Three teenaged idiots tried to break down my back door last Saturday afternoon.  Fortunately, my renter was in the house at the time.  He heard the noise from upstairs, though it was me, and walked down to check things out.  The kids, standing on my deck wearing bandanas over their faces while attempting to kick down a door (which is 90% glass, yet they were trying to break the deadbolt rather than smashing the glass), saw him and ran. 

Most excellently, one of them apparently busted his ass during the flight.  I hope it hurt.

Scott (the renter) immediately called 911 and then me (I was in middle Georgia shooting cemeteries – more on that later).  From what I’m told, three sets of cops were out the house within about 90 seconds.  No sign of the punks, though.  I’m guessing that they saw my laptop sitting on my living room table and figured they could accomplish a smash-and-grab manoeuvre; but I guess nobody ever told them that glass breaks easier than wood and metal does.  The did manage to crack the core of the door, which pisses me off. 

Not as much as the fact that they were in my back yard to start with, mind you, but it does piss me off.

I suppose I should consider myself lucky that I’ve lived in this hellhole of a metropolis for the last 20 years and this is the first time anybody’s tried to make me the victim of a home invasion.  Some loser did indeed break into my car about 15 years ago, though.  Did $300 worth of damage in order to steal a $10 equalizer.

Lesson learned.  Laptops now stay upstairs in my room – as do my wallet and keys.  But enough about all that.  As I said, I spent most of Saturday driving around middle Georgia shooting cemeteries and trying to fill requests for FindAGrave.com.  Betsy and I hit something like 9 graveyards between 7AM and 5PM and managed to get some pretty decent shots in spite of a couple hours of rain and an inability to find a couple of the smaller cemeteries we were looking for.  I also go to see Griswoldville, GA, for the first (and probably last) time.  If G’ville is famous for anything, it’s the fact that, during Sherman’s march from Atlanta to Savannah during the Civil War, a bunch of GA “militia” attempted to engage some of the union troops there.  After Sherman’s guys basically destroyed the rebs at Griswoldville, they were rather shocked to learn that this “militia” was comprised entirely of very old men and very young boys.  It was a clear sign that the confederacy was running out of soldiers.  This link gives a bit more background, though from a decidedly pro-southern point of view.

After driving through parts of Jones and Twiggs Counties, shooting at 5 or so cemeteries, we went to Macon and spent some time at the Old City Cemetery, the Jones Chapel Cemetery (a truly bizarre experience) and Evergreen Baptist Cemetery.   The Old Cemetery, located pretty close to downtown Macon, was in use from 1825-1840.  It has a rather odd feel to it, because it’s basically a raised hunk of land – about one city block square – surrounded on all sides by industry.  I’m not sure if it was never very popular or if headstones have just been stolen from it, but it’s mainly just a large open field, containing few graves.  In fact, the entire listing of the cemetery can be read here.  Still, it’s a pretty place.

After seeing the old cemetery, we went looking for the Jones Chapel Cemetery because Betsy had a couple of names from there on her FindAGrave list.  I said above that this place was bizarre, and I’m betting that whatever pictures of it that I include here cannot convey just how strange it was.  For starters, the Jones Chapel in question – the church to which this cemetery was presumably once attached – is no longer there.  As I understand it, it was moved several miles away.  On the spot where the church stood, there is now an abandoned house which – to me at least – looked as if it were being used as a crack house. 

The cemetery itself is so overgrown that we very nearly missed it, in spite of knowing exactly where it was and driving around three sides of it looking at it.  After parking the car (in what amounted to an alley across the road from section 8 housing), we made our way across a weed/briar barrier into what was basically a jungle.  Kudzu, vines, thorns, trees, trash….and every now and then, we’d stumble across a gravestone or a decrepit old wrought-iron fence surrounding what one must assume must’ve been a family plot at some point.

And I’m not saying that this was an OLD cemetery.  The latest graves there, I’m told, are from the 1970s.  The graveyard is in the shape that it is simply because the city of Macon turned its back on it.  We ran into a man and his son who were doing their best to clear the brush and clean things up, and they weren’t at all pleased with the lack of service the city was providing – things like sending a truck to pick up the piles of trash and debris that those two people had collected.   The son, probably about 13 years old, turned out to be somewhat of a genealogy buff who is an active member on FindAGrave.com. He knew exactly where one of the graves that we were seeking was.

On the Sunday following the cemetery tour, I spent a few hours at the 5 Seasons Brewpub near Buckhead watching “Mercury Orkestar,” a Balkan-style band that, honestly, I don’t much care for.  Several of my friends play in it, however, and I like hanging out with them and, potentially, networking.  Just because I don’t like *listening* to something doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to *play* it, after all.

And now, in spite of really not putting much of interest down, I think I’ve spent enough time writing in this for today.  I do actually have some real work to do.  I’ll try to get another entry added pretty quickly to catch you up on the wee BEFORE the idiotic moron loser jerks tried to smash my door down.

TWD

I couldn’t think of a decent title for this entry, but that seems to work.  I went on a redneck holiday recently, I’ve got a couple of brass band gigs coming up, and one of the original names for the GBB was (no kidding!) “Rednecks with Horns,” so….there it is.

Work for the last two weeks has been mostly annoying, but punctuated by moments of pleasantness when I actually got things to work that I hadn’t known how to do before.  I’ve been working pretty much exclusively on a “ticket scrubbing” system, which gives users the ability to edit information in trouble tickets, generate reports on those tickets, etc.  I’ve been using the <cfdiv> tag in my coding a lot lately and writing *a lot* of javascript functions (recall that that was one of my goals this year).  Add to that my recent experimentation with FusionCharts, and there have been days that I’ve really enjoyed coding. 

The annoyances have been caused mainly by an inept project manager who doesn’t have a clue about managing projects and continually lets the end users email me with requests for “aesthetic” changes to the program (yes, it’s a program – we’ve gone far beyond “webpages” here), which are generally “minor tweaks” that destabilize the entire project and cause me to have to rewrite numerous pages, resulting in unforeseen errors to other pages and yada yada yada.  These same users also have an extremely annoying habit of changing formulae on me. 

I can deal with their changes.  Users have never known what they want.  But scope-creep (and this project is the poster child for that phenomenon) is *supposed* to be contained by the project manager.  As I said, the PM on this project is clueless and I wish she’d just get out of the way, rather than calling for conference calls every three days and constantly pinging me to ask how things are going.

After the brass festival at the beginning of the month, the GBB took a week off from rehearsing, which was nice but left me absolutely bewildered about what to do with myself one Tuesday night. 

Betsy Jones and I went to two redneck staples near my house last Saturday afternoon: Stone Mountain Park and The Yellow River Game Ranch.  The former is (I believe) the largest slab of exposed granite on the planet and features a huge carving of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson on its face.  During the warm months, this carving is the backdrop for a nightly laser and fireworks show, which hasn’t changed much in the last 20 years.  What at one time was a pretty amazing technological display has become a fairly passé way to waste an hour while listening to diehard confederate sympathizers burst into rebel yells while listening to patriotic music and watching a laser trace out illustrations of a reunited north and south.

The rest of Stone Mountain Park is given over to your usual tourist-trap “country” stores, a campground (which I really need to check out sometime), various walking trails, a skylift, a train, a very small museum (which used to be free but is now, I learned last weekend, something that you must pay to see) and various other attractions that can only be found where one has access to the world’s largest exposed hunk of granite.  Betsy and I spent probably 4 hours walking around, taking pictures, and laughing at people. Prior to that, we went to the Yellow River Game Ranch, which is quite near the park and contains a menagerie that can only be thought of as a redneck zoo.  The YRGR’s tagline is (I’m not making this up), “Like a zoo.  Only better.”

One must assume that they chose this line of advertising because 1.the animals contained in the place are not what one would generally expect to find in a zoo, and 2.visitors are generally encouraged to feed said animals just about anything that they (the people) can think of.  It would not be considered odd, for example, to throw marshmallows at caged coyotes in the YRGR.  Other attractions of the YRGR include chickens (some caged, some wandering around free); rabbits; peacocks; a supposedly “talking” crow in a cage; a number of extremely bored black bears; a large enclosure wherein one is encouraged to pet rabbits; a cage containing approximately 9000 racoons; a toothless mountain lion which gums a hung of round beef once or twice a day; a herd of 100 or so deer (which wander around and have absolutely no fear of the people who attempt to feed them everything from peanut butter to steak); several donkeys, goats, pigs and sheep; some bison; some bobcats; turtles; geese that apparently enjoy French fries; and – the crown jewel of the whole place – a woodchuck named General Lee who annually prognosticates on the nearness of Spring (a la Puxatawney Phil).

I’ve been to the YRGR several times in the last two decades and I have to laugh and cry simultaneously each time I go.  It’s so pathetic it’s funny.  But let’s face it: who doesn’t want to see what happens when a gray fox is tempted by, say, a handful of Sugar Frosted Flakes?

On Sunday, I drove up to Travelers Rest to hang out with Dad, Cy, Greg (and his family) and Dianne for Mothers Day.  Greg fired up the grill at Di’s house and we chowed down on burgers, dogs, coconut, corn on the cob, and various other summer cookout foods.  Had a nice afternoon just hanging with the family and not thinking about anything.  Dianne’s got a really nice little chunk of the planet.

This past week at work was a repeat of the previously-outlined week, and seemed to last about 12 years, in spite of the fact that the GBB resumed rehearsals on Tuesday and my life – at least for that one night – resumed normalcy.  Friday finally came, however, and I left work early to go walk around some cemeteries and grab dinner with Chris in Macon.  I must say that her face was a most welcome sight.

The forecast is calling for rain all weekend, but as I sit here (naked, in bed, at 10AM Saturday), the weather outside is nearly perfect.  I’m told that there’s a balloon festival in NW Georgia today and tomorrow, and I’m considering driving up there today for some photographing fun.  Tomorrow, however, I’ve got a concert in Chamblee with the band.  Looking forward to that.

Hope everyone has a great time until I next update this thing.  Don’t put no beans up your noses.

TWD

Well, we’ve had some very nice (cool) days in Duluth, some extraordinarily hot ones, and a bit of rain over the last week or so.  This has made sleeping either very nice, very difficult, or pretty fantastic, respectively.

This past weekend, the Georgia Brass played at The Deep South Brass Band Festival in Pine Mountain, GA.  This is the festival’s second year and we were once again the “big name” band.  The festival’s unstated goal is to try to generate as much interest as The Great American Brass Band Festival gets (an annual shindig which has been going on in Kentucky for a loooong time), and Pine Mountain has a big hill to climb to get there; but it’s a fun gig and the crowds this year were definitely larger than they were last year – at least for the night portion of the festivities.

We played three gigs in Pine Mountain.  The first was in the center of town at three in the afternoon on Saturday.  It had been raining off-and-on for much of the day, so the audience was rather small, but very appreciative.  Our second concert was on the beach at Callaway Gardens, just outside of town, at nine in the evening.  By that time, the weather was beautiful (if a bit muggy) and we entertained quite a large crowd.

We wrapped things up on Sunday morning (Callaway provided hotel rooms for everyone in the band) by playing at a special service at the Pine Mountain Methodist Church.  Rather than having a sermon, the church did sort of a “praise through music” type of thing and we played a variety of Salvation Army arrangements and other sacred stuff.  We played it very well, too.  In fact, we got a standing ovation after the service.  I really wish we’d do that sort of gig more.  The arrangements are usually very well done, and our band plays them so nicely.  Our music director is a bit leery of the sacred stuff, though.  I think he’s concerned that we’ll get a reputation as being a Salvation Army band instead of just a generic brass band.

Because we had several hours between the Saturday gigs, I got on FindAGrave.com (it’s a real website) and looked for cemetery requests in and around Pine Mountain.  Oddly enough, I found a fairly large number of requests in three cemeteries within about 3 miles of the town, and I managed to locate about 17 graves for which pictures had been requested.  Before anyone asks, I can’t really tell you what exactly the draw is for me.  It’s just sort of fascinating to locate a grave that somebody from God knows where has been looking for.  I told Chris the other night that it’s like finding a bottle with a message in it – or like geocaching (a sort of high-tech meets camping scavenger hunt).  At any rate, I enjoy it and the people who request the photos are generally effusive in their thanks when you provide them with one or more shots.

Last week at work, my boss called a special staff meeting and announced that the four developers on our team (of which I am one) have been traded to a different affiliate.  I’m not sure exactly what this will mean going forward.  I know I’ll have to start learning a new set of systems, there will be some on-call time (oh joy), and everybody seems to think my new boss is the greatest guy ever…so we’ll see how it goes.

I also brought my car into the shop last week and discovered that a crankcase valve cover was loose or something, which had been causing my engine to lose vacuum or something, which had resulted in my car acting funny for the last month.  Thankfully, the repair was less than $200, and it has made a dramatic improvement to my daily commutes.  Also noted on my repair order was, “Slow leak in rear tire.  We found a nail in it.”  They didn’t FIX it, however…so I guess I’ll be going to a tire place near my house in the next few days.  I’d noticed the hiss before, but the tire never seems to get any softer.  I figured maybe it was just the noise of water steaming on the exhaust.  Oops.

The band has a concert coming up in a couple of weeks, then another concert a few weeks after that.  Then I think we’re taking a short break before trying to lay down some tracks for a long-overdue CD project so that, hopefully, we’ll have an album of Christmas  tunes ready for sale by, say, Christmas.   Lots of playing this year, which I like.  Many people don’t.  I don’t understand those people.

Still haven’t decided on the brass band association board thingy, and I’m running out of time to make up my mind.  I think I’ll probably have done so by the next time I update this blog.

Most of the pictures that I’ll throw into this entry will be from the Deep South festival.  Nothing particularly photographically appealing, but the shots have all already been resized and are sitting on this laptop waiting to be used for something, so it makes sense to use them here, right?

TWD