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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, cash is nice too.

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

Stupid politicians.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time for the Cosmopolitan, baby.

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

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

It’s good to be needed.

TWD