger team which has just been formed. The other is a kid who I think can be a senior in time, but he also needs to be put in an environment where he can step up as a leader, and he wasn’t going to get that opportunity on my team, which is generally composed of consultants who’ve been there longer than he has.

In return, I got one rising consultant from the other team, so I’m actually down to 7 directs and, with project season – when we onboard new clients – ramping up, I’m a bit concerned about how we’re going to handle the increased number of clients with a smaller team; but I’m confident that we’ll figure it out.

My boss has implemented an aptitude test for all of the people who apply for an L1 job, and he had all of the team leads take it to get an idea of how well it does. Turns out that I’m a “medium” fit for a helpdesk job – and the test pretty much nailed my personality, concluding in effect that I just like to get shit done, don’t always follow the standard procedures, and really don’t care what anybody thinks about how I do things. It said a lot of other things that were also spot-on, and I think it’s going to help bring in a higher caliber of candidate for upcoming interviews…..if we can work on that crappy salary thing…

I may try to go camping next week if Jenny is home (she’s in Santorini or someplace exotic like that, and I can’t remember when she’s coming home. If I do go out, it’ll be a solo trip. My buddy Brett and I had a pretty bad trip a month or two ago – actually came to a physical altercation, which I would never have imagined between the two of us – and we’re basically done with each other at this point. I haven’t been out by myself (other than Michigan trips) in several years, but the woods are calling me. Can’t say that the news about a moron killing somebody on the Appalachian Trail last weekend hasn’t been in my thoughts a bit as I contemplate going up to one of my favorite sites in NC that is fairly close to the trail, but I still believe that there’s a much higher chance of getting attacked in my house than there is in getting attacked in the woods.

Cy and “T” cruised through for a visit a few weeks back. It was good to see them, though I was a bit embarrassed at the state of my abode – still need to get down new flooring, put in a new fence, things like that. We had dinner (Jenny came along) and idle chit-chat. I don’t actually remember where we ate, but it was great to see them.

Jenny and I also flew (yes, I flew) to Cleveland a couple of weekends ago to see Dad and Diane – and Kara and her husband Tom on a Saturday evening. Got to meet the new puppy that Dad and Diane have (do not remember its name…I think I’m getting Alzheimer’s), hang around with the important folks for a few hours, and had a nice dinner with everyone at Bonefish Grill. Always great to see you and find out how you’re doing, Dad. Heard you had to visit your physician friends again this week, and I’m sending lots of good thoughts your way.

And now, it being Sunday, I think I’ll take a shower and go play some trivia.

Gotta think bout that work/life balance, ya know.

Updated by Popular Demand

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So I got a short email from Dad the other day, letting me know that I haven’t posted here since last Christmas. That seemed crazy to me when I read it, so I checked – and he is, of course, correct. That being the case, I shall now attempt to compose some sort of update on what’s been going on since then.

Not a lot, as it turns out.

Work has been a beast through this tax season (corporate deadline was last Saturday, and the personal one is April 15, as you probably know). We’ve had some issues with our physical file system, causing extreme delays and disconnections for a number of our clients. Naturally, they don’t understand or care that the level 1 people who are generally the first to respond to their complaints can do absolutely nothing about this – they just want to get pissed off with whomever is trying to help them. As a lead, I’m generally the guy who gets to be the backstop for my 9 direct reports, so I’m getting yelled at pretty much every day.

Making things more annoying is the fact that our systems admin team spent a long time refusing to admit that maybe it was their fault that the systems were failing, and sometime in late December or early January they decided that it must be scripts that other people had written that were causing the problems. A decree was issued that scripts were henceforth forbidden unless they were written by the systems admin team. Naturally, my own scripts – which were being used by most of the level 1 teams – were instantly assessed to be existential threats that had to be killed.

So the SA people wrote their own script to seek out and delete any copies of my scripts anywhere they resided, be it on the network or on local workstations. This plan was not announced, of course, but I had an idea that they might try something like that. Not wanting to lose 6 months worth of work, I deleted all of my scripts, keeping copies both in my recycle bin and on my iPod. These days, I feed bits and pieces of my scripts to the development team, who insist that their web-based portal can be used to do anything that I was doing with PowerShell – though that team tends to take about a month to even consider coding something that I’d regularly throw together in about 45 minutes when the need arose.

With one exception, by the way, none of my scripts do anything other than read data. They tell me, for example, who is logged on to a given server, what a user’s unique ID is (for registry searches), when a server was last rebooted, things like that. The exception to that is a script that deletes unnecessary files that are filling up space on client servers and causing them to fail. What I’m saying here is that 1}These are scripts that are needed to keep things running smoothly, and 2}There is no way they were causing any performance issues for the clients. After a few weeks of those scripts not running and performance continuing to decline, the SA team finally looked inward and discovered the file systems problems (not to mention problems with their own procedures – like running backups without checking first to see if the backup volumes had enough space to hold the incoming backups). A great hue and cry was raised (not to mention wailing and gnashing of teeth) about how this was the hardware vendors’ fault, how it couldn’t have been foreseen, and how they’d fix it after tax season; oddly, no mention was made of restoring my scripts, which were incredibly helpful in efficiently handling the volume of tickets being submitted due to the infrastructure problems. So they remain mothballed, and I – and one of the L2 guys who helped me – remain completely pissed off with the company as a whole and are at this point simply going through the motions at work. He (the L2) is actively looking for another job where he isn’t treated as a scapegoat who knows nothing, and may have gotten one last Thursday. We should know by next week. I’ve been sorely tempted to apply for either an apps management job or a level 2 job (both are currently open positions, and I’m fairly certain that I’d get either of them if I applied), but I’m sticking with management for now. If I have to keep working for longer than I’d like to, that’s where I’m most likely to find another gig.

Have to go help Jenny move some stuff for her dad. I’ll post this now, let my own Dad know, and continue with the drama of the last three months later on.

That Was A Short Spring

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I mowed my lawns three days ago.  It was a beautiful sunny Sunday, with temperatures in the 70s and a wonderful little breeze keeping everything nice.  Monday, it rained.  Tuesday, it rained and began to get a bit chilly.  Today had no rain, but it’s back in the low 40s with 20+ MPH winds, and it’s freaking cold!  This winter is never going to end.

Before I continue, I must wish Dad and his bride a happy 7th (?) anniversary.  I wasn’t sure if this was the right day or not, but I had a picture from their wedding show up on my Facebook feed this morning and then saw another one posted by Dianne, so I guess it is!  Sorry, Dad.  You know I’m not really big on remember dates.

The GBB is plugging along, getting ready for the championships in a few weeks.  Hard to believe that we’re already up against it.  I’m not overly excited about the contest this year.  I don’t think we’re all that great, don’t particularly like the music, and don’t have the vacation time that I used to have.  Burning two days off to drive up to Fort Wayne and back doesn’t fill me with excitement, considering that I’ll probably want those two days back in the fall when I’ll – hopefully – take a decent break from work.  I’m planning on spending a week or 10 days in Canada in July, which is nice.  Truth be told, though, I’m really looking forward to what has become a tradition of heading to Michigan sometime in October.  Hoping I’ll have enough vacation time built up to spend a week or two there.

I broke down and bought two Amazon Echo Dots a couple of weeks ago.  They were on sale for $30 each, and I figured it’d be nice to be able to turn my lights on and off with my voice rather than diddling around with my phone while I lie in bed.  I was right.  It’s very nice.  It’s also nice to be able to ask “Alexa” to play a podcast (or a list of them), or to play any of a number of calming noises (ocean, mountain brook, wind in the trees, etc.) or to just roll a little hypnosis at me to help me sleep.  I’ve also gotten into the habit of asking the thing for weather updates or a morning news brief, or to play the occasional game of Jeopardy.

The Dots came on the heels of me finally getting around to hooking up the Ring spotlights that I got for Christmas from the X-Company.  This is also a fun li’l toy for me.  It’s a motion detector with spotlights and a camera over my garage, which alerts me with indoor chimes (also on my phone) whenever it detects anything large in my driveway.  The large thing, as it turns out, is usually me – either leaving for work or coming home from work – and the cats have quickly figured out that, when the chimes sound in the evening, they’re about to get some food.  Other than being woken up by cats, there isn’t much better in life than coming into my driveway and seeing a little feline face (or two) peeking through the front windows at me.  I’m impressed enough with the spotlight that I may actually spring for a Ring doorbell to go with it.  I’ve got to admit that it’s nice to be able to keep an eye on my place when I’m not here.  There is the sporadic annoyance – like during a very windy day a week or two ago when I kept getting alerts because trees were throwing moving shadows across the driveway.  And I’ve been startled a couple of times on rainy nights when the glare of headlights going past on the street set off the motion alert; but through tweaking and modifying the motion zones, I’ve got it down to basically only letting me know when there’s an actual person (or car) in my driveway.

Also good for knowing when packages are delivered.

I have not yet figured out how to network the Echo Dots with the Ring.  For instance, if motion is detected after dark, turn on the lights downstairs.  But I assume that I will eventually.  For now, I’m just exploring the new gadgets and having some fun.

Speaking of fun, I’ve taken advantage of my new position at work to start doing a little bit of coding on the side again.  Nothing major, and I’m pretty much restricting myself to powershell scripts, but at least I can spend an hour trying to automate things without having to worry about my ticket closing numbers dropping.  In the end, the scripts that I write will end up helping my team to take care of things in a few seconds that might take other teams a few minutes.  Or maybe I’ll share the scripts with other teams and show what a great guy I am.

Nah.  I want my team to shine.

By the look on Joshua’s little face right now, I can gather that it’s time for bed.  So I guess I’ve written enough for now.  A warm bed sounds pretty good.

It’s Finally Saturday

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I percolated some coffee last night.  I’m not positive, but I think that was the first time I’ve ever done so when I wasn’t camping.  While I do love the speed and convenience of my little pod-based coffee machine, there’s something about percolating that I’ve always like; and something nudged me to brew a pot when I got home last night.  It was good.  It’s also good this morning.

Spent some quality time lying in bed with the cats this morning.  5:15 came incredibly early, so I got up to feed the cats (Ocean Whitefish today – Boo was not pleased), then went back to bed for a few hours.  I would dearly love to spend most of the day there – checked my sleep activity yesterday, and I haven’t gotten more than 7 hours in two weeks – but I’ve got a concert with the brass band at Kennesaw State this afternoon.  Next weekend is also booked with band stuff, all NABBA-related rehearsals.  Friday night, Saturday morning, all day Sunday.  I suppose I should be looking forward to that.  To some extent, I am; but I really just want a weekend with nothing planned.  Preferably a sunny one (it’s raining again today and is forecast to do the same tomorrow) so that I could head for the woods and try out the new car-camping setup that I put together several months ago and have yet to try.  I’ve got a new Napier rear-gate cover, similar to the tent that I’ve used for a few years, but without the tent.  It just slips over the back of the car, and provides a screen window and a very shallow awning.  Also picked up a couple of door window condoms – I think they’re supposed to be used to keep sun off of babies or something, but they also function as fast and sturdy door screens (to replace the netting & magnets that I’ve been using).  The only thing I’m still looking for, to have what I think will be the perfect car-camp setup, is a kid-sized memory-foam mattress.  The air mattress that I normally use is great, but I’d like to get something a little firmer and less prone to leaking.

Had a pretty decent day at work yesterday, although I learned in the late afternoon that the client who had previously sent a letter from their lawyer has now sent another.  They’re unhappy.  I get it.  They want to get out of their 5-year contract.  I get that, too.  I really sort of hope that we just let them go.  I’m tired of hearing their complaints, and I’m tired of them blaming me for stuff that I can’t control.  I’m told that I’m not mentioned by name in this second legal missive.  That’s a good thing, I guess.

Still thinking about retirement and how to go about it.  It’s dawning on me that I may have to postpone it for a bit – mainly because of the cats, although if I can put up a big enough shack, they should be fine.  Questions about pooping (mine, not the cats’) have me vexed for the moment.  I know I’m hiking & camping guy, but I really don’t want to just have a composting toilet as my primary john.  I’d be completely happy with a pit toilet in a separate shack, but if I do go to the place in SC that I’ve been thinking about, I don’t know if that would be allowed.  If it would be, I’d have to find out how much it would cost to put it up.  Understand that I don’t want just a hole in the ground with a wooden one-seater over it.  I’d want a cement vault, as you might find in some decent wilderness campgrounds.

I’ve also decided that I want a hot shower, which my friends who’ve retired early have so far forgone.  They’ve been bathing in a tub resembling a small horse trough and heating the water with a huge heating element.  Yeah.  No.  I want hot showers on demand.  Propane could do this, I guess.  Or a tank-less water heater.

It’s basically all coming down to “what am I allowed to do, and what will the start-up costs be?”  I’ll continue to work it out in my head and then start putting things on paper before deciding if and when I can actually take the plunge.  It’s always in the back of my mind.

Today’s featured image, by the way, is – I think – one that I took during a weekend in Waukegan a few years ago.  Amy and I spent a good part of an afternoon at a little coffee shop and took a shot of the wall.  Or maybe it’s a stock photo, but I don’t think so.  I can’t imagine why I would save it if it is.  Nah.  Pretty sure that I took it.

Since mentioning a few weeks ago that I intended to start walking in the mornings again, I have yet to actually do so.  I’m usually dog-tired in the mornings.  I guess that getting out of bed and walking for 45 minutes or so would help with that, but I just don’t have the energy or the desire to bundle up and go out into the (relative) cold.  Maybe next week.

Well, I must do something productive before getting ready for the gig.  Still working on the football site, and I have to figure out why the images from my migration blog aren’t showing up in my media library on this one.

Need to start taking back my guestroom, too.  It’s still full of boxes that got thrown into it when Mary moved in.  Really want to clean that room out and make it usable again. It’s a nice room.

 

a foot in the door

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I began my newest schedule today.  I should be happy that I get to wait until 10 to go into the office, but the cats are going to wake me up at 6:00 regardless of when I have to leave the house, so I’m still working 13-hour days as far as I’m concerned.  I don’t mind that too much, but I can’t stand coming home when it’s dark.

Couldn’t even go for a walk this morning because it was raining.  True, I could have walked in the rain.  I didn’t feel like it.

Work wasn’t all that hideous today because I spent a lot of time rebuilding a little excel-based program that I wrote a few months ago.  I’m trying to do the whole thing in Visual Basic with a secured back-end database so that the rest of my team can use it to do software upgrades and I won’t have to worry about them somehow getting to the code and screwing everything up.  At least when I’m developing something I’m not bored to tears.

A Furman defender goes after the runner.  The clarity in this picture – from
the shoes to the facial expression, blew me away.  I love this camera.

Furman dropped their game at App State last Saturday, but it was closer than most people had predicted (33-28, ASU).    More importantly, the camera that I rented for the game was everything I’d hoped it would be and more.  I actually used it at a high school game on Friday night and was amazed at the quality of the shots I got.  High school football games are a sports photographer’s nemesis because they’re almost always at night, the lighting at most high school stadiums sucks, and the team that you’re shooting is invariably in some dark color like maroon or navy blue.  You can shoot in manual at about 1600 ISO and set the shutter speed to a relatively slow 1/250, but your shots are still going to be blurry and lacking much detail.  They’ll probably have a lot of noise in them, too.



Furman’s Jerodis Williams tries to hurdle a linebacker.
At 10 framers/second, I could sit back, frame my
shots, and blast away.

The Canon 1Dx that I rented, however, has incredibly good high-ISO quality.  I shot the high school game at 20,000 ISO – which allowed me to have a shutter speed of about 1/600, and the resulting photos have virtually no noise whatsoever.  I was stunned and couldn’t wait to see how the camera would perform at a fairly well-lighted college stadium.  It did not disappoint.  With the ISO problems solved for the end of the game (when it did get dark), and with the camera blasting out 18-megapixel photos at 10 frames/second, I felt like I could just concentrate on framing and focusing and let the camera take care of everything else.  Turned out to be a good plan – I got hundreds of really nice shots.  I gave about 35 of them to the Greenville News and put 91 others into my own slide show. 

Ray Early watches his extra point attempt
go right down the middle

I got an email from the News’ sports editor today telling me that he was very pleased with my work and asking if I’d shoot the Furman/Citadel game for the News this weekend.

I think I mentioned in my previous post that I didn’t make a great deal of money for the ASU game.  I figured out during the drive home that, if I didn’t count what I spent on lens and camera rental, then I made just under $2/hour (after paying for gasoline) for the 18 hours I worked last Saturday.

Even so, being asked by a relatively major paper to shoot another game made me extremely happy this afternoon, and I agreed to shoot the next game.  I may never get a job as a “real” photographer, but the G’News is at least giving me a shot to string for them a little while – truly my dream job – and I’m just going to run with it as far and as hard as I can.  Maybe something will come of it, and maybe nothing will, but I have an opportunity.

The brass band played a concert at the University of Georgia about a month ago, and we got our recording of the concert back last week.  I am normally the first guy to hold his nose and cringe when listening to recordings made by my band, but I’ve got to admit that we made some really nice sounds at UGA.  One track in particular is virtually mistake-free, well in tune, and beautifully balanced.  I’ll try to put a copy of it into this blog at some point.  It’ll definitely be up on the band’s website within the next few days.

I mentioned that I paid off my car last week.  Naturally therefore, the Audi in question started making horrible noises at me when I backed it out of my garage after lunch today.  I’m hoping that it was just a case of having some water on the brakes or something, but – knowing my luck – it’ll probably end up being the first step towards having a blown engine or something along those lines.  You know: something that will cost me $3000 to fix and that will make my car completely worthless as a trade-in if I don’t fix it.

And that’s enough typing for tonight.

and you thought i was dead

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It was brought to my attention a few weeks ago that I have all but abandoned this blog – or any other blog – since last July.

Sorry about that.  There hasn’t been a great deal going on, I haven’t seen anything really shiny, and my stupid job has got me exhausted most of the time.  So….let’s just try to pick up where we left off and hit whatever highlights there have been in my life since July (in no particular order.  This will be strictly stream-of-consciousness writing).

For starters (or enders, actually), I’m typing this on my new Microsoft Surface tablet.  Yeah.  I finally joined the tablet generation.  There was no way I was going to get another Apple device, so the iPad family was out; but a lot of my friends have gotten various types of tablets over the last few years and I was growing somewhat fond of the portability of the things.  When Microsoft finally released a tablet that – quite seriously, thanks largely to the fact that it is Microsoft – has the potential to replace my laptop, I took the plunge.  Perhaps I should have waited another month and gotten the Surface Pro, which runs a full-blown instance of Windows 8 (this one runs Windows 8 RT, which is a scaled down version of the Windows 8 OS), but I thought the time was right, so I just got what I got.  If I want to upgrade to the Pro later on, I’ve been told I can do so for a $50 restocking fee.  We shall see.

At any rate, this is quite a nice little computer.  The touch-sensitive keyboard/screen cover had me a bit nervous at first, as I wondered if it would be a complete pain to use.  However, it works very well if it’s on a tabletop (as it is now).  Takes a little getting used to, and I’ll never be able to use it to type as quickly as I do on a mechanical keyboard, but I’m probably cranking out about 40 wpm right now.

The camera on the tablet is not great.  Actually, that’s a lie.  The camera is terrible – my phone’s camera is (literally) about 6 times better; but who really cares?  It’s not like I’m going to be carrying this thing around in the hope of getting a great photograph.  I have a phone – not to mention a couple of professional-grade cameras – for that. 

The biggest complaint I’ve heard about the surface (one which does not bother me, by the way) is that there aren’t as many apps available for it as there are for the iPad.  This is a fact in one sense and a complete red herring in another.  It is true that the Apple app store has a billion apps and the Windows app store does not.  A quick check just now revealed to me that there are around 4000 Windows 8 apps available in the US.  However, let’s think about the apps themselves.  How many different versions of a fart machine does the typical iPad user need to have?  And how many iPads are running full-blown Microsoft Office applications?  I rest my case.  I don’t think of my tablet as a toy – I really don’t.  It’s a tool and a potential replacement for my laptop.  I use it to check email, look up things on the web, work with files, and occasionally edit photos.  I don’t even have any games installed on it.  If I want to play computer games, I’ll use my playstation or I’ll go to an arcade.  Laptop games, by and large, suck.

Bottom line?  I like my new tablet.

Going back now….after I left Ahmic last summer, I drove west across Ontario in order to cross the border at Sault St. Marie, Michigan.  It was an absolutely stunning day and the drive was beautiful.  My border crossing was also, without question, the smoothest ever.  The customs dude, took my passport, asked me what I was doing (“Going home from vacation,” said I), gave my passport back, and waved me through.  Total time at the booth: 10 seconds.

After that, I made my way across Michigan’s upper peninsula, down through Green Bay, WI, and stayed the night at a hotel in Marinette, WI.  The following day, I completed my trip to Waukegan, IL, and set up camp at the Michigan Beach State Park.  I spent the next few days hanging out with Amy, swimming in Lake Michigan (cold, but fantastic), visiting one of America’s foremost renaissance fairs near Kenosha, WI (Amy is one of the court trumpeters), and had the extreme pleasure of sitting in at a rehearsal of the Chicago Brass Band.

I suppose I should talk a bit about work.  I hate my job, am not fond of my team, despise my company, and am getting incredibly sick of having me schedule radically changed every 5 weeks or so.  When I got back from vacation, I worked M-F, 8-5.  That was changed to M-T, 8-7.  Next week, I’ll be going to M-F, 10-7.  In December, I’ll be switched to S-W, 7-6.  Planning anything outside of work is a nightmare, which is one reason that this blog hasn’t been updated since my vacation.  I get home from work, watch a few minutes of television, and go to bed.  On my days off (like today), I sleep a lot or run errands.

Fortunately, I haven’t had to work on Saturdays yet, so I’ve been able to make all of my planned football games.  I’ve become convinced that my best lenses are badly in need of cleaning and recalibration, however, so have rented lenses for 4 of said games.  Not a particularly cheap arrangement, but hopefully the improved photos will result in increased sales.  So far this season, I’ve sold about $500 worth of pictures, which pretty much offsets the rentals and gas expenses.  This weekend (tomorrow), I’ve also rented a Canon D1-X body, and I’ll need to sell a pantload of prints to pay for that.  I doubt that will happen, but I really want to try out that camera body.  I’ve also been hired by the Greenville News for this game, which is nice.  It’s the first time that a major media outlet has given me a shot, so I’m really hoping to have a good outing and get my name permanently on their stringers list.

My Microsoft Surface Tablet PC

I paid off my car this week!  It was something that I expected to do by the end of the year, but a very nice windfall from Dad allowed me to do it all at once instead of waiting for next month.  As I told Amy, “That puts me one step closer to telling AT&T to get bent.”  I would dearly love to be able to do that on May 10th, 2013; but I don’t see that happening.  Maybe by 5/10/14 – that way they’ll have to give me my 15-year prize, too.  I think I’m up for luggage or something.

I’ve mentioned Amy a few times here, so let’s catch up on her a bit.  Since my first trip to meet her last Spring, I’ve gone back to the Chicago area a total of three times and she’s visited Atlanta three times.  The next time we get together is currently set for the week of Thanksgiving.  I’m looking forward to it.  We send lots of text messages to each other and talk on the phone 4-5 times a week, but being together is just so much nicer.

In September, I attended the NABBA fall board meeting in Cincinnati.  Not much to report on there, except that it was a nice drive, my hotel room was fantastic, and I actually kind of like downtown Cincy.

Now that the car is paid off, I’m going to enjoy not having a car payment for a few months, but I think there’s going to be a new car in the not-too-distant future.  The Audi is closing in on 170,000 miles.  Not a lot, I know, but it does mean that little things are going wrong more frequently than I’d like.  “Little” problems in an Audi usually equate to $1,000 repair bills.  I’ve got my heart set on a Subaru Outback because I want something that comfortable to tool around in in the city and is also something that I can take out into the woods when the opportunities arise,  While the Outback is by far my first choice, however, I’ve also been looking at other 4×4 vehicles that have some promise.  No drop-dead date on that purchase, but it is something that I’m looking into,

It has gotten cooler in Duluth, GA, and I’ve had a raging cold for the last couple of weeks to prove it.  My outdoor cats are quite comfortable, however.  Two of them, Daphne and Buddy, apparently spend most of their time under my deck.  Brooks, who I am 99% sure is the son of Fleck (Fleck died a few months ago, by the way) has taken up residence in the little house that I built for Fleck last summer, and he seems quite content there.  I can count on being stared at by one or all of them every morning now – they’ve become quite tame and they expect their breakfast to be delivered on time.

Walking has gotten more difficult as the year has gone on, largely because of my work schedule.  When I get out of bed, it’s pitch black.  By the time I leave for work, it’s just starting to get light.  By the time I get home, it’s pitch black again.  The schedule change next week should help, as I’ll be able to start walking at 8 in the morning or so and will be able to make it to work by 10.  When the schedule changes back to an 11-hour one, however, the walks will again suffer.  It’s too bad, because I was actually starting to get into shape when I was able to walk every day.  I’ve noticed now that the pain in my calves that I had largely overcome is now back when I try to go for more than a couple of miles.  Back to square one, I guess.

The Georgia Brass Band make actually return to the NABBA championships in 2013.  That was a done deal a month ago, but it’s now up in the air again because we’ve been invited to play at the Great American Brass Band Festival (and we’ll be doing it).  For some members of the band, the idea of playing both events is too daunting.  I don’t really know why, but I’m not going to push it.  I’ll be at NABBA regardless – and if the band doesn’t go, then I’ll have a much easier time doing my duties as NABBA’s secretary.

I guess that’s enough for now.  I was thinking about this blog the other day and I’d really like to write more going forward.  It all comes down to time and topics, however.  If I don’t have much of either, I may disappear for another four months.

…and only 120 takes later…

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Back row cornets Yes, indeed.  The brass band put in about 14 hours with a recording engineer and whipped through about 120 takes before wrapping things up last Saturday afternoon and having, hopefully, around 20 decent songs ready to be mixed and put onto our first commercial CD, which will be released in a couple of months.  I’m sure that everyone reading this will want a copy, right?  RIGHT?

Good.  It’ll cost you somewhere around $15-$20 for the whole thing, or you’ll be able to get it piecemeal from iTunes, Amazon, and other online distributors…if I get my act together and figure out how to make that happen.Our soprano cornet, Dave Kuehn, blasts through a passage.

The recording sessions were not what I’m used to (he says like he’s recording stuff all the time).  Nobody was sequestered.  Not the soloists, not the percussionists, nobody.  I was told that that’s the best way to record a full ensemble, but it sure gets annoying when one person doing something stupid requires that the whole band do another take.

It gets even more annoying when the whole band should do another Baritoness Betsy Jones works out some kinks. Yes, I made that word up. take, but the aforementioned recording engineer doesn’t feel that it’s necessary.

Yesterday (Sunday), I spent much of the day wandering around a cemetery in Sandy Springs, GA – and sweating off about 40 pounds.  This heat has GOT to stop at some point.  After that, for the second time in two days, I went home and crawled into a tub of cold water before crashing very early.

Probably not the greatest plan, because I woke up at 3:30 this morning and stayed up until 5.  Then when the cats came to wake me up at 6:30, I was tired.  Suffice it to say that today hasn’t been an incredibly productive one at the office.It has been said that a bass trombone sounds like a chainsaw, only without vibrato.

This week is looming vast and empty at this point.  No rehearsal on Tuesday.  Not much of anything that I can think of.  I’m going up to Furman for a scrimmage on Saturday, but before then….hmmm….boring.

I guess I’ll throw some pictures into this thing and publish it.  See what happens when I try to do two entries in a week?  My life just isn’t that interesting, folks.No joke. That's somebody's last name!

TWD