Old Stuff

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