I couldn’t think of a decent title for this entry, but that seems to work. I went on a redneck holiday recently, I’ve got a couple of 
brass band gigs coming up, and one of the original names for the GBB was (no kidding!) “Rednecks with Horns,” so….there it is.
Work for the last two weeks has been mostly annoying, but punctuated by moments of pleasantness when I actually got things to work that I hadn’t known how to do before. I’ve been working pretty much exclusively on a “ticket scrubbing” system, which gives users the ability to edit information in trouble tickets, generate reports on those tickets, etc. I’ve been using the <cfdiv> tag in my coding a lot lately and writing *a lot* of javascript functions (recall that that was one of my goals this year). Add to that my recent experimentation with FusionCharts, and there have been days that I’ve really enjoyed coding.
The annoyances have been caused mainly by an 
inept project manager who doesn’t have a clue about managing projects and continually lets the end users email me with requests for “aesthetic” changes to the program (yes, it’s a program – we’ve gone far beyond “webpages” here), which are generally “minor tweaks” that destabilize the entire project and cause me to have to rewrite numerous pages, resulting in unforeseen errors to other pages and yada yada yada. These same users also have an extremely annoying habit of changing formulae on me.
I can deal with their changes. Users have never known what they want. But scope-creep (and this project is the poster child for that phenomenon) is *supposed* to be contained by the project manager. As I said, the PM on this project is clueless and I wish she’d just get out of the way, rather than calling for conference calls every three days and constantly pinging me to ask how things are going.
After the brass festival at the beginning of the month, the GBB took a week off from rehearsing, which was nice but left me absolutely bewildered about what to do with myself one Tuesday night.
Betsy Jones and I went to two redneck staples near my house last Saturday afternoon: Stone Mountain Park and The Yellow River Game Ranch. The former is (I believe) the largest slab of exposed granite on the planet and features a huge carving of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson on its face. During the warm months, this carving is the backdrop for a nightly laser and fireworks show, which hasn’t changed much in the last 20 years. What at one time was a pretty amazing technological display has become a fairly passé way to waste an hour while listening to diehard confederate sympathizers burst into rebel yells while listening to patriotic music and watching a laser trace out illustrations of a reunited north and south.
The rest of Stone Mountain Park is given over to your usual tourist-trap “country” stores, a campground (which I really need to check out sometime), various walking trails, a skylift, a train, a very small museum (which used to be free but is now, I learned last weekend, something that you must pay to see) and various other attractions that can only be found where one has access to the world’s largest exposed hunk of granite. Betsy and I spent probably 4 hours walking around, taking pictures, and laughing at people.
Prior to that, we went to the Yellow River Game Ranch, which is quite near the park and contains a menagerie that can only be thought of as a redneck zoo. The YRGR’s tagline is (I’m not making this up), “Like a zoo. Only better.”
One must assume that they chose this line of advertising because 1.the animals contained in the place are not what one would generally expect to find in a zoo, and 2.visitors are generally encouraged to feed said animals just about anything that they (the people) can think of. It would not be considered odd, for example, to throw marshmallows at caged 
coyotes in the YRGR. Other attractions of the YRGR include chickens (some caged, some wandering around free); rabbits; peacocks; a supposedly “talking” crow in a cage; a number of extremely bored black bears; a large enclosure wherein one is encouraged to pet rabbits; a cage containing approximately 9000 racoons; a toothless mountain lion which gums a hung of round beef once or twice a day; a herd of 100 or so deer (which wander around and have absolutely no fear of the people who attempt to feed them everything from peanut butter to steak); several donkeys, goats, pigs and sheep; some bison; some bobcats; turtles; geese that apparently enjoy French fries; and – the crown jewel of the whole place – a woodchuck named General Lee who annually prognosticates on the nearness of Spring (a la Puxatawney Phil).
I’ve been to the YRGR several times in the last two decades and I have to laugh and cry simultaneously each time I go. It’s so pathetic it’s funny. But let’s face it: who doesn’t want to see what happens when a gray fox is tempted by, say, a handful of Sugar Frosted Flakes?
On Sunday, I drove up to Travelers Rest to hang out with Dad, Cy, Greg (and his family) and Dianne for Mothers Day. Greg fired up the grill at Di’s house and we chowed down on burgers, dogs, coconut, corn on the cob, and various other summer cookout foods. Had a nice afternoon just hanging with the family and not thinking about anything. Dianne’s got a really nice little chunk of the planet.
This past week at work was a repeat of the previously-outlined week, and seemed to last about 12 years, in spite of the fact that the GBB resumed rehearsals on 
Tuesday and my life – at least for that one night – resumed normalcy. Friday finally came, however, and I left work early to go walk around some cemeteries and grab dinner with Chris in Macon. I must say that her face was a most welcome sight.
The forecast is calling for rain all weekend, but as I sit here (naked, in bed, at 10AM Saturday), the weather outside is nearly perfect. I’m told that there’s a balloon festival in NW Georgia today and tomorrow, and I’m considering driving up there today for some photographing fun. Tomorrow, however, I’ve got a concert in Chamblee with the band. Looking forward to that.
Hope everyone has a great time until I next update this thing. Don’t put no beans up your noses.
TWD