Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity.

So today I am off from work because I worked over the weekend, per my once-a-quarter responsibilities of on-call at work. I have to admit that I prefer this way to enjoy a Monday instead of getting back into the weekly work routine, but I don’t know that I enjoy working over the weekend to achieve this type of Monday. Nevertheless, I will enjoy it for what it is. The next time I’m on the on-call is in mid June. I can’t complain about that!

I am currently in the northern New York village of Lowville, sitting in a Wal-mart parking lot eating a Subway sandwich. I’m taking a break from my little project of the day. I am attempting to drive what used to be NY Route 12 before it was upgraded to a more prominent road in the mid 20th century (I think some time in the early 1960s, but I’m not certain on that). There are a couple of reasons that I am doing this but the primary force behind this is that I’m just a geek, especially when it comes to roads. I’ll be writing a separate blog entry about my findings of the original Route 12 once I get my facts straight and am able to look at some satellite imagery to confirm my findings today. So far I have driven through a couple of villages (Port Leyden, Lyons Falls) that I had never been to before, even though they’re less than an hour away from our home. They’re small and what I would call “industrial quaint”.

I have always enjoyed two others villages along Route 12, the Village of Boonville in Oneida County and the Village of Lowville in Lewis County. Boonville is home of the Oneida County Fair each year and still has a quaint business area that appears to still be doing well. I have family that lives near Lowville, which is a cool little village supported by the agricultural goings-on around it. I enjoy the rural charm of this area; there’s no freeway exit leading to the village because there’s no freeway within 30 miles of this place. Lowville is home to the largest wind farm in New York State, Maple Ridge Wind Farm. That’s the wind farm that my favorite road to drive in the summer, NY Route 177, passes through. Lowville is also home to one of a half dozen men I call mustache heroes, a well liked veterinarian named Dr. Peter Ostrum. I saw his picture on television once and his mustache made an impression on me. Google his name to find out why he’s the “most famous man in Lowville”.

Tomorrow my schedule is back on track and your Tuesday is my Tuesday. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy my Sunday, which is your Monday, with a nice Sunday drive.

I’m sitting on the back patio at home enjoying the abnormally warm and sunny weather today. It’s been like this since our return from Florida. It feels like we brought the good weather along for a ride when we made that trek home last weekend but I know that they enjoyed the nice weather up here while we were gone too.

I’m home today because this is my weekend to work. This change in schedule happens every 13 weeks. Once you get beyond the fact that you have to work for the weekend the gig isn’t that bad. I have been in worse situations.

When I usually get a day off during the week I take the opportunity to go on some sort of road trip. I have a couple of favorite destinations in the Empire State that I like to visit on these day long trips; the Southern Tier and the North Country are both favorite areas of the state for me, but today I decided to stay at home since we had driven so much during vacation. Plus, my commute clocks in at 1 1/4 hours in each direction, so sometimes it’s good to skip putting extra wear and tear on my Jeep and on my body. To celebrate staying home, I babied the Jeep with an oil change and tire rotation (we both purred when the work was completed) and I have been doing geek things here on the back patio.

A little black and white bird keeps flying to the shruberry closest to the table and gives me a glance. I think he or she is trying to decide whether I’m harmless or not before hopping up to the adjacent bird feeder. Scott filled the bird feeder just before leaving for his latest tour of flying and they have already made a good dent in it. It’ll be ready for filling again when he gets back next week.

Earl has been out of town on business since yesterday morning but I received a SigAlert that he will be coming home tonight. That always makes my day better.

As I sit here and enjoy the backyard, I am noticing that the trees are starting to show signs of spring. The maples are starting to show the beginnings of the Leaves of 2012 and the evergreen trees are showing new growth. I think everything may be a week or two ahead of schedule, but I don’t think it’s something to complain about. I can’t remember having such a beautiful March in recent memory. Whatever is causing it (the natural cycle of things, HAARP, Global Climate Change, whatever), it sure is making this part of the country a little more enjoyable. Let’s hope we don’t boil away this summer though.

With my on-call I am working Friday-Sunday and then I have Monday off, where I then resume a normal work week next Tuesday. I’m thinking I might stay local again next Monday and, if the weather is still cooperative, plant a couple of trees in the side yard. Earl and I have talked about planting two trees in memory of our fathers; this might be a good opportunity.

It’s amazing how much one can enjoy life when they find enjoyment in their surroundings. I should remember to do this more often instead of running around trying to find it.

I seemed to have developed some sort of sniffly bug over the past 48 hours or so. The sniffles started on Sunday night when I went to bed. I got little sleep that night and had the sniffles and sneezes in full effect all day on Monday. This made returning to work after a week and a day vacation that much more pleasant. This morning I woke up congested but feeling better. As I write this during my lunch hour, I am feeling a marked improvement in my condition, though the congestion is still lingering around.

On a conference call today, it was mentioned that one of the intended participants couldn’t join us because, like me, they were on vacation last week and then had contracted some sort of bug and was at home sick this week.

That kind of sucks.

During the conversation a couple of people mentioned that these sorts of colds happen when one lets go of the stress that’s been building for a while. Your body has some sort of reaction to not being so tense all the time and all the bad stuff leaves by way of a grand sort of cold. I kind of think that’s what happened to me during our vacation. My work is relatively stressful, mainly of my own design due to the goals I set for myself along my career, and when I had the chance to relax last week at the House of the Mouse I took advantage of it. Subsequently, my body is purging all the bad stuff that’s built up and that’s why I appear to be getting over a 48 hour bug of some sort. This is just speculation, but I have a hunch that this is what’s going on.

And none of it’s a bad thing. It’s annoying to have the sniffles, but it’s not entirely bad.

My spirits are still good and I’m still feeling relatively relaxed so in the long run it’s all good. Less stress is always good.

In 1997 I attended my first radio convention. Orchestrated by a trade magazine called “Gavin”, I flew to New Orleans to hob knob with others in the radio and records industry and to check out a few new acts. It was at this Gavin Convention that I got to hang out with France Joli (best known for the disco hit “Come To Me”) and a Canadian group called Temperance, who did a remake of the Alphaville 80s hit, “Forever Young”. We were also to meet a new group called the Spice Girls, but they weren’t feeling the whole convention thing and they never showed up for their appearance.

There was a big cocktail party during the convention where anyone that was anyone would undoubtedly be in attendance at and I found this to be rather exciting. Coming from a market that could be best described as “midget”, I was fascinated with the special effects and the costumes and the atmosphere of the whole ghastly like encounter. There was a lot of fog, it was rather dark, Pat Boone was running around in a leather jacket and a bad wig and people were doing the Kathy Griffin-say-hello-to-no-one routine. I was asked on a couple of occasions if I had passed by N’dea Davenport or if I had engaged in any conversation with Stacy Ferguson from Wild Orchard (she’s now known as Fergie)¹. The answer to both questions was ‘yes’. N’dea was quite nice but Stacy was kind of doing her own thing but she seemed nice as well. I had a very good conversation with a head of lettuce which was actually a human head dressed up as a head of lettuce sticking up through a table. No photos allowed. The lettuce will wilt.

Finding myself in a conversational vacuum of undoubtedly my own creation, I wandered over to a table that had a bunch of wooden slabs with little pastries on them. Though it was a darker corner of the whole affair, I could make out the round bits of this and that that were being presented and I took a couple, put them on a plate and started munching on them. Expecting a confectionary delight in my mouth, I was a little surprised at what I tasted. I was must have had a weird look on my face as my friend Lynda came over to make sure I was doing ok talking to heads of lettuce and the like.

“Are you having a good time?”, she asked in her southern drawl.

“I am. I can’t believe this party!”

“Oh, they convention parties are always like this. You’ll find out”, she replied with a big smile. The radio station had just been given “reporting status”, which meant that the industry cared what we played. It was something no one had thought we would achieve and being a reporting station made us very popular with the record companies.

“So much fog and lighting and lettuce heads!” I must have sounded like a country bumpkin fresh out of the cabbage patch.

“No expense when it comes to reporting stations, darlin'”.

“I’m a little concerned about these pastries, though. I think they’re bad or something. They taste like fish.”

“Honey, that’s not a cookie, it’s sushi!”

I was eating sushi and I didn’t even know it. I had never had sushi before. I thought I was nibbling at a Lorna Doone or something. The little old program director from Upstate New York couldn’t tell the difference between raw fish and a cookie.

“That’s alright, darlin'”, Lynda quickly interjected, always trying to keep me feeling at ease, “we won’t tell anyone you thought the sushi was a cookie.”

And she never did.

But it got me hooked on sushi. Imagine my delight this afternoon when Earl came home with some sushi for dinner.

Now if I could only have a Lorna Doone for dessert.

¹ Listen to me throwing around names from my radio days.