Hi, Al. Welcome to the extremely small club. I see that you’re quite a bit more prolific with your postings than am I, which is a good thing. It’ll give me something new to read at work.
It is a rather beautiful day in ye olde Duluthe, with temps in the 50s, a slight breeze, and a sun that doesn’t want to quit. Bo is quite happily sitting in my lap as I type this, keeping my legs warm and hypnotizing me with his purrs. He’ll have to get over that (as will I) fairly shortly, as I need to take a shower, get my tax stuff over to Jenny’s place, and go to a quintet rehearsal.
So I’ll type fast and try to catch everybody up on the carnival that was my most recent week of life.
Chris hit the road last weekend for the dreaded visit to one of her possible schools. Yeah. One of. The one she visited was about 9 hours away, but now she’s also looking at one that’s about 9 million miles away. She got to the place last Sunday, got her visiting and other things done on Monday, drove halfway home Monday night, and ended up at my house Tuesday afternoon, where she choked down some of my jambalaya and promptly fell asleep on my couch.
I haven’t heard much about her impressions of the place, and I’m not going to spend a lot of time asking about them. I’m too busy trying to convince her that the whole school is infested by extremely large cockroaches and that doctoral candidates there are generally considered to be socially inept and never get jobs and are the butts of very bawdy jokes.
Anyway, while she was doing that, I was doing very very little. I practiced my horn a bit on Sunday, got a call cancelling my Monday-night lesson, and began rearranging my music room in order to make room for a number of bookcases which had been in my bedroom.
I later reorganized the bedroom as well. Also took all of the photos off of the wall in the living room in preparation for painting at some point.
On Monday – everybody take note of this – I GOT MY ROOF FIXED! Kent, one of the trumpet players in my quintet, is a landlord with several properties and he set me up with “his man, Juan,” who apparently enjoys fixing holes in roofs. Somehow, Juan convinced me to actually climb to the very top of my roof (a first for me), where he very diligently tried to point out to me the 5 cracked boots and various loose shingles. Between his broken English and my sheer terror, we set the price at $270, and a few hours (and a trip to Home Depot) later, he was done.
Since then, naturally, it hasn’t rained. For all I know, he made the holes bigger.
The rest of the work week was pretty much a blur. I took care of a few outstanding projects (got kudos for one of them during a team meeting), completed three or four mandatory training things, filled out administrative crap for salary treatments for this year, etc. I’ll have plenty to keep me busy this week.
Thursday night, I had a pretty nice dinner at a Greek place in downtown Macon with Chris. After dinner, we walked around a very chilly Macon and then hung out at a Starbucks for about an hour before I hit the road back to Atlanta. During the drive back, I got a somewhat disturbing call from Dad, who wished to make sure that I planned to visit him and Mom on Saturday. She apparently was semi-coherent that evening, and Dad was obviously shaken – as, I must admit, was I.
I left for SC early yesterday morning and managed to grab breakfast with Greg before heading the the ‘rents house, where I had a couple of nice chats with Mom. She is extremely thin (hell of a diet plan) and jaundiced (we’ll call her “bronzed”), but otherwise very much in control and referring to herself as, “The Queen.”
Jenny and her parents came up later in the afternoon, and by some miracle I’d managed to convince Mom that she was most certainly not a hideous-looking person – she broke her rule about “family only” and spent an hour or two chatting with Herb and Andi and Jenny.
I got home at about 7:00 last night and was emotionally and physically exhausted, so I hit the sack by 8:00 and slept until 10:00 this morning.
Cy is due in South Carolina this Wednesday, so I’m planning on going up again next Saturday to see her and the folks.
As it is now very nearly the time I told Jenny I’d bring her my tax stuff and I still haven’t taken a shower, I think I’d better wrap this up and do that.
One of the things Mom and I talked about yesterday was a Carolina Youth Symphony east coast tour that we took in 1983. I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but Mom was one of the chaperones for the trip. She scored extremely high marks with the girls in the woodwind section (two of whom I would later date – 1 of whom I began dating on that trip, actually), and also made her presence known in Washington, DC, when she insisted that the bus stop to let me and a trombone player out so that we could tour the senate office building rather than doing whatever stupid thing that had been planned for the rest of the orchestra.
I remember that day quite clearly – she’d forgotten all about it, and seemed shocked that she was such a pit bull during my high-school days.
TWD