Monthly Archives: July 2024

Dog Days

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Mojo (Sandie’s little dog) went to the vet yesterday. He (the dog) wasn’t particularly thrilled about this, but he had (probably still has) an ear infection that looked nasty, smelled disgusting, and was obviously bothering him. Sandie spent some time Monday night torturing him by pulling hair out of his ear, and I couldn’t stand listening to him yelp, so I insisted that he go to the vet.

Ear looks better and doesn’t smell anymore. And I didn’t have to hear him scream.

In other news, it has been hot and rainy since we returned from Canada last week. The yard is slowly growing into a jungle because it’s always raining – or when it’s not it’s like walking into a steam room whenever you go outside, so nobody has felt much like mowing. I’ve been spending some time in my shop redecorating. Pulling cabinets off of walls, reconfiguring them, planning in my mind how I want things to look. It’s a slow process, but should give me a lot more bench space when all is said and done.

Work is beginning to really bore me. I feel more sorry for the folks that I used to supervise every day, because doing tech support is just so uninspiring. You fix one thing and there are 10 more lined up to look at. Half of the questions seem to be variations of “Why doesn’t report A match report B?” My knee jerk response has always been, “Because they’re different reports,” but that wouldn’t fly, so I end up going into the database and comparing the reports on a line-by-line level until I can pinpoint exactly which record is missing from one report or the other, and it’s always because, for whatever reason, that record shouldn’t BE on report A or B and the user has done something stupid. I can’t explain this to them in technical terms, and I don’t understand it in accounting terms, so I usually end up finding the issue and then asking a teammate to translate for me. It’s just…boring. I like having projects that have endings. This type of support just doesn’t have those. Don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to do it.

Got a call from a group of doctors who stick cameras up your butt a few days ago. Seems that my doc REALLY wants them to do this to me. I’ve avoided it for nearly 60 years, but I guess I’ll bite the bullet and get it done, if only to get Sandie off of my back about it. Not something that I’m looking forward to, although I am a bit curious about how much weight I’ll lose during the purge process before I do it. That could be interesting.

Football season is only a month or so away. So that’s nice.

Not much else to say today. Maybe something amazing will happen tonight.

To Canada and Back

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Sandie and I got in the car two Fridays ago (July 5th) and pointed it north for our third annual sojourn to Magnetawan, Ontario. Stayed in Perrysburg, OH, Friday night and arrived at Camp Ulvik mid-afternoon on the 6th.

We spent a week there, doing what people do for a week at The Mag – sitting on the porch or our cabin, jumping in the lake, eating great food, drinking good bourbon (or, in Sandie’s case, wine), playing cards, visiting Parry Sound and Huntsville, eating pierogis from the snack bar in town, and generally relaxing with friends and family. The group this year was composed of Cy, “T,” Jamie Tall and his partner Alee (pronounced “Allie”), Trude and her friend Wayne, and Sandie and myself. An older group (Alee, at 29, was the baby by far), we may have done more sleeping and less “athleting” than in years past, but Jamie, Sandie, Cy, “T” and I did get a couple of hours in on the tennis court late in the week. The fence around the court was replaced (at ridiculous expense) sometime between last summer and this, and it seemed a shame to waste the opportunity.

Sunset on Ahmic Lake

It did rain a couple of times. For the most part, however, the weather was phenomenal. It was pretty drizzly for most of the day Monday or Tuesday, so we all went to Parry Sound and – except for Cy and “T” – we took a 2-hour cruise around the Georgian Bay on the Island Princess. I’d never done that before. It was interesting and a good way to kill a couple of hours. Not something I’d put on a “must do” list by any means. Particularly at $56/person.

There were at least 11 loons in the cove near our cabin, which was pretty sweet. I only heard them a few times, but it’s nice to know that the population is doing okay.

Last Saturday (July 12th), we packed up and hit the road by about 10AM. Crossed back into the States at Port Huron, MI, (the Blue Water Bridge there is terrifyingly high and narrow), and stayed in Lima, OH, Saturday night. Got home at around 7 Sunday evening, much to the joy of Mojo, Sandie’s little dog – and hopefully Joshua and Chamberlain were also pleased to have me back. They were not as ebullient in their happiness as was Mojo.

The 2024 Ulvik Gang

I wasn’t thrilled to get back to work on Monday morning, but fortunately I got another respite on Tuesday. The big boss came over from England, so the service team met him out our office (yes, there’s actually an office in Atlanta), where he went over our new application with us for a few hours and then took us all out for an afternoon of lunch and bowling, It was the first time that I’d ever met three of my 5 co-workers, including my immediate supervisor. The bowling alley SUCKED (after two rolls, I didn’t even try to shoot well), but being able to see people who I’ve only known from Teams meetings for the last two years was nice.

Interviews and Shop Renovations

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I was working in my shop last weekend (on the aforementioned closet shelves) and started looking around and seeing wasted space and other inefficiencies. When Sandie bought the house, the shop was outfitted with what were obviously cabinets that had at some point been in a kitchen. There was a long rank of cabinets along the back wall with a kitchen sink in the middle of it. Two ranks of overhead cabinets were mounted on the side walls. Another floor rank ran along one of the walls. And there were a few of basically stand-alone cabinets scattered here and there. They weren’t in the best places, but I guess they were fairly functional, the sink notwithstanding.

Sandie had a long workbench that her father had made, so we put that in the shop as well.

Then Sandie decided to remodel her kitchen….and I added most of THOSE kitchen cabinets to the shop. Took the kitchen island, added some casters, made it a mobile workbench. Moved the other stuff around against the walls. Made a little “L” on one wall. There was, to put it mildly, a lot of counter/bench space – and not a lot of room for anything else.

Over the past couple of years, as I’ve tinkered around with the shop layout, I’ve come to the conclusion that probably 50% of the cabinets are completely unused. And this weekend, I noticed that the long rank of overheads that had been there from the start (in which I’ve been storing lots and lots of paint) are most decidedly bowing in the middle. Add to that the fact that the paint is not very organized, making it difficult to find what’s needed, and I decided that it was time to make some changes.

I haven’t really figured out what those changes will be, but I’m sure that at least THAT set of overheads is coming down and probably being relegated to a pile of scrap wood or a dumpster. First, though, I need a place for the paint. So I build a couple of simple shelf sets out of plywood, which will hang on cleats on the wall. That was my Sunday project. Came out pretty good, and each unit holds 16 gallons of paint. Now all I have to do is figure out where I’m going to hang them. Once I’ve done that, I can commence with taking down that set of cabinets. I have NO idea how I’m going to do that without hurting myself, but it needs to be done, and it will start the process of making a great workshop.

One of the paint storage units I built on Sunday. Much easier to locate the correct paint now…

In other news, we interviewed 5 folks for the director of the GBB job last week. One more to go (next week, when I’m in Canada). No clear leader at this point, and it’s going to be tough to whittle the 6 down to three finalists, who will each take a concert series this year to help us (and the band) decide who gets the gig. Some have very strong administrative skills, others have strong brass band experience. I’m kind of hoping we can get one of the latter as the primary director, and one of the former as an associate.