Monthly Archives: May 2017

Chillin’

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Today’s featured image was taken on this day one year ago, and is of the Little Santeetlah Creek in the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest – one of my favorite places in the world for a quick getaway from city life.  My buddy Brett and I had actually planned to go up there a couple of weekends ago, but it was covered in snow, gates were closed, trees were down, and the roads were basically impassible.  We opted instead to hang out at Fires Creek in the Nantahala Wilderness for a one-night campout.  Bing tells me this about the JKMF:

Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest is an approximately 3,800-acre tract of publicly owned virgin forest in Graham County, North Carolina, named in memory of poet Joyce Kilmer, best known for his poem “Trees”. One of the largest contiguous tracts of old growth forest in the Eastern United States, the area is administered by the U. S. Forest Service.

Oddly enough, Kilmer himself was born, and lived most of his life, in New Jersey.  He was killed in France in WWI.  Why his name is attached to a forest in NC is somewhat of a mystery, excepting, of course, the reference to his “Trees” poem, of which I’m sure that everyone knows at least the first line.

Work was a bit more hectic than usual last week, largely due to the fact that I got another “primary” firm (meaning that I’m their primary consultant), and they’re brand new to The X Company.  McSoley, McCoy & Company is a small CPA firm in South Burlington, VT, and I’ve got to admit that I like taking care of them simply because of their location.  At this early stage, however, they’re pretty needy.  I’m told that it usually takes about 6 months for a new firm to settle into a cloud-based environment, and I’m hopeful that they get used to things a lot faster than that.  I’m spending a lot of time on the phone with them, and I’ve got 5 other primary firms that I’ve somewhat neglected since MMC on-boarded.  They’ve been fun to work with, however.  Nice people.

I tried to get some sleep yesterday – don’t have much time to do so during the week – but I still have things to do at home.  Managed to get a few loads of laundry done and to straighten up my bedroom.  Still need to mow the lawns, but storms rolled in yesterday afternoon and nixed any idea of working outside.  I should also mention that it was about 90 degrees and humid, so outdoor work would have been incredibly uncomfortable.  Took a 3.6-mile walk this morning in a steady drizzle, and the rain is predicted to continue for much of this week, so my lawns are going to be a major pain to mow by next weekend.  I’d hoped to maybe try the mountains again, but it looks like I’ll be stuck at home to mow and do other home-type things.  Still need to fix the toilet in my half-bath.  Been meaning to do that for about 8 months now….

Learned a couple of weeks ago that I will not be able to take a vacation in July, so Ahmic Lake appears to be out this year.  I’m trying to decide if I want to go back to Lake Superior in October (haven’t asked if I can have that time off yet…perhaps I should) or if I can find something acceptable that’s closer to home.  Basically, I don’t want much in a place, but there are some non-negotiables:

  1. It has to be cool, bordering on cold.
  2. It has to have plenty of tree cover.
  3. I have to be alone, or as close to it as possible.
  4. It has to have water into which I can immerse myself.  A decent-sized stream, a lake, an ocean.  No ponds.
  5. It has to have wind.
  6. It has to be secluded enough to allow me to take long walks in the trees.

Superior, of course, has all of those things and is currently at the top of my list.  The drive is the only problem.  Not that it’s boring (it’s beautiful for much of the way) or that it tires me out: It just cuts into my time in the woods.  Figure 1 or 2 days to make the trip each way, and my vacation takes a serious hit.  At AT&T, it wasn’t that big of a deal.  I mean, I got something like 38 days off every year.  At The X Company, I think I get 10.  I’d rather not lose 3-4 of them driving.

So I’m considering places along the Atlantic…North Carolina, Virginia, perhaps Georgia or SC (although I think it’d be too hot and too crowded in those states, not to mention the fact that the beaches in GA and SC have very little tree cover).  Have been looking into the other great lakes that would be closer – Michigan, Erie, Ontario – but I don’t know if they’ve got the tree cover that I’m looking for, either.

One idea that I’ve been pondering is to head to Vermont, somewhere along the Long Trail, and maybe talk The X Company into letting me have a couple of days “on the clock” visiting with McSoley, McCoy.  Not sure if that’d fly or not, but I’d be willing to float the idea if I can find a perfect camping spot in, say, the Northeast Kingdom.

“Why not just go to Joyce Kilmer,” you ask?  That is a possibility, of course.  The only problem with it is that hunters and rednecks abound in that area in the fall.  The “alone” part of my list is pretty important.

One other idea is Unicoi State Park in Georgia.  I’ve never spent much time there, but it’s in the mountains, it’s got a lake, it’s got trails, it’s got cover, and it’d be chilly in October.  Biggest drawback is that, in October, the leaf-peepers will be coming out of the woodwork.  It’s got some walk-in campsites, however, so I might be able to get away from the crowds.  Going to do some more research on the park.  If I could make it work, it’d be fantastic.  It’s only about 3 hours away, and it really is a beautiful park.

And I think that’s about it for now.  Still plugging away, still dreaming about a retirement life in the woods, still a bit pissed off at AT&T (I doubt that I’ll ever get over that, to be honest), but still trying to keep a positive attitude.  A few more years.  I can last a few more years.

TWD

In Praise of Waze

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As a rule, I like software.  Installing a new program – or even reinstalling old programs – has always been sort of a Christmas morning thing for me.  Building out a new computer and then deciding what software to install just gets me pumped up.  Outside of playing my horn, there’s not much I’d rather do than install (and then play with) software.

That being said, I rarely like a program so much that I’m willing to give it unsolicited props.  It’s not often that a computer program, much less an app on a phone, literally changes my life.  Microsoft Access did in the early 90s.  It provided a combination solution for my love of databases and my desire to write code and launched me on a career that, to some extent, continues to this day.  Kindle (or, more generally, any book-reading application) changed the way that I read books.  Sure, I generally have one or two paperbacks in the bathroom, but I’ve been carrying libraries on my PDA/phones since the late 90s, and whenever I have 5 or 10 minutes of down time, I open a book and read a few pages.  Never really did that before eBooks hit the scene.

And now there’s Waze, an app that I installed on my phone just over a week ago, after my commutes to and from work had begun to convince me – seriously – that I would have to quit my job before I had a stroke (or just a nervous breakdown).  I was complaining about my drive to one of the guys who was hired on the same day as I was, and he casually tossed out, “Just get Waze.”

I had to google the thing.  Thought it was spelled “Ways,” which would make sense for a mapping application.  Then I found it.  Read about it.  Installed it on my Windows phone.  And couldn’t get past the initial agreement screen because it was so poorly written.

Turns out the Google had purchased Waze a few years ago and had stopped supporting Windows phone.  But I was so intrigued by the idea of a crowd-sharing mapping program that I took my Android phone, which I had had fixed after it broke last year, but had never put back into service, up to the AT&T store and told them to make it a real phone again.

That’s right.  I abandoned Windows phone just so I could try this app.  And I made the right choice.

The first day that I used Waze to drive to work, it started me out in the “wrong” direction.  Literally had me turning left at the end of my road, away from work, instead of right.  But I thought to myself, “What the hell.  It’s going to take me an hour anyway.  I might as well see something new.”

Would you believe that I got to work in under 30 minutes?  Or that, except for the last 1/2 mile – which is always going to be gridlocked – I wasn’t stuck in traffic at all?  Or that I was regularly exceeding the speed limit, driving on little back roads that I didn’t even know existed?

I thought it was a fluke.  “Wonder what it’ll do to get me home,” I thought.  At 6:00 in the evening, after all, there’s NO WAY to get from Alpharetta to Duluth in under 75 minutes.

Waze got me home in under 40.  I was blown away.  I actually walked through the door of my house with a smile on my face.

So I used Waze for a few days going back and forth to work, and then decided to try it out on last weekend’s GBB tour through Alabama and Tennessee.  It worked okay.  Pretty much gave me the same directions as my Garmin, which is the go-to GPS for my long trips.

That is, it gave me the same directions until my trip home from Chattanooga last Sunday afternoon.  I’m cruising down 75 and Waze suddenly chirps at me “Standstill ahead.  Take exit blah blah and go WAAAAAY the hell out of your way.”

I paraphrase.

Since I didn’t have to be anywhere until Monday morning, I gave Waze the benefit of the doubt, and I took exit blah blah – which is the exit that I used to take when going camping in the middle of nowhere – and let it lead me home.  Which it did, again finding little roads that I never knew about.  I got home at about the time I’d expected to.

As it turned out, there was a major pile-up on 75, about 5 miles south of where I exited.  Had I continued to follow my Garmin, I would’ve been stuck in traffic for about two additional hours.  This little FREE app not only determined that my traffic was about to suck, but also figured out a way around it on the fly.  My Garmin would’ve eventually told me that traffic sucked (probably when it was too late to change course), and then would have waited for me to tell it to find a new route.

Waze also sends me updates about things on the route.  It will tell me, for example, “There’s heavy traffic 9 miles away on Kimball Bridge Road” when I leave my house.  This is a given.  There’s always heavy traffic on KBR.  But it will also tell me, “Be careful.  There’s road kill in your way in a mile.”  Or “Police radar in two miles.”  And it’ll put a little icon on my map telling me where the dead dog or the cop is.  It warns of cars parked on the shoulder, water in the road, school busses stopping…anything that a normal person would notice – because it’s normal people updating the thing.

And so I sincerely offer this blog post in praise of Waze.  It has definitely changed my drive, made me a happier person, and – possibly – lengthened my life.

Thank you, whoever invented this wonderful program.