Category Archives: concerts

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.

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.

End-of-the-year Crunch

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Yes, indeed.  The year is coming to a close and I’m in the middle of my “must get everything done before January” month.  There are many reasons that I like the fact that I was born when I was, but the December crunch is not one of them.

I got my driver’s license renewed last weekend.  Also received the letter to renew my tags, which I put off dealing with until today.  Other fun things included paying my auto insurance, renewing a couple of domains, doing year-end reviews for all of my direct reports (save one, who’ll get to go through that on Monday), and I don’t know what else.

As I said, I pulled out the registration letter today and logged on to pay for my 2019 registration, only to realize that I’ve forgotten to get my emissions checked (must do that before registering).  So I guess that’s on the docket for later this morning.

The X-company Christmas party was last Monday.  I did not attend.  Not a fan of 1}hanging out with the people from work, 2}hanging out with the people from work when there’s an open bar.  Not to worry, though.  The X-company gives out really nice Christmas presents to everyone – even those of us who don’t go to parties – and I scored a drone yesterday.  This is cool, because I’d been thinking about buying one anyway to take camping.  From what I can tell, the company saved me about $700.  I’ve been there for nearly two years and I’m not a huge fan of the job, but there are perks.

The GBB has a Christmas concert next Tuesday night, which should be fun.  After that, we’ll take a couple of weeks off and then start getting serious about NABBA rehearsals (we’re going in the Championship Section this year) and about the inaugural Southeastern Brass Band Festival, which was the idea of our board last summer and which – surprisingly – is shaping up to be a pretty good event.  I believe we’ve got 6 bands signed up for it and a great hall in which they can all perform.  That takes place in, I think, May.

It has been rainy and quite cool for the last month, and I must sing praises to my Nest Learning Thermostat.  Picked it up in late summer and have nothing but good things to say about it.  Since switching over from cooling to heating, it’s done a really good job of keeping the house comfortable and – from what I can see – saving me quite a bit of the green stuff.

Forgot to mention that I had my own annual review at work last week.  The first one I’ve had since I’ve been there, and I got “exceptional” marks all the way down the board.  First time that’s happened in about 30 years.  Granted, I think it’s the first time the X-Company has even done reviews, I’m in the first class of Team Leads they’ve ever had, my boss is the first-ever Director of Service in the company’s history, and I don’t think anyone really knows what they’re doing…but still – I got perfect scores and a raise and I’ll take it.  Also had a talk with my boss about restructuring going forward and there’s a decent possibility that I’ll get a bump up to some sort of capo di tuti capi role (floor lead/lead of leads) in the next year.  It will take my one level further away from technology and one step closer to full-time people administration, which is not an idea that I relish; but it is sort of what I had in mind when I took the job and told the hiring manager that I guess I’d start a completely new career with the X-Company.  

I’m getting more comfortable with my current role as lead – kind of shocks me at times to realize that I’m basically doing the job that my bosses used to do, but I also have the ability to take a step back if I need to clear my head and just work on technical problems.  I have two seniors on my team, one of whom I’m grooming to be a lead himself, so when I want to work on computer problems, I just tell my team to go to Matt with their questions for a while.  It’s working pretty well.

And I guess that’s about all I’ve got to say for right now.  The featured image for this post is of my kitchen in the Cheboygan Cabin last month.  I’d meant to use it for one of the posts that I wrote while in the cabin, but my phone apparently never uploaded the shot.  See how rustic I am!

Still Alive!

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So it’s been a while. Figured I’d try to catch up on things while I’m sitting at Tires Plus waiting for new tires. Also testing out a WordPress app on my phone, which may allow me to post more often and, hopefully, will work well enough so that I can use it when I’m in Michigan in a few weeks.

I guess that’s the big news for now. I rented a cabin at Cheboygan State Park again this year, and I’m planning to stay there from November 9th to the 16th. It’s a lovely spot and I’m really looking forward to having a week by myself in the middle of nowhere to decompress and think about things. That week will come immediately on the heels of a week in Toledo, where I’ll be on a project for work. Not looking as forward to that, but it works nicely financially, as I’ll be reimbursed for mileage for around 1300 miles out of my entire trip.

Work has been somewhat exhausting as of late. The X-Company really built up the numbers in L1 support staff this year, and I’ve now got 10 direct reports and am expecting 1 or 2 more by the end of the year. Having been back in the management gig for nearly a year now (the last time I had directs was around 2006), I’ve sort of settled in to it. Managing people is, for me at least, much more stressful than just dealing with misbehaving computers. I get particularly annoyed when one of my people feels the need to take an emergency day off because, “My kid threw up,” but I guess I’m not allowed to admit that. I also have a few scenarios every day when I’m deep in the heart of working a problem which has been escalated to me and I get interrupted by someone who needs help with something that, to me, seems incredibly obvious. Maybe not the solution, but definitely the troubleshooting steps required to find it.

I haven’t gotten to get out much this year. Did go up to Whigg Meadow two more times since that weekend when Brett and I discovered it. Both trips were really nice (I hiked up both times, rather than subjecting my car to the terrible drive), though I did get absolutely soaked the first time – caught on the trail in a downpour with no rain gear.

I’m still looking for the perfect place to buy some land for a tiny cabin to live in in my old age. Have not found it yet, and I’m again wondering when I’ll be able to actually do this. I looked at my 401k yesterday and see that in the last 2 weeks I’ve lost everything that I gained during the first nine months of the year. Wouldn’t call it depressing, but it’s certainly not encouraging.

…

And now it’s the next day. I did get my tires put on, and had the front end aligned, which makes my car feel like a new car. Very nice. Jenny and I went to a Gladiators hockey game last night. Once again, we saw them playing the Orlando Sun Bears, which I think is the team that we’ve seen play every time we’ve gone. And once again, the Gladiators lost. We have a bad hockey team.

After I got home last night, I saw that I had an email from Dad. It had been written while I was sitting at the tires place, and it mentioned that he misses seeing updates to my blog. Well, here you go, Dad!

I guess the last little bit of news is that I’ve got a concert with the Gwinnett Wind Symphony later this afternoon. We’re performing the Suite from West Side Story, the Candice Suite and something else that I don’t recall right now. The band has been sounding pretty good for the rehearsals, which is different for this group.

So, we’ll call this test over. This app appears to do a pretty good job of allowing me to update my blog on-the-fly. The Voice Control isn’t all that great, but it’s faster than typing on the little phone keyboard. I do have to go back and correct things fairly often.

I don’t know how it will do with inserting pictures, which will be important when I’m in Michigan, but I’ll try that out later.

The Taxman Leaveth

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Today’s featured image is one that was obviously taken quite a while ago.  The boys were still babies – I’d guess in the 4-months-old range – and Boo was still the biggest kitty in the house.  She is now dwarfed by them.

I was going to feature a panoramic shot that I took at Lake Huron last year, but it was just too large to be considered, so I’ll embed a smaller version of it here:

Now that that’s out of the way….what have I been doing with myself lately?  The answer to that is, basically, not a lot.  Settling into my life as an L1 lead at the X-Company is a bit challenging, having not had direct reports in over 10 years.  Last week, I completed three annual review with members of my team; somewhat awkward, considering that two of the three have been at the company longer than I have.  The toughest ones are still ahead.  I get to sit in judgement of two guys who basically trained me.  One of them can be confrontational at times.  Not looking forward to that, but it’s part of the gig.   I’ve also been doing a number of interviews every week – the L1 teams are going to be growing pretty dramatically, and we’ll probably end up hiring 20-30 new folks over the course of the year.  At least I’ve got a say in who the new people are, which is nice.

I’ve also been doing quite a bit more coding (which is what I really want to do anyway), putting together some scripts for my team.  I have to keep all of them on the down-low, as we’ve got a petty tyrant in an L3 role who doesn’t like for anybody to automate anything if they don’t report directly to him.  That being the case, I’m just very quietly writing, tweaking, and perfecting a few bullet-proof scripts for everyday tasks and letting a few of my folks use them until they become so engrained in the daily grind that it’ll be hell for the person who tries to take them away.  The new idea going around the L1 community is that the tyrant will say that my scripts are not allowed in our environment before magically releasing his OWN scripts a week later that do exactly the same thing.  Apparently, he’s done that in the past.  Should it happen, I will call him out on it.  Publically.

Tax season ends on the 17th, and everyone at the X-Company is looking forward to that.  With our growth and the merger and our infrastructure and development teams’ bad habit of rolling out changes without fully testing them, the last several months have been a long nightmare.  My main problem client (the one who sent at least two letters from their lawyer to complain) have formally announced that they will be leaving after the season (and the people praised the Lord), so I’m really looking forward to the 18th.  In the immediate aftermath of the season, the vast majority of CPA firms go on vacation for at least a few weeks, which means we’ll have the chance to clear out all of our old tickets, regroup, and get ready for the next season, which starts around August.

We’ll also be entering “project season,” which is when people like me go on the road and set up new clients.  The only project that I’ve volunteered for so far is one in Chattanooga (not THAT firm in Chattanooga…a different one) on the week of May 28th.  I didn’t realize when I signed up for it that that week includes Memorial Day, so I’m honestly not sure how that’s going to work.  I don’t know if I’ll have a day less to set things up or if I’ll get a comp day for working on the holiday or what.  In any case, I’ll be in Chatty for 4-5 days, away from the office and hopefully enjoying myself.

The GBB competed at the North American championships last weekend – and got thrashed.  It definitely didn’t help that we were scheduled as the second band to play in our section – the early bands generally get screwed by the judges, who are hyper-sensitive first thing in the morning and have to leave room for higher scores for later bands.  It also didn’t help that, frankly, we’re just not as good as we have been in the past.  We ended up coming in 12th out of 13 bands.  It was the first time since we started competing in around 2007 that we didn’t win or place 2nd – and we’re planning to move up to the highest section next year, so it was a bit of a wakeup call for the folks who were really pushing for that move.  Scores, should you be interested, are posted here.  Interestingly, the San Antonio Band, which won the section with a phenomenal score, was founded by two former members of the GBB who moved to SA several years ago.  They benefitted, I am told, from their late-in-the-day performance.  Since we played so early on Saturday, I hit the road almost immediately after our performance and didn’t hear any of the other bands.

So that was last weekend.  The week before that was devoted to rehearsals every night – preparation for the competition – and the weekend prior to that was Easter.  I had an Easter gig; that’s nice, but it pretty much spoiled any weekend plans I may have wanted to have.

So this weekend is really the first time in quite a while that I can relax a little bit.  Not much, mind you.  I need to mow the lawns and do some housekeeping, and I’m also in the middle of a long-term project of cleaning and organizing my garage.  So I’m going to do all of that stuff and get some sleep.  Next weekend, however, I’m headed to the woods.  Have already taken off next Friday in anticipation of this.  It will probably rain, of course, but just being able to kick back and sleep in the woods next to a stream will be fantastic.   And I might finally get to test out the car camping setup that I came up with late last year.

The Amazon Echo Dots that I mentioned in my last post have continued to be a source of fun for me.  I updated a number of the rooms in the house – and the garage – with Phillips Hue lights, and the Hue and the Amazon systems work really well together.  One cool thing about Hue is that it is aware of my phone location – so it will automatically turn off all of the lights in the house when I leave, and will turn on the garage and kitchen lights when I come home.  Since my garage door light gave up the ghost a couple of years ago, I’ve been coming home to a completely dark house.  It’s so much nicer to drive into a lit garage – and having the house light up for me is also pretty excellent.

That’s just the Hue system.  With Amazon/Alexa, I’ve also setup a number of routines – for example, the system turns on various lights in the morning and begins broadcasting NPR and the weather for me, then tells me what’s on my calendar for the day – and I’ve have had some fun playing “Jeopardy!” every night after work.  Also put in a couple of bluetooth speakers, and – thanks to my Amazon Prime account – I can tell the system to, for example, “Play Yorkshire Building Society Band,” and it’ll just kick off a random selection of that band playing throughout the house.

Being able to say, “Alexa, add toilet paper to my shopping list,” is pretty nice, since I have a terrible habit of forgetting what I need three seconds after I think of it.  Same with to-do items (“Alexa, put clean the garage on my to-do list”).  Definitely helpful for an old fart with a spastic memory.

The best things, however, are the various sleep sounds that I can have it play.  Not surprisingly, “Wind in the Trees” and “Icy Snowstorm” are my favorites, though I have over 50 white noises that I can tell it to play while I’m lying in bed (or, to be completely honest, when I’m not lying in bed); and I know – by checking my sleep patterns – that running those sounds at night is helping me sleep better, if not for longer.  My typical night used to consist of 2-3 hours of “restful” sleep and 4-5 of “light” sleep.  Those numbers have reversed since I started playing sleep sounds.  Also, if I concentrate, I can come close to believing that I’m in the woods when I play the “Wind in the Trees” sounds.

At any rate, I plan to add at least two more Phillips Hue lights (outside the front door) and am considering replacing the fluorescent tubes in my kitchen with some sort of recessed Phillips lights, and I’ll continue to experiment with gadgets and IFTT scenarios for the Dots.

So I guess I’ve kind of caught up with things, and I must now go tackle the lawn.  After that, I might do some shopping, then start in on housekeeping tasks – or maybe I’ll just go to a bar and play video golf.  It’s the weekend, dammit.

Finally.

 

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.

Back to Creation

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Today’s featured image is one that I took in July, 2011, of a couple of cats on my deck.  I have no particular reason for using it.  I just did.

Much of yesterday and this morning was dedicated to website design, build-out, and modification. You’ve probably noticed differences in this’yere blog – hamburger menu to categories, droplist for archives, etc.  I’m currently trying to get a plug-in to work that will allow me to embed files directly from my OneDrive, but have so far not had much luck.  Email has been sent to the plug-in’s developer.

Yesterday, I made some huge strides on getting GoPaladins.com to look more like I want it to look.  It’s now running completely on a BootStrap base, which is something that I’d just started learning about when AT&T dropped the hammer, and I haven’t had the time to fool around with stuff like that since joining the X-Company, so putting the big site on that code is forcing me to dig into it a bit and figure things out – which I enjoy doing.  Still a lot to do on that site if it’s even going to approach the functionality of the old one that GoDaddy broke; but the original was years in the making.  I’m taking baby steps with the new one.

One said baby step was the purchase of a new monitor yesterday morning.  The television that I was using wasn’t getting the job done, and is slowly failing (colors get all wonky, which is not good when you’re designing sites and/or editing photos), so I splurged and bought a 34″ curved display at MicroCenter.  Truth be told, I was considering doing that anyway, in order to make it not only possible but actually preferable to work from home, which I think I’ll now start doing one day a week.  The monitor is wide enough for me to treat it like two monitors, and it’s got software that lets me break it up into different windows – so I can use half of it for a browser and split the other side into quarters for two additional programs (a ticketing window and a remote control window, for example) and not have to spend my time hunting for the stuff that I need.  It’s also at a good height, which is very nice.  I spent 6 hours in front of it yesterday and didn’t have a headache OR a backache.  Money well spent.

Have a rehearsal with the Gwinnett Wind Symphony this afternoon, which should be interesting.  Haven’t touched my tuba in probably 6 months, and we’re playing Schoenberg and some other weird stuff.  Atonal garbage for the most part, but I need to get my tuba chops in shape for an upcoming Easter gig.  The concert, by the way, is next week.

I felt terrible this morning because I woke up convinced that it was Monday and I’d forgotten to go to the one rehearsal that I told the director I would make.  Put me into kind of a funk as I fed the cats, did my potty business, and prepared to take a shower before finally realizing that it’s Sunday.  Once I figured that out, I went back to bed, much to the delight of all three cats.

I’m considering mowing the front lawn today.  Also need to do some laundry.  And maybe try making some cheesy beef macaroni stuff in a crock pot just to see if it’ll work.  Or I could do it the regular way.  Rehearsal goes from 6-8, so I doubt I’ll be eating afterwards.

Well….that ought to do it for today.  Not much to put down here other than the fact that it was in the 30s this morning, which blew me away.  It has since gone up to nearly 70 in the sun, but still feels rather chilly.  I must be getting old.

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.

 

back to the grind

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So it’s been a couple of weeks since my sojourn to Chicago and life in Atlanta hasn’t changed much since then. I still go to work every day and wish that I could have almost any other job in the world.  I still walk a few miles in the mornings and take longer treks on the weekends.  I still have rehearsals on Tuesdays, still listen to my friend Robin play his guitar and sing on Wednesdays, still feed the feral cats most mornings, still have lots of jobs that need to be done around the house.

I guess about the only thing that has changed in the last two weeks is that I’ve been a happier guy.  And yeah – that’s pretty much a direct consequence of my Chicago trip.  Amy and I have had several long talks in the last two weeks and, though we don’t know exactly how things are going to work, we’re both pretty sure that they are going to work.  That makes me happy.  And that’s all I’m going to say about that for now.

Work really has been a complete drag since I switched to DLSO.  It’s bad enough that I really don’t understand what it is that we’re trying to accomplish.  What makes it worse is that the other Atlanta guy – the one who I was actually sort of looking forward to working with – doesn’t seem to have the capacity to shut up. Today, for example, he decided to spend twenty minutes reciting to me all of the company acronyms that he could think of – knowing that the over-abundance of acronyms in my job is one of the things that really pisses me off.  He’s a nice enough guy, but sheesh!  STOP TALKING ALREADY.

With that notable exception, today wasn’t all that bad.  I got volunteered to write the procedures for some failover testing that we’ll be doing tomorrow and it was the most useful I’ve felt in a month.  Nothing huge – just filling in some server names and determining in what order they should be shut off or turned on – but I was doing something tangible and it felt good.  I keep telling myself that if I can just hang in there until the actual technical trials start, I’ll be okay.  Time will tell.

It is currently pouring down rain for about the third of fourth time today.  I don’t mind, as it’s keeping the temperature down and it always sounds nice to me; but every time we get big storms I have to wonder what’s happening to my roof – and I have to wonder how fast my grass is going to grow.  I just mowed the lawns last Saturday, and it’d be nice not to have to do it again really soon, particularly as my next two weekends are booked and I’ll be going to Canada for three weeks after that.

Booked weekends?  Yes!  This coming Friday, I’ll be heading for Gettysburg, PA, immediately after work.  Amy will be playing there with the Athena Brass Band on Saturday afternoon, and that seemed like a good enough excuse to make the trip.  I also intend to kidnap her on Sunday and bring her back to Atlanta until Monday night.

The following weekend, the Georgia Brass Band will be playing at the International Euphonium Institute’s grand finale on Saturday night – and plans are in the works for a certain red-headed friend of mine to fly to Atlanta on Friday to take in the Saturday show and learn a bit more about my adopted city on Sunday.

After tucking her back into a plane on that Sunday, I’ll have one more day of work to snore through before putting my happy ass in the Audi and heading to Vermont, where – on June 28th – the GBB will play a benefit concert for the Sheldon Museum, and from there I’ll make my way up to Magnetawan to spend 10 days or so at glorious Ahmic Lake before picking my way southwestward between two rather larger lakes in order to spend another two or three days in Waukegan.  Then it’ll be, yet again, back to the grind.

I think I’ll still be pretty happy, though.

TWD