For the second straight night, I ended things off (before bed) by siting in a tub full of hot water – infused with some sort of oil that’s supposed to make my back less itchy in cold weather.  It worked yesterday, so here’s hoping it works today too.

I was going to write a bunch here about other things, but I don’t feel it right now.

Tomorrow, however, I’m going to vent about the brass band board of directors.

Stay tuned.

How’s it going, Al?  🙂

TWD

I have nothing to add tonight.  I’m simply typing this to keep my string of posts going.

For dinner tonight, I had jambalaya.  It really is the perfect food – particularly during No Dairy January.  The picture in this entry was taken during a game against Western Carolina in November, 2004.

The Post A Day suggested topic for today was, “Why did you start a blog?”

Initially, I was inclined to blow that topic off, as I have all of the suggestions.  Then I looked at what I’d done today (that’d be nothing, friends and neighbors) and figured I’d give it a shot.

The long and the short of it is that I started this thing because I was lonely.  I’d been divorced for about 18 months (separated for a good deal longer than that), had recently had a major falling-out with a girlfriend, was watching my best friend die a slow death, had been seeing my company shrink steadily for close to two years, and I wanted to do something to make myself feel better.

Blank pages have always comforted me.  When I was little, there wasn’t much that I liked more than a brand new notebook because it had all those clean pages just begging me to write something on them.  In high school and college, I’d quite often bring a notebook with me to orchestra rehearsals (where the tuba didn’t play much) or honor band rehearsals (where most of the work is done with the woodwinds) and pen conversations with myself.

I know that that sounds wrong, but it’s not.  I transcribed conversations between two voices in my head.  If you’re wondering, there was no plot.  There was no thought.  There was just knee-jerk writing stuff down. A typical conversation may have started off something like this:

• What are you doing here?
• Why would you ask me that?  I’m always here.  You’re the guy who’s always late!
• Well excuse the hell outta me!  I didn’t know we were punching a time clock!
• Dude, you couldn’t punch your way out of a wet diaper. 
• Oh that is SO mature of you.  What are you, 6?
• That’s not what your mom said last night.
• My mother was in church last night, you moron.

 …and so it would go for pages at a time.  The two voices never liked each other, they never actually made much sense, and only occasionally did they realize that there was a third person there – the guy holding the pen.

The men’s soccer coach and his son watch some American football. Two of his players that year are in the pros today and both have played on the US World Cup team.  One of them, a guy named Dempsey, is one of the best players in the world. 11/2/2004

Either just before or just after I got married, I managed to lose all of the notebooks with my conversations in them.  That’s always bothered me, as I had fun going back and reading some of the back-and-forth years later.  Not to mention the fact that there were other things in those notebooks that I liked.  Short stories, poems, letters that were never mailed….I even started a play at one point about a guy named Ralph Jenson.  Who he was is anybody’s guess.  I called myself Ralph Jenson for about two weeks during my junior year in high school, and the play had the character set as a knight.  He was on his way to rescue a damsel, I believe.  I don’t remember the female character’s name, but she was based on Fara Lockaby, who was my girlfriend at the time.  A number of other high school friends also had characters based on them.  I was probably 50 pages into writing the thing when I let it drop.  Like the conversations, it was never really meant to be anything.  It was just a way to pass time.

When computers started becoming fairly standard – somewhere around my junior or senior year at college – the comfort that I got from a blank piece of paper somewhat naturally evolved into a comfort that came from that blinking green cursor on a blank CRT screen.  My mother had a Kay-Pro “portable” computer that she used to type papers for college kids, and I sometimes borrowed it from her for my own papers.  More often than not, I’d end up writing essays about nothing or short stories or deliberately bad poetry – just because I liked filling up that screen.  And when I had a printer, it was a bonus.  I could fill up the computer screen first and then print out my garbage onto blank pieces of paper.  An epistolary two-fer!

Somewhere around the house, I still have some of those writings.  I used one of them as a part of my portfolio quite regularly when, in the late 80’s, I was bouncing around trying to land a journalism gig.  It (the story) was basically just a description of an evening that I spent on a sand dune at Myrtle Beach, SC.  For some reason, I thought it might show newspaper people that I could write.

After I moved to Atlanta and found out the hard way that I wasn’t going to land a job with a paper, I started writing my own.  It was called “The Thermonuclear Arrow” and was a completely tongue-in-cheek newsletter for my darts team, “The Terminators.”  Published weekly (“published” being a strong word…I usually printed out about 10 copies for my team), it chronicled the team’s successes and failures during league play, enthralled readers with stories of what the team did for fun when not playing darts, offered advice to young dart players, and even followed the harrowing story of Lex Luther, a team member who was brutally murdered by our team captain, Dan Briley….until it was discovered that Lex wasn’t actually dead.

I still have several issues of the newsletter, too.

So early one morning in June of 2005, when I was feeling sad and lonely and desperately wanted comfort, I sat down at the table in my breakfast nook, opened up my laptop, and said to myself, “Self – there are about 40 trillion blank pages on the internet, so why don’t you fill a few of them up?  Just write something.  It doesn’t have to be about anything.  Nobody’s going to read the stuff anyway.”

And there it was.  Stuff Nobody Reads.  Stuff that really was never meant to be read.  It was just stuff to make me feel better.

Generally, it still does.

TWD

Worked at home again today, thanks to very cold temperatures last night that turned most of the surface streets around metro Atlanta into skating rinks.  I drove to a convenience store to get some coffee this morning, but decided that that distance (about 1 mile total) was enough.

You think I’m kidding about the skating rinks, right?  Check it out:

The day wasn’t half bad, work-wise, though.  I got a new request from my PM asking me to use jQuery to enhance a report that I wrote late last year.  Having never used that set of tools before (though I’ve wanted to), I was a bit leery of the assignment; but an hour or so on Google and 30 minutes of experimenting did the trick.  Client’s happy, PM is happy, and I learned something new today.

One of the trucks in the neighborhood gives testimony about the recent ice storm

It certainly looks like I’ll be home again tomorrow at this point.  With the exception of about an hour today when the mercury pushed up into the mid-30s, it has been bitterly cold (for Atlanta) all day.  Temps tonight are supposed to be in the low-mid 20s, so I don’t see the roads being any better in the morning than they were today.

I heard the other day that there are eleven (11!) sand trucks in the Atlanta metropolitan area.  People wonder why a decent winter storm can knock this city on its butt for a week…

I also woke up with a cold this morning.  Have been sneezing my head off for most of the day and going through kleenex like whatever a good metaphor is for going through kleenex.  Don’t know where that came from, other than maybe the fact that I haven’t been outside for more than 30 minutes in the last three days.

Wish I had more to write about, but my house just isn’t all that interesting.

On the No Dairy January front, for those of you keeping track, I had noodles in a cup for lunch and rice….just freaking rice….for dinner.  Yum.

TWD

I’m not going to do a post today.

Oh wait.   I just did.

View out the front window at 6:30 AM

Please pardon the crappy photographs.  I took them with my iPhone this morning.  As you can see, it did indeed snow in Atlanta last night.  We got about 6″ of the stuff, which is the most I’ve seen here since about 2000, when we had a major storm that pretty much shut down Atlanta for a week.  As it is, I doubt I’ll be able to get back to the office before Wednesday.

Of course, not being able to go to the office is not a big deal for an intrepid IT guy like me.  I had my laptop at home thanks to the fact that I worked remotely last Thursday and Friday, so I just sat on the couch and did my work thing for most of the day.  Had a conference call with a client in Texas and nailed down some details for a huge dashboard that I’m working on for him, then spent half of the day trading instant messages with another guy who can’t figure out how to use another dashboard.

Also walked around my neighborhood at lunch and took a few pictures with a real camera.

Snowdrifts on the deck

I had a couple of pork chops for lunch, along with the risotto left over from a week or so ago.  No dairy there.  For dinner, I made some noodles in a cup.  Also found some old hot cocoa mix that seemed like a perfect thing to drink on a cold and snowy evening.  Betsy Jones pointed out to me via text message that the cocoa had powdered milk in it.

Dammit.  I didn’t know that.

But hey.  She’s eating eggs.  I consider eggs to be dairy, and I’ve taken them off of my menu for the month.  So pbtbtbtbtbtbt…

I felt bad for the birds and squirrels and raccoons and other critters that live in my yard, so threw a few handfuls of birdseed on the snow.  At last check, none of the ungrateful bastards had bothered to sample it.  I checked on my yard cats, though, and at least one of them was taking advantage of the little dome (actually the top of a litter box) that I put in a corner of the yard as a shelter for them.  That’s nice to know.  I like having the cats in the yard.  Hopefully, they take care of mice and other things that I’d rather not have eating my house.

The front yard

Having not much else to do, I’m already in my bed (it’s 8:00) for the night.  I’ll probably watch a movie on Netflix and maybe catch part of the BCS “National Championship” game, but should still be asleep well before my normal bedtime.

Gotta love being snowbound.

TWD

Well.

I slept until fairly late this morning (after feeding the cats, of course), and then did a bit of internetting to see if I could find some graveyards that I didn’t know about.  I found two in Dunwoody, which is a town about 12 miles from where I live.  I spent several hours wandering around those, resulting in enough pictures to make this post interesting.

At least I hope it’s interesting.

Currently, I’m watching Green Bay play Philadelphia in the NFL playoffs.  Atlanta, winners of the NFC South, has a bye week.  We’ll be playing Seattle next weekend.

Not much else to say today.  Still waiting for snow.

TWD

The pictures embedded in this entry are from a disk I found that was labelled “Desktop/My Documents, June 2004.”  Just so you know.

Bo’s first day at home – August, 2003

That post title refers to a 1983 song by Talking Heads.  It (the title) popped into my head at about 7:00 last night after I put too many duraflame logs in my fireplace.  I wanted to have a nice roaring fire going when Chris got here.  Instead, she arrived to find me standing on my deck staring at the chimney, carrying a pulse rate of about 220.  The roaring fire had been reduced, thanks to a couple of coffee pots of water, to a steaming pile of wet duraflame logs.  The living room, which had until moments earlier smelled like Christmas cookies (no, I wasn’t baking – I had a scented candle), was permeated by the festive odor of burning tires (did you know that wet, semi-burned duraflame logs smell like 18-wheelers in flames?).

After a few much-needed hugs, I calmed down.

All the excitement of the move tuckered Bo out

I must make a special explanatory foray here for any members of my family who are reading this, because our house really did burn down in 1967 – and everyone except for me probably remembers it and would rather not.  The above story is not meant to imply that I actually did set my house on fire last night.  Rather, it illustrates that I’m an incredibly cautious (probably overcautious) guy when it comes to having fires in my fireplace.  The flames got higher than I wanted them to get, so I doused the fire.  That’s it.  No real drama.  In fact, I later got everything burning again, chopped up the logs so that they’d burn faster, and sat and watched everything until I was satisfied that everything was going according to plan.   I’m paranoid about chimney fires, so when my flu starts to get too hot, I tend to freak out a bit.  No crisis, no story, no nothing. Just something to fill space in this here blog.

Bo’s first bed and his first bunkmate.

Dinner, after the smoke cleared out of the kitchen and the stench of liquified rubber lessened somewhat, was quite good, if a bit on the garlicky side.  Chris likes garlic.  I like garlic.  We had so much garlic going on that it was nearly too much for me….and necking on the couch was out of the question.

Instead, we attempted to watch the movie Final Countdown, then gave up on that and instead watched a few episodes of 30 Rock.  Later on, we did indeed make it through Final Countdown, then slept from about 1:30 this morning until 2:00 this afternoon, at which time we finished off the leftover garlic and attempted to watch the first Lord of the Rings movie.  Chris is a big L.O.T.R. fan.  I, frankly, have never really gotten into it.  Not the books, not the movies and not the books on tape.  It is interesting to note, therefore, that Chris slept through most of the movie while I fought off sleep and watched it.  I won’t say that I followed it.  I mean, it ended about 4 hours ago and I couldn’t give you a plot line right now; but I did stay awake for it.

Vermont Christmas, 2003

I’ll try again with it some night this week.  I feel at times like I’m really missing out on some of the “classic” literature that I just don’t enjoy.  Tolkien has never worked for me.  Neither has Faulkner.  I’m just about ready to give up on Emma, the first book by Jane Austen that I’ve ever tried to read.  The book 1984?  Never read it, although I did enjoy Orwell’s Animal Farm.  Other books that I probably should have read, but just never did: Fahrenheit 451.  The Iliad.  Ulysses.  Anything by Hemingway.  Anything by anyone named Bronte.

I blame Cy.  She got me hooked on children’s literature when I was a child, and that’s still my favorite genre.

Took this while camping in TN in January, 2004

Great Expectations, however,  is a major kickass book.  Does that fulfill my “classic” quota?  I’m also rather fond of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye, if that means anything.

I am now officially off of the Georgia Brass Band’s board of directors.  It was announced via email yesterday that the sitting board (which I was on) approved the election of the new board (which I am not), by a 5-3 margin.  As should be expected, even this announcement resulted in a virtual shouting match between a few folks.  I wish it to be known that I do feel bad about throwing in the towel with the BOD.  I’ll continue to do what I can for the band – I’ll run the website, I’ll pitch ideas to the director, I’ll push our CD wherever I can and I’ll do whatever I’m asked to do (within reason).  I might even still attend some of the board meetings.  Life is too short, however, for me to get my blood pressure jacked up because one or two people don’t understand that a community band isn’t the place for petty politics and ego.  What type of person thinks that arguments about nothing of substance are enjoyable?

I certainly don’t.

Jenny holds up Bo in September, 2003

Temperatures around the area were close to 60 early this afternoon, but plummeted at around 4:00.  Currently, we’re in the high 20s, and it is expected to remain cool for the next several days.  Maybe that snow actually will come.  That’s okay.  I’ve got a house.

Until I burn it down.

TWD

Wow.

I thought about changing the title for this post, but then I liked the way it looked.  That’s basically what happens when you sit down at a keyboard, don’t get your fingers lined up in the home position, and attempt to type “Productive Day.”

For all you people snickering out there, I’ve been known to type at close to 140 wpm.  So shut up.

I’m typing this at around 3:00 Friday afternoon because, as hoped, Chris is coming over tonight for dinner. I like typing and all; but I think that, given a choice between hanging out with her tonight or trying to keep a streak of blog entries going, I’ll take the former.   On the dinner menu, if you’re asking, is angel hair pasta,  some sort of sauce for it, French bread with garlic, and Fresca.  Or ginger ale.  Or something like that.

No dairy, at any rate.

As noted earlier, the title for this entry was to have been “Productive Day,” because I’ve actually gotten quite a bit done today.  In addition to regular work stuff (I wrapped up the mobility dashboard and have asked my project manager for more work), I did a few loads of laundry, washed some dishes, cleaned my toilet, and went grocery shopping.  Also scooped the litter box, but that’s pretty much a daily thing.

They’re calling for several inches of snow in Atlanta between Sunday and Tuesday.  I’ll believe it when I see it.

The Post A Day suggestion for today’s topic is “How do you stay focused?”

Bottom line:  I concentrate all of my will on the task at hand and never lose sight of my goa – ooh look!  A puppy!

TWD

I don’t know exactly how long I’ve been working at it, but I finally managed to get the MacBook operating system updated to v10.6 this morning. Except for the fact that I can now install some decent applications (I couldn’t previously), there’s not much difference between 10.6 and 10.4.

Rose on the deck.  April, 2004

That doesn’t matter. It’s the principle of the thing. No laptop is going to beat me.

Other than that, I didn’t get much done today that wasn’t actually related to my real job. Didn’t do anything with the android development, didn’t get any laundry done (I’d hoped to, but I guess I’ll take care of that tomorrow)….really didn’t do anything other than sit on the couch, take part in a couple of team meetings, and go through metrics code.

I did get a chance to talk to Chris, and dinner is on for tomorrow. So I guess I’ll be shopping for groceries at some point.

On the No Dairy front, I had red beans and rice and kielbasa for lunch and another boil-in-the package noodle thing for dinner.

It had shrimp in it.

I guess you can see (if you’ve read this blog before) that I’ve tweaked the layout just a tiny bit.  It seemed like it was time.  I’d had the basic black setup for a couple of years.  It’s classic and all, but I wanted something different.  Tonight was the first time in a long time that I’ve actually looked under the hood at blogger.  They’ve made some big strides since I started this thing.  Well done.

TWD