Welcome to Summer

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So I’m a month older than I was the last time I sat down to write something here – and a couple of pounds lighter thanks to renewing walking and cutting out as much processed sugar as possible. Don’t get me wrong: I’m still a fat bastard, but I’m a little less so now.

At work, we’re in the doldrums after tax season, and so it’s interview season. I’ve done a bunch in the last month, and they’ve been a pretty good crop, actually. I think offer letters have been sent out to two and we’ve got two others going through background and drug tests. Hoping to have them on board in the next 10 days or so. I’m also promoting my one Junior Consultant to a salaried Level 1 position on or about July 1, which is nice. She’s been a junior for longer than I would’ve liked, but I had a talk with her at the beginning of last month and told her I needed her to step up. She did. Assuming she did okay on the test I gave her yesterday, she’s ready to move up and I won’t have any juniors on the team….until the newbies come in.

Need to mow half of the front lawn today, and I’m hoping I can actually get my edger working so I can edge everything. The stupid thing just sort of died on me a couple of weeks ago, so I’ve got one half of one side of my driveway edged at this point. I’ve tried on three occasions to get it to start and keep running, but so far it’s been good for about 5 minutes before it quits. If I can’t keep it running today, I guess I’ll be making a trip to Home Depot for a new one. It’s amazing how much better my lawn looks when it’s been edged.

The band played a concert at Reinhart College (hope I spelled that right) a week and a half ago. It’s in Cherokee County, well north of Atlanta, and at about 20 minutes before downbeat our solo horn player sent a message that he wasn’t coming. Needless to say, there were some bad words following that. A couple of the pieces on the concert had fairly exposed solo horn parts, so our 1st horn learned those as quickly as possible and I learned the 1st horn part as quickly as possible. Another exposed part had to be transcribed for the flugel player, since all three horn parts were needed. Made it through the performance okay.

A couple of days after that, we had a board meeting, in which it was pretty much unanimously decided that the solo horn player won’t be returning for the 2019-2020 season. The big question is who’ll play that part. The 1st horn player and I have both said we’d like to play it at times, but not exclusively – it’s a painful part to play if you haven’t developed a high-range embouchure. I’m sort of hoping that Andrew (1st horn) will bite the bullet and do it, so that I can move back to 1st horn – which has always been my favorite horn part. Then we can recruit somebody to take my spot on 2nd.

Or if they want to try me on solo, I’ll do that, too. It’ll hurt for a few months, but might be a good learning experience for me, and could force me to deal with the stage fright that I’ve always had when playing solos.

Have plans to do some housework this afternoon – cleaning out my master bedroom, primarily. I’ve had a twin bed in there for the last few months (moved my queen to the guest room before Cy and “T” visited), and at first I was getting great sleep in it because the cats didn’t fit on it and pretty much left me alone. That’s changed in the last couple of weeks. They still don’t fit, so they just jump all over me and make sleeping pretty much impossible. Time to bring the queen back into play.

It is now officially summer in Georgia, and it’s been officially HOT for several weeks. Temps today should be in the mid-90s, which makes the thought of cleaning my room a bit more palatable than the thought of mowing the lawn.

But they’ve both gotta get done, so I guess I’ll go get started.

…And Two More Months Have Passed

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This whole work/life balance thing is out of whack, I guess. I come home from work, eat some dinner, watch a video or two on YouTube, and hit the sack. Get up, feed the cats, take a shower, and go to work. On Saturdays and Sundays, I sleep in as much as possible, watch a couple videos, maybe mow the lawn (caveat: sometimes I mow the lawn after work), go play trivia at a pub, do some grocery shopping, eat dinner, go to bed.

This has to stop. I’m getting out of shape, I’m bored, and I’m accomplishing nothing.

So, yesterday and today, I started walking again. Hiked up to Jenny’s house (4-mile round trip) to feed her cats. And I’m going to force myself to start walking in the mornings again. To that end, I’ve rolled my wake-up routine back a half an hour (to 5:25). Did that on Friday, because I had to go to work early, and the cats have already adjusted by walking all over me at 5:30 yesterday and 5:20 this morning.

My wake-up routine, you ask? It’s not really an alarm, as I prefer to be woken up by kitties, but it gives them clues when to do it. At 5:20, the kitchen light comes on. At 5:25, my bedside lamp comes on. At 5:26, the theme from Silverado plays on my Alexa speaker. Rarely do I make it to the music, as the cats take their cue from the kitchen light and pounce on me in search of breakfast.

Call me crazy, but it’s a much nicer way to be awoken than using some sort of alarm clock.

Anyway…

Last weekend saw the first of what we in the Georgia Brass Band hope is an annual Southeast Brass Band Festival. Our board started kicking the idea around last year, and – miracle of miracles – it came together pretty well. We had bands from Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama in attendance (6 total, including us), hired a long-time friend of the band (Dr. Ronald Holtz, who is huge in the brass band movement) to give comments on each band’s performance and award caption prizes (best soloist, most entertaining performance, best hymn, best march), and coordinated with a local high school with a phenomenal band program to use their facilities and let them sell concessions for their band program. It was actually a pretty rousing success, and (another miracle) the GBB came out in the black financially. As treasurer, I’d been thinking that we were going to take a bath on the thing, but we managed to make somewhere between $600 and $1000 for the day through t-shirt and CD sales and band registrations (we’re still waiting for one band to pay up, which is why I can’t say exactly how much we took in).

Our band was not eligible to win any of the awards, but we did get some excellent comments from Dr. Holtz and he confided to our director that, had we actually been competing, we would’ve blown the other 5 bands off of the stage – which we had kind of figured, hence we removed ourselves from consideration.

Originally, we’d ruminated on having the festival move around with different bands hosting each year, but now we’re leaning towards keeping it in Atlanta at least for a few years. Not to be immodest, but it’s hard to believe that any of the other bands in attendance could have better facilities, plus we’ve now got some insight on how to put on this type of event, and we think we can improve going forward.

All in all, it was a good day. I’m glad we did it and I’m looking forward to trying again next year.

At work, I had one of my direct reports leave a couple of weeks ago. He found another job that pays more (I’ve been saying that we need to improve our L1 salaries for over two years), and I was happy to see him moving on – not because he didn’t do a reasonable job for me, but because I’m always genuinely happy to see my directs move up. To that end, I also traded away two of my other directs, last week, to another team. One of them was one of my senior consultants, and I thought he’d come out of his shell a bit more with a younger team which has just been formed. The other is a kid who I think can be a senior in time, but he also needs to be put in an environment where he can step up as a leader, and he wasn’t going to get that opportunity on my team, which is generally composed of consultants who’ve been there longer than he has.

In return, I got one rising consultant from the other team, so I’m actually down to 7 directs and, with project season – when we onboard new clients – ramping up, I’m a bit concerned about how we’re going to handle the increased number of clients with a smaller team; but I’m confident that we’ll figure it out.

My boss has implemented an aptitude test for all of the people who apply for an L1 job, and he had all of the team leads take it to get an idea of how well it does. Turns out that I’m a “medium” fit for a helpdesk job – and the test pretty much nailed my personality, concluding in effect that I just like to get shit done, don’t always follow the standard procedures, and really don’t care what anybody thinks about how I do things. It said a lot of other things that were also spot-on, and I think it’s going to help bring in a higher caliber of candidate for upcoming interviews…..if we can work on that crappy salary thing…

I may try to go camping next week if Jenny is home (she’s in Santorini or someplace exotic like that, and I can’t remember when she’s coming home. If I do go out, it’ll be a solo trip. My buddy Brett and I had a pretty bad trip a month or two ago – actually came to a physical altercation, which I would never have imagined between the two of us – and we’re basically done with each other at this point. I haven’t been out by myself (other than Michigan trips) in several years, but the woods are calling me. Can’t say that the news about a moron killing somebody on the Appalachian Trail last weekend hasn’t been in my thoughts a bit as I contemplate going up to one of my favorite sites in NC that is fairly close to the trail, but I still believe that there’s a much higher chance of getting attacked in my house than there is in getting attacked in the woods.

Cy and “T” cruised through for a visit a few weeks back. It was good to see them, though I was a bit embarrassed at the state of my abode – still need to get down new flooring, put in a new fence, things like that. We had dinner (Jenny came along) and idle chit-chat. I don’t actually remember where we ate, but it was great to see them.

Jenny and I also flew (yes, I flew) to Cleveland a couple of weekends ago to see Dad and Diane – and Kara and her husband Tom on a Saturday evening. Got to meet the new puppy that Dad and Diane have (do not remember its name…I think I’m getting Alzheimer’s), hang around with the important folks for a few hours, and had a nice dinner with everyone at Bonefish Grill. Always great to see you and find out how you’re doing, Dad. Heard you had to visit your physician friends again this week, and I’m sending lots of good thoughts your way.

And now, it being Sunday, I think I’ll take a shower and go play some trivia.

Gotta think bout that work/life balance, ya know.

Updated by Popular Demand

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So I got a short email from Dad the other day, letting me know that I haven’t posted here since last Christmas. That seemed crazy to me when I read it, so I checked – and he is, of course, correct. That being the case, I shall now attempt to compose some sort of update on what’s been going on since then.

Not a lot, as it turns out.

Work has been a beast through this tax season (corporate deadline was last Saturday, and the personal one is April 15, as you probably know). We’ve had some issues with our physical file system, causing extreme delays and disconnections for a number of our clients. Naturally, they don’t understand or care that the level 1 people who are generally the first to respond to their complaints can do absolutely nothing about this – they just want to get pissed off with whomever is trying to help them. As a lead, I’m generally the guy who gets to be the backstop for my 9 direct reports, so I’m getting yelled at pretty much every day.

Making things more annoying is the fact that our systems admin team spent a long time refusing to admit that maybe it was their fault that the systems were failing, and sometime in late December or early January they decided that it must be scripts that other people had written that were causing the problems. A decree was issued that scripts were henceforth forbidden unless they were written by the systems admin team. Naturally, my own scripts – which were being used by most of the level 1 teams – were instantly assessed to be existential threats that had to be killed.

So the SA people wrote their own script to seek out and delete any copies of my scripts anywhere they resided, be it on the network or on local workstations. This plan was not announced, of course, but I had an idea that they might try something like that. Not wanting to lose 6 months worth of work, I deleted all of my scripts, keeping copies both in my recycle bin and on my iPod. These days, I feed bits and pieces of my scripts to the development team, who insist that their web-based portal can be used to do anything that I was doing with PowerShell – though that team tends to take about a month to even consider coding something that I’d regularly throw together in about 45 minutes when the need arose.

With one exception, by the way, none of my scripts do anything other than read data. They tell me, for example, who is logged on to a given server, what a user’s unique ID is (for registry searches), when a server was last rebooted, things like that. The exception to that is a script that deletes unnecessary files that are filling up space on client servers and causing them to fail. What I’m saying here is that 1}These are scripts that are needed to keep things running smoothly, and 2}There is no way they were causing any performance issues for the clients. After a few weeks of those scripts not running and performance continuing to decline, the SA team finally looked inward and discovered the file systems problems (not to mention problems with their own procedures – like running backups without checking first to see if the backup volumes had enough space to hold the incoming backups). A great hue and cry was raised (not to mention wailing and gnashing of teeth) about how this was the hardware vendors’ fault, how it couldn’t have been foreseen, and how they’d fix it after tax season; oddly, no mention was made of restoring my scripts, which were incredibly helpful in efficiently handling the volume of tickets being submitted due to the infrastructure problems. So they remain mothballed, and I – and one of the L2 guys who helped me – remain completely pissed off with the company as a whole and are at this point simply going through the motions at work. He (the L2) is actively looking for another job where he isn’t treated as a scapegoat who knows nothing, and may have gotten one last Thursday. We should know by next week. I’ve been sorely tempted to apply for either an apps management job or a level 2 job (both are currently open positions, and I’m fairly certain that I’d get either of them if I applied), but I’m sticking with management for now. If I have to keep working for longer than I’d like to, that’s where I’m most likely to find another gig.

Have to go help Jenny move some stuff for her dad. I’ll post this now, let my own Dad know, and continue with the drama of the last three months later on.

Christmas Vacation

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Well, there’s not a lot going on these days, but I thought I should update this thing anyway. I got the 24th-26th off from work (today being the 26th, of course), and I really haven’t done a thing in the last 5 days. Watched a bit of football on Saturday and sat at home watching television from Sunday until today. I did go over to Jenny’s place for dinner with her and her dad last night, which was nice. Some sort of a crabmeat casserole and some scallops, and a bit of catching up with Herb, who’s having more trouble getting out of a chair than he used to – and he’s not as light as he thinks he might be; I can attest to that having helped him up a few times. As he said when I was helping him into the car, “It’s amazing how fast your strength goes, and how much you don’t even realize you used to use it,” to do things like get into a car. Speaking of Herb and cars, Jenny and I are going to try to get his started and sold on Saturday. He’s also been talking to a realtor, so I guess he’s finally letting go of the house in Dunwoody.

Found out from my boss sometime last week that I’ll be getting a $750 bonus in my next paycheck, which is nice. Also getting a 4% raise starting with the January checks. Still nowhere near what I was making a couple of years ago (example: my last bonus at AT&T was just a bit over $9,000), but it’s a nice gesture and I do appreciate it. Got to give almost all of my direct reports raises for next year, too, which was great. The X-company just doesn’t pay their level 1 employees enough – which is probably why we can’t keep the good ones.

The photo for this post, should you be wondering, is of my buddy Brett during a trip we took to Huckleberry Knob in, I think, Tennessee, in July of 2009. I was going through some old hard drives today and found a bunch of old photos. Spent quite a bit of time reminiscing about everything from football games to camping trips to band concerts. It’s hard to believe how much time I spent with a camera in front of my face for the first 15 years of this century. Maybe I’ll pack one of the Canons the next time I go camping.

I toyed with the idea of going in to the office today to play around with a script that I’m trying to write for our infrastructure team, but that idea lost its luster over the last couple of hours, and now I’m thinking more about getting my hair cut and going to play trivia in a bar and watch whatever sports are on today. I just don’t feel like coding – or sitting in the office – before tomorrow.

And now I’ll dig into one of those old hard drives a bit more and see what other interesting things I can find. Sounds like a good way to waste a morning.

End-of-the-year Crunch

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Yes, indeed.  The year is coming to a close and I’m in the middle of my “must get everything done before January” month.  There are many reasons that I like the fact that I was born when I was, but the December crunch is not one of them.

I got my driver’s license renewed last weekend.  Also received the letter to renew my tags, which I put off dealing with until today.  Other fun things included paying my auto insurance, renewing a couple of domains, doing year-end reviews for all of my direct reports (save one, who’ll get to go through that on Monday), and I don’t know what else.

As I said, I pulled out the registration letter today and logged on to pay for my 2019 registration, only to realize that I’ve forgotten to get my emissions checked (must do that before registering).  So I guess that’s on the docket for later this morning.

The X-company Christmas party was last Monday.  I did not attend.  Not a fan of 1}hanging out with the people from work, 2}hanging out with the people from work when there’s an open bar.  Not to worry, though.  The X-company gives out really nice Christmas presents to everyone – even those of us who don’t go to parties – and I scored a drone yesterday.  This is cool, because I’d been thinking about buying one anyway to take camping.  From what I can tell, the company saved me about $700.  I’ve been there for nearly two years and I’m not a huge fan of the job, but there are perks.

The GBB has a Christmas concert next Tuesday night, which should be fun.  After that, we’ll take a couple of weeks off and then start getting serious about NABBA rehearsals (we’re going in the Championship Section this year) and about the inaugural Southeastern Brass Band Festival, which was the idea of our board last summer and which – surprisingly – is shaping up to be a pretty good event.  I believe we’ve got 6 bands signed up for it and a great hall in which they can all perform.  That takes place in, I think, May.

It has been rainy and quite cool for the last month, and I must sing praises to my Nest Learning Thermostat.  Picked it up in late summer and have nothing but good things to say about it.  Since switching over from cooling to heating, it’s done a really good job of keeping the house comfortable and – from what I can see – saving me quite a bit of the green stuff.

Forgot to mention that I had my own annual review at work last week.  The first one I’ve had since I’ve been there, and I got “exceptional” marks all the way down the board.  First time that’s happened in about 30 years.  Granted, I think it’s the first time the X-Company has even done reviews, I’m in the first class of Team Leads they’ve ever had, my boss is the first-ever Director of Service in the company’s history, and I don’t think anyone really knows what they’re doing…but still – I got perfect scores and a raise and I’ll take it.  Also had a talk with my boss about restructuring going forward and there’s a decent possibility that I’ll get a bump up to some sort of capo di tuti capi role (floor lead/lead of leads) in the next year.  It will take my one level further away from technology and one step closer to full-time people administration, which is not an idea that I relish; but it is sort of what I had in mind when I took the job and told the hiring manager that I guess I’d start a completely new career with the X-Company.  

I’m getting more comfortable with my current role as lead – kind of shocks me at times to realize that I’m basically doing the job that my bosses used to do, but I also have the ability to take a step back if I need to clear my head and just work on technical problems.  I have two seniors on my team, one of whom I’m grooming to be a lead himself, so when I want to work on computer problems, I just tell my team to go to Matt with their questions for a while.  It’s working pretty well.

And I guess that’s about all I’ve got to say for right now.  The featured image for this post is of my kitchen in the Cheboygan Cabin last month.  I’d meant to use it for one of the posts that I wrote while in the cabin, but my phone apparently never uploaded the shot.  See how rustic I am!

a terrible horrible very bad day

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Note: I found this in my “drafts” folder today.  I’m assuming that it’s from somewhere in 2015, when I was dating Amy from Waukegan.

Monday was driving day.  The return to Atlanta from Waukegan.  It began at about 4:30 AM – and I should’ve just stayed in bed.

Remember when truck drivers were among the best drivers on the road?  Yeah, well, they’re not anymore.  I started to notice this probably 10 years ago, and it just seems to be getting worse with time. With that in mind, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me that I came to a less-than-screeching halt 90 minutes after I set out on my trip Monday morning.  Feeling good about things after making it through downtown Chicago without any significant slowdowns, I found myself basically sitting still on I-94, in the rain, for the better part of two hours – caught in the backup created by three trucks that had somehow managed to tangle with each other on I-80, some 5 miles down the road from me.

After finally getting past the scene of the accident, I spent the next 13 hours in basically non-stop rain, fog,  and the mist kicked up by trucks whose drivers insisted upon driving next to other trucks, blocking both lanes and throwing up walls of water behind them.  I got a bit of a break just south of Nashville, when the rain stopped and, briefly, the sun came out.  By the time I approached the mountains north of Chattanooga, however, Mother Nature had thrown down the gauntlet.  The rain increased steadily for the remainder of the trip, which ended at around 8:00 Monday night.  By then, my neck and shoulders were in agony from the hunched-forward attitude that I’d been holding in the car for the majority of the day.  It’s now two days later, and I could still use a massage.

I did make it home, however – managed to take just over 5600 pictures during the trip (the GoPro was set to snap one every 10 seconds) – and yesterday was back to the grind.  It’s amazing how I can miss two days of work (three if you count the few people who go in to waste time on Saturdays) and end up with over 400 emails to go through upon my return.  I spent a couple of hours trying to pay attention to them yesterday before figuratively throwing up my hands and deleting the whole lot of them.  Probably not the most prudent thing to do, but I just wasn’t in the mood to deal with it anymore.  If there was anything in there that was actually worth reading, I’m sure it will be resent about 40 more times before I need to actually pay attention.

Spent the rest of the day dealing with obstinate workstations and working on some new code ideas.

After work, I went to a brass band rehearsal – which was nice.

There were no truck drivers there.

TWD

Back to the Grind

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So I did make it back from Michigan at just about midnight on November 16th.  It was a white-knuckle drive for the first few hours, as snow had been falling for most of Thursday night and plows had not been sent out by the time I left the cabin.  75 south comprised a couple of tire tracks that everyone more or less stayed in, with the exception of the random idiot who jumped into the left lane to try to pass everyone – without the benefit of any road markings at all.  I saw a number of cars that had spun off of the road and laughed a bit at all of them.

By the time I got back down to Toledo, the snow was pretty much gone, but it was bitterly cold whenever I had to stop for gasoline.  The Subaru did a great job overall.

Had a Thanksgiving dinner with Jenny, her neighbor, and Herb at Herb’s assisted living place on Saturday.  The food was good and the company was pleasant and I think everyone had a good time.  I also scored one of Herb’s old office chairs – we’d taken it to him, but because it has wheels, it’s not a good idea for him to try to use it – and I’m sitting in it as I type this.  I’ve never had a decent office chair at home, which is the main reason that I don’t take advantage of the fact that I could work at home a couple of days each week if I choose to.  I may choose to in 2019.

The next week, which contained Thanksgiving, was a short one at work.  We got Thursday and Friday off and I spent those two days recovering from the drive back – sleeping a lot, doing laundry, cleaning out the car, watching football.  Jenny and I had tentative plans to sell Herb’s car last Saturday, but they fell through so I spent the weekend watching more football, getting more sleep, doing more laundry.  Then it was back to work for a full week, which was not pleasant.

We had system outages on Monday and Tuesday – raised everyone’s blood pressures – and my problem employee was AWOL on Wednesday.  I sent him a number of texts and tried to call – no response until very early Thursday morning, when he sent a text to me to tell me that he had to take his kid to the hospital, that he’d tried to email me and my boss, but the email was stuck in the outbox, and that he didn’t have his phone with him.  Since he was supposed to be working at home all week – the result of a dead car, which he was to replace on Friday – I stewed a bit on Thursday before letting him know that I got his text and he really needs to confirm that his messages are received when he sends them to me.  On Friday, he sent me an instant message that he had to clock out at 1:00 in order to get a new car, which he had to do on Friday or it wouldn’t be done until Monday.

That kinda tore it.  On Monday, he and I and my boss and and HR rep will be meeting first thing in the morning, and he’ll be getting official written notice from me that he is not to miss any more days or he’s looking at getting fired.  I didn’t want to go there.  I’m a laid-back boss.  I’m also not a good guy to screw with on a regular basis.

So I’ve got that to look forward to tomorrow….

Was good to get back to the band last Tuesday night.  We’re rehearsing for a Christmas concert on the 18th (I think), and playing some good stuff.  My chops were a bit rusty after having three weeks off, but I acquitted myself well, I think.  Looking forward to the concert.

Yesterday, I found 14 forms of identification and drove over to the DMV (in the pouring rain) to get my license renewed.  I was worried that I might have to take an eye test (probably would’ve failed without my reading glasses), but everything went smoothly and I managed to get everything taken care of in under two hours.  Got my temporary replacement and should have the new license in a month or so.  So that’s out of the way.  I also paid my car insurance this week – no more of that until June.  Last thing I need to do with the car before 1/1 is get the registration renewed, but I can do that online.

I might make it through this year after all – two years at the X company.  Hard to believe.  I’ve pretty much settled into the salary.  Still miss the old one, but I can afford everything on what I make now and even splurge every now and then.  I’m kind of resigned to the fact that I hit my peak in 2016 and I’ll probably never make it back there, salary-wise, but I’m moving on and just trying to learn how to be an effective manager of people.  Got a nice boost from my boss on LinkedIn last week – he sent me a recommendation for my profile, which was completely unexpected and very much appreciated, and made me feel like I might just be making a good impression in my new position.  Small victories.

And so we’re all caught up.  Should you be wondering, the photo at the top of this entry was taken on the Thursday afternoon before I left Cheboygan.  The sun was on its way down, the wind had picked up, and a storm was just starting to make an appearance over the lake.  It was incredibly cold and gorgeous and I just kept running out into it to experience it, then running back to the cabin to get warm.  All in all, a great way to spend an afternoon.

Road Trip!

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The snow and wind stopped sometime during the night and I woke up (late – nearly 8:00!) to bright sunshine and crisp temperatures outside. Have not gotten above 25 today, but the lack of wind has made things much more hospitable than they were yesterday. My weather app tells me that tomorrow will also be sunny and that the thermometer will reach to nearly 40, which will feel like shorts weather after the last few days.

As planned, the fire had nearly gone out by the time I woke up, so I made some coffee and then shoveled a bunch of ash out of the stove, which I deposited into the trash can designed for such stuff outside. Feeling the housekeeping bug, I then proceeded to do some furniture rearrangement – moved my table and wood pile, pushed some chairs out of the way, redesigned the way that I hang my sink, set up a better coat rack, then swept out the entire cabin and the front porch.

After doing so, I brought in two loads of wood and completely filled my inside wood rack. Note to self: do that BEFORE sweeping the floor next time.

Took stock of my food for a bit next. Down to 6 beers, no chips left. Sure, I have other foodstuffs, but let’s be serious here. I was taking stock of the important food. Having determined that I was running low on the vitals, I determined to drive in to Cheboygan and restock. This turned out to be somewhat of a hassle, as my car has been sitting idle since last Friday and was covered in 3 inches of snow and ice. I brushed off most of the loose snow (did I mention that, yes, I have a snow brush and scraper in my car?), then remembered that I needed to add a quart of oil to the thing. Managed to get the hood open, but could not loosen the oil cap until I got a couple of logs from the woodshed and banged on it for a while. Got the oil put in, then climbed in and cranked her up to warm up the windows before scraping off the ice.

For a horrible moment, I thought the car wasn’t going to start, but it caught after a couple of attempts (this car has never sat out for a week in sub-freezing temperatures) and warmed up everything nicely. Drove to the Marathon station in town (about 5 miles) and filled up with gasoline, then picked up a 12-pack of brew, a couple bags of chips, a gas station sandwich – which I had for lunch, along with a pack of three-pepper sauce that I found in my brain – and a big bottle of Gatorade. Needed that last not so much for the drink, but because my current pee bottle needs to hold more, if you know what I mean.

Arriving back at the cabin, I shoveled some more ash out of the stove, then put in a couple of new logs, started listening to a podcast, and promptly fell asleep. I’ve been dozing on and off for most of the day since, and – now 4:20 in the afternoon – the sun is on the way down. I plan to hit the sack fairly early tonight (sleeping is what I do best on my solitary vacations), and maybe take a walk tomorrow, in between naps.

The picture for this post is of one of the two lighthouses that I have guarding the east-west channel alongside of which I’m camped. This one is right offshore to the west – it gives its name to the Lighthouse Cabin – and there’s another about a mile or two down to the east. I haven’t taken any pictures of them this year, but there are some BIG ships heading past every day, and the sounds of them chugging along and sounding their horns, along with the sounds of the horns from the lighthouses at night, is pretty amazing.

Cold Snap

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I woke up early this morning, and quickly discovered – on my way to the latrine – that it had gotten markedly colder than it was yesterday. The temperature itself wasn’t terrible, having only dropped a few degrees into the mid-twenties, but the wind was back with a vengeance. Not sure what the wind chill actually is (I used to have a chart for that), but I’ll just say that it has been COLD all day.

That being the case, I’ve spent most of the day inside the cabin, reading, snoozing, and listening to podcasts. I did bundle up and take a walk this afternoon – explored some of the Duncan Bay side of the point, and got in a bit more than 2 miles of exercise. Was forced to wear a gaiter than Cy gave me several years ago or my face would have frozen off; and I had on a tee, flannel shirt, windbreaker, gloves, and flannel-lined pants to keep the rest of me warm.

Today was pasta day at the old cabin. Made some ravioli on the wood stove for brunch and had some dehydrated spaghetti and meat sauce about an hour ago. Both were pretty good, but I’ll give the nod to the spaghetti. Mountain House makes some good dehydrated food.

It has also been snowing off-and-on for most of the day, although I got a couple hours of sunny clear skies during and just after my walk. No accumulation to speak of, but the sidewalk that I so carefully shoveled could probably use another scraping. That won’t happen today, as it’s already dark.

For some reason, the picture that I keep trying to attach to this post (a shot of my cabin kitchen) won’t upload, and my email doesn’t seem to be updating, either. That being the case, this post might not publish – but I’m going to click the “Publish” button now anyway.

Monday in the Woods

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I’m not sure what I said that I was going to do yesterday, but I’m fairly confident that I didn’t do it. I spent nearly the entire day in my cabin listening to podcasts and/or watching a couple of movies. I’d hoped to be able to watch the Falcons game, but my YouTube TV apparently doesn’t get live feeds in this area (one more reason that I’ll continue to experiment with that on a month-to-month basis).

As it turned out, the Falcons got crushed by a terrible Cleveland team, so I didn’t miss much.

I did get a nap in for an hour or so late-morning. Also brought in another load of wood (my third since Friday) and made some very good beef stew. Did that last on my old Coleman stove, which was the first time that I’ve used it at all since arriving here. My wood stove has done an admirable job of heating my water AND my food for the last few days. I stocked up on Coleman fuel for this trip, but it seems to me that I’m going to use very little of it. What I did not stock up on was lantern fuel – and since it’s pretty much pitch black in the cabin by 5:30 at night, that may have been an oversight. We’ll see how it goes. I’ve got a couple of tent lamps, at least one (I think two) head lamps, and a couple of flashlights, so I should be okay. If not, I don’t mind going to sleep when it gets dark.

Should you be wondering why I have so many flashlights and head lamps, it’s because I brought my “brain” on the trip. It’s the little bag that sits on top of my backpack, and I’ve said on many camping/hiking trips that, if necessary, I could live out of my brain for a week. It contains a lot of the ultra-light stuff that I’ve collected in the last 20 years while striving for the ultimate light pack, and usually has a couple of light sources, fire sources, spare food (oatmeal, cliff bars, coffee), water purifiers, various drugs and ointments, a spare knife, and lots of other things that may come in handy in an emergency. My brain only weighs about a pound, but it’s definitely a worthwhile weight for overnight hikes.

I did some snow shoveling this morning. Cleared the sidewalk between the cabin and the outhouse, and also cleared a path between the cabin and the wood shed. Salted everything, and that should take care of any slippery spots for the next day or two. It has continued to snow since yesterday afternoon, but it’s not sticking, so I don’t foresee any problems with actually driving out of here at the end of the week.

I did rouse myself out of the cabin stupor for about an hour late yesterday afternoon and took a rather brisk walk on the beach for about a mile (and another mile in the woods). My plan for today is to make a long loop on the various trails – head to Cheboygan point on an interior trail, circle back and head east on the beach all the way down to Poe Reef cabin, then head south through the woods to the campground, west on the other side of it, then back north through the cedar swamp to my cabin. I’m not positive about the distance, but I think it will be around 10 miles.

Or maybe I’ll just sleep, eat, and watch videos.

I meant to point out earlier that the picture at the top of this post is, I believe, one of loons that were hanging out in my little cove yesterday. There were 6 of them in total. Lots of water birds here. In addition to the (I think) loons, there is a flock of about 20 swans, at least two eagles, ducks, and lots of seagulls.

Later. My 10-mile walk ended up being a little over 6 miles. That’s fine, because my back, quads, and feet really didn’t want to go any further. Between the sand on the beach and the snow, walking was tough!

So that was a couple of hours this afternoon, since which time I’ve made a dehydrated turkey casserole (quite good), listened to a podcast, and played in the wind a bit. The wind has picked back up dramatically, and it has gotten quite cold on the beach. Since the sun is going down in the next hour or so (it’s already pretty dark), I think I’m probably in for the evening.

Loving that wood stove….