Category Archives: brain dump

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.

…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.

Week of 10/22/18

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Monday: Thought that I’d try something different this week and put down some notes from each day into a post that will be published at the end of the week.

I played a concert with the Gwinnett Wind Symphony yesterday afternoon. It wasn’t the best thing that I’ve ever been involved with, but it probably wasn’t the worst, either. We had a decent crowd at Gwinnett Infinity Theater, and – in spite of a few close calls – the band didn’t fall apart.

After the concert, I stopped at MicroCenter and picked up a mini Bluetooth keyboard, which I’ve paired to my phone (and am currently using to type this). Together with the WordPress app that I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, my phone is actually becoming something that I can legitimately use for writing. Yes, the KB is pretty cramped, and the shift keys aren’t exactly where I expect for them to be, but with practice, I can probably get up to 60-70 words per minute, which is amazing.

After the stop at MicroCenter, I went over to visit Herb in his new assisted living place. It’s a pretty good setup for him, and is close to Jenny and me. He’s got a small bedroom/office in one room, and kitchen/living room in another, and a good-sized bathroom. Pretty homey, all things considered, and he’s got caregivers around the clock, which is excellent. I helped him get his wireless printer set up and gave him a ream of paper (I’ve got more than I’ll ever use). Jenny was also there, so we visited for a bit before I came home, watched some television, did some laundry, and hit the sack.

Printers were the bane of my existence at work today. About a week ago, one of my firms decided to swap two printers. Normally, this isn’t a big deal, and I would just have to change their names in the group policy that pushes them out to workstations. Something went wrong with the policy, however, and I spend much of last week trying to get things working. Not only did the two printers not swap like they were supposed to, but people started losing OTHER printers. I got a frantic call from the client admin this morning saying that nobody on the second floor of the building had any printers.

So I spent all day trying various things to figure out what the hell was going on. Between 5:30 and 6:00 I think I finally got things working normally. It’s my hunch that the policy was never set up correctly when the firm came on board two months ago. I’m guessing that the on-site people manually installed everybody’s printers and nobody noticed that the policy wasn’t working until something had to change. When I made that change, all of the problems came to light.

It was, to put it mildly, a frustrating day.

I did get a little bit of time during the day to do some more work on a powershell script that I’ve been writing, and that was fun. I’m trying to, basically, rewrite the registry editor so that I can modify specific user hives in remote terminal servers. There are probably a hundred other (better) ways to do what I’m trying to do, but I’ve never used Powershell as much as I should have when I was managing systems, and learning a new language is a nice break during otherwise monotonous days.

Tomorrow will be another stressful day – we’re migrating four firms to Office 365. Two of my guys are in the O365 phone queue for expected heavy traffic, and two others are on a project in Florida, so my team will be severely short-handed.

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Tuesday: The weather took a turn for the cool this morning. I think it was in the low 50s when I got up and hovering around 60 when I left for work. Never got warmer than the low 70s.

Work itself wasn’t too bad. I had to do a few more tweaks for the printers that have taken up much of the last week, but got that out of the way early this morning. The rest of the day was spent closing tickets and helping my team with their own. Also got a little bit of work done on my Powers he’ll script and though of a few things that I can add to it.

Learned from one of my team that our team entry into last week’s Mega Millions drawing actually bore some fruit! We bought 9 tickets as a team on Friday as a part of a team-building exercise (went out to dinner at Dave & Busters), and we won $200. Not a billion bucks, but not bad. Of course, nobody won the whole thing, so tonight’s drawing, as you may know, is the largest jackpot ever at over $1.6 billion. Yes, I do have tickets – bought twenty of the things on my own. If I win, maybe I’ll throw some cash at my team.

I got home fairly late tonight – somewhere between 7 and 7:30 – and didn’t do much at all. Watched some television, washed some dirty dishes, and now I’m in bed. Maybe I’ll be a billionaire when I wake up.

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Wednesday: Not a billionaire. Not even a millionaire. In fact, on the twenty lottery tickets that I had – that’s 106 numbers altogether, I matched exactly…none. Oh well. Back to the grind, I guess.

It was nippy today for a while. Tomorrow is supposed to be nippier, with a high in the 60s. I’m not sure if it got over 70 today, but I was inside for most of the day, so I was comfortable in my Downtown Magnetawan tee and jeans. I had high hopes of closing out a bunch of tickets today, but things kept getting in the way and I honestly don’t know what my final numbers were.

Did an interview from 4 to 5:30. Nice kid, but he won’t be working for us. The three of us who interviewed him were unanimous in our opinions that he has absolutely no computer skills, in spite of his degree in cyber security.

Learned this afternoon that I have to do one-on-one meetings with my team before 11/15 – which in my case means before 11/1. So every day between tomorrow and next Friday will be spent in preparing – gathering metrics, listening to phone calls, reading ticket summaries, etc. Not my idea of a good time. We’ll also be migrating firms to Office 365 every night from tonight until the end of the year, which is going to cause high ticket loads every morning. This is the biggest project the X-Company has ever attempted, and I don’t think it’ll be a lot of fun, but it does need to be done.

I tied the registry portion of my Power Shell project into the lookup portion of it today, and it’s working quite well. This tool may actually wind up being really REALLY useful for my team.

Got home fairly late again tonight – somewhere around 7 – and make a couple of chicken sandwiches to eat while watching “The Newsroom” on Prime Video. That was it. Sitting in bed now and am about to be lying in bed. Just waiting for the kitties to settle in.

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Thursday: It was indeed a little cold today, with highs in the mid-60s and an unrelenting breeze. Normally, I would love that, but I underestimated the prognosticators and wore a tee shirt to work – did not bring a jacket. Of course, it was completely comfortable in the office, but my breaks outside were cold.

Tried to prepare for my 1-on-1 meetings with my directs for about half of the day, worked on tickets for most of the other half, and had my own 1-on-1 with my boss, where I learned that I’m doing pretty good. We talked about my future plans – whether I’d stick with the management path or jump to an upcoming escalations specialist spot. I said that, in my heart of hearts, I’m a techy; but that I’m determined to see if I can get comfortable in an admin role. That being the case, I do not intend to apply for the ES role when it comes up.

Turns out that I’ve got the inside track to a management promotion as we continue to add level 1 employees. My boss doesn’t want to have more than 12 directs. As we add more L1s, we’ll break them up into more teams, each with a team lead (leads currently report to my boss). The plan is to put another level in between the L1 leads and the Service director (my boss), and that’ s where I’d go. The leads would report to me and I’d report to the service director.

As I grow more comfortable in this role, I can see where that position would be more to my liking – dealing with intelligent technical leads without having to also deal with the daily grind of dealing with newbies who may or may not have a future in tech. Certainly something to think about.

We also talked about our respective personalities and how we approach our leadership positions. Turns out that both of us harbor inner thoughts that we’re frauds, which is oddly comforting. So I’ll soldier on and continue to work on my leadership and motivational skills (or lack thereof), and will continue to try to make this a new 2nd-act career.

At the end of the day, my friend Schuyler and I dug into my Power Shell project and tweaked and played until after 6:00. That being the case, I didn’t get home until close to 7:00. Made a shepherds pie for dinner (very good), did some dishes, and watched a hilarious mockumentary about a terrible survivalist. It was called, I think, “Tex Montana Will Survive.”

Got in bed with the intention of watching some college football, but it appears that it is not on a local (non-cable) channel, so I guess I’ll just go to sleep.

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Friday: A cold, drizzly day to end out the work week. At least I was smart enough to wear a rain coat today.

Worked on tickets for most of the day. Had one 1×1 meeting at around 11:30 and got some coding done late in the day, but for the most part, I zoned out to tunes and worked on problems. Had one guy not show up for work – he sent me a picture of the side of his car, said that he was hung up and waiting for AAA. 2 hours later said that AAA had just picked him up (this was a also at around 11:30), but he never came in. Very smart guy. Good guy. And this is his third unexcsused absence in two months and the second this week. We’ll be having a meeting on Monday, which I do not want to have. But… I wanted to manage people, right?

I got home by 6 o’clock or so and it was 60 inside the house. Hated to do it, but I was sort of tired of being right on the verge of cold, so I turned on the heat (set to 68). It’s the first time I’ve had it on since probably March, and the earliest that I can remember turning it on. My Nest thermostat needed something different, though, and I’m interested to learn if it handles heating as well as it handled cooling all summer. The heat has been off for the last hour or so, so I’m not overly concerned yet about my natural gas bill. Plus, we’re supposed to rebound and be back in the 70s by tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, I don’t have many big plans for the weekend. Going to fix Jenny’s toilet on Sunday – replace a flapper, I think – and will probably start organizing things tomorrow for my trip next week. Will probably also go somewhere tomorrow afternoon to watch some football, play trivia, and hoist a few. At some point, I need to buy toilet paper and clean my master bath.

Call it the weekend of the toilet.

So I’ll wrap this up now and call this experiment of nightly updates to my blog, using my phone as a monitor and a tiny Bluetooth keyboard as an input device, a rousing success. Had I known how much I could use the phone for if I attached it to a keyboard, I probably would’ve picked up the latter years ago. It will definitely come in handy on off-the-grid vacations in the future.

With that, I close this entry and prepare for sleep. I’ll pick up this tome next week!

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.