After throwing together that short little update yesterday, I decided to do things.

Specifically, I decided to go to the Kennesaw Mountain battlefield, which is about 20 miles from my house, and see if there was anything there worth photographing.  It turned out to be more of an adventure (I use the term loosely) than I’d anticipated.

I was originally planning to go to the main visitors’ center and climb to the top of the mountain and look at things and yada yada yada; but – I don’t know why I do things like this to myself – I decided to try getting there by just driving west from the house until I recognized something. 

Needless to say, I got completely lost and spent about 2 hours just driving around and wondering where the hell I was.  Found a tiny little cemetery and stopped to take a few pictures.  It didn’t really yield anything impressive, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to find it again, but it was something to break up the monotony of being totally clueless about my whereabouts.

Shortly after that, I pulled into a strip mall’s parking lot and got out the iPhone, figuring that I’d go ahead and use the maps app to actually get to the battlefield.  Unfortunately, I’ve recently “upgraded” the software on my phone, and (thanks, Apple), performance has been so degraded that the mapping ability is pretty much crippled.  Normally, I’d have just used my TomTom (GPS) at that point.  That piece of equipment, however, died about a month ago. 

Which reminds me that I need to get a new one before I head to Canada at the end of August.

So I continued driving and finally found US 41, which led me to an outlying part of the battlefield – the Dead Angle – about 4 miles from the actual visitors’ center.

History lesson time.  On June 27th, 1864, during a campaign in which Sherman’s troops were slowly but surely moving from Chattanooga to Atlanta (after the fall of which, Sherman began his famous “March to the Sea”) a large number of Illinois troops attempted to move a similarly large number of troops in the Army of the Tennessee off of Cheatham Hill, which is part of the Kennesaw Mountain area.  The confederates had erected earthworks on the hill for a couple of days before the union army arrived; and, after charging up the hill and being decimated, the Illinois troops found themselves in the unenviable position of being unable to advance and similarly unable to retreat.  So they hunkered down at a little swell in the hill about 20 yards below the confederate lines, dug what trenches they could (using bowls, forks, spoons and anything else they could find), and basically hung out there, sending and receiving fire, until the rebels evacuated (still concerned with the defense of Atlanta) on July 2.  It is difficult to imagine what it must have been like to hide between two-foot-high earthworks – while being shot at – for a week.  Particularly in late June in Georgia.  The heat (and the smell of decomposing bodies) must’ve been unreal.

I can speak to the heat a bit, because – God knows why – I decided yesterday to walk the path from Cheatham Hill to the visitor center, which is a distance of about 4 hilly miles.  Not being incredibly smart at times, I honestly didn’t think about the fact that I’d have to walk those same 4 hilly miles BACK to my car….

So, after marching 8 miles in 97-degree heat and high humidity (I’m told that the heat index was 105), I was pretty much dead.

Being dead, I thought it appropriate to drive to the Marietta National Cemetery, where, appropriately enough, a great many of those Yankee troops who died during the Kennesaw Mountain campaign are buried.  I’ve been told that the citizens of Marietta sort of freaked out at the thought of having union soldiers buried in their cemetery and moved their own dead to another cemetery a few miles away.  At any rate, the Marietta National Cemetery is dedicated to the union troops who died there, which is sort of bizarre.

It’s a beautiful place, though, and the turf is amazing.  I wish I could make the grass in my own lawn grow like it does at the cemetery.

After wasting all morning and half of the afternoon with the above-told story, I did some grocery shopping and also picked up a cassette tape recorder that will allow me to convert all of my tapes to .mp3 files, which is totally cool.

I also discovered that I’ve got three kittens, the offspring of one of the numerous feral cats that have been living in my backyard since I bought the house 11 years ago, living on my deck.  They (the kittens) are all completely adorable, but quite skittish.  I left them some water and food last night, which they seemed to appreciate.

Yeah, I know.  I shouldn’t encourage it, right?  Well, they’re not hurting me and they’re hopefully controlling the rodent population in the yard.  I’ve got no problem with kitties in the backyard.

This morning I networked a couple of my computers (I’ve been rebuilding laptops and desktops like a maniac over the last month) and started copying photos and converted cassettes to my main storage drive.  Haven’t decided what I’ll do later, but I do need to clean those dirty dishes that I mentioned yesterday – and do some more grocery shopping for stuff that I forgot in my heat-induced delirium yesterday.

Or maybe I’ll go to a baseball game.

TWD

I realized this morning that I’ve once again let two weeks slip by without posting anything here.  That being the case, I’m posting something here, but it’s going to be short.  There just hasn’t been much going on. 

It’s been unbelievably hot in metro Atlanta for the last two weeks (thermometer in the car hit 101 yesterday afternoon while I was diving home), and sleeping has been fitful at best.  A couple of days ago, I bit the bullet and cranked the A/C down to 73 for one night.  It probably cost me $800 for one night of relatively comfortable sleeping, but it had to be done.

I forgot to mention in my last entry that I got the living room, foyer, stairway and upstairs landing painted a few weeks ago.  A guitar-player friend of mine paints on the side, so I hired him to come do what I can’t – namely, paint walls without getting paint all over the floors, ceilings, cats, my car, and the neighbor kids.  Don’t know that I’m all that thrilled with the colors (pebblestone mostly, with 2 darker accent walls); but I’m really not a visual person, so I don’t know.  I know that the walls don’t look as crappy as they did before being painted.

Chris (yup, she’s still around) is talking about moving again – either this year or next – which is traumatic but not unexpected.  I covered all the roller-coastery stuff when she was thinking about it last winter, so I’m not going to write it all down here again. 

I got a new battery for my robotic vaccuum cleaner yesterday, which was nice.  The old battery had stopped holding a charge about a month ago, and – though I borrowed Jenny’s vaccuum cleaner while she was on vacation – my carpets were getting grungy.  This morning, after letting the Roomba run around for several hours last night, everything’s shiny and clean again.

Except the dirty dishes, which I need to wash today.

Told y’all it was going to be short.  That’s it for now!

TWD

So it’s been several weeks since I added anything here, and I must apologize profusely for that.  In my defense, I spent several days over the last week attempting to make a video of myself in order to post it here and bore all of you in living color.  For various reasons, I gave up on that idea after several attempts.

Making the video was easy.  Editing it was a bit more time-consuming, but doable.  Getting it to upload turned out to be more trouble than it’s worth.

So what have I been doing since the Great American Brass Band Festival?  Really not a great deal of note.  The GBB played the closing concert for the 2010 International Euphonium Institute, which is an annual camp for young euphonium players held at Emory University.  I don’t remember exactly how many times our band has played the closing concert, but it’s been at least the last 4 or 5 years.  I have a feeling that we won’t be doing it next year.  There’s not a great deal of enthusiasm for the gig among the band members (why that is, I’m not sure), and I don’t think our regular director has actually done the gig with us yet, as it always seems to happen when he’s on vacation.

Sticking with the playing theme for a minute, I put together  brass quintet for three gigs over the July 4th weekend (David Klausman hired me to do this), and it was a blast.  We played one rehearsal on Thursday, a service Saturday night and two Sunday-morning services – all at the (very large) Perimeter Church in Duluth.  In each case, we played a bunch of Chicago-brass type stuff behind a praise band (which was fun as hell…wait…can I say that?) and were featured during the offertory, during which we played an arrangement of John Williams’ Summon the Heroes.   We also played Shenendoah and America the Beautiful as pre-prelude music.

Summon the Heroes was selected by the church after I sent them a list of patriotic-type music that I have in my library.  I didn’t actually bother to look at the charts when I sent them the list and therefore didn’t realize that … um …. this was not an easy arrangement.  Fortunately, the folks that I recruited to play with me are all very solid and, after a somewhat-shaky run-through during the rehearsal, we knuckled down and gave three pretty nice performances of the piece, which garnered praise from the regular band and from several parishioners – not to mention a pretty nice paycheck for all of us.

Wish I could just get 4 folks who are that good and who are also interested in putting together a regular quintet.  In spite of what my music-for-a-living friends try to tell me, I could indeed play that type of stuff every day.

The actual company holiday for the 4th was on the 5th (last Monday), so I went ahead and scheduled the whole week off, figuring somewhere in the dark recesses of my brain that I’d sit at home and catch up on work.   I didn’t do that.  I’ve done absolutely nothing that is work-related since last Friday.  I’m not looking forward to going back to work next week at all.

Instead of working, I’ve done a lot of sleeping in; I’ve gone to a couple of baseball games in Macon, where  a new 4-team rookie league is playing this summer; I’ve watched a lot of television (I’m working my way through 6 seasons of the series called Lost); I’ve played a bit with my cameras; and I’ve tried to keep my two cats from killing each other.

I also got a nice email from Dad, who informs me that he likes to sit naked in his basement and read.  Dad…I love you and all, but I didn’t need to know that, dude.

Jenny’s been cruising above the Arctic Circle for the last couple of weeks (no joke!), so I’ve been taking care of her cats every couple of days.  I went to her place this morning and hung out for about an hour, much to the delight of Bailey, who we got as a kitten shortly before we divorced.  He crawled all over me and purred and generally made me feel happy, which was nice.

I don’t know if I mentioned it earlier, but I did indeed put my name in the hat for the NA Brass Band Assoc. board of directors and was elected into it in the middle of June.  The first board meeting that I’ll be attending in an official capacity (I audited one in April) will be on September 17 & 18 in Grand Rapids, MI; and, since Cy and T will be in Ontario during the first week of September, I’ll be taking another vacation to cover both of those events.  I’ll hang in out Magnetawan for a week, then figure out how to kill a week, then do the meetings in Grand Rapids, then drive (quickly) back to Atlanta to resume work on the 20th.

The worst part about the meeting is that it conflicts with a football game that I’ve been looking forward to shooting for – literally – five years.  Furman will be at South Carolina on the 18th, which is the first time SC has agreed to the game since losing (badly) in 1983.  A number of people – both from NABBA and from my football website – have suggested that I blow off the board meeting and shoot the game, but I just don’t feel good about doing that.  If it wasn’t the first meeting, I’d certainly think about it, as I think I could probably make about $1,000 selling pictures from the Carolina game.

But hey.  I knew what I was getting into, so I’ll do what I’m supposed to do.

And what I’m supposed to do now is throw some pictures into this thing, publish it, and go waste the rest of the day.  Talk at y’all later.

TWD