June 2006

Creative Space.

Originally uploaded by macwarriorny.

When I took my walk the day of the Summer Solstice this past week, I made a mental list of things I’d like to get accomplished. One of those things was to get the room I call my “creative space” cleaned up and to make it a more asthetically and productive environment.

So this afternoon that’s exactly what I did.

Earl and I have been using matching office chairs for the past couple of years in our respective computer rooms. They’ve matched to the point where they were both broken, ready to fling us out of our seats at a moments notice. I felt a trip to Staples was in order, so we picked up a couple of office chairs and I picked up a desk for my PowerBook setup.

The Mac Mini has had issues since I fired up the trial version of Microsoft Office on it, so I wiped the Mac Mini clean and I’m in the process of reinstalling all my audio tools. Thank goodness for firewire drives, it makes me it much easier when your important files are saved on a separate hard drive!

I also dragged the IBM Netstation from the basement up here into the studio so I would have a computer that could be devoted to work and all that stuff. It’s behaving itself on my old computer desk.

While in somewhat of a cranky mood today (which was rectified by a nap), at least now I’m feeling a sense of accomplishment and that I’m ready to tackle the work week head on.

Alumni.

Originally uploaded by macwarriorny.

Well Earl and I survived my high school’s 117th annual Alumni Dinner this evening, followed by a the presentation of scholarships and other alumni association business in the auditorium afterwards. The food was delicious and the whole program was quite interesting.

I graduated from high school 20 years ago. I thought that I would run into some classmates at the alumni banquet this year, but no such luck as I was the only representative from the class of 1986.

One of the more interesting things I noticed about the high school involves my handwriting. The summer between my junior and senior years of high school, I worked for the district cleaning and painting the classrooms to prep them for the new school year in the fall. That same year, Room 102 was divided into two smaller classrooms. Instead of numbering the new room as Room 101A or Room 102A, I took a heavy black magic marker and renumbered the existing Room 101 as Room 100 by making the trailing “1” into a “0” on the room number painted on the molding over the door. I then wrote “101” over the new classroom, doing my best to mimic the other painted room numbers throughout the school.

My room number is still posted in faded magic marker over the doorway to Room 101. I found this quite exciting.

Coupled with the work I’ve done as a hobbyist with the clock systems in the school, my legacy lives on at Pulaski Junior-Senior High School.

Earl and I are going to my high school’s annual Alumni Dinner this evening. I figured this year would be a good year to go for a couple of reasons. First of all, my Dad is being installed as the president of the Alumni Association this evening and I’d kind of like to be there for that. Secondly, and quite honestly I can’t believe this, I graduated from high school 20 years ago this weekend and I thought it’d be a nice round number to go and see if any of my fellow classmates are around.

The Alumni Dinner is an interesting experience in that it’s held in the high school cafeteria, using the school’s table settings and served and prepared by the school’s kitchen staff. Tonight, Earl and I will be enjoying a fine roast beef dinner served a la fifth period with mashed potatoes that have just the right amount of “plop” when placed on a melmac plate.

I have to admit that I’m not really that nervous about the whole affair, in fact, I’ve kind of been looking forward to the experience. It’ll be fun to walk the old hallways again.

I think the woods out back have become home to a gang of very feisty squirrels. A couple of days ago I noticed that our new cedar bird feeder was lying around the ground. I figured it was a victim of the storms that blew through over the weekend and really didn’t think much more about it, until I went out this morning to hang it back up.

Upon closer inspection, our National Geographic bird feeder looked like it had been run over by a truck and then beaten to death for extra good measure.

The little stopper that keeps the rain away from the feed had somehow been relocated to the inside bottom of the feeder. The little stands for the cute little chickadees to use as a booth at their favorite diner were ripped out of the plexiglass. And the nylon rope that held the whole affair together had been shredded into a purple mess.

Either we have some birds that are telling me to buy them some better seed or we have some squirrels telling me to put a squirrel feeder in and don’t go light on the mounted corn cobs, bucko. While I was making this discovery early this morning, as I was staggering around the lawn trying to pretend I’m a morning person when I’m really not, I had a fleeting thought that perhaps the birds were mad because the feeder didn’t have an orange roof on it. Years ago my grandfather had painted his bird feeder, quite massive in size now that I think about it, to resemble one of those fine Howard Johnson restaurants. It sat right outside the dining room window, where it provided hours of entertainment by watching the birds come in and out and seeing a few make a wrong turn and consequently smacking into the window. That feeder was always quite busy with many bird families having to maintain a holding pattern until those eating had cleared their dishes and left.

Now that I think about it, Ho Jo’s had some pretty feisty waitresses back in it’s day. Maybe the squirrels are learning something from them.

This evening I made the trek to Syracuse on one of my computer excursions, this time the lucky family member was my mother.

My mom has been cranking along on an old Pentium II running Windows ME with a dial-up connection for a long while. I told her enough is enough and it was time to upgrade, so tonight I installed a respectable refurbished Pentium 4 we had found for her at a great price and it came with Windows XP Professional pre-installed. I’ve been getting it ready for her over the past couple of weeks, installing anti-virus and Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird for web browsing and e-mail. She picked up a Roadrunner DIY high speed connection kit so tonight was pretty easy as far as dabbling in computer land goes. With the right tools, Microsoft Windows XP can be pretty acceptable.

We took the opportunity to go to dinner beforehand with my sister and her boyfriend and his little toddler of a son. It was all good. We went to a restaurant called “Plainville Turkey Farms” where they serve, well, turkey. I ate entirely too much at the buffet, especially since I had worn a pair of my “really skinny” shorts on purpose to keep my food consumption in check. I did manage to make it through the evening without my pants exploding off of me, so I guess I did show a small bit of control.

One of the nice things about living a little bit of a distance away from my relatives is that it makes getting together that much more special. It’s a shame that Earl couldn’t join us tonight because of work obligations. My sister told me that she’s caught up on my blog and that she skips over the parts when I rant about the president, since she already knows how I feel about that subject. See? I have a big mouth in person too.

So now I’m online and I see Mom is logged into several different instant messaging clients. I guess I need to keep my clothes on if I’m going to use the webcam.