Lazy Sunday

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It is a dreary morning here on the shore of Lake Huron. It’s been snowing for a few hours now, and that shows no signs of stopping. Not a heavy snow, but enough to fill in my footprints after 20 minutes or so.

The wind completely died away sometime after midnight last night, and the most immediate result of that is that it has become uncomfortably warm inside the cabin. I’ve got two windows and the front door open and I’m still sweating through my tee shirt. Maybe I’ll take a dip in the lake. Ha!

It was wonderfully cold outside last night. Sounds strange, I know, but there is something about a northern cold that I really like. I know that I complained a few months ago that it had been relentlessly cold in Georgia last winter – and I meant that – but I guess because of the humidity the cold in Michigan or Vermont or Canada just feels different, and I like it. There was also a break in the cloud cover last night and I was able to catch a look at the night sky away from city lights. Beautiful.

I’ve been listening to podcasts this morning, but will probably take a walk in a little while. Might also shovel the sidewalk (I didn’t get to that yesterday), and will definitely bring in another load of wood. It’s warm in here now, but I know how fast this cabin will reach the twenties if I let the fire die.

Other than the walk, the wood, and the shoveling, I have no plans for today. Might be a day for reading or napping.

Snow Day!

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I woke up this morning to a beautiful Lake Huron sunrise, strong winds, and a couple of inches of the white stuff. As I sit here at the table in my cabin, listening to a Furman football game, I’m looking out at something I’m pretty sure that I’ve never seen before: snow in the foreground and the lake, with huge white caps, in the back. The wood stove in the cabin is doing an amazing job – I’m in my underwear and have cracked a window, both to cool things down a little bit and to let me hear the wind, which is constant and incredibly soothing. I played my wind game for about an hour earlier this morning, which I haven’t been able to do for several years.

Wind game: try to find a spot outside that allows me to simultaneously be in and out of the wind. I invented it as a small child in Shoreham – the perfect spot was behind the berry bush between the roots of the Elm tree in the front yard. The best spot I found today was in a Cedar Grove near the beach.

Took two fairly long walks today. The first one took me to Cheboygan Point, about a mile from here. I wandered around there for a while, then walked east on the beach back past my cabin to the edge of the park. Came back to the cabin for a lunch of chicken and dumplings, then opted to walk over to the campsite on the southern edge of the park rather than take a nap.

I’d just arrived back at the cabin after that trek when one of the rangers showed up to give me some rock salt and – you called it, Dad! – a snow shovel. I shoveled off the front of the cabin, where I have my “settin’ outside” chair, before coming back in to listen to the game. Later today, I might get enough energy to shovel off the walkway that leads to the latrine.

A bit about the cabins here at Cheboygan State Park: there are three of them, all available year-round, and all basically the same. I stayed in the Poe Reef cabin last year. This time, I’m at 14-Foot Shoals, which is about a mile further off the main road than Poe. A quarter-mile further along is Lighthouse Cabin. 14-Foot Shoals has a “porch” of sorts, which is missing in the other two cabins. It’s just a little 3-foot overhang across the front of the cabin, but it’s a great place to sit outside without being completely exposed to the elements.

Other than that, the cabins are all pretty much the same. They’re square buildings – I’d guess about 20 feet per side – with a single room under a peaked roof. Each wall has at least one window (2 on the lake-facing wall), and there is a small counter in one of the lakeside corners. Each building also has a wood stove, 4 sets of bunk beds, a table with two benches, and a number of wooden chairs. Hooks in the rafters provide a good place to hang a lantern (there is no electricity). Each cabin also has two out-buildings: a vault toilet and a large woodshed. Water is available from a hand pump outside (kind of yellow this year, but seems to taste alright), and there are two picnic tables and two firepits – one set at the forest side of the cabin and the other on the beach.

I’m sure that, during the summer, the beaches here get crowded. In late October/early November, however, I’ve had the place pretty much to myself. Yes, there are people staying in the other two cabins, but they are distant enough to not exist, basically. Solitude is what I like, and this place has it.

A Home in the Woods

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I have arrived at Cheboygan State Park in Michigan.

Actually, I arrived at just after 2 this afternoon, and it is now about 3:30. In the 90 minutes between, I unloaded my car of about a week’s worth of supplies, stocked the cabin with firewood (there’s plenty more in the wood shed), put on my boots, walked on the beach, and have drunk exactly one beer (more will be consumed, I predict).

It was snowing when I left Perrysburg, OH, this morning, and it’s threatening to do the same here in Cheboygan before the day is over, but right now it’s just overcast and a little chilly (about 36 degrees, according to the cabins thermometer). In the cabin itself, I’m guessing that it’s in the 50s, but I did get a fire started (forgot to mention that), and I expect that it’ll be up closer to 70 before too much longer).

The week in Perrysburg went pretty well. We had some network trouble on Sunday night, but got that cleared up on Monday, got all of the workstations set up, and were able to leave the office by about 6:30. Tuesday-Thursday went smoothly. Not too many people had trouble, so it was mainly a case of making sure printers worked okay, explaining how multiple monitors have to be configured, easy stuff. There was a system-wide outage on Wednesday morning, which was not cool at all, but nothing we could do about it. My mind was in Michigan anyway.

The plan for the rest of the day is to get the temperature up in the cabin, drink a bit of beer and bourbon, heat up some water for a sponge bath in the morning, maybe take a walk, watch a movie (I brought six of them on my phone), and sleep like a dead man. Between the breeze in the woods and the sound of the surf, about 100 feet from where I’m sitting, that last should be no problem at all.

Week of 10/22/18

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Monday: Thought that I’d try something different this week and put down some notes from each day into a post that will be published at the end of the week.

I played a concert with the Gwinnett Wind Symphony yesterday afternoon. It wasn’t the best thing that I’ve ever been involved with, but it probably wasn’t the worst, either. We had a decent crowd at Gwinnett Infinity Theater, and – in spite of a few close calls – the band didn’t fall apart.

After the concert, I stopped at MicroCenter and picked up a mini Bluetooth keyboard, which I’ve paired to my phone (and am currently using to type this). Together with the WordPress app that I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, my phone is actually becoming something that I can legitimately use for writing. Yes, the KB is pretty cramped, and the shift keys aren’t exactly where I expect for them to be, but with practice, I can probably get up to 60-70 words per minute, which is amazing.

After the stop at MicroCenter, I went over to visit Herb in his new assisted living place. It’s a pretty good setup for him, and is close to Jenny and me. He’s got a small bedroom/office in one room, and kitchen/living room in another, and a good-sized bathroom. Pretty homey, all things considered, and he’s got caregivers around the clock, which is excellent. I helped him get his wireless printer set up and gave him a ream of paper (I’ve got more than I’ll ever use). Jenny was also there, so we visited for a bit before I came home, watched some television, did some laundry, and hit the sack.

Printers were the bane of my existence at work today. About a week ago, one of my firms decided to swap two printers. Normally, this isn’t a big deal, and I would just have to change their names in the group policy that pushes them out to workstations. Something went wrong with the policy, however, and I spend much of last week trying to get things working. Not only did the two printers not swap like they were supposed to, but people started losing OTHER printers. I got a frantic call from the client admin this morning saying that nobody on the second floor of the building had any printers.

So I spent all day trying various things to figure out what the hell was going on. Between 5:30 and 6:00 I think I finally got things working normally. It’s my hunch that the policy was never set up correctly when the firm came on board two months ago. I’m guessing that the on-site people manually installed everybody’s printers and nobody noticed that the policy wasn’t working until something had to change. When I made that change, all of the problems came to light.

It was, to put it mildly, a frustrating day.

I did get a little bit of time during the day to do some more work on a powershell script that I’ve been writing, and that was fun. I’m trying to, basically, rewrite the registry editor so that I can modify specific user hives in remote terminal servers. There are probably a hundred other (better) ways to do what I’m trying to do, but I’ve never used Powershell as much as I should have when I was managing systems, and learning a new language is a nice break during otherwise monotonous days.

Tomorrow will be another stressful day – we’re migrating four firms to Office 365. Two of my guys are in the O365 phone queue for expected heavy traffic, and two others are on a project in Florida, so my team will be severely short-handed.

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Tuesday: The weather took a turn for the cool this morning. I think it was in the low 50s when I got up and hovering around 60 when I left for work. Never got warmer than the low 70s.

Work itself wasn’t too bad. I had to do a few more tweaks for the printers that have taken up much of the last week, but got that out of the way early this morning. The rest of the day was spent closing tickets and helping my team with their own. Also got a little bit of work done on my Powers he’ll script and though of a few things that I can add to it.

Learned from one of my team that our team entry into last week’s Mega Millions drawing actually bore some fruit! We bought 9 tickets as a team on Friday as a part of a team-building exercise (went out to dinner at Dave & Busters), and we won $200. Not a billion bucks, but not bad. Of course, nobody won the whole thing, so tonight’s drawing, as you may know, is the largest jackpot ever at over $1.6 billion. Yes, I do have tickets – bought twenty of the things on my own. If I win, maybe I’ll throw some cash at my team.

I got home fairly late tonight – somewhere between 7 and 7:30 – and didn’t do much at all. Watched some television, washed some dirty dishes, and now I’m in bed. Maybe I’ll be a billionaire when I wake up.

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Wednesday: Not a billionaire. Not even a millionaire. In fact, on the twenty lottery tickets that I had – that’s 106 numbers altogether, I matched exactly…none. Oh well. Back to the grind, I guess.

It was nippy today for a while. Tomorrow is supposed to be nippier, with a high in the 60s. I’m not sure if it got over 70 today, but I was inside for most of the day, so I was comfortable in my Downtown Magnetawan tee and jeans. I had high hopes of closing out a bunch of tickets today, but things kept getting in the way and I honestly don’t know what my final numbers were.

Did an interview from 4 to 5:30. Nice kid, but he won’t be working for us. The three of us who interviewed him were unanimous in our opinions that he has absolutely no computer skills, in spite of his degree in cyber security.

Learned this afternoon that I have to do one-on-one meetings with my team before 11/15 – which in my case means before 11/1. So every day between tomorrow and next Friday will be spent in preparing – gathering metrics, listening to phone calls, reading ticket summaries, etc. Not my idea of a good time. We’ll also be migrating firms to Office 365 every night from tonight until the end of the year, which is going to cause high ticket loads every morning. This is the biggest project the X-Company has ever attempted, and I don’t think it’ll be a lot of fun, but it does need to be done.

I tied the registry portion of my Power Shell project into the lookup portion of it today, and it’s working quite well. This tool may actually wind up being really REALLY useful for my team.

Got home fairly late again tonight – somewhere around 7 – and make a couple of chicken sandwiches to eat while watching “The Newsroom” on Prime Video. That was it. Sitting in bed now and am about to be lying in bed. Just waiting for the kitties to settle in.

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Thursday: It was indeed a little cold today, with highs in the mid-60s and an unrelenting breeze. Normally, I would love that, but I underestimated the prognosticators and wore a tee shirt to work – did not bring a jacket. Of course, it was completely comfortable in the office, but my breaks outside were cold.

Tried to prepare for my 1-on-1 meetings with my directs for about half of the day, worked on tickets for most of the other half, and had my own 1-on-1 with my boss, where I learned that I’m doing pretty good. We talked about my future plans – whether I’d stick with the management path or jump to an upcoming escalations specialist spot. I said that, in my heart of hearts, I’m a techy; but that I’m determined to see if I can get comfortable in an admin role. That being the case, I do not intend to apply for the ES role when it comes up.

Turns out that I’ve got the inside track to a management promotion as we continue to add level 1 employees. My boss doesn’t want to have more than 12 directs. As we add more L1s, we’ll break them up into more teams, each with a team lead (leads currently report to my boss). The plan is to put another level in between the L1 leads and the Service director (my boss), and that’ s where I’d go. The leads would report to me and I’d report to the service director.

As I grow more comfortable in this role, I can see where that position would be more to my liking – dealing with intelligent technical leads without having to also deal with the daily grind of dealing with newbies who may or may not have a future in tech. Certainly something to think about.

We also talked about our respective personalities and how we approach our leadership positions. Turns out that both of us harbor inner thoughts that we’re frauds, which is oddly comforting. So I’ll soldier on and continue to work on my leadership and motivational skills (or lack thereof), and will continue to try to make this a new 2nd-act career.

At the end of the day, my friend Schuyler and I dug into my Power Shell project and tweaked and played until after 6:00. That being the case, I didn’t get home until close to 7:00. Made a shepherds pie for dinner (very good), did some dishes, and watched a hilarious mockumentary about a terrible survivalist. It was called, I think, “Tex Montana Will Survive.”

Got in bed with the intention of watching some college football, but it appears that it is not on a local (non-cable) channel, so I guess I’ll just go to sleep.

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Friday: A cold, drizzly day to end out the work week. At least I was smart enough to wear a rain coat today.

Worked on tickets for most of the day. Had one 1×1 meeting at around 11:30 and got some coding done late in the day, but for the most part, I zoned out to tunes and worked on problems. Had one guy not show up for work – he sent me a picture of the side of his car, said that he was hung up and waiting for AAA. 2 hours later said that AAA had just picked him up (this was a also at around 11:30), but he never came in. Very smart guy. Good guy. And this is his third unexcsused absence in two months and the second this week. We’ll be having a meeting on Monday, which I do not want to have. But… I wanted to manage people, right?

I got home by 6 o’clock or so and it was 60 inside the house. Hated to do it, but I was sort of tired of being right on the verge of cold, so I turned on the heat (set to 68). It’s the first time I’ve had it on since probably March, and the earliest that I can remember turning it on. My Nest thermostat needed something different, though, and I’m interested to learn if it handles heating as well as it handled cooling all summer. The heat has been off for the last hour or so, so I’m not overly concerned yet about my natural gas bill. Plus, we’re supposed to rebound and be back in the 70s by tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, I don’t have many big plans for the weekend. Going to fix Jenny’s toilet on Sunday – replace a flapper, I think – and will probably start organizing things tomorrow for my trip next week. Will probably also go somewhere tomorrow afternoon to watch some football, play trivia, and hoist a few. At some point, I need to buy toilet paper and clean my master bath.

Call it the weekend of the toilet.

So I’ll wrap this up now and call this experiment of nightly updates to my blog, using my phone as a monitor and a tiny Bluetooth keyboard as an input device, a rousing success. Had I known how much I could use the phone for if I attached it to a keyboard, I probably would’ve picked up the latter years ago. It will definitely come in handy on off-the-grid vacations in the future.

With that, I close this entry and prepare for sleep. I’ll pick up this tome next week!

Still Alive!

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So it’s been a while. Figured I’d try to catch up on things while I’m sitting at Tires Plus waiting for new tires. Also testing out a WordPress app on my phone, which may allow me to post more often and, hopefully, will work well enough so that I can use it when I’m in Michigan in a few weeks.

I guess that’s the big news for now. I rented a cabin at Cheboygan State Park again this year, and I’m planning to stay there from November 9th to the 16th. It’s a lovely spot and I’m really looking forward to having a week by myself in the middle of nowhere to decompress and think about things. That week will come immediately on the heels of a week in Toledo, where I’ll be on a project for work. Not looking as forward to that, but it works nicely financially, as I’ll be reimbursed for mileage for around 1300 miles out of my entire trip.

Work has been somewhat exhausting as of late. The X-Company really built up the numbers in L1 support staff this year, and I’ve now got 10 direct reports and am expecting 1 or 2 more by the end of the year. Having been back in the management gig for nearly a year now (the last time I had directs was around 2006), I’ve sort of settled in to it. Managing people is, for me at least, much more stressful than just dealing with misbehaving computers. I get particularly annoyed when one of my people feels the need to take an emergency day off because, “My kid threw up,” but I guess I’m not allowed to admit that. I also have a few scenarios every day when I’m deep in the heart of working a problem which has been escalated to me and I get interrupted by someone who needs help with something that, to me, seems incredibly obvious. Maybe not the solution, but definitely the troubleshooting steps required to find it.

I haven’t gotten to get out much this year. Did go up to Whigg Meadow two more times since that weekend when Brett and I discovered it. Both trips were really nice (I hiked up both times, rather than subjecting my car to the terrible drive), though I did get absolutely soaked the first time – caught on the trail in a downpour with no rain gear.

I’m still looking for the perfect place to buy some land for a tiny cabin to live in in my old age. Have not found it yet, and I’m again wondering when I’ll be able to actually do this. I looked at my 401k yesterday and see that in the last 2 weeks I’ve lost everything that I gained during the first nine months of the year. Wouldn’t call it depressing, but it’s certainly not encouraging.

…

And now it’s the next day. I did get my tires put on, and had the front end aligned, which makes my car feel like a new car. Very nice. Jenny and I went to a Gladiators hockey game last night. Once again, we saw them playing the Orlando Sun Bears, which I think is the team that we’ve seen play every time we’ve gone. And once again, the Gladiators lost. We have a bad hockey team.

After I got home last night, I saw that I had an email from Dad. It had been written while I was sitting at the tires place, and it mentioned that he misses seeing updates to my blog. Well, here you go, Dad!

I guess the last little bit of news is that I’ve got a concert with the Gwinnett Wind Symphony later this afternoon. We’re performing the Suite from West Side Story, the Candice Suite and something else that I don’t recall right now. The band has been sounding pretty good for the rehearsals, which is different for this group.

So, we’ll call this test over. This app appears to do a pretty good job of allowing me to update my blog on-the-fly. The Voice Control isn’t all that great, but it’s faster than typing on the little phone keyboard. I do have to go back and correct things fairly often.

I don’t know how it will do with inserting pictures, which will be important when I’m in Michigan, but I’ll try that out later.

Ahmic 2018

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Yep.  I made it back to Camp Ulvik this year after not being able to do it last year.   What follows are notes as I wrote them in notepad while waiting for the WiFi to be turned on.  I’ll just update this post over the next few days rather than make new posts.

6:03 AM 7/8/2018
A gorgeous morning, with a slight breeze coming into the guest cabin from the lake. I arrived in camp at around 7:30 last night after driving up from Lima via Sault St. Marie. I took that route, though it is longer, because the crossing is so much easier than it is in Detroit and because the drive is much prettier. Saw a herd of bison, and a heron, in the Upper Penninsula of Michigan. Just Cy, T, and I in camp last night and we had burgers and a pasta salad for dinner. In bed by 9:30 and I got nearly 8 hours, though my watch tells me that only 3 of those were deep.

2:03 PM 7/8/2018
Took a fairly long walk this morning – down Langford Lane to the Rouse camp, then back up Thompson Road until I saw an interesting 4-wheeler track off to the right. Followed that into the woods for a while, then came back out, continued the walk up to Nippissing, and came back to the main cabin here. Got my 10K steps in, which I think is around 4.5 miles. When I got back, it was about 11:30 and Cy and T were heading into town to refill their propane tank, so I relaxed in the guest cottage. Sat on the porch in my underwear after taking a dip in the lake and listened to the wind chimes. Walked back up to the main cabin at around 1 and chatted with the two of them while they ate lunch. T is now in his cottage reading and I think Cy’s gone to the dock to try to steal WiFi from Whit and Ellen’s place (the phone lines are down here – wire snapped and T and I were unable to get the two ends close enough to splice, so the telephone guy is supposed to be here tomorrow to try to fix it). I stole T’s wireless keyboard for a while, since the “T” on my own keyboard has stopped working (along with a couple of other keys, I think). That’s on my surface pro. Guess I’ll need to get a replacement for it if I’m going to continue to take this little computer camping with me. For dinner tonight, we’re planning on going to Tanner’s British Pub. Have never been.

7/9/2018
We did indeed go to Tanner’s for dinner.  Everyone else had prime rib.  I opted for Shepherd’s Pie.  Wasn’t all that great – generally isn’t, from what I’ve learned by ordering it in restaurants.

Dianne arrived during the early afternoon and got settled into the near side of the boathouse.  There’s a new shower on that side this year, which is pretty cool.   Took the boat into town for a few things (I needed ingredients for a chicken/rice thing that I made for dinner – somehow managed to lose the can of soup that I got there….).  I spent much of the rest of the day trying to snooze in my cottage, but didn’t really sleep much.   Rolled myself up to the main cabin to make dinner somewhere between 5 and 6.  In addition to the rice chicken (which was pretty good), we roasted some beets (also pretty good).  Played team cribbage until about 10:00 (Di and Cy smoked T and I), then we all crashed.

7/10/2018
I slept in this morning – didn’t wake up until after 7, then stayed in bed for another hour before going up to the main cabin for coffee and conversation.  Took another long walk after that, dressed in a manner that covered every inch of exposed skin to keep the flies and mosquitos off (jeans, pullover, netting over my hat, and gloves).  Worked okay, but the little bastards bit my hands through the gloves anyway.  Got back to the camp and jumped in the lake a couple of times.  Cleaned the windows in the boathouse, fixed the drain on the fish sink, and had a bologna sandwich for lunch.

7/11/2018
Dianne made dinner on Tuesday night – hot dogs and some sort of macaroni salad (good stuff) – and the four of us played Oh Hell until about 10 o’clock.  I held a lead for most of the game, but fell apart late and Dianne kicked everyone’s butt.  Chris and Jamie still hadn’t arrived by the time it was dark, so we all went to bed.

7/12/2018
Chris and Jamie got here shortly after we had all retired on Tuesday, so it was great to see them first thing in the morning.  It was a beautiful day all day – lowest temps of the weeks (high 70s) – and we got some chores done before Cy and I went to Huntsville for groceries and to look for souvenirs.  That latter part was a complete bust for me.  Huntsville is no longer the nice little downtown area with cool mom and pop shops, but a built up tourist trap with very little other than restaurants.

Once we got back to the camp, I did a bit of reading and took a nap before heading back out to go to the Cornball Store for croissants and to the bait store for gasoline.  Cy made stuff peppers with leftover rice from Monday and some sausage that she brought from Vermont – fantastic!

The 6 of us played a variant of Pitch until it was dark.  Didn’t really keep score because we weren’t completely sure how to play, but it was fun.

7/13/2018
I slept until almost 7:30 this morning!  This is my last day in camp, so I’m planning to clean out the guest cabin today and get ready to hit the road as soon as I wake up tomorrow.  Plans for today are nebulous, but it’s supposed to be very hot and overcast (bugs will be bad!), so I see a lot of reading, swimming, and sleeping in my immediate future.

The croissants are amazing, by the way.

trips and falls

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So, yes.  It’s been a while since I updated this thing.  Truth be told, I just don’t feel like looking at a computer screen after I get home from work.  Don’t feel like doing much at all, honestly.  Free time is a luxury these days, with the relatively long commute to and from the office and the little projects around the house that never seem to go away.  So I wake up, I do or don’t take a walk, I drive to work, I work, I drive home, and I generally go to bed.  On the weekends, I flip a coin to decide whether to stay home and accomplish something (or sleep) or to go out and not accomplish anything.

On this fine Saturday morning, I haven’t flipped the coin yet.  Instead, I pulled out the laptop, paid some bills, did a little administrative work on my football website, and decided to add a new post to this story of my mid-life.

Today’s featured photo is of the mess that is called “the network closet” at the J. D. Frost CPA firm in Chattanooga.  That closet and that firm is where I kicked off the month of June by onboarding them during the week of Memorial Day.  The week went extremely well (hey, I was the lead on the project – a first for me – and I expected it to go well) and one other X-Company employee and I got the firm set up and working pretty much on the first day.  The rest of the week was spent fixing little problems that popped up (the same stuff we’d normally do over the phone for clients) and getting to know the 30-some CPAs in the office.  Great group of people, by the way – even though a bunch of them were UTC grads.

I stayed at the Read House on Market Street in Chatty, which I would’ve thought would be a lot nicer, considering how much it costs to stay there.  No refrigerator or microwave in the room.  No free breakfast (not even coffee, except for the little in-room coffee maker).  Small room with a view of an alley behind a parking deck.  Tattered carpeting in the halls.  They say that they’re doing a $25 million restoration until this summer, so maybe I should look again in the fall.  As it is….well…kind of a dump.

The hotel was about two miles from the office.  Two miles DOWNHILL from the office.  I know this because I walked to the office every morning and got to really hate that hill.  Also got rained on pretty much every day.  The rain, however, did little to bring the temperature down; so in addition to walking up that two-mile-long hill every morning (and back down every evening), I generally had to wear my North Face rain gear and a Tilly hat in the sauna that was Chattanooga in the rain.  Didn’t enjoy that a lot.  I did find a good pizza place though: Community Pie.

The Friday night that I got back from that job, I hosted Dianne and one of her friends at the house.  They’d come down to run a 5K race in Atlanta to raise money for the aquarium or something.  Good to see her, although I really have to question her sanity.  Who wants to run in the Atlanta heat?

We had a post-race meal with Jenny and her father at Mad Italian, during which I got the details on a trip that Jenny was taking to London the next week (last week).  When she does things like that, I’m supposed to feed her cats and occasionally check in with Herb to make sure he hasn’t fallen down his stairs or something crazy like that.  I’ve only actually done that a couple of times, and both times he’s kind of laughed at me, which I can understand.

So Jenny texted me last Saturday afternoon about something (I think I’d sent her pictures of her cats) and asked if I’d called her dad yet.  I said, “Not yet,” and didn’t think much of it.

Got a text from Jenny on Tuesday morning of this past week that said, “Call me.  Dad’s in the hospital.”  Also got a voice mail from Herb’s neighbor.  Herb had fallen down the stairs.  On Saturday afternoon.  And had lain there, literally in a pool of his own blood, until 11AM Tuesday morning.

Needless to say, I felt like the world’s biggest horse’s ass for not calling to check on him over the weekend; but after considering it, I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that if I’d called and he didn’t answer, I’d have left a message and not really worried about it.  I don’t have a key to his house or anything.  I may have called again and – perhaps – have driven over to the house if I hadn’t heard back from him by Sunday.  I honestly don’t know.

What I know now, though, is that Herb has a fractured skull, a broken wrist, a bit of pneumonia,  a slight brain bleed, and is eating through a feeding tube since his epiglottis isn’t working normally (possibly because when he arrived at the ER on Tuesday, he was understandably incredibly dehydrated and malnourished).

He spent Tuesday through Thursday in the ICU before moving to a regular hospital bed Thursday night.  Doug flew in from California early Wednesday morning, and Jenny cut her London trip short and came back Wednesday evening.

The good news is that his physical improvement since I first saw him in the ER on Tuesday morning is incredible.  His right eye had been completely swollen shut, but is now looking almost normal.  His speech, which had been slurred and often confused (he wasn’t able to distinguish between reality and the hallucinations that he’d been having since Saturday afternoon) is pretty much back to normal, although he’s obviously tired and was still a bit taciturn when I went to check in on him yesterday morning.  His wrist will not require surgery, nor will his skull.

The somewhat “iffy” news is that his throat still isn’t working properly and he can’t really swallow, so the feeding tube remains in place and doctors yesterday were talking about surgically implanting a stomach plug so that he can get nutrition that way.  One doctor apparently said that “he doesn’t have an epiglottis,” which sounds like a load of hooey to me.  The man is 85 years old.  If he didn’t have an epiglottis, I can’t believe that he wouldn’t have been hospitalized about 100 times for pneumonia before now, and someone during those times would’ve figured out that he’s been aspirating crap into his lungs since he was born.

More likely, his throat muscles atrophied for 4 days and he needs to learn how to swallow again, but assisted living places don’t like to (or can’t) take patients with feeding tubes, so the stomach plug is a quick way to discharge him.  Of course, that would put an end to things like enjoying food (and wine, which he loves).  Doug is gathering information and he and Herb and Jenny will decide how to proceed.

At any rate, he’s much better than he was on Tuesday and, though there is still much to be decided about where and how he’s going to live, live he will.  That he managed to survive is, to me (and to the doctors and nurses that I met during the week) almost unbelievable.

Tough old bird indeed.

Back at the Shop

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I’m writing from the Tires Plus near the house today.  The Subaru has started to make ominous squealing noises when I turn left, and I’m wondering if I may be up for some brake work.  It actually began several weeks ago, and I was more than a little concerned last weekend when I was tooling down twisty mountain roads in NC and TN and wondering – not for the first time – what I could do if my brakes failed.  I think I’ve mentioned that the car doesn’t have a mechanical emergency brake.  It’s got a button that electronically turns on the parking brake, and it doesn’t work if the car is moving.

I really wonder who’d design something like that.

So I’m sitting here and letting them figure out what the problem might be.  Might also need a tire or two.  Or four.  Who knows?  At any rate, camping.  Brett and I drove up to Joyce Kilmer last Friday morning and spent the night in one of our favorite spots on the Santeetlah, giving me a chance finally to try out my new car camping setup.  It worked very well.  I’ve got a Napier Sportz Cove for the car, which is a great size for short trips (maybe longer ones if I combine it with my Noah’s Tarp).  With the Cove installed and two “don’t let the sun hit my kids” pantyhose over the rear windows, the car is essentially turned into a large screen room.  I also picked up a nice thick memory foam mattress for the back of the car.  Everything together worked great, and I slept like a dead man on Friday night.

Saturday, we’d planned to hike up to Bob Bald and spend the night there, but Brett wanted to check out Whiggs Bald first, so we drove up to it.  A terrible, horrible, very bad drive indeed, which lasted for a bit more than 6 miles – and had me really thinking about those brakes – but we finally pulled into a clearing near the bald (the end of the road), and it was incredible.  After a very short hike (maybe 200 yards), we found a fantastic place to set up tents and settled in.  360-degree views from the bald, creeks, a pond, and a very nice portion of the Benton McKay trail make this place a must-go-again destination for me.

Saturday was beautiful, weather-wise.  Bright sun (I got burned), but not too hot, and a non-stop breeze that developed into pretty strong winds by Saturday night.  Slept very well in the tent, though I have to admit that, once the sun went down, it got a bit chilly.  Brett, assisted by a healthy dose of Jamison’s, curled up in his sleeping bag on the ground and slept in the open all night.  Not sure how he didn’t freeze to death, but it probably helped that his new puppy, Luke, was in the bag with him.

I awoke fairly early on Sunday morning and took a nice walk on the BK trail.  Walked down the mountain for two miles or so, then turned around and went back to the campsite.  Got me thinking that I may be able to find a more car-accessible trailhead and get to the bald by hiking up from below on the BMT.

…..later…..

It is now Saturday, May 19th, and I’m just getting back to this post that I began at Tires Plus two weeks ago.  The problem with the car ended up with me needing new brakes, tie rod ends, and (I think) rotors.  Set me back about $850, which wasn’t at all thrilling.  I was no more thrilled when, a few days later, half of the outlets in my master bedroom – as well as that room’s ceiling fan – stopped working after I unplugged and then re-plugged my television.  Not a breaker situation, and I don’t mess with wires inside the walls, so I had my first experience with an electrician.  He was a nice kid, knew what he was doing, and ended up replacing all of the outlets and switches in my bedroom and bathroom (and did something so that they’re not tied to each other any more) and happily lightening me by another $750.

That tax refund was fun while it lasted.

The GBB played a concert with the Atlanta Wind Symphony, a group with which I once played, last Saturday – both groups did well, although the gig was in Kennesaw, so it was pretty much an all-day thing for me.  On Sunday (Mothers Day), Jenny and I went to a AAA baseball game here in Duluth with her Dad and one of her neighbors.  It was a nice day and the game was pretty good.  It also took most of my day, though.  I’d hoped to get a bit more work done around the house.  I need to finish clearing out my guest bedroom so that Dianne can use it in a couple of weeks, and I’m still emptying out my garage and music room.  Will be taking up those projects again this weekend, although we’ve gotten so much rain in the last week that I also need to mow the lawns again (if it doesn’t rain today).

I did finally reserve a hotel in Chattanooga for the week that I’ll be working up there (Memorial Day week).  Another $700, but at least I’ll get reimbursed for that.  It is months like this one that make me really miss the checks that I was getting from AT&T.  I have indeed learned to live on 50% of what I was making, but little surprises are no longer “little” when they happen.

And I guess that that’s all the news that’s fit to print for now.  Have a happy day.

The Taxman Leaveth

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Today’s featured image is one that was obviously taken quite a while ago.  The boys were still babies – I’d guess in the 4-months-old range – and Boo was still the biggest kitty in the house.  She is now dwarfed by them.

I was going to feature a panoramic shot that I took at Lake Huron last year, but it was just too large to be considered, so I’ll embed a smaller version of it here:

Now that that’s out of the way….what have I been doing with myself lately?  The answer to that is, basically, not a lot.  Settling into my life as an L1 lead at the X-Company is a bit challenging, having not had direct reports in over 10 years.  Last week, I completed three annual review with members of my team; somewhat awkward, considering that two of the three have been at the company longer than I have.  The toughest ones are still ahead.  I get to sit in judgement of two guys who basically trained me.  One of them can be confrontational at times.  Not looking forward to that, but it’s part of the gig.   I’ve also been doing a number of interviews every week – the L1 teams are going to be growing pretty dramatically, and we’ll probably end up hiring 20-30 new folks over the course of the year.  At least I’ve got a say in who the new people are, which is nice.

I’ve also been doing quite a bit more coding (which is what I really want to do anyway), putting together some scripts for my team.  I have to keep all of them on the down-low, as we’ve got a petty tyrant in an L3 role who doesn’t like for anybody to automate anything if they don’t report directly to him.  That being the case, I’m just very quietly writing, tweaking, and perfecting a few bullet-proof scripts for everyday tasks and letting a few of my folks use them until they become so engrained in the daily grind that it’ll be hell for the person who tries to take them away.  The new idea going around the L1 community is that the tyrant will say that my scripts are not allowed in our environment before magically releasing his OWN scripts a week later that do exactly the same thing.  Apparently, he’s done that in the past.  Should it happen, I will call him out on it.  Publically.

Tax season ends on the 17th, and everyone at the X-Company is looking forward to that.  With our growth and the merger and our infrastructure and development teams’ bad habit of rolling out changes without fully testing them, the last several months have been a long nightmare.  My main problem client (the one who sent at least two letters from their lawyer to complain) have formally announced that they will be leaving after the season (and the people praised the Lord), so I’m really looking forward to the 18th.  In the immediate aftermath of the season, the vast majority of CPA firms go on vacation for at least a few weeks, which means we’ll have the chance to clear out all of our old tickets, regroup, and get ready for the next season, which starts around August.

We’ll also be entering “project season,” which is when people like me go on the road and set up new clients.  The only project that I’ve volunteered for so far is one in Chattanooga (not THAT firm in Chattanooga…a different one) on the week of May 28th.  I didn’t realize when I signed up for it that that week includes Memorial Day, so I’m honestly not sure how that’s going to work.  I don’t know if I’ll have a day less to set things up or if I’ll get a comp day for working on the holiday or what.  In any case, I’ll be in Chatty for 4-5 days, away from the office and hopefully enjoying myself.

The GBB competed at the North American championships last weekend – and got thrashed.  It definitely didn’t help that we were scheduled as the second band to play in our section – the early bands generally get screwed by the judges, who are hyper-sensitive first thing in the morning and have to leave room for higher scores for later bands.  It also didn’t help that, frankly, we’re just not as good as we have been in the past.  We ended up coming in 12th out of 13 bands.  It was the first time since we started competing in around 2007 that we didn’t win or place 2nd – and we’re planning to move up to the highest section next year, so it was a bit of a wakeup call for the folks who were really pushing for that move.  Scores, should you be interested, are posted here.  Interestingly, the San Antonio Band, which won the section with a phenomenal score, was founded by two former members of the GBB who moved to SA several years ago.  They benefitted, I am told, from their late-in-the-day performance.  Since we played so early on Saturday, I hit the road almost immediately after our performance and didn’t hear any of the other bands.

So that was last weekend.  The week before that was devoted to rehearsals every night – preparation for the competition – and the weekend prior to that was Easter.  I had an Easter gig; that’s nice, but it pretty much spoiled any weekend plans I may have wanted to have.

So this weekend is really the first time in quite a while that I can relax a little bit.  Not much, mind you.  I need to mow the lawns and do some housekeeping, and I’m also in the middle of a long-term project of cleaning and organizing my garage.  So I’m going to do all of that stuff and get some sleep.  Next weekend, however, I’m headed to the woods.  Have already taken off next Friday in anticipation of this.  It will probably rain, of course, but just being able to kick back and sleep in the woods next to a stream will be fantastic.   And I might finally get to test out the car camping setup that I came up with late last year.

The Amazon Echo Dots that I mentioned in my last post have continued to be a source of fun for me.  I updated a number of the rooms in the house – and the garage – with Phillips Hue lights, and the Hue and the Amazon systems work really well together.  One cool thing about Hue is that it is aware of my phone location – so it will automatically turn off all of the lights in the house when I leave, and will turn on the garage and kitchen lights when I come home.  Since my garage door light gave up the ghost a couple of years ago, I’ve been coming home to a completely dark house.  It’s so much nicer to drive into a lit garage – and having the house light up for me is also pretty excellent.

That’s just the Hue system.  With Amazon/Alexa, I’ve also setup a number of routines – for example, the system turns on various lights in the morning and begins broadcasting NPR and the weather for me, then tells me what’s on my calendar for the day – and I’ve have had some fun playing “Jeopardy!” every night after work.  Also put in a couple of bluetooth speakers, and – thanks to my Amazon Prime account – I can tell the system to, for example, “Play Yorkshire Building Society Band,” and it’ll just kick off a random selection of that band playing throughout the house.

Being able to say, “Alexa, add toilet paper to my shopping list,” is pretty nice, since I have a terrible habit of forgetting what I need three seconds after I think of it.  Same with to-do items (“Alexa, put clean the garage on my to-do list”).  Definitely helpful for an old fart with a spastic memory.

The best things, however, are the various sleep sounds that I can have it play.  Not surprisingly, “Wind in the Trees” and “Icy Snowstorm” are my favorites, though I have over 50 white noises that I can tell it to play while I’m lying in bed (or, to be completely honest, when I’m not lying in bed); and I know – by checking my sleep patterns – that running those sounds at night is helping me sleep better, if not for longer.  My typical night used to consist of 2-3 hours of “restful” sleep and 4-5 of “light” sleep.  Those numbers have reversed since I started playing sleep sounds.  Also, if I concentrate, I can come close to believing that I’m in the woods when I play the “Wind in the Trees” sounds.

At any rate, I plan to add at least two more Phillips Hue lights (outside the front door) and am considering replacing the fluorescent tubes in my kitchen with some sort of recessed Phillips lights, and I’ll continue to experiment with gadgets and IFTT scenarios for the Dots.

So I guess I’ve kind of caught up with things, and I must now go tackle the lawn.  After that, I might do some shopping, then start in on housekeeping tasks – or maybe I’ll just go to a bar and play video golf.  It’s the weekend, dammit.

Finally.

 

That Was A Short Spring

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I mowed my lawns three days ago.  It was a beautiful sunny Sunday, with temperatures in the 70s and a wonderful little breeze keeping everything nice.  Monday, it rained.  Tuesday, it rained and began to get a bit chilly.  Today had no rain, but it’s back in the low 40s with 20+ MPH winds, and it’s freaking cold!  This winter is never going to end.

Before I continue, I must wish Dad and his bride a happy 7th (?) anniversary.  I wasn’t sure if this was the right day or not, but I had a picture from their wedding show up on my Facebook feed this morning and then saw another one posted by Dianne, so I guess it is!  Sorry, Dad.  You know I’m not really big on remember dates.

The GBB is plugging along, getting ready for the championships in a few weeks.  Hard to believe that we’re already up against it.  I’m not overly excited about the contest this year.  I don’t think we’re all that great, don’t particularly like the music, and don’t have the vacation time that I used to have.  Burning two days off to drive up to Fort Wayne and back doesn’t fill me with excitement, considering that I’ll probably want those two days back in the fall when I’ll – hopefully – take a decent break from work.  I’m planning on spending a week or 10 days in Canada in July, which is nice.  Truth be told, though, I’m really looking forward to what has become a tradition of heading to Michigan sometime in October.  Hoping I’ll have enough vacation time built up to spend a week or two there.

I broke down and bought two Amazon Echo Dots a couple of weeks ago.  They were on sale for $30 each, and I figured it’d be nice to be able to turn my lights on and off with my voice rather than diddling around with my phone while I lie in bed.  I was right.  It’s very nice.  It’s also nice to be able to ask “Alexa” to play a podcast (or a list of them), or to play any of a number of calming noises (ocean, mountain brook, wind in the trees, etc.) or to just roll a little hypnosis at me to help me sleep.  I’ve also gotten into the habit of asking the thing for weather updates or a morning news brief, or to play the occasional game of Jeopardy.

The Dots came on the heels of me finally getting around to hooking up the Ring spotlights that I got for Christmas from the X-Company.  This is also a fun li’l toy for me.  It’s a motion detector with spotlights and a camera over my garage, which alerts me with indoor chimes (also on my phone) whenever it detects anything large in my driveway.  The large thing, as it turns out, is usually me – either leaving for work or coming home from work – and the cats have quickly figured out that, when the chimes sound in the evening, they’re about to get some food.  Other than being woken up by cats, there isn’t much better in life than coming into my driveway and seeing a little feline face (or two) peeking through the front windows at me.  I’m impressed enough with the spotlight that I may actually spring for a Ring doorbell to go with it.  I’ve got to admit that it’s nice to be able to keep an eye on my place when I’m not here.  There is the sporadic annoyance – like during a very windy day a week or two ago when I kept getting alerts because trees were throwing moving shadows across the driveway.  And I’ve been startled a couple of times on rainy nights when the glare of headlights going past on the street set off the motion alert; but through tweaking and modifying the motion zones, I’ve got it down to basically only letting me know when there’s an actual person (or car) in my driveway.

Also good for knowing when packages are delivered.

I have not yet figured out how to network the Echo Dots with the Ring.  For instance, if motion is detected after dark, turn on the lights downstairs.  But I assume that I will eventually.  For now, I’m just exploring the new gadgets and having some fun.

Speaking of fun, I’ve taken advantage of my new position at work to start doing a little bit of coding on the side again.  Nothing major, and I’m pretty much restricting myself to powershell scripts, but at least I can spend an hour trying to automate things without having to worry about my ticket closing numbers dropping.  In the end, the scripts that I write will end up helping my team to take care of things in a few seconds that might take other teams a few minutes.  Or maybe I’ll share the scripts with other teams and show what a great guy I am.

Nah.  I want my team to shine.

By the look on Joshua’s little face right now, I can gather that it’s time for bed.  So I guess I’ve written enough for now.  A warm bed sounds pretty good.