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For serious, folks. I will go for years at a time without picking up any kind of illness, yet almost as soon as I lost my job in March, I developed a cold that hasn’t gone away for almost two months. Now, I can deal with a cold. I mean, it’s a cold. I’m not bleeding out my eye sockets or anything; it’s just a bit of coughing. And that’s hardly going to kill anyone.

Except for the fact that this week has turned into some kind of bizarre experiment on the part of Nature to see exactly how much can be done to me before I give up. My cough got worse a few days ago, and then yesterday the lymph nodes in my throat swelled up so much that it interfered with the workings of my tongue and I sounded like I had cotton balls in my mouth. And then, this morning I woke up to find that my sinuses were all clogged up and my left ear felt like it had a fife and drum corps marching around in it.

So I suppose it’s only natural that almost immediately after my chance to sign up with COBRA expires, I get this kind of terrible, horrible, no good very bad sickness to contend with. Murphy’s Law hasn’t let me down in the past, so why should I expect it to do so now?

They say that the surest way to know that a blog is dying is that it starts apologizing for the length of time that goes between posts. So I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to move right on and try to actually post, y’know, content.

Over the last year(!) since my last post, I’ve had a lot of things happen. The biggest of these is probably that a couple months ago, I lost my job, which has been a somewhat cathartic experience for me, and maybe a little bit eye-opening as well. It’s worth noting that I’ve done a TON of photography over the last year, some of it for fun and some for business. Yeah, that’s right, I said business. As in, I think I’m going to try and make a photography business take off the ground.

I’ve had a REALLY big jump in the quality of my photos over the last year and I’m going to take some time over the next few weeks to upload a bit of it (including some in this post), but it’s worth noting that I’ve purchased a new domain name and it’s going to be the primary focus for a photography portfolio. I want to separate out my personal/family photos from my professional stuff, so I’m thinking that what I’m going to do is either create a second Flickr username for my professional photos, or keep it only on my professional site (which will more than likely contain a photoblog, while this site will be more writing-, family- and life-oriented) and pull the professional stuff out of my existing Flickr pool.

But none of that’s happening just yet. Keep an eye out for the announcement of my photo studio website, but in the meantime, here’s a good cross-section of some of the photos I’ve taken over the last year. I’ll include links to the album pages if you want to look at the other photos from the sets.

from Memorial Day Barbecue
from Seth and Christine’s Big Day
from July 4th at Rob & Ryan’s
from Sailfest 2009
from Takeout/ATICC Fashion Shoot
from Brokedown Serenade, 8/29/09
from I AM Festival 2009

Next weekend I’ll be back in Vermont for Memorial Day: my sister and brother-in-law are hosting a barbecue. I’m sure I’ll get a ton of photos from that.

What I hadn’t planned on, though, is that apparently my mother hates salmon. D’oh.

I do have to say, though, that despite that one little snafu, I completely rocked the meal: salmon steaks with lemon garlic herb butter, fresh brussels sprouts and rice pilaf. Three out of four of us loved it. Unfortunately, the one person who didn’t was the one I was cooking for. :)

And now, the aforementioned photos:

Estrogen and Tonic

Nerve Tonic

Paul Brockett Roadshow

That’s the short version. :)

Longer version is: This piece is called “Ich Grolle Nicht” (translation available in that link) and is from Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe, and it’s all about how love is a cruel bitch. My kind of stuff.

Ich Grolle Nicht

(Oh, and yes, I’m also playing the piano. It’s a really fun part to play.)

At first I kept my distance, shooting them with my zoom lens, not wanting to bother them. But one of them noticed and I heard him tell his buddies, “Hey, some guy’s taking pictures of us,” so in a desire to avoid being thought of as creepy, I walked up and asked if they wanted to see what I’d taken so far. That got them more interested, and after seeing what I’d done, they were suddenly really excited to have me take all sorts of pictures of them trying tricks on the boardwalk. I think they were a little confused that I had such a nice camera but didn’t work for a newspaper or something similar; I got asked more than once about my reasoning for taking photos (“you mean you just take pictures of random stuff?”).

Before I headed off, I gave them the address to my Flickr page and told them that they could expect to see them uploaded later in the day. All in all, they were really cool about having a stranger take photos of them, and they provided for some amazing subjects in action photography.

(On a side note, MOO.com offers Flickr-based business cards for, I suppose, this specific purpose. I need to order a set, I think, in case something like this happens again.)

Last fall, my friend Finnigan threw a going away party—he was moving to Boston and wanted one last hurrah at his place before he went. While I was there, I met a girl who seemed interesting: cute, funny, a little bit of a stoner but I don’t have a problem with that. I managed somehow to gather up the stones to ask for her number and received it, so a few days later I called and we scheduled a date. We went out a few times—and to be fair, I had a pretty good time—but after a couple dates I didn’t really feel a vibe coming from her and I stopped calling. (This is something that Finnigan gave me much grief over, stating that a woman likes to be pursued and I should have kept at it a little longer.)

Well, fast-forward a bit to New Year’s Eve, when I did my yearly ritual of sending a text message to everybody in my phone book at midnight stating a simple wish for a happy new year. I got a response from this girl, asking “Who is this?” And it was at this point that I realized exactly when I should have seen that there wasn’t going to be a Love Connection between us: my memory flashed back to a point when I had called her to ask her on a date (third, I think?), and she didn’t know who I was when she answered.

Now, in this age of cellphones, not knowing who’s calling you can only mean one thing: that you see only a number come up on the Caller ID without a name to go with it. The reason for this was simple: she had never added my number to her phone’s phonebook. This explains why she didn’t know who the text message came from at New Year’s—I don’t know about anybody else, but my phonebook entries don’t get deleted unless I never ever expect to receive a call from them again, or if the number I have is out of service and I don’t have a new one—but it was also that seminal moment where I realized that I was right not to have called her again. After all, if she didn’t see the need to keep my number handy, even in those first few weeks when we were going on dates, then obviously she didn’t think she would be calling me much.

Needless to say, that was also the point I removed her from my own phonebook.

And most people would be right. But here’s the thing.

I went to bed early tonight. Two o’clock, I was in bed and sleeping. And then, at 3:49am, I was awake. My only guess is that when I push my bedtime earlier, my body assumes that I’m having a nap. The problem with this is that around noontime, I’m going to completely hit a wall, which is okay under most circumstances—if I’m at home, I can just take another nap and I’ll be fine—but what if I happen to hit a wall while, say, driving? If that were to happen, I might hit other things, like… cars.

The reason I had gone to bed early was because I need to drive back to the town I used to live in, because apparently it thinks that I still live there. No, literally: I got a car reregistration form in it a couple of months ago that is now overdue by almost a month (yeah, I know, but I was told I have a month from the date my sticker expires, which gives me until the end of March, and like I said, getting errands done isn’t the easiest for a nocturnal creature), and while reviewing it last night I came to the realization that it says on it that I owe back taxes. For West Haven.

For the record, I have not lived in West Haven for more than two years. And I happen to know that all my car taxes are paid up through the end of 2006, the last year I lived there. So if they think I owe them money still, well, they’re sorely mistaken.

But that doesn’t really matter to the Great Bureaucracyâ„¢. Thanks to the miracle that is state governments, I have to get a physical stamp on my registration form that states that my taxes are paid. Which means I have to drive an hour back to West Haven, argue with the tax collector about whether or not I actually owe them money (my wager is that I’m still going to have to give them a pound of flesh whether I lived there or not), get a stamp, go to the DMV, pay them for the registration (plus a late fee, I imagine, if the month-long-grace-period thing I was told is untrue), and come home so I can work a full eight hour day night. Oh well, at least it gives me some time and material with which to write a blog post.

And finally, an interesting thing happened to me a couple weeks ago: I got a friend request on Facebook from somebody I hadn’t seen since college. We started to talking and she invited me up to Boston on Monday to go to an art opening she was doing. I asked her if it would be gauche to take along my camera and snap some shots of the opening, and was told of course not, by all means, so take it along I did, and also documented a bit of the aprés-opening gathering at her apartment.

Emma’s Art Opening, 3/2/09

Now, I tend to assume that this is really corporate-speak to mean something along the lines of “We’d be able to save money on employees if we can make the employees we already have do more work in the same amount of time.”

But I kind of take it to heart. I’ve already mentioned on this blog how much I enjoy creating methods to make it so I don’t have to do repetitive tasks, but tonight I encountered something that made me really question how much those other people really enjoy the idea of reinventing the wheel:

Let’s say that you have a computer. If you’re reading this, you either do have one or you employ somebody to print out your favorite websites for you to read with the morning paper. Since nobody in his or her right mind would pay somebody to print out this blog, I’m going to go with the former. Anyway. You’ve got a computer. And let’s just say, you want to run a program and it doesn’t load. Instead, you get an error message. Doesn’t really matter what it says, because when I ask you what the error said, you’re not going to remember it anyway. But we’ll come back to that.

When I encounter this type of situation, there’s a very specific set of things I do to try and fix the problem. It goes like this:

• Make note of the exact text of the error.
• Go to Google.
• Type in the exact text of the error.
• Read the links that follow to see if anybody else has had the same error, and what they did to fix it.
• Do what those other people did, which will almost always fix the error.

Now, that makes sense, right? I mean, it’s Google. As my friend Jonny says, “Google is the best sysadmin in the world. That Google dude knows everything.” It is incredibly rare that I get a computer problem that nobody in the world has EVER had before, and since it’s, well, Google, all those issues are generally available with a few simple keystrokes.

Thus, it’s very, very easy for me to do my job. I simply check to see if anybody else has done it before me, and I copy them. Now, utilizing these very same secret methods, you too can become a systems admin.

And now we’re back to the part that I said we were going to get back to: If you ever call me with computer problems, you can be sure that the one question I will absolutely, definitely ask you will be if there were any error messages, and what they said. It is in your best interest to be able to answer these questions. :)

But back to tonight. Without going into details, let’s just say that I encountered an issue with a computer that had been confusing people for days. During that time, the only time I actually got to look at the computer was while it was running a scan or something, so I didn’t have an actual chance to sit down and try to fix it myself until tonight. And when I did, what was the first thing I did? Looked for the error messages. (You starting to notice a recurring pattern? Good, I thought so.) Once I saw the error message, it took me all of five minutes to go to Google, find a solution, and implement it.

FIVE MINUTES.

I don’t think I’m anything too special when it comes to what I do. Hell, I already said that you could do my job if you wanted to, just by using my tried and true methods. So what does it say that for almost a week, an entire team of people couldn’t fix an issue that was solved by fifteen seconds’ worth of googling? I mean, seriously, folks, it was the first link that was in the search results.

Like I said, for me, a lot of these issues are fixed in this manner. In reality, it’s a very simple thing.

I don’t really know if what I do is working smarter, but one thing it’s definitely not is working harder.

Link to the actual photo gallery

This is my eulogy to a shepherd/retriever mix named Mahogany (so named for practically no reason at all, since she wasn’t mahogany colored—we literally couldn’t think of a name for her and this was the first one that was suggested by my sister after a marathon naming session that didn’t make any of us retch). She was getting on in years, had lost much of her hearing and was the second dog in a row that we owned that had Cushing’s Syndrome. But she was in our lives since I was fifteen, which is about half of my life, and she meant a lot to me.

When she was younger, she was a terror. We got her at about eight weeks, the day after Christmas of 1994, and she was adorable and fuzzy and couldn’t go the whole night without having to go out and pee. Somebody had to sleep with her in the back room of our house so that we could take her outside when she needed to. She was terribly submissive, and had a knack for peeing all over the floor when somebody new came into the house. And if somebody showed up in our driveway, she would go crazy, but not because she wanted to hurt them. It was more of a “OMIGOD THERE ARE PEOPLE THIS IS GREAT I LOVE NEW PEOPLE I WONDER IF THEY WILL PLAY WITH ME” kind of thing. Funny that nobody else but us saw it that way, though.

Since then, she was kind of a fixture in my life. I’d come back to my parents’ house for a weekend and she’d be there at the door, as excited to see me as if I had simply gone away for the day and was getting home.

Even as she got older—and her age really started to show—she would still have puppy moments. Though the fur under her chin started turning gray at the young age of two or three, she still loved to go outside and run like there was no tomorrow. And she loved playing in the snow, right up until the end. Somehow, she never really grasped the concept of how large she was. It was always funny to see a sixty-five pound dog try to climb into somebody’s lap while they sat in a recliner. And God save you if she ever climbed on a bed while you were laying on it: your face was inevitably doomed to a quite literal tongue-lashing from the dog, which would only let up once you had capitulated that she was, indeed, the winner.

My mother told me earlier this week that she was going to be put down. I’m thankful that my job affords me the ability to work from any location, because I decided quite fast that I would drive up so I could see her again and say goodbye. And this morning, at nine o’clock, we made the trip to the vet’s to put her to rest.

The entire process took only about two minutes. It’s not the first time I’d seen a family member die—no, this was in fact the third time I’d had the privilege. The vet pushed what seemed to be an absurd amount of anesthetic through a syringe, and quite soon, the pup’s breathing slowed and stopped.

She died with her eyes open. I had thought she would drift off to sleep, but I guess it happened too quickly for even that.

In a way, getting to say goodbye to my dog makes me feel a little better about not being able to say goodbye to my grandmother. The frustration of having one family member pass on so fast is tempered a little bit by the ability to show the other one how much I loved them both. It’s a small consolation, but it is one, at least.

My parents say they probably won’t get another dog for a while. The last time we had to put a dog down, it was about six months before we all decided it was time. Now that there isn’t a whole house full of kids to help take care of it, I wonder if it might not be a little while longer, if at all, before they get another. But this family has always had a dog in it, and I can’t imagine it without one in the house to help keep the cats company.

I just hope that if they do get a new one, it’s not something small. I wouldn’t want to accidentally step on it.

Mahogany

October 23, 1994 — February 20, 2009

You were loved and you will be missed by all—even by those who thought you were trying to eat them.

I had grown really weary of the old site design, but there was a certain element of pride involved with the fact that I had designed it myself, from the ground up, not to mention that there were some custom things I had done with it that had even prevented me from upgrading Wordpress for fear that I might break something on the site. Not that there weren’t already things wrong with the site—the image galleries never quite seemed to work right, for example—but the concept of redoing it all, from scratch, was so daunting as to be completely paralyzing.

I had been trying to come up with a way to incorporate this particular look (a color-shifted variant of the Fusion theme that I was quite fond of) into the site, and using it to help come up with a site design that better fit my current interests. I wanted something that would allow me to incorporate all of the photography I’ve been doing lately, without losing the function and form of the pages I’d already incorporated into the site.

I dunno. I guess tonight was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I decided that come hell or high water, I was both upgrading the software on the site and changing the theme, and I would worry about fixing the problems that would undoubtedly crop up later. It turns out that I didn’t have anything to worry about. The upgrade wiped out the custom changes I’d made, so I didn’t have to worry about extricating them from the internal code—and thankfully, I have since learned that there are easier ways to customize, and I will definitely be using them should I want to make any changes under the hood from now on—and the theme installed flawlessly without any real effort from me. From there, it was a simple matter of moving the content around and installing or upgrading some plugins I had had running.

And speaking of moving content around, some notes on housekeeping:

• The pages for my Senior Recital and the Plymouth Mozart’s Requiem performance are still here, but are now listed as menu items under the “Music Related” menu at the top of the screen.
• The same goes for certain site related content: the Privacy Policy, Contact Form and Email Subscription options page are all available as items in the “Site Related” menu up there. Also, in addition to the archives dropdown menu and category listing on the right, there are links to the archives and categories in that same menu.
• Those of you—particularly family members—who have been going to my Flickr page to look at photos of the niece can now simply come here. I’ve integrated the blog with Flickr, so all of my photosets and albums are available through the Photo Galleries link above. The integration allows for commenting and posting notes on the pictures without having to go to Flickr. I’m hoping that this will encourage you to participate in addition to just looking.

See? It’s as easy as clicking the photo album cover here. :)

Ultimately, this overhaul is intended to force me to actually use the skills I acquired during all those years of school and write more. But part of the new look is to incorporate my new hobbies—namely, the photography. I took some photos of a friend’s band at a club this past weekend, and after she looked at them today I was almost instantly offered a paid gig doing promotional photos for the band. Not only is this an enormous compliment, it’s affirming in a way, because I’ve gotten so into photography that I was considering starting up a small business with it, and this kind of thing lets me know that it’s a possibility, even if it’s only local and even if it’s only once in a while. It’s nice to know that people think what you do is worthwhile.

So I’m hoping that I’ll contribute more often to the site, and not just in one medium, but in three—image, word, and music. It’s been a while since I put anything new on the site, musically, but I am working at it, if slowly. And the other two are just as lacking.

If you notice anything on the site not acting as you think it should, comment on this post. And keep an eye out for new content. It’ll be coming, I swear it. Just a reminder that you can subscribe via RSS or email. :)

(You might also notice that the name of the blog has changed. Think of it as my take on nirvana, I guess.)

[01/25 16:26:48] Nick: what the hell happened last nigh?
[01/25 16:26:50] Nick: night*
[01/25 16:40:42] Andrew: Went up to Nashua to visit a friend from college
[01/25 16:41:10] Andrew: She’s not known for being the most stable of people, but she’s going through some tough times and I figured we could go out dancing and just relax and have fun for a night, she could unwind a bit
[01/25 16:41:59] Andrew: She’d been going through this thing with a guy who is, for lack of a better term, abusive (at least, I believe he is, even if he hasn’t hit her), and she said it was over with him, but I found out when I got there that they were back together
[01/25 16:42:13] Andrew: Something in me just knew that that meant trouble
[01/25 16:42:30] Andrew: And I was right, I guess toward the end of the night she tried to get in touch with him and he wouldn’t respond, and she FLIPPED. OUT.
[01/25 16:43:02] Andrew: She took off without me, so I went looking for her and finally took a cab back to her place
[01/25 16:43:12] Andrew: She was there but wouldn’t let me in
[01/25 16:43:45] Andrew: And finally called the cops on me because I wouldn’t leave (and she was right, because my camera and clothes were in her apartment and I was NOT leaving without my stuff)
[01/25 16:43:48] Andrew: So the cops show up
[01/25 16:44:07] Andrew: Ask me a few questions, determine that I’m completely harmless, and all of a sudden I’ve got three cops on my side
[01/25 16:44:08] Andrew: Heh
[01/25 16:44:31] Andrew: So they’re asking her what the situation is, and she all of a sudden backs down and says I can stay
[01/25 16:46:19] Andrew: So I go upstairs and try to crash on her couch, and all the while she’s screaming her head off and trying to call this guy
[01/25 16:46:34] Andrew: And then she flips out again and starts telling me to leave
[01/25 16:46:44] Andrew: And by this time I’m PISSED, and I just want to sleep and sober up so I can drive home
[01/25 16:47:01] Andrew: So I’ve got my comforter wrapped around me
[01/25 16:48:26] Nick: what a nut
[01/25 16:48:35] Andrew: Hold on
[01/25 16:48:39] Nick: i know
[01/25 17:10:19] Andrew: Sorry, my mom called
[01/25 17:10:29] Nick: np
[01/25 17:10:47] Andrew: So anyway, she flips out again
[01/25 17:10:56] Andrew: Grabs the comforter and pulls me down to the floor
[01/25 17:11:03] Andrew: Then starts KICKING ME IN THE HEAD.
[01/25 17:11:08] Andrew: Telling me to get out
[01/25 17:11:18] Andrew: Then she calls the cops a second time
[01/25 17:11:30] Andrew: And tells them that a “homeless guy” is on her couch and won’t leave
[01/25 17:11:35] Andrew: I was just laughing at this point
[01/25 17:12:12] Andrew: So they show up again and they’re like, “Look, we understand your situation, but for your own safety, you shouldn’t stay here. We’ll call you a cab to take you to a motel”
[01/25 17:12:32] Andrew: I said, “I’m not paying another $60 tonight to crash at a motel.”
[01/25 17:12:51] Andrew: So they offered instead to take me to a Dunkin Donuts so I could chill for a couple hours until I was okay to drive
[01/25 17:12:59] Andrew: But wait, there’s more
[01/25 17:13:08] Andrew: So I finally call another cab to take me back
[01/25 17:13:12] Andrew: This is around 4:00 or so
[01/25 17:13:26] Andrew: She calls me again
[01/25 17:13:48] Andrew: Apparently she’s locked herself out of the apartment now, and called the cops (no idea of the rationality on that one, but when you’re blacked out you do weird shit)
[01/25 17:14:17] Andrew: So I get one of the cops on the phone and he explains the situation to me, and I explained that I was in a cab and was going to be there in a few minutes
[01/25 17:14:34] Andrew: So when I get there, she’s nowhere to be found
[01/25 17:14:51] Andrew: And a cop pulls up to me while I’m outside the place and tells me that she took off down the road and disappeared into a side street
[01/25 17:15:01] Nick: wtf
[01/25 17:15:02] Andrew: So for the next HALF HOUR, I’m driving around looking for her
[01/25 17:15:09] Andrew: Because it’s like 5 degrees
[01/25 17:15:17] Nick: was she in her apt the whole time?
[01/25 17:15:20] Andrew: And all I could imagine was her passed out in a snowbank somewhere
[01/25 17:15:23] Andrew: No
[01/25 17:15:52] Andrew: I called her repeatedly trying to get ahold of her, and after 30 minutes or so, she picks up and is like “I locked myself out, I’m at a friend’s place, relax and stop calling me”
[01/25 17:16:01] Andrew: I wanted to reach through the fucking phone
[01/25 17:16:07] Andrew: And throttle her
[01/25 17:16:28] Andrew: So I told her I was going home
[01/25 17:16:41] Andrew: Then drove two hours home, got here at like 7 or so
[01/25 17:18:01] Nick: i’m guessing you won’t be talking to her for quite a while
[01/25 17:18:23] Andrew: I talked to her this morning because I was too asleep not to pick up the phone, she called around 10:30 to find out where her keys were
[01/25 17:18:27] Andrew: Like I had them or something
[01/25 17:18:49] Andrew: Then she wouldn’t let me tell her what happened
[01/25 17:18:52] Andrew: So I hung up on her
[01/25 17:19:00] Andrew: She called me repeatedly for the next several hours
[01/25 17:19:37] Andrew: Finally left me a VM that said she got into her apartment and found her keys and could I call her to fill her in on what happened, and she can’t apologize enough, etc.
[01/25 17:19:47] Nick: ha
[01/25 17:19:49] Nick: whatever dude
[01/25 17:20:01] Nick: maybe she should lay off the fucking crack
[01/25 17:20:04] Andrew: But yeah, I set a silent ringtone on her
[01/25 17:20:13] Andrew: So when she calls I won’t know
[01/25 17:20:17] Nick: good
[01/25 17:20:20] Andrew: Problem is, she’s got a private cell number
[01/25 17:20:32] Andrew: So unless she unlocks it before she calls, it rings anyway because it just says private
[01/25 17:21:33] Nick: i wouldn’t ever talk to her again
[01/25 17:22:46] Andrew: Yeah, it’s probably gonna be awhile.

Needless to say, it was an eventful evening.

In 2007, I put in a little bit of effort (not even a lot) and lost about 20 pounds.

My New Year’s resolution for 2008 was to lose another twenty. Turns out I didn’t quite hit that—but I did lose about fifteen pounds. I’d say that’s not too bad.

This year? Same thing. I resolve to lose at least twenty pounds by the end of 2009, and keep it off. I know it’s possible, but I’m already working on being healthier, not just less corpulent. Daily workouts on the exercise bike and better, more disciplined eating habits are already helping.

2009 is going to be the year that I focus on being a better me. It’s funny how you can forget to do things like that when you’re so busy focusing on external stuff.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” they said. “That all men are created equal.”

Strange as it may seem, that was the first time in history that anyone had ever bothered to write that down.

Decisions are made by those who show up.

If you believe in a better world, if you want your voice to be heard, then do not even consider staying home on Tuesday.

I’m not going to say that it doesn’t matter who you vote for—because I believe it does matter—but to quote another character from The West Wing: “No matter who you vote for, make sure you vote.”