It’s about 10:30 Sunday night and I just got home from a nice Indian dinner and some coffee with Betsy in middle Georgia.  I’d planned to make it down to Macon in time to walk around a cemetery and take some pictures, but after wasting much of the day watching a movie and then spending an hour or so cleaning out my pigsty of a car,  it was nearly dark by the time I got down there – so I blew it off and went straight past it to Warner Robins.

The car drove well, and I didn’t hear the brakes squealing too much, which is a good thing.  It’s become obvious that I need to have them worked on, but I just can’t afford it until March, when I get my bonus.  Hopefully, that first check in March is going to be a monster and help me get back on track after an extremely expensive couple of months.  It’ll be nice to start taking huge, sucking chest-wound bites out of my debt.  I’ve found myself fantasizing recently over when the old debt ball is really going to start rolling – when I’ve paid off any one particular debt and can start applying double payments to another one, and then triple payments to another one, and yada yada yada.  The goal I set for myself a year ago had me debt free in March of 2013, and – while that stupid car repair bill last year set me back a bit – I can still see a light at the end of the tunnel.

As I said yesterday, I took a drive around north Georgia yesterday afternoon, mainly to get some shooting in.  Along the way, I found a campground near Lake Lanier that I didn’t know existed.  It’s a very pretty place.  Unfortunately, it appears that the park, which was or is a state park, is pretty much run by the Lake Lanier Island Association.  What this means is that it’s horridly overpriced.  For only $36/night, I can set up a tent there.

I’m used to paying….um….NOTHING for primitive camping.  Still, maybe I’ll get a couple of friends to go with me.  I suppose $10 is okay for the chance to get out in the middle of nowhere in a really gorgeous location.

The more I write tonight, the more I realize that I don’t have much to say, so I’m going to just throw in a couple of pictures and end this blathering.  Tomorrow, I think I’ll just go off on something different and see what happens.

TWD

I drove up to north Georgia today and hung around Lake Lanier and drove through the mountains and took pictures and generally enjoyed myself.

I’ll talk more about that tomorrow.  I just don’t feel like doing much of anything tonight.

Have I mentioned that I hate the fact that Mac computers don’t have a backspace key?

Boo attacks my phone

I really do.  Having to post pictures from my iPhone just doesn’t feel right.  It’s supposed to be a beautiful day across most of Georgia tomorrow, so maybe I’ll take a few hours and go find something interesting to look at.  Or maybe not.  Who can say?

I worked from home today, spending most of my time taking some mandatory training and getting it out of the way for the next 6 months.  We’re required to take some of the most moronic courses ever thought up.  It’s not that their concepts are stupid – business ethics, sexual harassment,  etc – but it’s ridiculous that people still have to sit through “training” about it, complete with tests at the end that are made up of incredibly obvious questions.  I’ll admit that, most of the time, I just skip to the test right off the bat and don’t bother with the material.  It’s sort of pointless to spend an hour watching poorly-acted and patently unbelievable video when you can just answer some questions which will typically be phrased something like this:

One of Skip’s employees, Mandy,  tells him that another employee, Steven, regularly steals money from petty cash.  What should Skip do?

1. Alert human resources.
2. Tell Mandy that she shouldn’t squeal on other employees.
3. Confront Steven and blackmail him.
4. Do nothing.  Everybody steals from petty cash.

Today, however, I sat through most of the videos – basically because I don’t like starting new projects on Fridays, and I finished my old ones yesterday.

Had some shepherds pie for lunch and dinner, and spent the last couple of hours watching Ghosts of Mississippi, which is a movie about the retrial of the guy who murdered Medgar Evers in the 1960s.  This is about the third time in the last year that I’ve stumbled across something dealing with Medgar Evers.  Each time, I’ve been somewhat appalled at the bigotry of the middle of the last century.  I understand that prejudice is a fact of life and that everybody’s got some and that, particularly in the south, racism still exists in many ways today; but the over-the-top nature of it during the 1960s just blows me away.  How can/could anybody actually think like that?

I had a brief email conversation with my father about just this subject sometime in the last year, trying to find out how he felt about issues of race when he was in his 20s and 30s, and how his views have changed, if at all.  He told me that New England was pretty isolated from the whole problem.  I can accept that.

Politically, it just makes me more liberal.  Over generations, societal change is effected best by government intervention.  The government made forced integration.  At the time, it caused riots.  Today, nobody thinks anything about it (except very stupid people who tend to be over 50).  Government sued the tobacco industry, shouted about the evils of smoking, and made it illegal for anyone under 17 to buy cigarettes.  When I was in high school, smoking was no big deal.  Most of the kids I know today think it’s disgusting.  In the 50s and 60s, drunk driving was a comical offense (think Otis on the Andy Griffith Show).  After MADD got government involved, it became a crime nearly worthy of the death penalty.

There are plenty of other examples that I can’t think of right now, but my point is still this: if you want big-time changes, you need big-time regulation.  It’s not something that parents pass down to kids.

I also practiced the tuba for about 45 minutes today.  I think it’s the first time in about a week that I’ve played it.  Started out pretty rough, but smoothed out after I warmed up.  Didn’t take the alto horn out of the case.  I’ll blow on it this weekend, probably.

Got a slight case of indigestion this evening and really wanted a glass of milk, but let it go.  No Dairy January is almost over.

TWD

As I mentioned last night, I’ll be playing alto horn for the foreseeable future with the band.  This is due to many factors, not least among them (I suspect) being Bob.

Yeah.  That guy again.

I’m not going to specifically blame him or anything (and “blame” isn’t a good word to use, because it’s not like I’m dreading the horn switch or anything), but you should know by now that he caused a lot of bad feelings on the board last year.  Rich, who was installed as the band’s secretary in December, quit abruptly last Tuesday afternoon.  Quit not just from the job of secretary, and not just from the board, but quit the band completely.

The reasons he gave were fairly vague – he couldn’t commit the time to the band, he wasn’t sure if his playing was good enough, he needed to spend more time on his business, etc – but knowing what I know, I tend to read between the lines that he just didn’t want to be involved because he’d started to hate everything about the way the band runs.

Rich was one of the founding members of the band.  He was in large part responsible for getting the original musicians together in 1999 – I’m fairly certain that the only reason Joe called me was because Rich knew me from another group and suggested me for this one.  Rich was also the band’s personnel manager and equipment manager.  What that actually means is that he maintained our attendance records and he was the guy who made frantic phone calls looking for subs whenever anybody told him that they were going to miss a rehearsal.

He and I have disagreed about various things over the years, he’s annoyed me a few times (and I’m sure I’ve done the same to him), but he’s a good guy and I consider him a pretty good friend.  In fact, had I not met him in 1991, I probably wouldn’t be playing anything other than my piano today.  At that time, I didn’t own a tuba (when I graduated from school in 1987, my access to the school’s horns went away).  I joined a community band at the request of another friend and, after playing one horrible rehearsal on an ancient bell-front Conn, I was ready to pack it in completely.  But I got a call later that week from Rich saying that he’d found a beaten-up old Zeiss that was in playable condition and that I could buy it for $500.

So I did.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Anyway, Rich was also one of those guys like me (I say modestly) who could move around the band and play various instruments whenever there was a hole that needed to be filled.  He’s primarily a cornet player, and he’d play any of the parts if there was a need; but he also did a few stints on alto horn, baritone, and possibly flugel.  I’m not sure how he would have done if he’d attempted to move any lower down the brass totem pole (it takes a special breed of freak to play trombone and tuba).

For quite a while, we’ve had a terrible time finding anyone to regularly play the 2nd alto horn part.  It’s a stupid hard horn to play with any feeling, and the 2nd part is pretty monotonous.  Because we’ve not been able to keep anybody on the part for more than one concert at a time, Rich has been filling in a lot on it.

And then he quit.

So on Tuesday night, Joe made an announcement that we were in desperate need of a full horn section and asked if anybody knew anybody who might be able to play it.  Well, I played it for about two years when the band was first formed (actually, I played the 1st part, but you get the idea), and I haven’t been particularly fond of my own (tuba) section for the last year.  On the side, I’ve been bitching to Rich and Betsy that I’d really like to play some baritone or horn – but, to be totally honest, that was mostly just something for me to bitch about.

Fact is, I’ve improved quite a lot on my tuba over the last couple of years, and I think I’d continue to do so.  I enjoy playing it, I like the way it sounds, and I generally like the parts that the Eb tubas have.  However, I’ve gotten pretty tired of having one of the guys in my section – who is an extremely talented tubist – constantly taking little shots at me whenever I miss a note or move a tuning slide or ask a question or anything else.  And there’s this other guy on Eb who sits between me and the guy who picks at me, and I’m becoming convinced that he’s got not sense of pitch and not much of a sense of rhythm.  I keep him between me and the picky guy so that the picky guy has less opportunity to pick, but then I’ve got to try to figure out where my own pitch center is when I’ve got the pitchless guy playing into the side of my head.

So you can imagine that it was with very mixed feelings that I raised my hand on Tuesday night and quietly announced that I’d play horn if no one else would.  I got an email from Joe yesterday asking me if I was serious, and, after giving him a very short version of the story that I just gave you, I told him it was up to him.

I picked up the horn this afternoon.  Played it a little bit, and I sound terrible.  It’s going to be tough to relearn it, but I’ll figure it out.  And I’ll continue to practice my tuba, because eventually one of those two guys who annoy me is going to quit – at which point I’ll ask to move back to the tuba section and the band will again be looking for a decent horn player.

So in the end, we’ve got a good guy and a good musician who quit.  We’ve got a pretty decent guy and an okay tubist who is now playing a stupid hard horn with boring parts.  And we’ve got an Eb tuba section that consists of one guy who hasn’t quite grown up yet and another guy who’s just not very good.

I blame Bob.

TWD

I don’t feel much like writing tonight, so let me just say that I’m moving from tuba to alto horn.

Al, that’s a tenor horn on your side of the pond.

TWD

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

I didn’t skip a day yesterday.   I wrote a very enlightened entry and posted it.

For about three hours.  Then I deleted it.

I thought I had another one saved and ready to go, but it turns out that I didn’t.  Imagine my chagrin.  The point is, I did indeed write something yesterday.  So there.

The weather in Duluth yesterday, by the way, was sort of incredible.  At about 3 o’clock, when I took my only break at work (work was sort of incredible, too – I love days like that), I walked around the building and couldn’t believe it.  It was about 60 degrees and beautiful.

A few days ago, there were warnings about deep freezes and blizzards and armageddon and other random acts of weather violence.  Oops.

It is currently a little before 6AM on Tuesday, and I’ve got a band rehearsal tonight.  In order to make sure that I don’t have two open dates in a row, I’m writing this now and scheduling it to be published later tonight.  The ability to do this is a good thing.  Unfortunately, it sort of hinders my ability to write about what I’ve done all day when I haven’t yet done it.

That being the case, I shall now write about what I haven’t done.

1. I have never skydived, bungee-jumped or rock-climbed.  This is primarily because I am terrified of heights.  Why that is the case is not clear to me, as I didn’t used to be.  When I was young, I loved being up in the air.  I have dim memories of hanging out in the top of extremely tall trees at Acadia National Park in the mid-70s, when my family took a vacation there while taking Cy to start her studies at, interestingly enough, Acadia University (Halifax, NS).  I was climbing trees constantly when I was young.  I fell out of one once.  It was behind the apple stand by the Red Apple Motel on Route 22a in Vermont.  Cy and I were working there one weekend (actually, apparently Cy was working there and I was climbing a tree in back) and a branch broke and I plummeted about 10 feet to the ground, where I landed flat on my back, got the wind knocked out of me, and thought I was going to die.  Cy heard a thump, came to see what it was, saw me lying on the ground going “huh, huh, huh,” and, to my great dismay, walked away.  She later explained that she thought I was laughing at her.  No, Cy.  I couldn’t breathe.  So maybe that’s why I’m now afraid of heights.  I honestly don’t know.

2. I’ve never been a good passenger.  If I’m in a car (or bus or airplane or train or golf cart or any other conveyance) and I’m not driving it, I tend to get extremely nervous.  I’m the guy who has the imaginary brake pedal on the passenger side, and I’m constantly stepping on it and annoying whoever is doing the actual driving.  People tend to take this personally.  They shouldn’t.  I just don’t like being the passenger. Because I’m a completely selfish bastard, it never occurs to me that they might not like being along for the ride when I’m driving, either; but that’s really not my problem.  Better for them to be nervous than me, say I.

3. I’ve never been fired.  No, really.  In my entire life, I’ve never gotten the axe.  I suppose I should be furiously knocking on wood at this point, because losing my job at this point in my life would be a catastrophe (I’d be looking for a bankruptcy lawyer within 10 minutes), but I’ve often pondered just why it is that I’ve been so lucky.  Oh, wait.  I think I might have been let go from one job that I had when I was helping a guy build his house.  I must have been in 10th grade and it was a summer job.  This guy was building an underground house, powered by a series of ponds that drained into each other and produced enough energy to power the house, pump the water back to the top pond, and have enough leftover electricity to sell back to the power company.  I hated that job and was terrible at it.  Frankly, I don’t remember if he asked me not to come back or if I told him I wasn’t going to.  At any rate, both of us were quite content with a situation wherein he finished the project without my assistance.

4. I’ve never understood this whole “reverence for the flag” thing.  This is coming from someone who’s been flying an American flag at his house since he first moved in (the ability to put up a flag was, in fact, one of the reasons that I wanted to own a house), who was in the Boy Scouts (made it to Life Scout, which is one below Eagle, I think), and who is genuinely happy to live in America – though I was a lot happier with that fact before Newt Gingrich and his cronies got power in 1994 and pretty much destroyed the concept of civility.  The flag is a piece of cloth.  I pretty much tune out whenever anybody talks about “fighting and dying for our flag,” and it honestly doesn’t affect me to see pictures of irate Iranians burning the American flag or anything else.  Here’s a tip, flag burners: we’ve got more.

5. Going along with point 4, I’ve never “gotten” the concept of military fraternity – or fraternity fraternity for that matter.  People who get all misty-eyed about their time in the service (or in a frat) and wax philosophical about brotherhood and teamwork and the honor of serving together and yada yada yada – particularly those people who’ve never actually been in the military – tend to annoy me.  It’s a job.  If you enjoy doing it, good for you.  I have a job, too; and I used to – and occasionally still do – hang out with coworkers at non-work functions.  You don’t hear me babbling about the “brotherhood” of my office, though.   The same goes for organized labor.  Now, don’t get me wrong here.  I do have a problem with huge companies, and I want to vomit every time I hear the CEO of, say, AT&T pop off with the “our greatest asset is our employees” nonsense.  At the same time, however, I have to wonder about the people in the unions.  Where do their loyalties lie?  With the company that pays them or with the union that they pay to belong to?  What is all this psycho-babble about “I’m a union man, and I stand with my union brothers?”  The only “union brothers” (and sisters) that they know are the ones who work in the same office with them, and – more than likely – they’re not going to open up their spare bedroom when one of those union brothers gets fired.

6. I’ve never – and I mean never – been a morning person.  Getting out of bed, particularly when it’s dark, is the hardest thing I have to do every day.  When I was in elementary school, my father would have to wake me up about 6 times every morning.  I’m sure it aggravated him that I’d fall asleep two seconds after he’d woken me and he’d have to keep coming back to do it again, but that’s just me.  Once I’m awake, I can stay awake for a long time and light revives me when I’m tired.  When I want to drive to Canada non-stop, for example, I like to leave at about 4 in the morning.  That way, I get to be on the road when the sun comes up and I can thrive off of it and drive, without feeling at all tired, for 18 hours. That initial awakening, however, is a bitch.

7. I’ve never bought the whole “for the children” thing.  Granted, I’ve never had children, and that could possibly be clouding my thoughts; but whenever a politician trots out that whole “we’re passing our debt along to our children and grandchildren” argument, I tune out.  So what if we are?  Are they any more likely to pay it off than we are?  Should they get a free pass when we didn’t?  If it weren’t for them, maybe we wouldn’t have all the debt to begin with.  Same goes for other child-related arguments.  Taking hostages is a bad thing, but taking a child hostage is a really really horrible nasty terrible awful thing.  Why is that?  If anything, young children have a better chance of bouncing back from it.  And that’s another thing: when does a child cease to be a child?  If a 9-year-old kills his sister, he didn’t know any better.  If he does it when he’s 13, he’s a “disturbed youth.”  If he’s 17, we have hearing to determine whether or not to try him as an adult.  If he’s 18, he’s locked up for 50 years.  The message is that if you’re 18, you’re a responsible adult, right?  But you can’t have a beer until you’re 21.  When did you stop becoming a child?  And what is our whole hang-up with age anyway?  Is 18 really any different than 17 or 21?  I don’t get it.

8. I’ve never eaten a live prawn.  I’ve never eaten a live anything, I don’t think.  Oh, wait.  One time when I was 8 or 9, I ate an apple (the hole where the core had been removed was full of peanut butter, by the way), and I’m pretty sure that there was an ant in it and it bit my throat on its way down.  It hurt and I was horrified and thought I was going to die.  I haven’t liked peanut butter much since then.

9. I’ve never poured concrete.  Don’t know how to do it.  Wouldn’t have a clue what’s in it.  This is too bad, because I’d sort of like to build a new shed in my back yard; and I’d like to put it on a slab.  As I’ve noted, however, I don’t know how.  Like, how deep do you dig the hole that you’re putting the concrete in?  Is two inches enough or does it have to be three feet?  And what keeps it from seeping into the dirt around the hole (is that what those 2x4s are for)?  So,  nope.  Totally helpless when it comes to pouring concrete.  Or is it cement?  Are they the same thing?  See what I’m saying here?  I just don’t understand.

10. I’ve never done anything and then said to myself, “That was awesome.  You just can’t do it any better than that.”  I am the ultimate perfectionist.  If I bowl a strike, I want to bowl another one.  If I write something, I want to edit it…and then edit it again…and then again (I should point out that, except in extreme situations, I do not edit this blog.  This garbage flows out of my head just the way you get it).  If I play something very well on my horn, I’ll always find something about my playing that bothers me anyway.  If I’ve rearranged my room once, I’ve done it a hundred times.  I’ve just never been been satisfied with anything, to be honest.

11.  I’ve never known how to end a blog entry.

TWD

“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” ~ Mark Twain

As expected, I did nothing today of substance. After the early-morning cat food run, I slept until just about 2 o’clock, then spent another hour in bed looking for coupons and making a shopping list, though subconsciously knew that there was no way I’d go shopping today.

Somewhere between 4 and 5, I rousted myself enough to get downstairs, wash some dishes, do two loads of laundry and reheat some of that weird smorgasbord dish that I made a fee days ago.

Tastes better as leftovers, actually.

As bonus chores, I refilled a couple of salt shakers and combined two bottles of hand soap. Yay me.

The football website has been targeted by a lot of spammers over the last few weeks, which is incredibly annoying. I initially combatted this by disallowing links in user signatures, as the jerks would put a link for a Viagra website in their signature and then post random crap in the forums.

Once I cut off the signature links, they started just to post links in their bogus messages, which is worse.

So last night, I set things up so that I have to approve all new registrations. Now I’m getting requests for registration approvals about 5 times an hour, 99% of which are obviously spam, but I generally do take a few minutes to trace ip addresses before I delete the requests.

Sigh. It was so much easier when nobody knew about the stupid site.

TWD

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Inverloch Cir,Duluth,United States

Sashimi and Jurassic Fire roll

As far as I’m concerned, my streak of posts remains intact.  It’s only 9:55 PM in California, after all.

After feeding the cats this morning, I crawled back into bed and fully intended to sleep for a long time.  Instead, I ended up playing around on the laptop.  I optimized a couple of my websites to work with iPhones, caught up on the football news that I’ve been ignoring for the last two weeks, made a few Scrabble moves, and watched some 30 Rock.

At around noon, I moved myself downstairs, ate some eggs and corned-beef hash, and prepared to watch some more 30 Rock.  Fell asleep on the couch.  It was a lovely nap.

At a little after three, Betsy called and we arranged to have sushi for dinner and maybe catch a movie.  The sushi was amazing.  I was never a big raw fish fan until Betsy turned me on to the stuff a couple of years ago.  Now I really like it.  Particularly sashimi, which is just your basic raw fish.  In addition to that tonight, we got a special sushi roll called Jurassic Fire, and it did not disappoint.  I couldn’t tell you what was in the thing other than rice, shrimp, avocado and (horrors!) a bit of cream cheese; but just dang!  I think I could eat that stuff three times a day.

Sushi chefs or priests or whatever they’re called.

The timing for the flick didn’t work out quite right, though, so we opted instead to go bowling after dinner.  It’s been just about a year since I was last at the lanes, so I was fairly pleased with myself after bowling games of 173, 155 and 169.  Nothing earth-shattering, sure, but the average I carried when I was in leagues for several years in the 90’s was about 175.

I’ve gotten older, my knee doesn’t want to bowl 10 games at a time any more, and the ball (16 pounds) feels a bit heavier than it used to; but I really can’t complain about my scores considering how little I get to roll these days.

One of the pictures in this entry is of Betsy holding “The Bowling Buddy,” which is a stuffed rat that I use to wipe the oil off of my bowling ball.  I started using a stuffed animal for this, rather than a towel, during my time in the leagues.  I’m not exactly sure why, other than the fact that I had one in my bowling bag one night and it seemed like a logical thing to do.  My current bowling buddy (the rat) is actually the third toy that has had that title with me, and it generally gets a few comments from whomever is bowling in the lanes next to me – and it makes me smile when I see its little head getting crushed on the ball return rack.

Betsy poses with my disgusting, oil-coverd “Bowling Buddy”

An interesting thing about bowling for me is that I generally don’t care about anybody else’s score.  It is one of the only competitive games that I play in which the only thing on my mind is trying to do better than myself.  There is something fascinating (to me) about watching the ball spin down the lane, hook in a way that seems to defy gravity (I have a hook that breaks so hard that it’s generally impossible for me to pick up single pins on the right side of the lane) and then explode into the pocket just like it should.  If someone throws better than I do, I honestly don’t care.  It’s all about the feeling that I get from my own throws.

Billiards is a similar thing.  I’m terrible at pool and I know it – but I love watching the balls bounce all over the table.

After bowling, we stopped at a Krispy Kreme donut place for a late snack.  I’ve never been a huge fan of KK donuts, but every now and then a mouthful of sugar can taste pretty good, and we got a couple of the things straight off of the line, which was a first for me.  Gotta admit that warm donuts covered with glaze….mmmmm.

Tomorrow should be a lazy day for me.  Planning to do some laundry, wash some dishes, tidy up downstairs a little bit, and maybe practice my horn for a while.  Mostly, however, I’ll just be napping on the couch and waiting for the next winter storm (predicted for sometime between tomorrow and Tuesday) to hit.

Maybe I should go get my laptop from the office.  Just in case.

TWD