Category Archives: travel

Wilderness State Park – 2024

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As the title would imply, I’m at Wilderness State Park in Petosky, MI, this week. I arrived yesterday afternoon, late enough to take everything out of the car, put it in my cabin (the Sturgeon Cabin), drink some bourbon, and go to bed.

This morning, after a breakfast of granola and berries (I’m hillbilly like that), I drove to the Walmart in Cheboygan and picked up 3 new lanterns. The cabin is DARK. Got back, got things organized, and I guess my vacation can now REALLY begin. On Election Day, no less.

Wilderness State Park? I found this place last year, when I was trying to book a week at Pictured Rocks and discovered that Michigan is now closing a lot of its parks (yes, Pictured Rocks is a national park, but I group them all together) on October 15th. This did not sit well with me, since I like for my Michigan sojourns to be at least a bit chilly, so I went on the hunt for the northern-most park in Michigan that I could reserve in November. I found Wilderness. And I spent a week last November living at the park in a tent.

It was glorious.

On one of my walks last year, I stumbled upon the Sturgeon Cabin, and instantly fell in love with it. It’s a log cabin that’s about 3 miles from anywhere, right on the shore of Lake Michigan. No power. Hand-pumped (tannin-filled) water out front. A vault toilet about 100 yards away. Wood crib that holds about a two cords of wood. So secluded that you almost don’t see it if you drive past on the “road” (literally a couple of dirt ruts) that goes past it. When I saw that I could reserve it for the second week of November, it was a no-brainer to grab it. I’ll have some pictures up in a future post.

This is smaller than the cabins I’ve stayed in at Cheboygan State Park. It’s probably 18×22 inside, with two bunk beds and another single bed, a table and benches, a counter with two shelves, and a wonderful little wood stove. Behind the stove is a stonework that looks like it may have been an actual fireplace at one time, but it is now just a great place to store wood – and whoever was here before me left me a good supply, so I probably won’t have to go to the wood crib before I leave.

Behind the cabin is a short path through some trees and shrubs to a private beach on Lake Michigan. I say “private” because – due to the way the land lies – you’d have to REALLY want to get to this beach from anyplace other than the cabin. On the other three sides of the cabin are fairly thick woods. This is the type of place that I’ve fantasized about retiring to for the last 30 years. I may never (let’s face it, I’ll never) get to realize that dream, but I can live it a couple of weeks every year.

So that’s a description of where I am. Over the next week, I’ll try to get daily entries in – with photos – so I can remember what I did this week in November of 2024.

Wilmington Trip

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Sandie and I took a long weekend and drove up/over to Wilmington, NC, last Friday. She lived there for about 14 years and wanted to show me around a bit and reconnect with some old friends.

We tried to go to a seafood place at Wrightsville Beach for dinner Friday, but the line to get is was so long that we bailed on the idea and got Mexican food instead.

Saturday, we went to the historic district, took a walking tour, and got some seafood at a bar and grill (which was actually really good). Saturday night, we drove past Sandie’s old house and she spotted a neighbor “kid” (now with two kids of his own) that she recognized from her time there, so we wound up spending an hour at their house. Not overly thrilling for ME (shoot, I didn’t know anybody), but she had a good time.

Sandie and one of her old buddies pose in front of a giant basket of French fries

That evening, we went to one of her old hangs – a pool/dart bar – and hung out with some of her old friends while being filled with bourbon by one of her old bartenders.

Fortunately, we got an Uber driver for that last, because the bourbon was pretty freaking good.

Wilmington has an extraordinary history as one of the earliest, largest, and most influential towns in North Carolina – Cornelius Harnett, for example, was a signer of the Articles of Confederation and a native Wilmingtonian – but it also has a pretty dark period which was nearly forgotten until just the last 10 years or so. I’m speaking, of course, about the Wilmington Massacre of 1989. During a few days in November of that year, a group of White Supremacist Democrats not only completed the only successful coup d’etat in American history, but also exiled the majority of the city’s prominent blacks (and a good number of sympathetic whites), and murdered between 10 and 200 other blacks (nobody seems to have a good grasp on the actual number). As a result, huge numbers of blacks fled the city, flipping it from majority black to majority white literally overnight, draining it of skilled and unskilled labor, and pretty much handcuffing it economically.

The massacre can in some ways be considered to be the spark that spread Jim Crow throughout the south, as it became a blueprint for Southern Democrats on how to disenfranchise blacks without also losing the poor/illiterate whites. One enduring legacy – in 1898, blacks made up 56% of the population in Wilmington. Today, that number is 16%. This is not a spurious relationship – Wilmington today is still seen by many blacks as somewhat of a sundown town.

If you’d like to learn more about this, check out Wilmington’s Lie – a well-told and well-researched tome covering the event itself, the political causes of it, and the political fallout from it. I found it to be eye-opening, depressing, and fascinating – and quite relevant to today’s political and racial climate.

Grave of Cornelius Harnett

The Eve of Destruction

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Once again, I’ve managed to go a couple of months with nothing new written here – which is sort of odd, because a lot of new things have happened since August. I guess the most earth-shaking is that I’ve kinda started dating again. At the end of the last post, I mentioned that a couple of friends and I might hike up to Bob Bald since Joyce Kilmer was open. The two friends were one of my bartenders and one of her girlfriends, and the bartender bailed – so the girlfriend and I went alone, had a nice couple of days (in spite of the fact that we went up in the tail end of a hurricane), and decided to continue seeing each other when we got back to the big city.

As it turns out, Sandie (I’ll call her “Sandie” here – largely because that’s her name) bought a fixer-upper of a house several years ago, and she’s fixered-up the hell out of it since then; so she’s been very interested in making me move a lot faster with my own projects. What that means, frankly, is that she’d demolish my entire house if I let her. I’m not letting her. I’ve given her the upstairs guest bathroom as her own makeover project while I focus on replacing the floors in the rest of the house – at my own pace, thanks very much – which has been the plan all along.

The first step of that project was to buy some new power tools. Partly because I’d need them for putting down the floors, and partly because I needed them to build a new workbench so that I could clear up some space in my garage so that I’d have room in it for three pallets of laminate and my car. So I dipped into the refi money and bought a new table saw, miter saw, and brad nailer.

Yeah, so I didn’t really NEED the brad nailer, but I’ve always wanted one and I was in the store and…things just happened.

Next, I needed to buy enough lumber to make a long, sturdy workbench in the garage. The idea being that I’d be able to get rid of at least two of the three “benches” that are in the garage now and have plenty of room for the laminate. I built the bench top during the weekend of September 27th, and was moving along nicely….until I got word on the 28th that the laminate, which was supposed to have been delivered in the middle of October, would be delivered the following day. I spent much of the 28th moving as much stuff as I could out of the garage and into the attic above the garage, and throwing out a bunch of other things. Rather than freeing up room by replacing three benches with one, I actually received the pallets with FOUR benches in the garage (one being only half-built).

But I managed to get the pallets in.

I also managed to finish the bench – last night. The final glue-up for the top of it (a piece of MDF) is the subject of this post’s featured photo. The final product ended up looking like this:

So far, I haven’t actually started putting in the new floor. Sandie, however, has gone crazy on the guest bathroom. She removed the stipple from the ceiling, then spackled it (and the walls), sanded everything, primed and painted the ceiling, and has primed the walls.

She also managed to talk me into buying bead board for the walls, a new sink, new sink hardware, new light fixtures, and a new fan cover. Somehow, she convinced me to take out the toilet – which I did yesterday, which resulted in a whole new set of problems and necessitated my having to buy a new Dremel multi-tool in order to get the busted closet flange out of the main pipe (in addition to buying a new flange and the ever-popular wax ring). I also determined that the sub-floor around the toilet might be suspect, and I may have to replace that (leading to removing the bathtub and vanity). I dearly hope not. The bathroom will end up looking amazing. Of that, I have very little doubt. I’d never planned to spend so much time or effort on it, however. I just want to put the floors down, to take my time doing so, and to deal with whatever comes up next….NEXT. Some people like to do everything at once. I’m not one of those people.

In the good news department, I’ll be heading back to Cheboygan next month and spending a week in the 14-Foot Shoals cabin at Cheboygan State Park. I opted for a “staycation” last year – worried that I waited too late and I might have a problem with snow at the Straits of Mackinaw – and I was unable to get the kind of relaxation that I needed. Combined with my health issues at the beginning of this year (along with other pandemic-related things), missing that week away really took a toll on me this year. I’m really looking forward to just going to my little cabin on the shore, putting a nice fire in the stove, and doing absolutely nothing for 6 days. If I get snowed in, I’ll find a way to dig out. Nothing’s stopping me from going this year.

And that should bring everybody pretty much up to speed. I’ll try (again) not to wait two months to update this – but maybe I’ll wait a month and update it from my phone when I get to Cheboygan.

The Rise and Fall of the Turf

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Two more months have gone by, and we’re now officially well into the hottest part of the summer in Georgia. I’m quite settled into the work-from-home routine – though I’m actually at the office today because my internet crapped out at home and AT&T isn’t sending a technician until Friday. Yes, I do have a mobile hotspot, but it’s just barely sufficient for doing my job at home.

The routine for the last few months has been pretty much set in stone. I get up at 5:00, feed the cats, drink a cup of coffee while watching the news or some YouTube videos. Shortly before 6:00, I’ll head out for a 5-mile walk, which gets me home at just after 7:00. At that point, I’ll have another cup of coffee (decaf, by the way – always), will watch the tube a bit more, and might eat something for breakfast – egg white omelet, bowl of cereal, or some fruit. As often as not, I’ll skip the food altogether. At around 7:30, I’ll take a shower and start work. Somewhere between 4:00 and 5:00, I’ll turn off the computer, feed the cats again, take another walk, put something on the stove for dinner, and drink a couple of rocks glasses of bourbon while looking at Facebook or playing a game on my phone – generally sitting in the screen house on my deck, though it’s recently gotten so hot that it’s uncomfortable to sit outside for too long.

The “Bourbon Barn” on my deck – a screen-house with removable wind/rain panels – is where I’ve taken to spending most evenings. I took this picture the day the roof was being replaced, which explains the rope on the roof.

After an hour or so, I’ll wander back inside, eat whatever was cooking, watch part of a movie or something, and generally hit the sack before 9:00. Lather, rinse, repeat. It really shouldn’t be surprising that I quite often do not know what day it is. Seriously – it’s not unusual at all for me to start the day by saying, “Alexa, what day is it?”

There are some highlights and banner days, however. For example, I had my gutters replaced last Thursday. After getting quotes from three different roofers to do the job – and after all three of them gave me quotes, but never followed up to schedule the work even when I sent them emails, I called a fourth company who was recommended by my bartender on Sunday. They came out and took pictures on Monday, gave me a quote on Tuesday, and did the job Thursday. The gutters look great, the work was done in less than three hours, and I’m not sure why the first three companies didn’t think it was worth three hours of their time to make $1500.

Another example: yesterday was Tuesday the 11th – and on Tuesday the 11th, my new retaining wall was completed. While it was expensive, it came out looking great and I’m confident that the erosion that has claimed about a foot and a half of my backyard over the last 20 years will now stop. I ended up hiring a hardscraper who lives in my neighborhood, and he went to town: 85-pound blocks, a few tons of gravel, two large drainage tubes, another ton of fill dirt, another ton or two of large rocks….the upper yard is not going anywhere anytime soon.

The new retaining wall shortly after it was finished.

The biggest disappointment with the new wall, however, is that my lawns were absolutely destroyed by the equipment and materiel needed to build it. As you can see in the picture, both the lower and upper yards are now little more than dirt. I’m fairly certain that it’s too late in the year to try planting grass, but I’m going to give it a shot anyway. Wendell (the guy who built the wall) really wanted me to hire him to resod the yard, but I’m not doing that anytime soon. The plan all along has been “Roof then wall then floors,” and I’m sticking to it. My floors – at least downstairs – are getting replaced next.

And I think the upstairs will get replaced sooner rather than later, too. Since I’m going to be working out of the house for the long term, I really want to get my upstairs office into better shape, starting with a new floor. It’s okay right now, but I need to make it feel less like a spare bedroom and more like an office, so I might as well start at the bottom, rip out the floor, repaint it, replace the lights, then put in a new floor and start getting the furniture laid out like an office. I think it will help me put some distance between home and work, and make the days a little less monotonous.

I did drive up to the NC mountains last weekend – mainly to find out if they were open and people could camp there again. I went to the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest and drove along the forest road next to the Little Santeetlah River, where all of my favorite spots did indeed have people in them. So that’s a good thing. I stopped for 45 minutes or so just to sit by the river and soak up the sound of quiet. Now that I’ve established that the place is open, a couple of friends and I may hike up to Bob Bald in the next couple of weeks and spend a night up there. That should be really nice.

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

Happy National Birthdays

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It’s made it to July in Atlanta, and in most other places, too, I would imagine. Canada Day (7/1) nearly got past me, but I remembered it at around noon. There was no way to forget the 4th, seeing as how my neighbors began their annual bombardment sometime in late June. That has, fortunately, nearly ceased – although there were a couple of explosions last night. Thankfully, it rained yesterday (hard!), and I’m hoping that will put a damper on the fireworks.

One of my favorite clients, in Burlington, told me the other day that it was nearly 80 degrees and she was ready to enjoy the warmth. Suck it, Vermont. It’s been pushing 100 down here for the last couple of weeks, and I’m ready to hit the road for winter in Michigan. That’s still three or four months away, unfortunately. I’m hoping to spend Thanksgiving week in Cheboygan, since we get both Thursday and Friday off on that week. I’m also hoping that there isn’t as much snow up there as there was last November, since I’ll be going a week later and I don’t want to find out how my Subaru does in a foot of snow on an unplowed track through the woods to my cabin. If I have to find out, however, I’ll find out. I’ve been dreaming of being at that cabin for the last couple of months.

I power-washed my driveway last weekend, which was quite a bit of fun and also quite a bit of work. My whole body ached on Sunday. Hard to believe it was so much work, but the driveway (and my front stoop) looks amazing. I also “fixed” my old trimmer/edger/weed-whacker….by throwing it away and buying a new one. I can’t complain too much, as I did get 4-5 years of use out of the old thing, but I’m still not sure what actually killed it. It’d been acting temperamental for several months and last week it just died and seized up when I tried to restart it. Futzed around with it for 30 minutes or so and then just tossed it. The new one is doing an admirable job and all of the accessories from the old one fit it just fine.

We’ve got 7 new people starting at work on Monday. There were supposed to have been 8, but one of them who’d reluctantly accepted our offer on Wednesday decided to reverse himself on Thursday. I can’t say that I’m heartbroken over that, as my comments regarding his interview began with “Rubbed me the wrong way at first – throughout the interview, actually. Struck me as arrogant, thinks he knows more than he does, kind of entitled.” So how’d he make it to the point of getting an offer? Well, I finished off my comments by saying that I was probably the same way on my first interview out of college, and that he probably had the raw skills to do an okay job if he could watch his attitude when dealing with clients. I said I’d approve him if the other two interviewers did, and they did. They started to rethink things when his acceptance of our offer began with, “I guess I’ll go ahead and accept your offer…”

As I said, he changed his mind the next day. I’d already indicated that I didn’t want him on my team, so I’ll still get two newbies and we’ll begin interviewing for another junior consultant later next week. I’m getting pretty good at spotting the ones who won’t work out, I must say.

Got the oil changed in the Subaru this morning. Only about 1000 miles after I should have, and almost forgot to do it anyway. I looked at my watch at 6:30 and remembered that I meant to do something. 10 minutes later, it dawned on my that I’d made a 7:00 appointment with Tires Plus for the oil. No harm, no foul – I wasn’t even late.

My no-sugar diet (or as close to none as I can get) is actually working out pretty well. I’ve dropped 10 pounds in the last month or so (Chamberlain, who also likes to weigh himself, has held steady at 16.2 pounds over the same period), and don’t feel nearly as crappy as I did for the last year. Have even started walking most mornings again. Not going for speed (much), but my calves have stopped aching and I guess I’m averaging around 16-17 minutes per mile, which is fine.

Got a pot roast and some veggies lined up for the slo-cooker this afternoon, which should be pretty good. Had salmon and potatoes the last couple of days. Interesting fact: Chamberlain’s favorite cat food is salmon-flavored stuff, but he turned his nose up at the real thing. More for me. The other two kitties, should you be wondering, were both upstairs when I made the offer to Chamberlain. I don’t know if Joshua would’ve gone for it or not (although he’ll generally try anything that I put in front of him at least once), but I suspect that Boo would’ve sucked it down pretty fast.

I do need to mow half of the front lawn today. I did the other half on the 4th, but it was so hot I didn’t want to spend more than 15 minutes outside. The weekend before, I put in a few hours in the back yard and the south 40, which I hadn’t even looked at in about a year. Lots of bushwhacking with a machete and urging my ancient gasoline mower through 4-foot-tall shrubbery. In restrospect, it was probably that (not the pressure washing) that put me in my sore state.

I guess that that’s about enough writing for today. I actually sat down at the computer just to update my bills spreadsheet with the oil change and some grocery shopping that I did this morning, but thought it’d be nice to do some typing, too.

Now that I’ve done so, it’s time to tackle the lawn.

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.

Snow Day!

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I woke up this morning to a beautiful Lake Huron sunrise, strong winds, and a couple of inches of the white stuff. As I sit here at the table in my cabin, listening to a Furman football game, I’m looking out at something I’m pretty sure that I’ve never seen before: snow in the foreground and the lake, with huge white caps, in the back. The wood stove in the cabin is doing an amazing job – I’m in my underwear and have cracked a window, both to cool things down a little bit and to let me hear the wind, which is constant and incredibly soothing. I played my wind game for about an hour earlier this morning, which I haven’t been able to do for several years.

Wind game: try to find a spot outside that allows me to simultaneously be in and out of the wind. I invented it as a small child in Shoreham – the perfect spot was behind the berry bush between the roots of the Elm tree in the front yard. The best spot I found today was in a Cedar Grove near the beach.

Took two fairly long walks today. The first one took me to Cheboygan Point, about a mile from here. I wandered around there for a while, then walked east on the beach back past my cabin to the edge of the park. Came back to the cabin for a lunch of chicken and dumplings, then opted to walk over to the campsite on the southern edge of the park rather than take a nap.

I’d just arrived back at the cabin after that trek when one of the rangers showed up to give me some rock salt and – you called it, Dad! – a snow shovel. I shoveled off the front of the cabin, where I have my “settin’ outside” chair, before coming back in to listen to the game. Later today, I might get enough energy to shovel off the walkway that leads to the latrine.

A bit about the cabins here at Cheboygan State Park: there are three of them, all available year-round, and all basically the same. I stayed in the Poe Reef cabin last year. This time, I’m at 14-Foot Shoals, which is about a mile further off the main road than Poe. A quarter-mile further along is Lighthouse Cabin. 14-Foot Shoals has a “porch” of sorts, which is missing in the other two cabins. It’s just a little 3-foot overhang across the front of the cabin, but it’s a great place to sit outside without being completely exposed to the elements.

Other than that, the cabins are all pretty much the same. They’re square buildings – I’d guess about 20 feet per side – with a single room under a peaked roof. Each wall has at least one window (2 on the lake-facing wall), and there is a small counter in one of the lakeside corners. Each building also has a wood stove, 4 sets of bunk beds, a table with two benches, and a number of wooden chairs. Hooks in the rafters provide a good place to hang a lantern (there is no electricity). Each cabin also has two out-buildings: a vault toilet and a large woodshed. Water is available from a hand pump outside (kind of yellow this year, but seems to taste alright), and there are two picnic tables and two firepits – one set at the forest side of the cabin and the other on the beach.

I’m sure that, during the summer, the beaches here get crowded. In late October/early November, however, I’ve had the place pretty much to myself. Yes, there are people staying in the other two cabins, but they are distant enough to not exist, basically. Solitude is what I like, and this place has it.

A Home in the Woods

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I have arrived at Cheboygan State Park in Michigan.

Actually, I arrived at just after 2 this afternoon, and it is now about 3:30. In the 90 minutes between, I unloaded my car of about a week’s worth of supplies, stocked the cabin with firewood (there’s plenty more in the wood shed), put on my boots, walked on the beach, and have drunk exactly one beer (more will be consumed, I predict).

It was snowing when I left Perrysburg, OH, this morning, and it’s threatening to do the same here in Cheboygan before the day is over, but right now it’s just overcast and a little chilly (about 36 degrees, according to the cabins thermometer). In the cabin itself, I’m guessing that it’s in the 50s, but I did get a fire started (forgot to mention that), and I expect that it’ll be up closer to 70 before too much longer).

The week in Perrysburg went pretty well. We had some network trouble on Sunday night, but got that cleared up on Monday, got all of the workstations set up, and were able to leave the office by about 6:30. Tuesday-Thursday went smoothly. Not too many people had trouble, so it was mainly a case of making sure printers worked okay, explaining how multiple monitors have to be configured, easy stuff. There was a system-wide outage on Wednesday morning, which was not cool at all, but nothing we could do about it. My mind was in Michigan anyway.

The plan for the rest of the day is to get the temperature up in the cabin, drink a bit of beer and bourbon, heat up some water for a sponge bath in the morning, maybe take a walk, watch a movie (I brought six of them on my phone), and sleep like a dead man. Between the breeze in the woods and the sound of the surf, about 100 feet from where I’m sitting, that last should be no problem at all.

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.