Nathan made my day with this shot. I think it might be the best I’ve ever taken.

Last week was fairly eventful, what with my nephew Nathan starring in a college production of “The Music Man” on Saturday night and my father getting hitched Sunday afternoon.  I’ll include a few pictures of the latter event with this entry.

Actually, I’ll start things off just by talking about the pictures, which were right up there as one of the highlights of the week.  I only took about 70 on Sunday, but when I started going through them Sunday night, I was amazed.  41 of the shots went up on Facebook with just about no editing.  Of those that I didn’t post, most were good shots – they just didn’t add anything to the gallery.

Slap a cross and some flowers on an antique sewing machine table and bam!  Instant wedding chapel

41 out of 70.   Consider this: when I shoot a football game, I’ll take between 700 and 800 pictures.  If I’m lucky, 50 of them will be usable.  41 out of 70 is unheard of for me.  Made me pretty happy, and you can see/print all 41 of the final shots at this link.

I test out my wireless shutter release while Greg and Kara do photos the old-fashioned way

As for the wedding itself, it went off pretty much without a hitch (no pun intended).  Dad and Diane appeared to be pretty happy with their respective mate selections, and I had a nice time getting to know my step-brothers, step-sisters, step-neices and nephews, etc.  Also got to see all of my siblings, and Jenny and her father made the trek to SC for the festivities as well.

I believe Dad and his bride will be moving back to her place in Cleveland today.  Why anyone would want to leave Greenville for Cleveland is a mystery to me, but that’s the plan.  Maybe Dad just wants to see the world or something.  I wish them both the best.

Tried out my new Garmin GPS unit on the way up (yeah – I broke down and bought one.  I’ve got a couple of long trips coming up in the next few months, and football season this year will also have a few hefty treks).  Overall, it’s an acceptable unit.  Not as good as the Tom-Tom that I had until last year, but it’ll get me where I’m going.  I read an article today saying that GPS units are dinosaurs and using a smart phone is just as good an option.   No.  It’s not.  A dedicated GPS device will always be better than a smartphone that has GPS in it.  Trust me on this.

Doing that whole “With This Ring” thing

The amazing Bob – he of the band’s board of directors – has claimed another victim.  Betsy quit the board in spectacular fashion yesterday by sending them a resignation letter that pulled no punches, left absolutely no doubt about *why* she was quitting (that’d be BOB, ladies and gentlemen), and ended with the question, “How many more good people have to quit before you’ll take some action [against Bob]?”  I loved every word of it – and I believe Betsy will be much happier now that she’s washed her hands of the problem, as both Rich and I did earlier this year.  Eventually, I think the board *will* get the message – I just hope the band still exists at that point.

Diane checks out the wedding cake. I really like this picture.

In other board business – the North American brass band kind, I mean – crises are looming as we prepare for our 30th championships, in Grand Rapids, MI, in a couple of weeks.  The biggest problem is that the board from a few years ago vastly overestimated their bargaining power and agreed to block 850 rooms in the hotel which is hosting the event.  In exchange for the room guarantee, they got free meeting and performance space.  Good deal, right?  Sure – if they could actually get people to rent the rooms for the contest.  Unfortunately, the hotel is one of the most expensive in the city, the city is way off the beaten path for most Amercian brass bands, and no Canadian bands decided to make the 6-hour trip from Toronto to Grand Rapids.  End result?  Only 13 bands will be competing, only 400 rooms have been sold, and the organization is on the hook for close to $50,000 (at last check, our entire treasury was about half of that).  Last I heard, the board’s executive committee made a deal to let the same hotel host the contest again in 2014 in order to avoid lawsuits.  If that’s the case, I predict a general outcry from member bands when that decision is announced, and I predict that the 2014 championships will be even less well-attended than the 2011 version.

It also came up in recent board discussions that there has been generally no publicity about the championships in Grand Rapids or the surrounding area.  Good planning, huh?  Not surprising, considering that our president has been AWOL for most of the last year (he will be removed from that office at our meeting on April 7) and no one else feels empowered to do anything on their own.  When I joined that board, I didn’t know I was jumping in to the wheel house of a sinking ship.

Work this week has been good.  My project manager has been feeding me jobs that she hasn’t had time for, and I’ve been steadily knocking them out of the park.  I don’t feel like I’m working particularly fast, but she warmed the cockles of my heart the other day when she said something like, “I like giving these to you because you get them done so quickly.”  So I’ve got that going for me.

The happy couple, faces covered in cake frosting, makes out in front of their children.

Almost forgot to mention that I got a fairly decent bonus at the beginning of the month and made that stupid American Express balance go away.  I’m hoping to be able to nuke one of my Visa cards with my tax refund in a few weeks, and then it’s just a matter of time before the other debts go the way of the passenger pigeon.  Once I’m down to just having a mortgage payment and utilities, I can start socking away some serious green.  I’m actually excited about this, folks.

Felt tired for most of today, so I’m going to finish this up now and get some sleep.  Congratulations again, Dad and Diane!

TWD

I had planned to update this blog tonight – something which is long overdue, considering that I managed to update it just about every day in January and a good many in February – but I got home from work, practiced my tuba (something else that was long overdue), started watching some Netflix, and generally lost track of time.

I’ve got rehearsal tomorrow night, so don’t expect much in the way of an update then, either.  Maybe Wednesday.

By way of catching you all up, I played with the band at the closing ceremonies of the Southeast Regional Tuba & Euphonium Convention in Chattanooga on Saturday – I’ll try to get some pictures up (maybe even a video) when I next update this.  The main story from that event was – who else? – Bob.  He decided near the end of the dress rehearsal that the band was taking too much time rehearsing….so he walked out, and took one of his minions with him.

You heard that right.  He left 10 minutes before we were done rehearsing because, according to him, “it didn’t look very professional” for us to be having a dress rehearsal so close to the start of the closing ceremonies.  Apparently, it looks more professional to the few people who had straggled into the auditorium to see 50% of the band’s tuba section walk out of rehearsal.

Betsy Jones and I floated a petition around to see about having him officially censured by the board or made to apologize to the band or something.  Maybe nothing will happen, but I’m bound and determined to have the board at least discuss the incident so that it will be written up in the minutes.

Walking out of a dress rehearsal?  Are you kidding me?

The concert itself seemed to go okay, though we had a near-disaster during the first number – Candide (had it lasted 5 more seconds, I fear that we would have had to stop in the middle of the piece).  Interestingly, that was the piece that Bob decided not to rehearse with us….

I also spent some time at the confederate cemetery while I was in Chatty, and will hopefully get some of those pictures up here, too.

And now, friends and neighbors, I’m going to shut off my light and try to get some sleep.

TWD

“A-ha moments.”

We’ve all had them, right?  You’re trying to figure out the answer to some problem, usually a difficult one, and the answer will suddenly come to you in a flash of insight.  I’ve had my share of those types of “difficult” solutions, usually in the context of trying to figure out a particularly brain-draining piece of code.  Many times the answers came to me in dreams; which I’ve learned, from talking with other programmers, is a fairly common occurrence.  There’s even a website out there named Dream In Code that I visit fairly regularly when looking for answers to problems that I’m having.

I also have very different, incredibly stupid, “a-ha moments.”  What I mean is that I am prone to suddenly realize things that should be completely obvious to a person who has paid any attention to life.  These are the moments in my life that make me want to come up with a new word, somewhat like “bittersweet,” but not quite.  It would be a word that expresses incredible relief and excitement while at the same time evoking the spirit of “Dammit!  Why didn’t anybody tell me this?”

The most amazing moment of this type that I’ve experienced is probably one that I’ve told to a lot of you who are privy to this blog.  It occurred at the end of my junior year in high school.  It was when I learned what a valedictorian is.  It was when I learned, for the first time, that that “permanent record” that everyone was always talking about was an actual thing.  Prior to that moment, when my friend Mark suggested that he and I go to the school’s career counselor and find out what our class ranking was, I had absolutely no idea that I was actually being ranked against my classmates.  I was familiar with the concept of Grade Point Average, but I’d never dreamed that it was a cumulative thing and that people actually kept track of it.
Prior to that moment, I carried about a C- average in high school.  After I learned about it, I pretty much blew the minds of everyone who’d ever known me by blasting through my senior year with about a 4.5 GPA – the highest of any senior in the class.  All because of an “a-ha moment” that I probably never should have had.

I majored in sociology because of another fantastically stupid oversight on my part.  I’d wanted to major in anthropology – preferably physical anthropology (the cool kind where you get to dig up skeletons and stuff), so I took every anthropology class there was.  When it came time to declare my major, I matter-of-factly told my faculty advisor (who was also the guy teaching most of my anthropology courses) that I wanted my B.A. in anthropology.

He then matter-of-factly told ME that Furman didn’t have an anthropology major and that all of those classes that I’d taken fell under the sociology umbrella.

So I got a B.A. in sociology.

Well, today I had another mind-blowingly stupid “a-ha moment,” based mainly on a conversation that I overheard between Betsy Jones and one of her euphonium students last Friday.  I’m not sure exactly what they were talking about, but at some point she mentioned that she didn’t like to teach “don’t puff out your cheeks” when you play, but preferred to teach “keep the corners of your mouth firm” (the end result being that your cheeks can’t really puff out).

In retrospect, I guess I must’ve known – on some level – that maintaining firm corners on my embouchure is important; but until this afternoon, when I was once again struggling with that insipid flutter-tone, I’d never thought about it or concentrated on it or really felt it.

And in 40 years of playing brass, nobody’s ever actually said to me, “Keep the corners firm.”

So while struggling today and getting more and more frustrated with my inability to consistently play a D without flutter, that remnant of a conversation between Betsy and her student inexplicably swooped through my head, and I concentrated on the corners of my mouth.

And, voila!  The flutter went away.

It went away on the D.  It went away in the high range, the mid range, the low range.  It went away regardless of whether I was slurring or tonguing.   It went away at fortissimo and it went away at pianissimo.

It.  Just.  Freaking.  Went.  Away.

I noticed that when I stopped concentrating on the corners and started concentrating on the notes, it came back.  And when I stopped concentrating on the notes and started concentrating on the corners it went away again.

I realized that my face looked exactly like the faces of other people who I’ve watched playing their horns, and I realized that my face had never looked like that when I was playing before.

And I noticed that, after about 20 minutes of really focusing on maintaining firm corners, the muscles around my jaw were aching.  But I still wasn’t fluttering.

When I was growing up, I pretty much taught myself how to play, and I did it in a way that worked for me.  I guess when I was younger, I had enough natural ….. what?  Talent?  Flexibility?  Luck? …. to play pretty well without knowing the fundamentals.  Over the last 10 years, I’ve figured out that that isn’t working for me anymore.

In a nutshell, I’ve got to learn a new way of playing…..but now I know what I’ve been doing wrong.

I’m hoping this is like my senior year in high school all over again.  Time will tell.

Thank you, Betsy.

TWD

Isn’t that how March is supposed to make its entrance or something?  If so, it’s a fairly sated lion.  The weather has been remarkable over the last few days, with the exception of a few hours on Monday evening, when basically the entire southern United States was under a tornado watch.  We got some nice wind and a few strong rainstorms, but it blew over and everything’s been pretty perfect since then.

I made some progress at rewriting queries on Monday and then took the day off on Tuesday.  Not for any particular reason other than the fact that it was a nice day and I didn’t want to go to work.  I spent the day watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on netflix and cleaning up around the house.  Also made some macaroni and cheese – and had brass band rehearsal, of course.

A squirrel outside of my bedroom window on Tuesday afternoon

The rehearsal went fairly well, although the baritone section  – minus Betsy Jones, who was auditioning in Virginia – left a lot to be desired.  One thing I’ll say for playing in the tenor horn section: I can hear a lot more of the band from its center than I could from the back row (in the tuba section).

Speaking of tubas, I figured that I’d neglected mine for long enough this evening and practiced  – mostly scales, long tones, and a few etudes – until my face was about to fall off.  I still haven’t figured out what the deal is with the 3rd-line D (I may never figure it out, as the insipid flutter-tone has been going on for over 10 years now), but I spent the last 20 minutes of my practice by slamming into and around the D as hard and fast as I could.  As things transpired, I began to get very solid on the D….and the flutter-tone crap moved to the B and C.  There has to be a physical reason for this, but I just don’t know what it is.  I never had this problem before I put the horn down for 5 years in the late 80s, and I never really noticed it until it began to become a liability in some quintet literature in the mid-late 90s.

Had my annual review on Monday and received, as expected, a rating of “Meets and May Exceed Expectations.”  That has got to be the stupidest rating ever devised, and I’ve gotten it every year for the last 12.  Either I *did* exceed expectations or I did *not* exceed them.  What is this “May Exceed” garbage?  At any rate, it was good enough to merit a 3.09% increase in my salary, which is by far the biggest raise I’ve gotten since I started working at BellSouth in 1999.  I’ll take it.

We also got our bonus figures on Monday, and I’m not complaining about mine at all.  The economy may be in the toilet, but apparently ATT did pretty well last year.

TWD