That picture should give you a clue that I’ve been on vacation. I took it on July 5th in Magnetawan at about 10 o’clock at night. There are lots more like it in this slideshow.

Due to some insane thinking by my boss, I wasn’t allowed to use a full two weeks of vacation this year and only got to take a week, so I took the week of July 7th and snuck out of work early on Thursday, July 3rd. For some strange reason, I decided to take the eastern route up to Canada (Niagra Falls). It’s only about 30 miles longer than taking I-75 to Detroit, and I figured it’d be a nicer drive.

I can’t say that it sucked, but it did rain for most of the night and I pulled into a rest area in PA at about midnight on the 3rd, totally exhausted. Slept for about three hours and then continued north, arriving at Ahmic Lake at around lunchtime. A cheese sandwich thus began my week of bliss with Cy, “T”, Dad, Dianne and – briefly – Diane Neusse, Billy someone and his fiance, Faryn, and another lady who’s name I can’t remember.

It was a typical Ahmic vacation, with dominoes and cards and beer and reading and sleeping and beer and tennis and bears and swimming and cocktails and great food and staining the deck and beer and sunsets and baby birds and boating and walks and beer and laughs and fun. All this for $75 (if you don’t count the $400 in gasoline). Thanks as always, Mr. and Mrs. Tall.

Far too quickly, it was the folloing Saturday morning and I had to head for home. I took the western route this time and it rained for most of the early part of the trip. That had stopped by the time I was on the outskirts of Windsor, Ontario – and so had the traffic. Completely. As in people were getting out of cars, walking around on the highway, meeting other people, trading vacation stories…we had a ball for about 45 minutes.

I stayed that night in Lima, Ohio (my traditional halfway point) and made it home Sunday night. In the rain again. Another vacation gone, but I’ve still got ten days left to burn later this year.

As I mentioned in the previous entry, I was painting my deck before I left for Canada. Julie and I did manage to finish that project on about July 2. For the most part. As I type this, I still need to apply a second coat to the floor of the thing, but it still looks pretty good and I hopefully won’t have to do that again for a couple of years.

When she wasn’t helping me with the deck, Julie amused herself by swabbing primer all over my spare bedroom, assuming that I would finish painting it while she was in Minnesota on vacation. Well, she’s been up there since last Friday and she gets home in two days and I haven’t done a thing. Ha!

It appears that I will indeed continue to receive a paycheck from ye olde AT&Te for the forseeable future. I just got the call this morning and, barring catastrophe, I’ll be working for a guy in Mission, Kansas. While I’m not entirely sure of my job duties, they will involve creating metrics reports from a number of U-Verse databases and making them availalable via a web interface. This is something that’s been in the works for the last month or so, and I was never sure if I’d get the job or not; so it was kind of a relief to finally get the voice mail today.

Yes, I said my boss will be in Kansas. I, however, will be at our U-Verse operations center right here in Tucker, GA. Most of my team is already there – has been for a year – but I’ve managed to sit tight in the BellSouth building where I’ve been working for the last 6 years, although I do have a desk at Tucker and most of my stuff has been there for several months. I’m not anti-social or anything. I just don’t want my current boss to realize that I have virtually nothing to do. Shutting down a company is BORING, people. I’d guess that I do actual work-related stuff for a total of about 45 minutes a day. The rest of the day is spent surfing the net, watching movies, listening to music, walking around a nearly-empty building….not the type of stuff you’d want to have your boss see.

I do come up with little projects for myself (inventorying the basement, building webservers for shared documents, cleaning the crud off of mouse balls….) but if I really WORKED at doing those things, I’d be done in about 4 hours. I have to spread these tasks out over a couple of weeks to keep from gnawing my arms off.

Tomorrow, morning, I get to play at the DCI Southeastern Championships with the GA Defense Force band. Oh joy. I’ll get to stand up there in front of 30,000 people who know what a brass band is supposed to sound like and play the national anthem with 13 other people who seem to care more about the fuzz on their army berets than on intonation.

But it’s a free ticket into the competition, which is basically the only reason I agreed to do it.

On Sunday, as I said, Julie gets back into town. I’m supposed to be picking her up at the airport sometime…I’ve lost the itinerary she gave me. Then, at midnight Sunday, I go on call until midnight next Sunday. So there’s two weekends shot. I’d hoped to go camping the following weekend, but – wait for it – I’m on call AGAIN that weekend, filling in for a guy who took my on-call July 6th so that I could go to Canada. After that, we’re starting to get close to football season and all of my weekends will be shot for a few months. Guess hitting the woods is going to have to wait.

Speaking of football, I get to fly to another game this year. Oh joy. I do so love to fly. But Furman’s playing at Colgate and I’m not willing to drive there. The guy who I work for in the sports network (I’m now the official radio photographer…you didn’t even know radio people needed photos, did you) called me yesterday and told me he’d booked me on the charter. I was really sort of hoping to miss that week. This year is going to be a bear, much like two years ago. We’ve got away games at Boone and Elon (NC), Blacksburg (VA), Hampton (NY) and Birmingham. That Birmingham trip will actually be the shortest for me (remember, my “home” games are still 150 miles away). I don’t think I’ll be doing a whole lot of sleeping during the football season. I do think a number of my shots from last year might be in this year’s programs, however. That’s sort of cool.

Well, I just realized that it’s pushing 10 and I’ve got to be downtown at 9 tomorrow morning for the DCI thing, so I think I’d better get some sleep. Hope everyone’s having a happy whatever. I’ll try to update this thing in a few weeks if anything exciting happens.

TWD

The year 2008 continues to chug along and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that.

On the one hand, it’s been an incredibly boring year. On the other, the date when my company closes (and I, presumably, am looking for a job) continues to creep ever closer. We still haven’t been given any sort of drop-dead date, but our president has announced his retirement effective June 30. I doubt we’ll go on for much longer than that. The big question for me remains the same: Is there a job for me in U-Verse?

Be that as it may, I’d finally had enough of taking my car to the shop every three months, so I bought an Audi A3 Turbo Wagon about three weeks ago. It’s “brilliant black” (whatever that means) and – horrors! – an automatic transmission. It still gets slightly better mileage than my PT Cruiser did and it’s a solid car with low mileage. I’m looking forward to seeing how it performs on the way to Magnetawan next month.

Having purchased a German car, I felt somewhat guilty and so decided to help out a paramilitary group catchily named the Georgia State Defense Force when they called me a few weeks ago and asked if I’d play in a Memorial Day parade with them. After I’d agreed to play, the gig calendar changed quite quickly. It went from one parade to a change of command ceremony and two parades a week later. In for a penny, in for a pound, huh?

The change of command thing was on Sunday of last week in Forsyth, GA. I had a church gig that morning, but figured I could make it to the National Guard HQ by 2:00 (that’s 1400 in Army talk) easily enough. I’m never going to learn.

After the church thing, I changed into ACUs and hit the road by about 11:00 AM (1100). I made great time to downtown Atlanta…and then inched forward for close to an hour (60) through a 5-mile (8-click) section of the downtown connector which was being repaved. I ended up getting to the National Guard place at about five minutes before two (1355).

The head guy what’s in charge of the band (“Command Sergeant Major”) met me by the band (“musical unit”), shook my hand (“saluted”), warmly thanked me for being such a great help to them (“gave props”), and informed me that he’d forgotten to bring my music (“screwed up”). What he wanted me to do, he explained, was improvise (“wing it”) for about 45 minutes.

Uh. Yeah. Wing it for 45 minutes on pieces that I did not know with a band that…well…let’s just say that their center of pitch is actually a circle of pitch with a radius of about 90 cents. If you know what I mean.

So I bravely “winged it.” The highlight of the day for me was the playing of The Stars and Stripes Forever. Some of you hopefully know what I’m talking about when I mention the dogfight in the piece – where the low brass plays a series of decending 16th’s very loudly and obnoxiously. It’s a quite recognizable part of the piece.

Funny thing, though. I was the only guy playing that part. And I was the only one who didn’t have music. And nobody seemed to notice.

At any rate, I got through that debacle okay and made plans to meet up with the band the following Monday for the parades. Then I went home and started painting my deck.

Actually, I didn’t start painting until the following Saturday, but I did a heck of a job once I got started. Worked on it all day Saturday and managed to get a very stiff back, a great start on a sunburn – and about a third of the deck covered with primer. On Sunday, I managed to do the same thing. Monday, you’ll recall, was Memorial Day.

So it was Julie who actually got to finish covering the deck (and part of the sidewalk) with primer while I went off to defend America against invading hordes of parade watchers.

First stop was in Fairburn, GA, about 30 minutes south of Atlanta. I made it there in plenty of time for a 9:30 (0930) start. Problem was, nobody else did. After an hour or so, however, various people started dribbling toward a common area – looking like stragglers in, say, The Red Badge of Courage.

We marched the parade. A mile. Maybe two. I had music. I made (“asked” might be a better word) a colonel to take my picture. This was something that I had to do, because 1}It was the second time in my life that I’d been in an Army uniform and 2}It was the first time in two decades that I’d been reduced to carrying a sousaphone.

After the parade, we got some free foodstuffs from a kind-hearted local (who, no doubt, felt a great deal safer thanks to our visit) and then set off for Senoia, GA, which is about 30 minutes even further south.

The Senoia parade turned out to be a lot shorter (about 1/2 mile), a lot hotter and A LOT better attended. The town, with a population of around 12, somehow managed to pack 30K folks on the sidewalks to watch a great many bands, cars, tractors and soldiers walk down the main street.

I also got to play a different sousaphone – this time a silver Conn 20 with quick-action valves. The thing weighed a ton, but MAN…the bell on it rang like a gong. I have no doubt that I covered up the entired band in front of me. Power like that is hard to come by. And quite a bit of fun. And a great way to cover up a wildly-gyrating circle of pitch.

We finished up that parade by about 3 (1500) and I made it home by 4 (1600), which was just in time to get changed out of the uniform and head back downtown for a quintet rehearsal at 5 (5:00. My military bit was done for the day).

My little CC tuba has never so much fun to play. It felt like I was playing a trumpet or a clarinet or some other sub-standard instrument. I think I frightened my quintet.

But hey, I’ve done my part for America now. And don’t go thinking that it was all just fun and games. When I got up yesterday morning, my calves were on fire for several hours. And I still haven’t caught up on my sleep (I was on call all weekend).

So I think I can now safely say that my military sacrifices are equal to – or greater than – those of Dubya.

So there.

TWD

I finally decided that it was time to replace the fascia, soffits and gutters on the house. Since I used Taylor Construction to replace all the windows and put siding on the house about 4 years ago, I decided to go ahead and get a quote from them for the work that had to be done this time around.

Hence, the title of this post. After getting my “returning customer discount,” agreeing to let them leave a sign in my yard for a month and agreeing to let other potential customers call me to hear me say nice things about Taylor, I got the low, low price of sixteen grand.

I’d like to report that I threw the sales weasel out of my house, but I didn’t. I did tell him – very politely, of course – that there was no way in hell I was going to drop that much money for what amounts to trim. I don’t think he was happy, but he left anyway.

Got a new meeting with his sales manager a week or so later and said I could do without the gutters. The price dropped to around $7,500. Much more betterer.

So, for the last three days, I’ve had a couple of guys showing up at my house every morning at around 6:30 and banging on it with hammers. I’m assuming that they’re also replacing the fascia and soffit.

Julie has changed her plans yet again and is now moving in next weekend. Or this weekend. Or sometime. I don’t pretend to understand the schedule. I just try to stay out of the way.

I’ve got a board meeting with the GBB tomorrow, followed by a birthday dinner for Herb, who will be 75. Another rehearsal with the church on Sunday. Yippee.

NABBA is now two weeks away and I must say that I’m not feeling overly confident about the GBB’s chances in the competition. We just aren’t clicking this year. Yes, we sound awesome; just not championship calibre. We’ve decided to have a combination concert/open rehearsal on the night of the 25th. That’ll be nice, as we haven’t played an indoor concert in close to a year. I’m all for competing, but rehearsing all year for a 23-minute competition gets really boring really fast.

Heard recently that my company, scheduled to close early next year, is now on the fast track to defunctness. That’s a word. Really. The new schedule has us shutting off the last customer as early as next month. It’ll still take several months after that to get rid of our equipment, finalize billing, etc., but the bottom line is that – unless they find a REAL job for me in U-Verse, I’m looking at a severance package a lot earlier than I’d anticipated.

Did I mention that I just dropped $7,500 on my house? Yikes.

After a few days of madness, I did manage to get the week of July 7th off so I can make the trek to Ahmic Lake. Was a bit disappointed that I was not allowed to take a full two weeks off (has never been a problem before and I don’t know why it would be this year, but….). Immediately after being granted that week off, I was informed that I’m scheduled to be on call from June 30-July 6.

That’s a very very bad thing, as it effectively blows away my ability to leave Atlanta on the 3rd, using the holiday and the weekend to drive to Canada. I begged and pleaded with a few co-workers and finally convinced one of them to take my on-call from midnight on the 3rd through midnight on the 6th. In exchange, I’ll be covering his second shift on the 21st and I’ll still owe him a favor at some point.

Really don’t enjoy many aspects of this job. On-call is right up there. Yeah, I was used to being on-call 24x7x365 in my old job, but in a bad year I might have gotten called twice. With this job, you’re pretty much guaranteed that you won’t get much sleep for a week every month and a half. During the last week I had the OC duty, I think I managed to average about 4 hours of sleep a night. Don’t know how I’m going to handle football season.

This week is not moving. I feel like it should be Thursday at the very least. I thought life was supposed to go by faster when you reached my advanced age. Another lie told me me in my youth, I guess.

Still not a great deal of interest going on in Duluth and its environs. I had great rehearsals last Friday night and all day on Saturday with Dr. Holman – actually received a few kind words from the flugel player in the band who said something along the lines of, “There are at least two of us that really enjoy listening to you play and we think you sound better than the other guys back there.” I politely thanked him, told him he was insane, and blushed for about three days. He’s actually the third person in the band who’s said that to me in the last year. So the insanity is spreading, but it’s still nice to hear. 🙂

In all seriousness, I have been getting a lot stronger on the Eb horn since rejoining the band in 2006; but I have nowhere near the talent level as the 4 guys who sit back there with me and let their skills remind me on a weekly basis that I may have been the big dog 20 years ago, but I’m not anymore.

Doesn’t mean I can’t keep trying and eventually blow them out of their chairs, but I’ll wait until the time is right.

After the Saturday rehearsal, I went to The 5 Seasons Brewpub with 6 other guys (well – 4 guys, 2 girls) to talk music, drink really good beer and generally laugh at everything. I do enjoy hanging out with the bandsmen of the GBB. It’s a fun group. This is a good thing, as one of the BBb tuba guys and I are renting a car a couple of days before NABBA so we can go up to Louisville and hang around for a while before we have to play anywhere. Robert is originally from the area, so he knows the cool stuff to see. We’ll also be rooming together (with one other guy, who I don’t recall at the moment) at the Galt House in the city until Sunday. Maybe it’s the Gault House. I don’t know. It’s just a really big expensive hotel.

Found out this morning that I’m supposed to be playing a church service next Sunday. This is news to me. I’d sort of planned on going camping. Guess not. What do I have to do to get a free weekend around here? Last weekend was the Holman rehearsals, this weekend is a service, next weekend I’m on call….I just want to get some camping in, dammit!

Julie moved a lot of her kitchen stuff over to the house while I was in rehearsal, incidentally. She apparently had a ball rearranging everything that’s been in the same place in my kitchens since I was 4 years old. I will admit that she did a great job of organizing, although it took me about 4 hours to find a potholder.

Our Ad Insertion server in Florida (I think I mentioned it in the last entry) is now dead. I mean, like, REALLY dead. As in, barring a complete miracle, it’s not coming back to life. As in, we’re out of the advertising business in Florida. I hope my president takes this turn of events very poorly indeed. After all, he was the guy who said we couldn’t replace or upgrade any of the hardware or software two years ago when we told him it was going to fail. His response at the time was, “I guess if it fails, we’ll be out of the adveritising business – ha ha!”

Sorry, Don. You said it, buddy, not us. This particular server generated somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 per year. How much would it have cost to replace it two years ago? About $80,000. I guess corporate presidents have no more foresight than national ones, huh?

Ha! That should get Mom fired up, so I guess I’ve written enough for one day.

TWD

I guess two and a half months per entry is a good number.

I really should do this more often, however, as I wind up trying to figure out what exactly I’ve been doing with myself for the previous 10 weeks and I ultimately end up sounding like I have an incredibly boring life.

I don’t. Not really. Monotonous, perhaps. Dull. Colorless, unspirited, repetitious, vapid, wearisome, spiritless and bromidic.

But not boring.

Take the roommate thing (“…take my roommate. Please.”). After unloading Keith (who has, by the way, recently moved to Florida to live with his father, leaving all of his possessions except the bed (which I have) in the apartment of the poor sucker he squatted with after I threw him out), I mentioned to a friend one night that I had a room to rent. Oddly enough, she liked the idea, so Julie will be moving in sometime in March. She’s from Minnesota. She speaks like someone trapped in “A Prairie Home Companion”. She equates cosmopolitan living with owning a shack in St. Cloud.

She reads this blog. Oh crap.

Anyway, Julie and I get along famously and I’m looking forward to taking her money and listening to her prattle on in that Fargoesque accent of hers.

Keith’s bed? I still have it. I’ll be chucking it to make room for Julie’s. He had three months to claim it.

Let’s see….Christmas. I have no idea what I did for Christmas. I think I might have slept for most of the day and then gone over to Jenny’s place to have dinner with her and her folks. Lasagna, if I recall. Good stuff. I spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s sleeping in a lot (got to take vacation after all), and actually made it past midnight (awake) on New Year’s Eve – mainly because I was watching a football game that didn’t end until 11:45.

Work has been rather boring as of late, although for the last three or four days I’ve been having trouble with an Ad Insertion server in Florida. It started acting up last Friday night and has had something go wrong every day since then. I think I managed to get it back to operational status about 30 minutes ago. If not, I’ll mess with it again tomorrow. Everything else is just … well … boring. Now that I’ve learned what actually has to do what, I can pretty much do my job duties in about 12 minutes every day. The rest of the time is spent in documentation, rewriting websites, studying (read, “surfing the web”) and doing the occasional special project. I still get home late and I’m still tired most of the time.

The Georgia Brass Band is officially ramping up for this year’s NABBA championships, to be held just north of Louisville on March 29th. We’ll be playing “Journey into Freedom” by (I think) Eric Ball and “Encounters” by Philip Spark. “Journey” is a fantastic piece. “Encounters” makes me want to vomit. Not incredibly difficult. Just incredibly tedious. Anyway, we’ve had a few extra rehearsals since December and we’ll be rehearsing with Dr. Colin Holman (Chicago Brass Band) this Friday night and all weekend. Looking forward to that. The band sounds phenomenal this year and I think we’ve got a decent shot to win the Honors section at NABBA. Hope so, anyway, because we probably won’t make the trip next year.

Speaking of the GBB, I somehow managed to get myself on that board of that august institution. I’m still not sure how. Two other board members are also tubists, however. I envision some sort of special tuba rulings being made in the future….

On January 11th, Jenny and her folks and I drove up to Greenville to wish Dad a happy 75th birthday. We were met at the house by all of the Day children and a handful of grandkids. Don’t remember exactly the last time that happened, although we came close at Thanksgiving.

Heard through the grapevine recently (actually through the internet via an instant message) that the woman who last broke my heart is now engaged. I sure do know how to pick ’em for other people, huh?

I’ve started playing my piano a lot more over the last few months for some reason. Not exactly sure why, but I’m not complaining. Feels like I’m getting better, actually. For the record, Julie plays piano (quite well), so the fact that I have one in the house did not cause me to lower the rent.

Oh! My pathetic quintet played at the annual flower show at the GA World Congress Center a couple of weekends ago. So I’ve got that going for me. I also played a service with my worthless church orchestra this past Sunday and I get to play again with that sorry collection of misfits on Easter.

I have high hopes that the music minster doesn’t read this blog.

And I’ve just been informed that the server in Florida is in an alarm state again. It was a fun 45 minutes while it lasted. Everybody have fun. Everybody Wang Chung. I hate UNIX.

TWD

Wow.

The football season is over, I’ve got a new job, housemates are gone, car has been to the shop again, and the Christmas rush has arrived – and during all this time, I haven’t once taken the 15 minutes necessary to update this enthralling autobiography.

When last we left our intrepid hero (that’d be me), I’d just returned from a wonderful Summer vacation. I returned to Atlanta just in time to begin one of the most stressful periods of my life so far.

For starters, the housemate situation wasn’t working out. My house is big enough for two people who aren’t related or for three people if two of them are intimately involved. As Dennis and Keith weren’t my brothers (and none of us is gay), it was just too much. The older of the two, Keith, is a great guy who has absolutely no sense of personal responsibility. In layman’s terms, that means that he doesn’t pay rent. I’d actually discussed this problem with Dennis before the two of them moved in; but Den assured me that, if Keith didn’t pay, then he (Dennis) would pay for both of them. No problem, right?

Partially true. As expected, Keith was constantly short on cash and Dennis ended up paying for him every month. While this was helpful financially, it also led to hard feelings all around. Keith got annoyed with Dennis for frequently reminding him that he needed to pitch in. Dennis got extremely annoyed with Keith for 1)not paying, and 2)not caring. Throw in some alcohol and the two nearly came to blows one night when I wasn’t home. I got home to find my coffee pot shattered and one of my tubas in a spot where it shouldn’t have been (later learned that Dennis had thrown it at Keith).

The next day, I told Dennis that I need for them to move out. Dennis readily agreed – and he was gone within two days.

Keith didn’t leave, however. Seems that he couldn’t find another place to stay (granted, squatting is a tough sell).

Long story short, I didn’t get rid of Keith until late October, after threatening to put all of his stuff in storage and not pay the storage fee. He is currently squatting at another friend’s house in Dunwoody. I still have his bed. Eventually, I will throw it out if he doesn’t come and get it. For now, however, I have my house back and am once again looking for a renter. I have learned, however….

On top of the roommate situation, I also returned to a new job – that of UNIX administrator for BellSouth Entertainment. Have I mentioned that I don’t speak UNIX? See, the idea was that I’d take this job and keep things rolling as well as I could until I was ultimately hired on to administer Windows machines in AT&T’s U-Verse organization, which will be replacing BEI when we go under next year.

This is not me being negative. It has been established that we’re closing next year. But by getting on the platform side of BEI (the part of the company that actually puts the signal out to customers), I ended up on the U-Verse side of operations on paper. I figured it was just a matter of time until I was officially with U-Verse.

Those of you who’ve gone through large corporate mergers before can probably follow my logic. It was a good plan.

Unfortunately, nobody bothered to tell me just how pathetic (read “old”) our existing operations are. Things – important things, like our on-screen program guide – were breaking every day. Our Ad Insertion servers (responsible for embedding advertisements into program streams) are about 10 years old, have no documentation, no redundancy, and are prone to failure – and our president’s stance has been, “I guess if it breaks and you can’t fix it, we’re out of the advertising business.” The Box Drivers (a system that makes sure people who order Pay-Per-View events actually get them) have a tendency to fail at 1:30 every morning.

And, due to my new title, I’m the guy that everything rolls to. I’m supposed to know how to fix it. Talk about on-the-job training!

(For reference purposes, I’m on vacation today. I have been since yesterday. I’ve also been logged in remotely SINCE yesterday, and have already had to fix two program guides and restart our billing services).

But I’m learning, and I can now grep, cron and vi with the best of them. Well….maybe not the best of them, but enough so that I can bullshit my way through a UNIX interview.

I’m also nominating myself for every Windows job posted in our internal career path system. Have only gotten one nibble so far (in Morristown, NJ); but my boss knows that I’m looking and I’ll bolt at the first decent offer.

Football season also added to the stress level this year. For the second year, I was contracted by sports marketing to shoot every game my team played. Don’t get me wrong: I love shooting games. Not having a weekend off, however, gets old really fast. Particularly when you’re getting calls at 1:30 every morning because something’s broken at work. Additionally, my team performed dismally on the field for the first half of the season – this in spite of having what looked like one of the strongest teams in recent memory – and the games weren’t much fun to watch. And my pictures stunk for the most part. I’m chalking that up to old age (my eyes are going), but it still sort of blows to take 700 pictures every week and find that maybe 20 of them are useable.

Did I mention that I’m still with that horrid chruch orchestra and therefore was losing my Sundays as well as my Saturdays?

At any rate, it was a very long season for me and I was rather glad to see it end. It ended in a spectacular fashion, actually. The team rallied from a 1-4 start to finish at 6-5, knocking off two ranked teams in the last three weeks and – as a bonus – taking our biggest rival out of first place in the conference and ultimately out of the playoffs. And after something like 10 straight weeks, I finally got to sleep late last Saturday.

The car. A few weeks ago, it freaked out again. Short story: I dumped another $1,100 into it and it’s running great now. I, however, am broke. Between the car and my job, I’m afraid there will be no Christmas jaunt to Vermont this year. I still have the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day off; but there’s no way my boss is going to let me leave town for a week.

Thanksgiving was a rather enjoyable experience, however. Jenny and her parents and I drove up to Greenville to spend the day with Mom, Dad, Greg, Lisa, Larry, Marilyn, Dianne and an assortment of nieces and nephews. Lots of people, lots of food, lots of laughs. Hope everyone had as nice a time as I did.

And now? Well, between putting out fires at work, I spent yesterday doing about 20 loads of laundry, 8 loads of dishes, vacuuming and catching up on other stuff that I’ve need to do for the last three months. Today I’m expecting to do more of the same before heading to rehearsal tonight; and I assume that tomorrow will be the same.

So much for sleeping in.

TWD

Day 11 – 13/Jul/2007 17:35

The portion of my vacation that I spend at Ahmic Lake is always a great one, and this year has proven to be no exception. In fact, although my brother-in-law may disagree with me, this year at the lake has been one of the nicest that I can recall ever having spent here.

Lots of backstory to fill in here.

The folks who were supposed to show up on Sunday didn’t. As of today, nobody knows where most of them are (a family of 4 has disappeared from the face of the earth).

Cy and I played some tennis Sunday afternoon (I whooped her, thanks very much) while “T” pretty much moped around and slept. The day was fairly cool but sunny. The forecast called for rain. Cy made a fairly spectacular pork roast for dinner, after which we were joined by “T”‘s sister Ellen and her husband, Whit. They just finished building a house and boathouse on the parcel of land next to Camp Ulvik, and seem like nice folks. The five of us played “Oh Hell” (a great card game) until 11:30 or so before retiring to our cabins.

The weather fireworks began sometime after 2:00 Monday morning. For probably two hours, the lake was hit with a monster storm which featured driving rain, nonstop lightning and extremely strong winds (Ellen and Whit, sleeping in their boathouse, were apparently terrified). I loved it. The lake sounded like an ocean crashing against my dock.

At some point during the storm, we lost power (known as “Hydro” hear in the land of the Ojibwe). It would not be restored until 5:00 Tuesday afternoon.

Since Jamie had still not arrived (he’d attended a rock concert in Ottawa on Sunday night), Cy and “T” and I decided to drive to Parry Sound (which still had hydro) on Monday. We had a nice lunch by the harbor and puttered around in book stores and other shops for a few hours, then came back to camp to take a nap.

During nap time, Jamie arrived and the three Talls played tennis while I slept, swam, and walked in the woods.

I cooked some rice/sausage/leftover stuff on the propane stove in the farmhouse on Monday night and we all ate and later played cards by the light of my lantern.

Tuesday morning looked like more rain was on the way, but it never developed. Most of the day was spent reading, although the four of us did get some tennis in in the afternoon. After power was finally restored, Cy made another monster dish with leftovers and the evening was completed with a rousing game of “Oh Hell.”

On Wednesday, I decided to head towards North Bay for souvenirs and gifts. On the way there, I took a detour to the dump to get rid of some garbage. I ended up spending a couple of hours taking pictures of lots of bears. They’re pretty populous and bold at the dump this year.

We got some more tennis in in the afternoon, Jamie grilled some steaks for dinner and the evening’s entertainment was doubles cribbage (Cy and I destroyed the Tall men).

Yesterday was basically a dock day. It was sunny but brisk for much of the day. I did get a fairly long walk in and took a bunch of pictures.

We invited Ellen and Whit and a couple from Indian Point (Dexter and Carol Coolidge) over for dinner last night and I opted to make my (in my mind) world famous Shepherds Pie. It seemed to go over fairly well and Ellen chipped in with some fresh brownies which we topped with ice cream and devoured before moving on to a game of Mexican Train (dominoes).

This morning, everyone rose fairly early and Jamie, “T” and I set off for Parry Sound to take a cruise among the 30,000 islands and have lunch at Henry’s renowned restaurant on Frying Pan Island. The cruise was basically chartered by a decent number of Ahmic cottagers, Ellen and Whit among them.

We got back to camp at around 5:00 this afternoon. I’d like to take a nap now, but I’m leaving tomorrow and I don’t want to miss anything. So, as I’ve typed this, I’ve had one eye on the lake.

And I think I’ll go jump in it.

TWD

(Note: This entry – and any others in the same vein which follow – are taken verbatim from the journal I keep while on vacation. Please excuse spelling and grammatical errors as well as repetition, sappiness or other examples of idiocy. Such things are probably the result of my having been DWT – “Drunk While Typing”)

Day 1 – 30/Jun/2007 16:18
So here I am in wonderful southwestern Ohio (just outside of Oxford, to be exact) at Hueston Woods State Park. I arrived here just about two hours ago and have busied myself since then with setting up camp. I must admit that the site I got is great. It’s large, fairly private, and far enough off of the main road so that very little traffic (vehicular or pedestrian) is around to bother me.

Having said all that, it’s sort of amazing that I’m surrounded by probably 20 other people in 6 or 7 campsites.

Setting up was a rather sweat-producing experience. It is a beautiful day – the sun is out and it’s probably about 78 degrees – but it rained recently, and the air is still pretty saturated. I brought my very large tarp (something like 300 square feet) with me and it was a struggle to get it strung up. Once I managed to accomplish that, I dragged the picnic table about 40 feet to get it underneath the tarp (told you it was a big campsite), got all the electric stuff hooked up, set up my tent, got the car parked close enough to the table so that I can use my camp kitchen, and moved the firepit far enough away from the car so that I don’t blow it up if I start a fire tonight.

This all took about 90 minutes, and when I was finished, I was very much ready for a beer – an absolute no-no in Hueston Woods State Park. No problem, right? I just pour the beer into a cup and throw the can in a trashbag and everything’s cool.

Only I couldn’t find my trashbags. It made me slightly insane, because I knew I bought a box of bags specifically for this trip and I couldn’t imagine that I’d left them at home. I even knew where I’d have logically put them in my kitchen – but they weren’t there. So I basically tore my car apart for 15 minutes before determining that, yes indeed, I’m a moron.

So I went to the camp store (needed some firewood anyway).

They didn’t have trashbags.

At this point, I’m getting a tad pissed. How on earth could I forget something as necessary as trashbags? And just how the hell am I supposed to discreetly drink my beer? Aha! A koozee! So I go into my trusty kitchen, pull out a koozee, pop the beer….ahhhhh….

Time to start getting dinner ready, right? Right. So I get out the oven and a pan and prepare to boil some red beans (for chili). At this point, my eye falls on the macaroni and cheese in the purple box right in the middle of my kitchen.

Only it’s not mac & cheese. It’s the damned trashbags.

I’m prepared even if I don’t know it.

Day 3 – 2/Jul/2007 14:06
Guess it’s time to get caught up on what I’ve been doing since Saturday afternoon.

I spent the rest of that day basically doing nothing. Read for a few hours, took a nap, had some crackers, ate my chili, etc. For the evening’s entertainment, I watched “The Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and fought with my external hard drive/card reader, which for some reason had stopped displaying its contents on the LCD screen and was very picky about giving up the data that is stored on it. I ended up letting it charge for about three hours and, while the LCD still isn’t working, I can now at least read the thing when it’s attached to my laptop.

I woke up fairly early yesterday because I was freezing to death. It gets down into the mid/low 40’s at night here. I was not expecting that and only brought along a couple of sheets and the throw that’s always in my car for sleeping. Having woken myself up, I proceeded to go back to sleep until 10 am or so, then got up and put on some sweatpants.

For the rest of the day, I did absolutely nothing other than cooking a steak, listening to the radio and reading.

Last night I watched “Gettysburg” for about the 50th time and realized that it was July 1st – 144 years to the day after the battle started. The terrain that I’m camped in is actually pretty similar to the battlefield, so it was cool to see my computer screen with images of Little Round Top set against a backdrop of the same trees and hills (only about 400 miles west) that those guys were fighting on. As usual, the film had the effect of kicking me in the gut and making me question “The Killer Angels” that we are. Went to bed pretty late.

I was awakened at about 4:00 this morning by the cold and the sound of shredding plastic three feet from my head. I’d left my bread on the picnic table (normally, I pack it in the kitchen) and a neighborhood racoon was missing no opportunity. I didn’t want to yell and wake up everyone in the campground, and I didn’t have my camera with me; so I just watched as he sampled a piece of bread before taking the whole bag and leaving.

When I got up at around 6:00 (again because of the cold), I took a walk and found the remnants of my bread about 50 feet up the hill that overlooks my site. After a few cups of coffee and some reading, I headed for the nearest decent-sized town (Eaton, OH) to replace the bread and get my annual extra blanket.

I think I currently own about 8 blankets that I’ve purchased because I went camping expecting to be warm enough but wasn’t.

I’ve never really been anywhere in Ohio off of the interstate and I discovered that it’s actually a very pretty state. No, there are no mountains; but it’s not as flat as you might think, either. It is the definition of “rolling hills,” actually. As I mentioned, my campsite is in a little valley between two very tall (and steep) hills; and the drive to Eaton is rather nerve-wracking because you’ll be tooling down the road at about 60 (speed limit is 55) and you’ll start coming up to the crest of one of these hills and realize that you have no idea what’s on the other side of it. You CAN’T see for miles.

Making things even more interesting is the fact that, apparently, the roads were constructed to go around cornfields (which are plentiful – along with fields of soybean and peas). So there are no graceful sweeping turns on the roads. There are 90-degree turns, and these are often thrown together at the corner of a field….so you’ll crest a hill and see that you have about 100 yards to slow down enough to make a right-angle turn to the left, followed immediately by a right-angle turn to the right, followed by another hill.

I bet it’d be great fun on a snowmobile.

Day 4 – 3/Jul/2007 13:07
Well it’s only 1:00 in the afternoon, but it’s been a productive day so far. First, to wrap up yesterday:

After returning from Eaton, I took a walk to the “fossil hunting” area of Hueston Woods State Park. Apparently, this section of Ohio was an inland sea a few million years ago (that may be disputed later in my vacation, when I tour the “Creation Museum” in KY. For now, I’m sticking with the pagan theory); and there is a stream about a mile from where I’m camped that is littered with fossil-covered rocks. I spent a couple of hours looking for a really nice one (didn’t find any) and taking pictures of the stream and surrounding country, then came back to camp and ate a couple of cheese sandwiches while reading and trying to get close-ups of various birds – all of which had an uncanny knack for staying just out of the spot that I’d focused on (camera on a tripod).

Last night’s movies (watched while drinking wine from a box – I have loads of camping etiquette) were “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and the first half of “We Are Marshall.” I’ll watch the second half later today.

My raccoon buddy visited me again last night. I heard him huffing and chirping his way down the hill to my campsite at around midnight, but by the time I rousted myself and unzipped the tent, he’d figured out that something wasn’t quite right and scurried off. Apparently he revisited the camp later, however, as I awoke this morning to find a hole gnawed through my trashbag and an empty tuna can next to it.

So, while making coffee, sausage and scrambled eggs (EggBeaters, y’all. I am health-conscious 24×7), I discarded the trash bag in a dumpster nearby and decided that I’ll try to setup my video camera on a tripod tonight (it has pretty good night vision) and operate it remotely from inside the tent.

I mentioned making coffee. Here’s the thing: I really like percolated coffee when I’m camping, but I hate the fact that I always end up with coffee grounds in the bottom of my cup. You take that last really big swallow and end up convulsively spitting it out all over the front of your shirt because it feels like you’ve just attempted to drink a beach. Fortunately for percolated camp coffee lovers everywhere, I’ve hit upon the solution: line the percolator basket with Kleenex! For best results, fold the remaining tissue over the top of the coffee, put the little metal percolator basket cover over that, and voila! Good coffee with very few grounds in the pot.

I would advise against using the type of Kleenex which is impregnated with skin cream (for the tender-nosed booger blower), but whatever floats your boat.

My neighbors left this morning and gave me a stack of wood that they’d been using. I think they were trying to calm down their 5 little girls before the trip, so they had the kids carry over all the wood and stack it for me while their dad and I talked. He and his wife are both morbidly obese (I’m talking 400+ pounds here), but seem like genuinely nice folks. I didn’t ask, but I suspect that most if not all of the kids are adopted or foster children; and the husband works as a truck driver for Goodwill.

The wife gave me directions to Eaton yesterday and invited me over for S’mores last night (I declined, being involved in my movie and mildly drunk on boxed wine); and the husband, who is probably a few years younger than I, chatted happily this morning about everything from cameras to computers to OTR trucking to Emerald Ash Borers (the current threat to Ash trees in 31 Ohio counties, including the one that I’m in) to insurance companies. His is Aflac, as I learned when he told me how great they were when he had a heart attack three years ago.

Given his weight, the story of the heart attack didn’t surprise me. I opted not to mention this.
After he and the kids went back to packing their stuff up, I decided to wash my dishes. That being the case, I proceeded to dump scalding hot water into my dishpan, in the process dropping the cover off the top of the kettle. This development engulfed my left hand in steam and burned the living crap out of two of my fingers. I put cream on them and bandaged one. Call me a boy scout or something.

Since then, I’ve been reading, listening to the local NPR station (run out of the University of Miami (Ohio)), and waiting for one of those stupid birds to pose in the right spot for my camera. The campground, which was nearly empty after my neighbors left, is beginning to fill up again. I suspect that it will get busy tonight and tomorrow, but – as I mentioned somewhere earlier – my site is very large and secluded. If I don’t go to the Grand Canyon next year, there’s a good possibility that I’ll stay here again.

Day 5 – 4/Jul/2007 20:54
I ended up taking a very long nap yesterday afternoon, waking up at dusk. Made some tuna casserole for dinner and watched the first half of “Hope Floats” while eating half of it and wathing it get dark. The campground did gain a few new arrivals but didn’t get (and still isn’t) nearly as crowded as I thought it would get.

When it got pretty dark, I built a fire and sat by it with my video camera for a while, waiting for Rocky Raccoon to make his appearance. He eventually did, but I couldn’t get the stupid “MagicVision” (or whatever it’s called) feature working properly on the camera. I may have gotten a few shots of him – probably not – and I ended up scaring him away, although he did let me get to within about 4 feet of him. I then got my big flashlight out of the tent and made plans to wait him out. Sometime after midnight I gave up and went to bed.

Got up around 5:45 this morning, put on a pot of coffee and started reading. And that’s pretty much what I’ve done all day.

This afternoon, it looked like it was going to rain, so I spent about half an hour rehanging my tarp to cover more ground (it has just now started to rain, some 8 hours after I prepared for it). I also ate the rest of my casserole and took a short nap.

After then nap (which ended around 7:30), I got up and made a couple of hamburgers, which I ate while watching the rest of “Hope Floats” (just finished).

Obviously, I am now typing this, but I’ve pretty much covered the day. I think I’ll now just sit at my table and watch the rain and feel the wind. Happy Independence Day!

Day 8 – 7/Jul/2007 12:09
I guess I have a bit of catching up to do, although not much of import happened between Wednesday night and today.

On Thursday, I spent most of the day reading and listening to the radio, which spent most of its time saying that I was due to get severe thunderstorms and hail all day. This did not happen, although one relatively strong storm did blow through late in the afternoon. By that time, I’d gotten in touch with Cy and made plans to leave Ohio on Friday (rather than Saturday) and head to Canada.

Getting in touch with her, by the way, was not all that easy. In order to get any type of cell signal, I had to climb the hill (aka “Mt. McKinley) next to my campsite, stand on one leg and hold the phone against my right ear using my left hand while making a pose reminiscent of John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever.”

Having done that, I took down my camp in stages (before and after the rain and between chapters and glasses of wine). By about 8:00 or 9:00 Thursday night, I had everything packed in the car. I spent the next couple of hours watching the second half of “We Are Marshall” and then packed MYSELF into my car, where I slept (quite comfortably) until about 6:00 yesterday morning.

I violated yet ANOTHER rule of the Hueston Woods State Park at that point by (gasp!) taking a shower in the “A” section of the campground. Having camped in the “B” section, I was not supposed to use any of the “A” facilities – which included running water and showers. I was not, however, about to drive 10 hours to Canada after having not bathed in 7 days.

The drive to Ahmic Lake was rather uneventful, although I did have a fairly extended and pleasant conversation with the Canadian customs guy who was quite impressed with my camp kitchen and a little jealous that I’d been camping for a week and still had 10 days to go for my vacation. He seemed like a really nice kid (this was by far the most “conversing” I’ve ever done with a customs agent). About an hour later, I got a tad worried when I drove up to a section of the 401 that was closed and was forced to take an (unmarked) detour for about 20 miles.

Thank God for GPS.

The rest of the trip was boring. Actually, it was somewhat annoying between Toronto and Barrie. I’d forgottent that “cottagers” would be taking the same route as I on a Friday afternoon. The majority of them split off (on route 11) at Barrie, however, and from there to Parry Sound was quite pleasant. Just outside of Parry Sound, I noticed that I was getting low on gasoline and called “T” to make sure that there was gas at Camp Ulvik. Being assured that there was, I opted not to tank up.

Almost a mistake. While coming through Dunchurch, my fuel light came on, indicating that I had somewhere between 15 and 20 miles left before I’d be empty. For those of you not in “the know,” Dunchurch is about 12-15 miles from Magnetawan and the camp is on the far side of that wonderful little hamlet. I told Cy and “T” last night, “If you’ve got a martini glass and 3 olives, I’ll drink the gas left in my tank.”

I’m living in “The Honeymoon Cottage” for the next week, as I’ve done on two other occassions. This is a delightful little house with its own dock (and a screen porch) located just down the hill from the main cabin. It is very comfortable (I didn’t get out of bed until about 9:30 today) and has an wonderfully isolated feeling.

After breakfast, Cy and I put our heads together and got a wireless router working in the main cabin (DSL was installed last year, and I immediately saw an opportunity to network the camp and “give back” a little; so I got the router for them this year). After quite a bit of trial and error (the error being that I’m an idiot and had wired the router to Cy’s laptop instead of to the DSL modem), we were pleased to discover that not only did the setup work, but also that it reached all the way to the cottage in which I’m currently sitting and composing this.

Very sweet.

Cy and “T” have since gone to the farmers’ market “downtown” (Magnetawan has a population of about 300 full-time residents) and I’m getting ready to go fall in the lake, although it rained this morning and is still somewhat dreary looking.

Jamie Tall and 4 or 5 other people are scheduled to show up at the camp tomorrow, which should make for a pleasant, if somewhat quiet, week.

-TWD