So my last vacation day of the year is tomorrow.  Man, that went by too fast.  In 4 days, I’ll be back at the office, doing more inane garbage that bores me for people who know, deep in their hearts, that it bores them just as much.

Ugh.  Enough about that.

I did basically nothing at all today, and it was fun.  I stayed in bed until noon, surfing the web.  Agathe von Trapp, the eldest daughter of the von Trapp family singers, died yesterday; so I spent some time reading about the family and wishing I were in Vermont.  Then I watched a couple of movies (one of them, Les Miserables, was quite good), then dumped some of Jenny’s old clothes off at her house, collected a few Christmas/birthday presents from her, and wrapped up the day by watching some more episodes of 30 Rock.

Yesterday, I spent some time going through old photos.  I’m frankly sort of amazed at the number of disks I have that are full of photographs that I’ve taken in the last 11 years (when I resumed a hobby that I’d given up in about 1978).  It’s also interesting to look at shots from 10 years ago, when I had one of the best digital cameras on the market, and to see just how much better the cameras I have today are.  Technology moves so fast.  I remember printing out 8×10’s for players’ parents and having to charge them $60 just to cover my own costs.  Those same prints today cost me about $2 and I sell them for $20.  And the prints today are so much better than they were.  My camera in 2001 shot a staggering 4 frames a second, and the pictures were all of 3.8 megapixels.  My main camera today is shooting nearly 8 fps – and they’re 18 MP shots.  Wow.

All of the photos included with this entry, by the way, are from a camping trip that I took with a buddy in July of 2007.  We set up our tents at a place called Huckleberry Knob in the Unicoi Mountains of North Carolina.  It’s an extraordinarily beautiful, windy, place.

Cy sent me a note last night asking if the band would be interested in playing in Vermont next June.  I’ve turned it over to the board, and there is genuine interest.  I hope we’ll be able to work it out, if for no other reason than it’ll give me a good excuse to take a Vermont vacation.

I really need to start reading on a regular basis again.  I used to read during my coffee breaks, during lunch, while waiting for service on my car….anytime when I had a few minutes and could pull out the iPaq, which was always loaded with about 40 books.  I stopped doing that about a year ago, opting instead to check Facebook statuses and email or maybe make a couple of moves in Scrabble games before realizing that I’ve wasted enough time and need to get back to work.  I still read books during lunch, but lunches seem to have gotten shorter, too.  I’ve been reading the same stupid book (Emma) for about 4 months now.  I shouldn’t have taken me more than a week.

So I think that’ll be my only resolution for this New Year.  I’m going to start reading again.  Facebook will have to survive without me just a little bit more.

Maybe that will convince me to get my stupid eyes checked.

TWD

So let’s give this iPhone app a shot, shall we?

I got a bit more accomplished around the house today, but still haven’t made my way out to someplace that sells paint. In fact, I haven’t left the house at all since I got home Sunday night.

I spent today emptying and organizing some junk drawers, shampooing the carpets upstairs, rearranging my bedroom a bit, washing some dishes, doing a few more loads of laundry, and cruising through several more episodes of 30 Rock (in the second season now).

And I’ve run into my first issue with this app. I can’t figure out how to italicize words or insert pictures.

So I’ll just publish this as it is and see what happens.

Aha!

As you can see, i sort of figured out the answer to those two questions…

TWD

Location:Gravitt Trail,Duluth,United States

I took this shot of a church bell with my 50MM f1.8 lens while walking around a cemetery last week.

I am currently having a pretty nice Christmas – New Year’s holiday. While it would have been nice to spend some time with Cy and “T” at their place in Vermont, I really couldn’t work up any shred of enthusiasm for the 48 hours of driving that that would entail. Instead, I’ve opted to do basically nothing out of the ordinary to end off 2010.

Metropolitan Atlanta apparently doesn’t share my penchant for the unremarkable – the area was blanketed with about 1.5 inches of snow on Saturday afternoon, marking the first time since 1882 that Atlanta had a white Christmas. I have to admit that I was skeptical that we’d actually get any snow, but it started falling at around 3:00 o’clock, and by 4:00, when I left to have dinner in Macon, it was obvious that there would be some accumulation. I got back to the house at around 10:00 to find everything covered with the white stuff. It’s remained fairly cold since Saturday and, while the snow is gradually giving way to the dead stuff underneath it, there’s still enough in the yard to make a snowman, were I so inclined.

I’m not.

As a completely unrelated aside, I’d like to point out that most of the pictures included with this entry will have nothing to do with anything that I’m typing. I just pulled a CD out of an old CD folder from 2002. Figured I’d post a few shots from then and see if I’ve improved at all in the last 8 years.

Grandma Sprague at Thanksgiving, 2002. I wrote about her death in one of the earliest entries in this blog.

Yesterday afternoon, I once again drove down to middle Georgia and spent about 5 hours doing basically nothing with Chris. We walked around a bookstore, spent some time driving around taking “light paintings” (my phrase for shooting long, unrecognizable photos of lights at night while moving – you get some really cool effects and Christmas lights are always fun to play with), had some pretty good Indian food for dinner, and probably broke some sort of law by driving into Rose Hill Cemetery after dark. I must admit that that last bit was sort of creepy. Not because I worried about ghosts harassing us, but because I worried about roving bands of vandals harassing us. Fortunately, that didn’t happen and I arrived home safely at about 11:30 last night.

Mom looks on as I attempt to make my nephew Samuel throw up his Thanksgiving vittles.

I’d intended to do quite a bit of housework today – up to and including painting my bedroom. Didn’t happen. While I did get some cleaning done, and while I did manage to do three loads of laundry, I also spent a great deal of time watching 30 Rock, which is a hilarious sitcom that I’d never heard of before a few weeks ago. It’s on Netflix, so I started with season one, immediately got hooked, and am currently 9 episodes into it. Maybe I’ll find some paint tomorrow.

I forgot to mention in my last entry that I finally have a new cell phone. I was so sick of my iPhone 3G that I was literally counting the days until December 12th, when I could upgrade the stupid thing. As soon as that day arrived, I ordered a phone running Windows Mobile 7 – just to stick it to Apple.

Samuel and Riley check out photographs from a much earlier time.

Unfortunately, I discovered within a day that the Windows phone just isn’t ready for prime time and brought it back to the store, where I traded it for an iPhone 4. So far, I don’t really have any complaints.
I mentioned this because I downloaded an app last night that should let me update this blog with the phone. Hopefully, that will inspire me to do it more often during coffee breaks or whatever. We shall see.

Billy Napier looks for a receiver in a losing effort at Villanova in the 2002 playoffs.

Lastly, I’ve decided to take a stab at at “No Dairy January,” a concept thought up by Betsy Jones. She says that she generally feels better when she avoids dairy products, so she’s going to give them up for a month. Her main concern, she says, is giving up cheese and ice cream.

Pshaw, say I. I’ve been living on cheese sandwiches and milk for most of my adult life. If I can do without them for a month, she should be able to.

I’m not saying that I can, you understand. I’m just going to give it a shot and see if I feel any different.

If I don’t, I’m chowing down on 5 pounds of macaroni and cheese come February 1st.

TWD

So it’s been two months since I last updated this thing.  How did that happen? Al?  Aren’t you supposed to be reminding me to write occasionally?

Ha!  Just kidding.  Sort of.  I need somebody to blame, and you seemed like a good candidate.

At any rate, I now have to sit here and try to figure out what exactly I’ve been doing for the last two months.  Oddly, there have been quite a few things going on.  Maybe my biggest problem will be addressing them without typing about 20,000 words.

Boo sits by the fire on a chilly December evening

I guess I could start with what I’m typing this on.  Several months ago, my renter let me borrow one of his Mac Powerbooks – specifically, the one that had neither a battery nor a power supply.  I took it with the idea of eventually trying to write some iPhone apps, and promptly forgot about it.  Then, about a month ago, I went out and got the necessary things to actually turn it on, tweaked the software a bit, and have been using it fairly regularly for various things since then.

Stone Mountain Cemetery

It’s an okay machine, but guess what: I still prefer using Windows.  For all those mac-heads out there who continue to insist that their computer is the superior one, I’m sorry.  You’re just wrong.  And yes, I am a trained professional.

The brass band’s album was finally shipped to us on December 1st and we’ve actually had a pretty good number of sales so far.  I think we need to sell about 600 of the things in order to break even on the project.  Not sure of the exact numbers at this point, but I’d estimate that we’ve unloaded about half of that number in the last three weeks.  If anybody who reads this wants a copy, go to GeorgiaBrassBand.com and you can buy one there for $15 (plus shipping).

In my next-to-last post (from October, I think), I mentioned that I played a gig at Perimeter Church with a quintet.  During a break between the services in that gig, I got an email from my father, who informed me that he’d be out of town visiting a woman in Cleveland, OH, who he’d met at his 50th high school reunion.

I got another email about a week ago from him.  He has now proposed to “the Cleveland chick,” she’s accepted, and I guess I’m going to become one of that sociological group known as “step children.”

I am so not riding in a pumpkin, Dad.  And I don’t sweep fireplaces, either.  Let’s get that straight right now.

This was one of the memorials in the infant section of Stone Mountain Cemetery.  I think it’s bizarre.

My football team, thanks largely to key injuries during the course of the season, had their first losing campaign since about 1994.  They finished with a 5-6 record and the head coach, who was a classmate of mine, was basically forced to resign.  Many of the visitors to my website were thrilled by this.

Many of the visitors to my website are dicks, say I.

Anyway, after about a two-week-long search, we have a new head coach.  Ironically, he came in second for the job when it was given to the coach who just resigned, yet all of the people who were calling for the head of the old coach are simply thrilled at the prospect of the new one.

I expect the team to do very well next year – were it not for the injuries this year, they would have done very well, and only about 7 guys are graduating.  After next year, however, we’ll find out what the new coach is all about.  I wish him well.

I mentioned recently that I’d be off of the band’s board of directors as soon as an election was held.  Well, we held the election about a month ago and I’m still not off of the board.  One of the last things I was to have done as a director was to rubber-stamp the election of the new board.  Unfortunately, major screw-ups were made with the election (some members were not aware that there was going to BE one, one of the listed candidates should not have been on the ballot, etc); and, as of now, the current board is still trying to determine whether or not to scrap the results and do it again.  

Creepy, huh?

I’ve voted against that idea, by the way.  The new board, as elected, will do just fine.  There’s no reason to screw around and vote again, particularly given that the guy who led me to resign has now seen the actual numbers and will be sure to tell all of his buddies exactly how to vote in order to seat the board that he wants.

I think that’s about enough for now.  I will once again attempt to make more regular entries into this thing going forward.  Call it a New Year’s resolution.

Or don’t.

TWD