And it can’t be gone fast enough, if you ask me. It has been unbelievably hot in Georgia this year. I think – don’t quote me on this – that today marks the 35th day in a row that the temperature has crossed the 90-degree threshold. Prior to this streak, we had an 18-day stretch of 90+ days. In case you’re wondering, Atlanta normally has 32 days a year of 90+ and to say I’ve been uncomfortably hot this year is an understatement.
At the moment, I’m sitting (NOT naked) at the Audi dealership, waiting for my car to come back from its 95K service, a front-end alignment, and various and sundry other things that will, once again, push my service bill above $300. I love my car, but sheesh. Except for warranty work, I never get out of this place with any money left.
The brass band is nearing the end of our CD project. We had an extra 3-hour rehearsal last Saturday morning, we’ll have our last regular rehearsal tonight, and the actual recording sessions are scheduled for Thursday and Friday nights and all day Saturday. I don’t remember exactly how many tunes we’re recording, but it’s somewhere around 20. I love playing with the group, but I’m more than ready to take a few weeks off after Saturday’s session.
My vacation plans are finally starting to gel. I’ll be leaving for Magnetawan probably on the afternoon of September 4th and plan to arrive at the camp sometime on the 5th. After chilling for a week or so on the lake, I’ll head west in Canada and cross back into the US at Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario sometime around the 14th or 15th. I still haven’t decided exactly how I’m going to waste one or two days before I’m due for the meeting in Grand Rapids, MI, on the 17th, but I’ll have a tent with me and I should be able to find someplace to set it up in northern Michigan. After the meeting on the 18th, I’ll probably take two days to get back to Atlanta, and I’m scheduled to be back on work on the 21st.
To say that I’m ready for vacation would be another understatement. Normally, I’d have taken off during the first week of July, and waiting the extra two months this year has been mentally draining.
At work, I’ve been fighting with the CFGRID tag for the last two weeks. I got a relatively benign request to keep a “timeline” of user-entered comments for trouble tickets and figured it’d be a quick fix. Silly me. I’ve tried to set it up about 12 different ways since receiving the request, and I keep getting killed by little things in ColdFusion that don’t work the way I expect/want them to work. I did make some huge strides on the project yesterday, however, and am very much hoping to wrap things up today. Just in time, because I’ve got a meeting about a new (huge) project on my calendar for tomorrow morning.
This past Sunday was “Feed the Players” day at Furman. It’s a pretty cool idea, amazingly allowed by the NCAA. Basically, fans can volunteer to host small groups of football players for one home-cooked meal before school starts. It was a tradition at the school for quite a long time, but died out for about 10 years before being resurrected last year. Last year and this, I imposed myself on a good friend and his wife by joining them and four players for the dinner. It’s a fun time, allows me to get to know a few of the kids on a more personal level (which helps immeasurably in my photography during the season, believe it or not), and lets them get to know me so that Ihey won’t wonder who that weird guy with the camera is who shows up at all of their games.
Speaking of shots from the games, I think I’ll be using SmugMug this year to host and sell the photos. Still playing around with it to make sure it will work as well as the system that I set up for myself a few years ago. Hope so, as it will be A LOT easier to maintain things.
Also on Sunday, I discovered a huge cemetery in downtown Greenville that I never knew was there. Spent a few hours wandering around it and taking pictures before dinner, and I’m definitely planning on going back up there some morning and exploring a bit more.
Oh! I forgot to mention that I’m typing this on my new Dell Inspiron Mini, a netbook that I got last week. Basically, I went looking for a new GPS unit for my car before I started driving all over the country in September. After looking at a number of models and determining which ones would best meet my needs, I figured out that, for an extra $100, I could just pick up a netbook (a tiny laptop with a long-lasting battery) and install Streets and Trips on it. So I did. And it works great. Good call for me!
Well, my car should be just about done by now, so I’ll wrap this up. No pictures in this entry at the moment. Maybe I’ll add some later.
TWD
Yes, indeed. The brass band put in about 14 hours with a recording engineer and whipped through about 120 takes before wrapping things up last Saturday afternoon and having, hopefully, around 20 decent songs ready to be mixed and put onto our first commercial CD, which will be released in a couple of months. I’m sure that everyone reading this will want a copy, right? RIGHT?
take, but the aforementioned recording engineer doesn’t feel that it’s necessary.
