The GBB finished up our 25th season last night by performing at the annual Euphonium and Tuba Festival (IET). We’ve done this many times before, and IET’s creator is currently one of the applicants to replace Joe. He’s a superb musician and has done a great job over the last 25 years or so at getting his name out there and developing contacts in the brass world, which has Simone wondering if he’s looking at the GBB job as a chance for more self-promotion. I wonder that about several of our applicants, but it’s not a showstopper for me. We need somebody who’ll be able to bring the best out in the band – particularly in terms of dynamics. If they can do that, I don’t care if they’re in it for the band or for themselves, to be honest. As long as they’re committed to actually being there and following through on band commitments, I’m good. One of the applicants let us down a few years ago – bailing as our conductor for personal reasons about a month before we were to compete. Granted, it was a big deal for him. He was to receive the GA teacher of the year award of some such on the same weekend as the competition; but it had us scrambling to find an alternate conductor, and the guy we ended up with really didn’t understand the music. One of the adjudicators was the composer. As the piece was extremely personal to him (the music dealt with an unexpected stroke that he had which left him struggling to do anything, much less compose, for a few years), he was not happy with our lack of interpretation.
At any rate, that applicant will not get my vote.
In other news, yesterday was Juneteenth, which is now a federal holiday, and my company gave us the day off.
I celebrated by attempting to electrocute myself. Actually, no, I didn’t do that. But I DID finally change out a 3-way light switch in our closet for a single-pole switch and removed the other 3-way from the kitchen. Have been meaning to do this for about 6 months, but I’m happily ignorant about anything involving electricity, and I didn’t want to do something that would burn the house down. Thank God for YouTube.’
So after I got that done, I put in a motion detector instead of a switch (in the closet) and began building some shelves that Sandie’s been asking for.
It has been extraordinarily hot for the last couple of weeks. I entertained the thought (briefly) of pressure washing parts of the driveway over the weekend, but with the mercury hitting the 90s by 8:30 in the morning, the idea just didn’t appeal to me once it was late enough to get out there with 1}a leaf blower and 2}a pressure washer. Yeah, I could start at 7AM, but I think the neighbors might take issue with that.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in the shop (air conditioner blasting) over the last couple of weeks putting together a workstation for my table saw. For the most part, I finished it up on Saturday, although I’m still waiting on a couple of parts to complete the crosscut sled that will be an accessory for it. The workstation itself consists of a box that holds the saw (a Dewalt contractor saw), a foldable extension wing on the left, retractable infeed and outfeed support, and a fairly substantial drawer for extra blades, jigs, etc. It also has open slots for a crosscut sled and the braces for the extension (or extensions if I decide to make one for the right side (which I might do if I decide to also use it as a temporary workbench).
When fully opened, the extensions allow me to safely cut a full 4’x8’ sheet of plywood (although those puppies are HEAVY, and getting them started is kind of a bear), but when everything is retracted, the whole thing has a footprint of about 2’x2’ and sits on casters, allowing me to move the thing out of the way when I’m not using it. It’s probably the most complex thing I’ve built, and I like it a lot. In truth, I’ve been meaning to build something like this for years, but never thought I could do it. When I saw an ad for birch plywood sheets for $25 each about a month ago, I jumped at the price, had 8 of them delivered, and figured, “What the heck. No excuse not to build it now.”
Table saw workstation, retracted
Table saw workstation, extended
It works well, and I just need to put the rail on the back fence of a crosscut sled that I built for it before I can pretty much call it done. One really nice thing about it is that the board that the saw actually sits on is micro-adjustable by means of four bolts under it – so I can always make sure that the top of the saw is exactly even with all of the extensions.
About 6 months ago, my favorite laptop – a Surface Book that I bought in 2015 – finally got to the point where it was unusable. The screen had been heated up and forced out from the frame by an expanding battery to the point that it was just pointless to continue using it for as much as I had been. I bought a replacement battery and screen, but have not yet attempted the repair (it’s a very delicate and tedious process and I’m waiting to be in just the right mood before I get started on it).
I have other machines, so things like databases and email and games and whatnot were not a huge problem. The biggest issue was that I had been using the Surface Book for several years as my de facto sheet music repository. GBB music, gig music, wind symphony music, tuba and horn etudes….all of my sheet music was on the Surface Book and there was no way I was going back to using paper music. So I needed a solution.
At first, I tried using my phone. Bad plan. I’m almost 60 and my eyes have been shot for 25 years. In a pinch, I can read off the phone, but it’s strictly for emergencies at this point. After determining that the phone wasn’t going to work, I tried using a small (6”) Android tablet that Sandie had no further use for. It was a definite improvement, but the screen real estate was so limited that doing markup on the music was difficult and nearly impossible. Also, the software options for music display and markup available for Android is/was pretty limited. There’s basically one program for it, and it just doesn’t work that well. Apple, however, has an excellent piece of software for musicians called forScore, and so I finally took the plunge and bought myself an iPad – something that I’ve been swearing was a pointless thing to do since the iPad was first released.
To a large extent, I still believe that. I use my iPad almost exclusively as a sheet music organizer/editor/displayer; but I’ve started to play around with the little thing more and more trying to figure out just how much I can actually use it for. And, much to my surprise, I’m finding that I do indeed have uses for it.
For years, I kept the GBB library updated and organized using Microsoft Access. I like doing it that way because…well…because I was an Access Developer for many years and I’m comfortable building and customizing programs to do exactly what I want them to do in Access. The biggest problem with that is that if I don’t have the machine with the database on it, I can’t use the data in it. If I want to check to see if the band has a particular chart while I’m at rehearsal, for example, I can’t do it unless I’ve got a computer with Access installed. When I was using my Surface Book, that was not a problem.
With the iPad, however, using Access isn’t an option. And there really isn’t a decent alternative, short of putting everything online in MySQL or something and building a front end that I can use on the iPad. I actually tried this, but the MySQL clients that I could find for iPad absolutely suck and weren’t worth my time.
Next, I built a Power BI application on my work laptop and pointed it to a OneDrive copy of my GBB database, and it worked great! Power BI is available for iPad and I can fire it up and search the DB easily. Unfortunately, I can’t UPDATE data with Power BI, and I also can’t use it unless I’ve got a corporate license (that’s why I did this on my work machine), and nobody’s got the time or money for that.*
So I started looking into “database” applications built specifically for the iPad and found one that isn’t too terrible called MyStuff2. In spite of the ridiculous name, and in spite of the fact that there’s no way to do any real programming with it, MS2 has done a pretty good job for me in helping to organize and build out the GBB music library, and it allows me to have a to-the-minute reference of the library with me when I’m at rehearsal. I had to do quite a bit of initial setup to get things like I needed them and to export the information from my original Access DB into MS2, but having done that, things are looking good.
As I start building more advanced stuff in the woodshop, I’ve also been able to use the iPad to help with that.
Adding a wing to my table saw workstation
One of those tools is called Moblo 3D, which is a kind of limited CAD and allows me to model what I want to build, calculate measurements, and build shopping and cut lists. For example, Sandie wants some very specific shelving units build for the master closet. So I used Moblo to start sketching those out. Works pretty good, although I really haven’t spent enough time with it to understand all that it can (or cannot) do for me. It wasn’t totally free, but I can’t complain about $8 for this thing.
Moblo 3D rendering of a couple of closet organizers. The nicest part of this for me is that I can design what I want and then export a list of the wood that I need and a cut list for it
Another tool that I’ve been using in the shop is the iPad version of X-Tool Creative Space, which connects to my laser engraver and lets me design stuff for it. The engraver is still very much of a toy, but I’ve been able to use it for branding wooden creations (rather than using my physical metal brand), and most recently did some engraving on a baton box for a gift that the band gave to our founder/music director on the occasion of his stepping down after 25 years.
The concert, by the way – the finale of our 25th season – went really well. Joe, the director, pulled out all the stops and included a couple of championship-level test pieces near the end. A severe chops buster, but the crowd seemed to enjoy it, and it was an exhausting but exhilarating set list.
Creation screen of X-Tools Creative Space
I guess the most recent tool I’ve added to the iPad is what I’m typing this on – the WordPress editor. I installed it a few days ago after realizing that – having purchased a mouse and keyboard for the iPad (specifically to use with the GBB library database) – I could probably do a lot more with the iPad than I had been previously. Restarting the blog entries seemed like a logical place to start, so that’s what I’m doing. Since the iPad is so portable, and since it’s so much easier to use as an editor than my phone is, I should be able to do updates from campsites (or anywhere else outside of my office) a lot easier than I’ve been able to previously. I’ll put that to the test in Canada (next month) and Michigan (in November).
For today, however, this has been enough.
*Actually, the GBB may be able to get a full-blown O365 license, including PBI, for a reasonable price by using our non-profit status. That is being investigated.
It’s been three-and-a-half years since I updated this. I guess not much has happened?
Let’s see…
For starters, I moved in with Sandie a couple of years ago. She bought a log cabin in Lawrenceville on a few nicely-wooded acres and we decided that it was easier for me to just move here than it was for us to continue in separate domiciles. As it turned out, the move was pretty well timed, because a mutual friend found himself homeless shortly after I vacated my place, and he’s been renting from me ever since.
The boys, Joshua and Chamberlain, weren’t especially thrilled with the ride from my house to the cabin (particularly Josh, who managed to rip out a couple of claws in his panic during the ride), but they’re settled in nicely with their “cousin” Mojo (a Shih-Tzu dog) and have adjusted to the new things that come with a new place. Chamberlain loves nothing more than to sleep on the screened-in porch (at home, the closest he could get to being “outside” was to sit by an open window), and Joshua spends most of his time sleeping upstairs in my office. He’s had a rougher time of it – including falling from a catwalk that spans the main room of the house (scaring the hell out of me) – but he seems on the whole to be relatively content.
I quite my job at the X company in November of 2022. Mainly because my director moved to a different job, I couldn’t stand his replacement, and when a newly-created position opened up for an overall service manager, it went to a colleague of mine who I could never see myself respecting. The story I gave them was that I wanted to “get back into tech,” and move away from a supervisory role, but the simple fact was that I couldn’t stomach the thought of reporting to either of those guys. My new job is, to put it mildly, difficult. As far as the “tech” goes, it’s fine – I work almost entirely with SQL servers, which is no big deal – but the questions that I get from the accounting companies that I support might as well be in another language. 18 months into it, I’m still constantly asking my teammates, “What exactly are they saying the problem is?” There are plenty of days that I think I regret making the jump, but then I try to imagine doing my old job and taking direction from two morons, and I wind up feeling better about the decision again.
My woodworking hobby has taken off since moving here, also. The previous owner had setup a detached garage on the property as his workshop, and Sandie and I continued that. At first, we both had workbenches in the place, but she slowly moved most of her tools and projects to a corner of the in-house garage (she calls it “the SPA” – small projects area), and I’m slowly filling the bigger shop with some serious hardware. Planer, jointer, laser engraver, router table….all the fun stuff that I would have loved to put in my garage at home, but for which there just wasn’t space. Don’t know that my woodworking has gotten any better, but at least I’m willing to try things that I would not have considered previously. Sandie, as is her wont, is methodically remodeling the house, and she’s asked me to try building things for it – benches, closet space, cabinets and the like. I practice for things like that by making shop furniture, and I do see some improvement. Maybe if I can ever retire I can make a bit of money on the side as a carpenter.
Hanging out in the woodshop. Sitting on a bench that I reconstructed from cast-iron parts I found buried in the yard.
Speaking of retirement, Sandie took that plunge a year or so ago. She’s younger than me, but when her father passed away a few years ago, he did so as a pretty wealthy guy. Sandie’s mom set her and her sister up with pretty decent allowances and they’re both living the retired life. She’s told me to make the plunge a few times, but I’m not ready yet. I want that sweet government insurance. And I want to have some structure. I think when I actually do take the leap, I’ll be looking for a part-time gig within a year just to stay somewhat focused (and also have a bit of extra scratch coming in).
I continue to play with the Georgia Brass Band, and continue to act as the librarian for that group. During the Covid lockdown in 2020, I started scanning all of our music and estimated that it would take me 6-12 months to have everything digitized. 48 months later, I’m maybe a 10th of the way through it. Granted, I had a move during that time (there are currently 11 file cabinets full of music in the basement), but my original idea was vastly underestimated – and I don’t spend as much time scanning as I probably should. The group sounds good, though. We’ve gone back to NABBA a few times (competing in the Championship Section) and haven’t embarrassed ourselves yet. May do it again in 2025. The jury is still out on that, but our director – who founded the band – is retiring after 25 years at the helm (on Sunday), and he was not into competition at all. The new guy, who hasn’t been selected yet, may be more excited about it.
So that’s a (very) brief rundown of what’s been happening for the last 3 years. I’ve said this (many times) before, but I’ll try to be more diligent about keeping this thing updated going forward.
Two more months have gone by, and we’re now officially well into the hottest part of the summer in Georgia. I’m quite settled into the work-from-home routine – though I’m actually at the office today because my internet crapped out at home and AT&T isn’t sending a technician until Friday. Yes, I do have a mobile hotspot, but it’s just barely sufficient for doing my job at home.
The routine for the last few months has been pretty much set in stone. I get up at 5:00, feed the cats, drink a cup of coffee while watching the news or some YouTube videos. Shortly before 6:00, I’ll head out for a 5-mile walk, which gets me home at just after 7:00. At that point, I’ll have another cup of coffee (decaf, by the way – always), will watch the tube a bit more, and might eat something for breakfast – egg white omelet, bowl of cereal, or some fruit. As often as not, I’ll skip the food altogether. At around 7:30, I’ll take a shower and start work. Somewhere between 4:00 and 5:00, I’ll turn off the computer, feed the cats again, take another walk, put something on the stove for dinner, and drink a couple of rocks glasses of bourbon while looking at Facebook or playing a game on my phone – generally sitting in the screen house on my deck, though it’s recently gotten so hot that it’s uncomfortable to sit outside for too long.
The “Bourbon Barn” on my deck – a screen-house with removable wind/rain panels – is where I’ve taken to spending most evenings. I took this picture the day the roof was being replaced, which explains the rope on the roof.
After an hour or so, I’ll wander back inside, eat whatever was cooking, watch part of a movie or something, and generally hit the sack before 9:00. Lather, rinse, repeat. It really shouldn’t be surprising that I quite often do not know what day it is. Seriously – it’s not unusual at all for me to start the day by saying, “Alexa, what day is it?”
There are some highlights and banner days, however. For example, I had my gutters replaced last Thursday. After getting quotes from three different roofers to do the job – and after all three of them gave me quotes, but never followed up to schedule the work even when I sent them emails, I called a fourth company who was recommended by my bartender on Sunday. They came out and took pictures on Monday, gave me a quote on Tuesday, and did the job Thursday. The gutters look great, the work was done in less than three hours, and I’m not sure why the first three companies didn’t think it was worth three hours of their time to make $1500.
Another example: yesterday was Tuesday the 11th – and on Tuesday the 11th, my new retaining wall was completed. While it was expensive, it came out looking great and I’m confident that the erosion that has claimed about a foot and a half of my backyard over the last 20 years will now stop. I ended up hiring a hardscraper who lives in my neighborhood, and he went to town: 85-pound blocks, a few tons of gravel, two large drainage tubes, another ton of fill dirt, another ton or two of large rocks….the upper yard is not going anywhere anytime soon.
The new retaining wall shortly after it was finished.
The biggest disappointment with the new wall, however, is that my lawns were absolutely destroyed by the equipment and materiel needed to build it. As you can see in the picture, both the lower and upper yards are now little more than dirt. I’m fairly certain that it’s too late in the year to try planting grass, but I’m going to give it a shot anyway. Wendell (the guy who built the wall) really wanted me to hire him to resod the yard, but I’m not doing that anytime soon. The plan all along has been “Roof then wall then floors,” and I’m sticking to it. My floors – at least downstairs – are getting replaced next.
And I think the upstairs will get replaced sooner rather than later, too. Since I’m going to be working out of the house for the long term, I really want to get my upstairs office into better shape, starting with a new floor. It’s okay right now, but I need to make it feel less like a spare bedroom and more like an office, so I might as well start at the bottom, rip out the floor, repaint it, replace the lights, then put in a new floor and start getting the furniture laid out like an office. I think it will help me put some distance between home and work, and make the days a little less monotonous.
I did drive up to the NC mountains last weekend – mainly to find out if they were open and people could camp there again. I went to the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest and drove along the forest road next to the Little Santeetlah River, where all of my favorite spots did indeed have people in them. So that’s a good thing. I stopped for 45 minutes or so just to sit by the river and soak up the sound of quiet. Now that I’ve established that the place is open, a couple of friends and I may hike up to Bob Bald in the next couple of weeks and spend a night up there. That should be really nice.
Another day home, another day getting better at working there. The boys are currently settled in happily on their kitty tree by the window. They don’t both have to be there, though. They were being little hellions yesterday. Fighting over the top spot on the tree, then flying around the house and yowling at each other, they made it very difficult for me to get any kind of a work groove going. With that in mind, I added another chair (Gramma Sprague’s old wing-back) to a spot in front of the window today. Joshua immediately curled up in it and went to sleep, and Chamberlain settled into his favorite spot on top of the tree. I had an uninterrupted morning.
I also had some issues with my internet yesterday, which was a bigger concern than the cats. I figured that the problem was probably my wireless signal and not the speed of the outside connection, but I really didn’t want to move everything downstairs in order to plug the laptop directly into the router. Truth be told, that’s exactly what I’d tell a client to do if they called in needing help for internet issues while working from home.Instead of doing that, though, I spent $130 on NetGear PowerLine Adapters,which I was able to buy online from Best Buy and pick up at the store at about 10 yesterday morning.
We used a version of these things at Digital Life when a customer didn’t have good wireless strength throughout the house, but I was never overly impressed with them. The newer generation, though…just damn. Call me impressed. The way the adapters work is pretty simple. You plug one into an outlet near the router and you attach it to the router with a Cat-5 (Ethernet) cable. Then, you plug the other adapter into an outlet near the system that needs a better connection (my upstairs laptop, in my case). The adapters use the electrical power lines in the house (basically) to connect the “far away” adapter directly to the router. Much easier than having to fish cable through the walls. The “far” adapter can serve as a wireless access point, a physical network port, or both. In my situation, I connected my laptop to the adapter with Cat-5, and my download speed when from about 8MB to about 29MB instantly. Problem solved.No problems for the rest of the day yesterday and today is a continuation of that. Decent speed, no jitters…just like working from the office.
I also connected my upstairs Roku to the wireless access point; and that seems to be running better, too.
Joshua looking regal in the wing-back chair
Chamberlain has now moved off of the tree and settled into the wing-back. Everybody’s still happy.
For the last week or so, I’ve been opening the front windows for the boys, but I don’t dare open them all the way, as I do downstairs. When they see anything – a bird, a dog, a bug, or an air molecule – they tend to try to get to it. I yell at them downstairs when they do this, but the paranoid side of me can see both of them leaping for a squirrel outside of the upstairs window, hitting the screen with a combined 35 pounds, and falling out. Because of this, I basically crack the windows open about 2 inches on either side (these are tall windows that open side-to-side, not bottom-to-top.
Since I do want to be able to open them a little more, I think I’m going to try to build some frames this afternoon, into which I can insert a couple of heavy-duty pieces of wire shelf. I can then attach the frames to the windows and let the boys have about 10 inches of fresh air. It’s hard to describe, but I’ll put a picture in here after I complete the frames.
The featured image for this post (also inserted here) is one that I took in my back yard a couple of days ago. I went out on Tuesday evening to mow the back yards – first time I’ve done so this year – and determined that I can no longer look the other way when it comes to fixing the landscape timbers that are keeping the upper part of the lawn from sliding into the lower part. As you can see, they need to be replaced. I don’t know exactly how to do this, but it’s something that has just risen to the top of my list. I talked with a friend who is a handyman by trade, and he told me that I can probably get the timbers – pretreated and stained – for about $10 each. If that’s the case, then I’m probably looking at $600-$700 for the material and God knows how much time learning how to replace everything. No way am I hiring somebody to do that, however. It can’t be that tough, right?
