Hi, Al.  Welcome to the extremely small club.  I see that you’re quite a bit more prolific with your postings than am I, which is a good thing.  It’ll give me something new to read at work.

It is a rather beautiful day in ye olde Duluthe, with temps in the 50s, a slight breeze, and a sun that doesn’t want to quit.  Bo is quite happily sitting in my lap as I type this, keeping my legs warm and hypnotizing me with his purrs.  He’ll have to get over that (as will I) fairly shortly, as I need to take a shower, get my tax stuff over to Jenny’s place, and go to a quintet rehearsal.

So I’ll type fast and try to catch everybody up on the carnival that was my most recent week of life.

Chris hit the road last weekend for the dreaded visit to one of her possible schools.  Yeah.  One of.  The one she visited was about 9 hours away, but now she’s also looking at one that’s about 9 million miles away.  She got to the place last Sunday, got her visiting and other things done on Monday, drove halfway home Monday night, and ended up at my house Tuesday afternoon, where she choked down some of my jambalaya and promptly fell asleep on my couch.

I haven’t heard much about her impressions of the place, and I’m not going to spend a lot of time asking about them.  I’m too busy trying to convince her that the whole school is infested by extremely large cockroaches and that doctoral candidates there are generally considered to be socially inept and never get jobs and are the butts of very bawdy jokes.

Anyway, while she was doing that, I was doing very very little.  I practiced my horn a bit on Sunday, got a call cancelling my Monday-night lesson, and began rearranging my music room in order to make room for a number of bookcases which had been in my bedroom.

I later reorganized the bedroom as well.  Also took all of the photos off of the wall in the living room in preparation for painting at some point.

On Monday – everybody take note of this – I GOT MY ROOF FIXED!  Kent, one of the trumpet players in my quintet, is a landlord with several properties and he set me up with “his man, Juan,” who apparently enjoys fixing holes in roofs.  Somehow, Juan convinced me to actually climb to the very top of my roof (a first for me), where he very diligently tried to point out to me the 5 cracked boots and various loose shingles.  Between his broken English and my sheer terror, we set the price at $270, and a few hours (and a trip to Home Depot) later, he was done.

Since then, naturally, it hasn’t rained.  For all I know, he made the holes bigger.

The rest of the work week was pretty much a blur.  I took care of a few outstanding projects (got kudos for one of them during a team meeting), completed three or four mandatory training things, filled out administrative crap for salary treatments for this year, etc.  I’ll have plenty to keep me busy this week.

Thursday night, I had a pretty nice dinner at a Greek place in downtown Macon with Chris.  After dinner, we walked around a very chilly Macon and then hung out at a Starbucks for about an hour before I hit the road back to Atlanta.  During the drive back, I got a somewhat disturbing call from Dad, who wished to make sure that I planned to visit him and Mom on Saturday.  She apparently was semi-coherent that evening, and Dad was obviously shaken – as, I must admit, was I.

I left for SC early yesterday morning and managed to grab breakfast with Greg before heading the the ‘rents house, where I had a couple of nice chats with Mom.  She is extremely thin (hell of a diet plan) and jaundiced (we’ll call her “bronzed”), but otherwise very much in control and referring to herself as, “The Queen.”

Jenny and her parents came up later in the afternoon, and by some miracle I’d managed to convince Mom that she was most certainly not a hideous-looking person – she broke her rule about “family only” and spent an hour or two chatting with Herb and Andi and Jenny.

I got home at about 7:00 last night and was emotionally and physically exhausted, so I hit the sack by 8:00 and slept until 10:00 this morning.

Cy is due in South Carolina this Wednesday, so I’m planning on going up again next Saturday to see her and the folks.

As it is now very nearly the time I told Jenny I’d bring her my tax stuff and I still haven’t taken a shower, I think I’d better wrap this up and do that.

One of the things Mom and I talked about yesterday was a Carolina Youth Symphony east coast tour that we took in 1983.  I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but Mom was one of the chaperones for the trip.  She scored extremely high marks with the girls in the woodwind section (two of whom I would later date – 1 of whom I began dating on that trip, actually), and also made her presence known in Washington, DC, when she insisted that the bus stop to let me and a trombone player out so that we could tour the senate office building rather than doing whatever stupid thing that had been planned for the rest of the orchestra. I remember that day quite clearly – she’d forgotten all about it, and seemed shocked that she was such a pit bull during my high-school days.

TWD

Sitting naked on my bed on a Saturday morning, wondering what I’ll do today.  The zoo has sort of a siren song to it, as does driving up to SC.  Chris is supposed to be working across town today, so maybe she’ll want to do something tonight.

Or not.  Our relationship has been somewhat strained lately.  I keep telling myself that she’s under a lot of stress.  Or that I’m just really uninteresting.  One of those.  I told you it wouldn’t last, remember?

Last weekend I ended up going down to Macon to spend a beautiful Sunday afternoon shooting pictures at the Rosehill Cemetery.  I had the afternoon free (no church rehearsal) because I played a service in the morning.

Prior to the service, I had breakfast at IHOP, which was nice.  I think I’m in love with cheese and corned beef hash omelets.  And pancakes.  In fact, I was making out a shopping list this morning and I included eggs, corned beef hash, and Bisquick on it.

Had a pretty good tuba lesson last Monday night.  I’m still very nervous about playing soloistically in front of anyone – I feel like a complete retard when I inject vibrato into stuff – but I managed to suck it up for an hour and made some pretty good sounds. Because of other students’ cancellations, I got to start at 6:30 instead of 8:30.  I have a feeling that that helped me immensely.  It’s tough to sound good after you’ve worked a full day, taken an hour off, then fought your way through traffic to get to a lesson where you know you’re going to be verbally abused (it’s okay!  I want that!).

The week at work was, for the most part, pretty good.  I knocked out a bunch of projects on Monday, including one that I’ve been trying to finish for about a month.  Did the ColdFusion demo phone call on Tuesday and represented myself quite well on that.  Completed a few more projects on Tuesday and Wednesday before turning my attention to a huge item which has been on my plate for about two months.  It really doesn’t interest me, but it’s too big to just do it and forget it.  I wish I could give it to someone else. But I digress. 

As soon as I decided to focus on the report from hell, I completely lost interest in coding and pretty much wasted Thursday.  Yesterday I got back on track somewhat and wrote a couple of queries  to populate part of the hateful thing, then put it aside and smashed a new, interesting, request out of the park.

I also took a long lunch yesterday and got in a solid hour of practice on my horn, using a mouthpiece that’s quite a bit larger than the one I normally use.  The borrowed tuba that I’m playing tends to be extremely sharp in the low register.  After some discussion with my cohorts in the GBB tuba section, I figured I’d give the larger mouthpiece a shot rather than giving up on the horn completely.

 
I spent some time updating the brass band’s website this week as well.  Nothing earth-shattering, but I figured it could use some new content even if nobody except me ever reads it.  I posted a blurb about our director and got some background information for a short article I’ll be writing about an upcoming weekend rehearsal and concert.  Maybe I’ll do that today.

Ooh!  I sold a bunch of pictures yesterday!  The season has been over for nearly four months, but I got two different orders out of the blue in one day.  So I’ll be editing photos sometime this weekend.  It’s a lot more fun when you’re getting paid for it.

Mom wanted me to play the saxophone.  Can you believe that?  I think it was my greatest and most blatant act of disobedience when I chose trombone instead.

Sax.  Please.

TWD

Yep.  We got a halfway-decent amount of snow in The ATL last night.  “Halfway decent” meaning, of course, about 2 inches.  From what I hear, there was the requisite run on the grocery stores and I’m certain that, today, there will be no bread, milk, beer or batteries on the shelves of those institutions. 
The roads weren’t at all bad during the storm, but the drivers were – as usual – complete morons.  I can understand not wanting to drive 45 MPH on a twisty secondary road when it’s snowing out; but come on, people.  FIVE MPH is taking things a bit to extremes, don’t you think?

I’m not sure how cold it got last night, so I have no idea about driving conditions today.  If things are okay, I’m toying with the  idea of going up to SC to see the folks and maybe take in the football banquet.  Failing that, I’ll probably grab the camera and go somewhere to shoot snow scenes.  Maybe that stupid cemetery that I spent two days trying to find a couple of weeks ago.

As I mentioned in my last entry, my quintet played at the Southeastern Horticultural Society flower show last weekend.  We’ve done this just about every year for the last 10 or so, and it’s always a traumatic experience for me.  The other four folks would rather sit around and talk than actually play, which is embarrassing.  This year, we had the added bonus of not having our regular first trumpet player, and the guy who subbed for him was…well…not good.  And I learned that our regular first trumpet player covers up a multitude of mistakes made by our second trumpet player.  In a nutshell, the only thing more embarrassing than sitting around not playing this year was – you guessed it – sitting around playing.  Glad that’s over.

Work this week was, for the most part, sort of fun.  I started playing around with a new tag in ColdFusion that allows me to include inline HTML in my code.  What that means is, for example, I can show a summary listing of servers at all the locations in the country – Atlanta has 30, Dallas has 22, Denver has 12, whatever.  The user can then click on any of those locations and I can display the details for that location on the same page with the summary, rather than opening a new page.  It makes things a lot cleaner for the user, which is always a good thing.  It also makes things a lot more interesting for me, which is always a better thing.  That (CFDIV) tag, plus my continued experimentation with javascript, actually held my interest for most of the week.

Also had my annual performance rating meeting with my boss (who I still have never seen), and was graded out as someone who “meets and may exceed” expectations.  I’ve never really understood that concept.  These reviews are…well..reviews.  We’re looking back at the previous year.  Either I *did* exceed expectations or I *didn’t* exceed expectations.  There’s no *may* about it.  Yet I’ve been described on my reviews for the last 12 years in just that manner.  People wonder why I don’t understand big corporations.
I was supposed to teach a class (via conference call) on ColdFusion and Dreamweaver yesterday afternoon, but it was rescheduled for next week.  The most interesting part about that is that I really don’t know much about ColdFusion or Dreamweaver.  I spend most of my time “coding” pages in ColdFusion by copying stuff that has been written by someone else and tweaking it to fit my purposes.  I couldn’t tell you, from memory, 75% of the tags that I use.  As far as Dreamweaver goes (it’s a program in which one writes code), I rarely use it as it’s too slow.  I prefer to code in notepad.  You know – that little text editor that has been a part of Windows since about 1990?  That’s my primary tool at work.  Dreamweaver, for me, is worthless.   The class I teach next Tuesday should be interesting.

When I was very young – I’d guess 5 or 6 – Mom brought home a Tupperware toy that was called, I think, a Pop-a-Lot.  It was a yellow funnel-shaped thing with a red screw-on bellows-type thing on the narrow end.  The way it worked was fairly straightforward.  You dropped a hard blue plastic ball into the funnel, pointed the fat end of the funnel away from yourself, and slammed your hand on the bellows thing.  That compressed the air behind the ball, which subsequently exploded out of the funnel, to be caught (one would hope) in another Pop-a-Lot that somebody else had.

As I was saying, Mom had at least one of these things at home and I was small and I naturally thought that the proper way to use the Pop-a-Lot was to put it between your legs and bounce around on the bellows thing while trying to avoid getting bashed in the face by the ball, which, as you can imagine, would furiously try to escape from the funnel every time my 5-year-old butt slammed the bellows thing into the ground.

So I was doing that in the dining room in Shoreham.

Mom saw me from the kitchen at about the same time I saw her.  Let me rephrase that.  Mom saw me stopping what I’d been doing at about the same time I saw her and figured I’d better stop what I was doing.  And you know how moms are about things like this.

“What were you just doing?”

“Nothing.”

“I saw you doing something.”

“I wasn’t doing anything.”

Somehow, she managed to convince me that I wasn’t in trouble, and so I showed her what I’d been doing, thinking all the while that I was in deep shit for doing it (not that my Congregationalist-Church-Raised-Fiver-Year-Old mind would ever have thought of it in those terms).

As it turned out, she thought the whole “Riding the Pop-a-Lot” idea was a wonderful thing to use at a Tupperware party that night.

I’m not sure how many of the ladies present managed to win door prizes doing it, but I like to think my creativity was worth at least one or two sales for Mom.

TWD

Good:
I got to work early this morning for a change.  That might have something to do with the fact that I’ve had a pretty good week at work so far.  I’ve been playing a lot with javascript and completed a page yesterday that used it heavily (and successfully) as well as a few more advanced concepts of ColdFusion.  Before I left last night, I sent a note to my boss saying, basically, “This stuff is actually interesting again.”  Let’s hope today goes as well as the last four have.

Got to spend some time with Chris on Tuesday and Wednesday, and might even go see her tonight if our schedules allow.  Don’t think I have to explain why that’s good.

I got an email from David Klausman last night and I’ve been booked to play a high-paying Easter gig with a kick-ass quintet.  Really looking forward to that.

My own (very mediocre) quintet will be playing at the Atlanta Lawn and Garden show in Cobb tomorrow night.  I guess that’s a good thing.  It’s a chance to play in front of people, at any rate.  We’re not that good, but we’ve been doing the flower show for the last 5 or 6 years now and it’s a nice low-stress gig that nets us dinner.

Bad:
I took my car into the shop on Tuesday to have them figure out what was causing a rattle underneath the passenger floor.  They worked on it for about 2.5 hours and apparently managed to find the culprit, as the rattle is gone.  They did this for free. Why is this bad?  Because they handed me a sheet when I was leaving describing in detail all the things that they found wrong with the car which need to be addressed quickly.  Little things like brakes and split seals.  So my bonus, which I’ll get on March 6th, is basically already spent.  Total cost is looking to be $2K-$3K.

It continues to rain every time I have an opportunity to do things that require that it not be raining.  I refer, of course, to the leak in my roof.  I have *got* to get that thing fixed, but – seriously – everytime I leave my office, it starts raining.  I’m not going to try to get on my roof in the rain.  I just won’t do it.  Still trying to figure out how to just go ahead and put on a new roof.  I’m thinking a 401K loan might be in order since my insurance company doesn’t want to get involved.  I’m also thinking that I might get involved with a new insurance company.

Really freaking ugly:
I can’t really go into much detail about this because it involves the GBB.  One of our tuba players did something stupid and was asked by his section to take a leave of absence for the rest of the concert season because of it.  Our reasons for asking this of him vary – some liken it to an intervention, others to outright punishment (I’m with the latter).

Because this was a personnel issue, I thought the the personnel manager of the band should be informed about the act of idiocy.  Because of potential embarrassment to the idiot, the rest of the tuba section over-ruled me.  As it turned out, the personnel manager found out anyway and was/is extremely pissed about the situation.   The entire board has now been informed of the details – several different versions of the details, actually – and a regular old shitstorm of emails has been flying for the last couple of days.

The sentiment of many on the board is that the half-wit was treated unfairly by the rest of the section and “forced out of the band.”  I disagree with this attitude, but as far as I can tell, my credibility with the board has been destroyed and I have offered to resign if anyone would like for me to.  I still am not sure if that’s what I *want* to do, but the actions of 1 total imbecile and 3 other idiots, who didn’t want to take the simple step of informing the personnel manager, may have taken the decision out of my hands.

Remember in my “Disturbed” post when I talked about how, in spite of a lot of work that was put into a code of conduct several years ago, the band still has no code of conduct?  Ironically, such a document would have saved a lot of bad feelings in this situation.  I guess I should have pushed harder to get it done.

And that’s enough about that.

At the end of my sophomore year in college, I won a lottery and was one of the very few people who lived on campus who was awarded a coveted single room.  The school didn’t have many singles, preferring instead to put two people in each room (or three or more in some cases), and I was pumped about getting one.  Juniors being awarded singles was extremely rare – the rooms usually were snapped up by seniors in the weighted lottery – so I was thrilled.

During the summer, I procured a couch, built a loft for the bed, and did various other things so that I’d be ready for my wonderful private dorm room.  And then I got a message from the school saying, “We made a mistake.  TWD shouldn’t have been given that room.  We gave it to someone else.  Tough luck on that.  Maybe next year.”

Mom basically blew a gasket.  I’m still not sure exactly who she talked to or what she said to them, but she was over-the-top livid mama hen in fully involved “I will eat you for breakfast” mode.  In about a week, I was informed that the school had magically found ANOTHER single room that I could have.

I got the room that I’d originally wanted for my senior year – making me one of the very few people who ever had a single for two years.

Thanks, Mom.

TWD