Time to catch up

Well, it’s only been a few weeks since my last entry, but it feels like three months have gone by since I put everything in the car and hit the road out of Magnetawan, headed for Grand Rapids, MI.

I got up fairly early on Thursday, September 16, though not early enough to have had to set the alarm or anything.  My plan was to be on the road by about 9AM, and I did that after taking a shower in the farmhouse and doing a last walk-through of the camp.

It was an absolutely gorgeous sunny morning when I left, but that didn’t last long.  By the time I got to King, Ontario, it had begun to rain – and the rain continued more or less all day long.   One notable exception was, thankfully, at customs in Port Huron, MI.  For only the second time in the last 20 years, I was subjected to having my car searched.

More specifically, it was x-rayed.

Oh, it wasn’t just me.  I just happened to be the first one in a string of about 5 cars that was apparently selected for a random x-raying.  The guy at the customs booth asked me virtually nothing other than, “What nationality are you?” Once I told him (American, for those of you keeping track), he stared at his little computer screen for about 3 minutes without saying a word, then told me to pull forward “until that guy up there tells you to stop.”

Said guy had me stop 50 yards up the road and promptly ignored me for 10 minutes while this whole process was repeated with the 4 or 5 vehicles immediately behind me.  At that point, the aforementioned guy told me to leave everything in my car and walk back past all of the other cars until I was “behind the orange barrels.”

I did so, along with everyone else in the other cars.  A large truck then drove slowly down one side of our cars, turned around, drove slowly back up the other side of our cars, and parked. 

We were then told we could go.   And it immediately resumed raining.

I got to Grand Rapids at around 5:00, checked into a hotel, had a quick dinner, and went to bed early.

On Friday, I picked up Betsy Jones from the GR airport and we spent the next two days in board meetings.  More specifically, we spent the next two days wasting a great deal of time and accomplishing basically nothing that couldn’t have been accomplished in 15 minutes over the internet.  We did, however, get a tour of a very nice hotel (The Amway Grand Hotel), which is the site of the 2011 brass band championships.

On Saturday night, I caught parts of the Furman/USC game over the internet.  The good guys lost, 38-19, but played pretty well against the #13 Gamecocks.

Sunday, we left at about 11AM and headed for Atlanta by way of East Lansing, where Betsy had gone to grad school, and then Adrian, where her parents live.  In E. Lansing, we stopped at an interesting little brewpub “…and Tuba Museum,” which was filled with about 1000 tubas, baritones, euphoniums, helicons, serpents – and outside there was a silver Conn 20-J literally steamrolled into the pavement.  Interesting place.

In Adrian, we got some lemonade from her parents, a tour of the house next door (which, along with all that it contains) was given to her parents when the previous owner died, a similar tour of her mother’s various quilts (the woman is a prize-winning quilter), and a demonstration of how her father is able to make squirrels beg for peanuts.  The one what we saw beg was named “Buddy.” There’s another one, named “Lugnuts,” apparently because he has/had a fairly severe inflammation of his squirrely man-parts.

Forgive me.  The name made me laugh pretty loudly.

The rest of the drive home was pretty straightforward, and I dropped Betsy off in Marietta at around 2:30 in the morning; then made my way to Duluth, where I hit the bed by around 4:00 and was asleep instantly.

I had Monday off, waded through my email on Tuesday, and was back into the swing of things at work by Wednesday, 9/22. 

Wednesday night, I had a rehearsal with a quintet at Duluth Perimeter Church, where I’d played for the July 4th weekend.  Everything seemed to go pretty well.  Thursday and Friday were uneventful.

Saturday, September 25, I headed up to Greenville and shot my first football game of the year.  The good guys won, 31-14, but I wasn’t overly impressed with their play.  Neither was I overly impressed with my pictures (which you can see at theuffp.smugmug.com).

On Sunday, I lounged around for most of the day before heading to Perimeter Church to play for the first two services in their new chapel.  Because we’d learned, after the Wednesday rehearsal, that we needed some more music, I brought along Bach’s Alleluia, which is a fairly straightforward, pretty piece.  I’ve played it probably 50-100 times.  We had a short rehearsal before the first service and it went off quite well, as it did for the service itself.

After a dinner break, we went back to play the second service, starting again with Alleluia.  Something – I have no idea what – went horribly awry within the first 15 bars of the piece, and the song that I’ve played 50-100 times became completely unrecognizable to me.  I struggled for much of the rest of the tune to try to find a pedal note upon which to sit or to pick out anything in the other parts that I could mimic or harmonize or anything else, but in the end it was no use.  This very pretty quintet piece sounded like something out of a bad horror flick until everyone finally came together for the last two bars.  At least we ended it right.

The rest of the service went quite well. 

Last week at work was nothing to write about.  I caught up on some projects and training while waiting for Saturday and my second football game of the year.  I did, however, find out that I’m finally setup to get U-Verse (ATT’s television offering), so I signed up for that, and it will be installed tomorrow.

Also took the car into the shop on Friday morning because the check light kept coming on.  Got an estimate for $800.  So, while U-Verse is being installed in my house, a few different parts will be getting installed in the car tomorrow.  Sigh.

Last Saturday was a beautiful day for a game, but Furman was absolutely crushed by tiny Wofford College, 38-17, and my pictures weren’t much better than the score.  I’ve spent the last couple of days policing my website and removing various variations of “we suck!” from the messageboards.

Here’s hoping the guys do a little better next Saturday.

 

TWD