This week is not moving. I feel like it should be Thursday at the very least. I thought life was supposed to go by faster when you reached my advanced age. Another lie told me me in my youth, I guess.

Still not a great deal of interest going on in Duluth and its environs. I had great rehearsals last Friday night and all day on Saturday with Dr. Holman – actually received a few kind words from the flugel player in the band who said something along the lines of, “There are at least two of us that really enjoy listening to you play and we think you sound better than the other guys back there.” I politely thanked him, told him he was insane, and blushed for about three days. He’s actually the third person in the band who’s said that to me in the last year. So the insanity is spreading, but it’s still nice to hear. 🙂

In all seriousness, I have been getting a lot stronger on the Eb horn since rejoining the band in 2006; but I have nowhere near the talent level as the 4 guys who sit back there with me and let their skills remind me on a weekly basis that I may have been the big dog 20 years ago, but I’m not anymore.

Doesn’t mean I can’t keep trying and eventually blow them out of their chairs, but I’ll wait until the time is right.

After the Saturday rehearsal, I went to The 5 Seasons Brewpub with 6 other guys (well – 4 guys, 2 girls) to talk music, drink really good beer and generally laugh at everything. I do enjoy hanging out with the bandsmen of the GBB. It’s a fun group. This is a good thing, as one of the BBb tuba guys and I are renting a car a couple of days before NABBA so we can go up to Louisville and hang around for a while before we have to play anywhere. Robert is originally from the area, so he knows the cool stuff to see. We’ll also be rooming together (with one other guy, who I don’t recall at the moment) at the Galt House in the city until Sunday. Maybe it’s the Gault House. I don’t know. It’s just a really big expensive hotel.

Found out this morning that I’m supposed to be playing a church service next Sunday. This is news to me. I’d sort of planned on going camping. Guess not. What do I have to do to get a free weekend around here? Last weekend was the Holman rehearsals, this weekend is a service, next weekend I’m on call….I just want to get some camping in, dammit!

Julie moved a lot of her kitchen stuff over to the house while I was in rehearsal, incidentally. She apparently had a ball rearranging everything that’s been in the same place in my kitchens since I was 4 years old. I will admit that she did a great job of organizing, although it took me about 4 hours to find a potholder.

Our Ad Insertion server in Florida (I think I mentioned it in the last entry) is now dead. I mean, like, REALLY dead. As in, barring a complete miracle, it’s not coming back to life. As in, we’re out of the advertising business in Florida. I hope my president takes this turn of events very poorly indeed. After all, he was the guy who said we couldn’t replace or upgrade any of the hardware or software two years ago when we told him it was going to fail. His response at the time was, “I guess if it fails, we’ll be out of the adveritising business – ha ha!”

Sorry, Don. You said it, buddy, not us. This particular server generated somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 per year. How much would it have cost to replace it two years ago? About $80,000. I guess corporate presidents have no more foresight than national ones, huh?

Ha! That should get Mom fired up, so I guess I’ve written enough for one day.

TWD

I guess two and a half months per entry is a good number.

I really should do this more often, however, as I wind up trying to figure out what exactly I’ve been doing with myself for the previous 10 weeks and I ultimately end up sounding like I have an incredibly boring life.

I don’t. Not really. Monotonous, perhaps. Dull. Colorless, unspirited, repetitious, vapid, wearisome, spiritless and bromidic.

But not boring.

Take the roommate thing (“…take my roommate. Please.”). After unloading Keith (who has, by the way, recently moved to Florida to live with his father, leaving all of his possessions except the bed (which I have) in the apartment of the poor sucker he squatted with after I threw him out), I mentioned to a friend one night that I had a room to rent. Oddly enough, she liked the idea, so Julie will be moving in sometime in March. She’s from Minnesota. She speaks like someone trapped in “A Prairie Home Companion”. She equates cosmopolitan living with owning a shack in St. Cloud.

She reads this blog. Oh crap.

Anyway, Julie and I get along famously and I’m looking forward to taking her money and listening to her prattle on in that Fargoesque accent of hers.

Keith’s bed? I still have it. I’ll be chucking it to make room for Julie’s. He had three months to claim it.

Let’s see….Christmas. I have no idea what I did for Christmas. I think I might have slept for most of the day and then gone over to Jenny’s place to have dinner with her and her folks. Lasagna, if I recall. Good stuff. I spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s sleeping in a lot (got to take vacation after all), and actually made it past midnight (awake) on New Year’s Eve – mainly because I was watching a football game that didn’t end until 11:45.

Work has been rather boring as of late, although for the last three or four days I’ve been having trouble with an Ad Insertion server in Florida. It started acting up last Friday night and has had something go wrong every day since then. I think I managed to get it back to operational status about 30 minutes ago. If not, I’ll mess with it again tomorrow. Everything else is just … well … boring. Now that I’ve learned what actually has to do what, I can pretty much do my job duties in about 12 minutes every day. The rest of the time is spent in documentation, rewriting websites, studying (read, “surfing the web”) and doing the occasional special project. I still get home late and I’m still tired most of the time.

The Georgia Brass Band is officially ramping up for this year’s NABBA championships, to be held just north of Louisville on March 29th. We’ll be playing “Journey into Freedom” by (I think) Eric Ball and “Encounters” by Philip Spark. “Journey” is a fantastic piece. “Encounters” makes me want to vomit. Not incredibly difficult. Just incredibly tedious. Anyway, we’ve had a few extra rehearsals since December and we’ll be rehearsing with Dr. Colin Holman (Chicago Brass Band) this Friday night and all weekend. Looking forward to that. The band sounds phenomenal this year and I think we’ve got a decent shot to win the Honors section at NABBA. Hope so, anyway, because we probably won’t make the trip next year.

Speaking of the GBB, I somehow managed to get myself on that board of that august institution. I’m still not sure how. Two other board members are also tubists, however. I envision some sort of special tuba rulings being made in the future….

On January 11th, Jenny and her folks and I drove up to Greenville to wish Dad a happy 75th birthday. We were met at the house by all of the Day children and a handful of grandkids. Don’t remember exactly the last time that happened, although we came close at Thanksgiving.

Heard through the grapevine recently (actually through the internet via an instant message) that the woman who last broke my heart is now engaged. I sure do know how to pick ’em for other people, huh?

I’ve started playing my piano a lot more over the last few months for some reason. Not exactly sure why, but I’m not complaining. Feels like I’m getting better, actually. For the record, Julie plays piano (quite well), so the fact that I have one in the house did not cause me to lower the rent.

Oh! My pathetic quintet played at the annual flower show at the GA World Congress Center a couple of weekends ago. So I’ve got that going for me. I also played a service with my worthless church orchestra this past Sunday and I get to play again with that sorry collection of misfits on Easter.

I have high hopes that the music minster doesn’t read this blog.

And I’ve just been informed that the server in Florida is in an alarm state again. It was a fun 45 minutes while it lasted. Everybody have fun. Everybody Wang Chung. I hate UNIX.

TWD