As I look around this messy garage, with the dried brown leaves that have been tracked in and the half emptied boxes of miscellaneous stuff that hasn’t been unloaded from our move a year ago and the puddle of water coming from the condensation pump that’s getting ready to give out, I can’t help but think how fortunate I truly am.

Anyone who knows where this link is knows the situation I have been able to craft….some out of hard work and some out of luck.  It has now been two full years since I left North Carolina to return home to my native West Virginia, and all indicators point to success.  For starters, I still have the job I had when I left Charlotte, and apparently have survived a change of managers intact.  I get to wake up in the morning and miss a commute, and when work ends in the evening I miss another commute.  I can eat lunch from my own kitchen, take a dump on my own toilet, and there’s a TV behind me for background noise whose remote I control.

I get to see my kids on break and lunch.  I can sit on my own porch at lunchtime and read the paper while our dog runs in the front yard.  I can arrange my schedule to take classes for a second degree, and the campus is a five-minute drive from my house.  I don’t have to pay for a tank of gas every week.  Because I don’t have the limitations of a long commute and tight timeframes I can participate in more of my children’s activities.

The professional benefits are there as well.  I don’t have near the amount of interruptions as I did in the office so I can be more productive.  Because I don’t have the ability to stand in front of someone for five minutes to explain myself my communication is clearer.  My remote software and a cell phone allows me to be available from pretty much anywhere.  Learning a new application requires me to sharpen my focus during in-house sessions and encourages my exploration when I’m back here.  The nickname for our team’s business continuity plan is “Chris,” because let’s face it – if there’s a critical scenario happening onsite it’s likely not to be occurring 350 miles away, and if it is occurring here too then I think we’re all pretty much doomed.

It’s not all peaches & cream here, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t note the drawbacks.  If I had the desire to advance high within my present company those opportunities are pretty much shot.  The same personal interruptions that let me be productive are also “shoot-the-shit” moments that allow personal bonding.  I send up to a week away from my family regularly to be onsite.  It’s easy to put myself in a situation where I’m not separating work life from personal – if there’s a situation where our production needs to be monitored by one of my teammates, I’m easy to call on since I have the shortest commute.  Because I’m not visible, I feel the need at times to prove that I am working and providing value.  And I also hear through the grapevine that my situation may cause occasional grumbles and jealousy, although I also hear that those people should be less worried about me and more worried about themselves.

Two years ago my wife and I loaded up all our stuff, setting course to chart waters we had never encountered before.  Could we make the successful transition?  Could I keep the job that was allowing me to do this?  Would we be able to build the foundation quickly and securely enough here to make this work long term?  The answer appears to be Yes, Yes, and Yes.  

I know that nothing is guaranteed.  There’s always the chance that some part of the foundation we’ve built could crack, forcing us to revisit what we’re doing and develop alternate plans.  I also know that hard work and careful planning can help mitigate the damage that could be done.

In the end, with risk comes reward.  We’ve taken a huge risk to get where we wanted, and for now we seem to be getting the reward.  That’s a great feeling to wake up to every day.

To pick up from my last post….yes, I was kind of sad after our number was over.

Saturday night was the finale concert from the Festival of Steel, which as some (but sadly not many in Morgantown) know is a week-long workshop run by the of the modern steel drum fathers, Elle Mannette. Several different ensembles performed, from a “jazz” group of pans and beginners all the way up to the highest experience levels. (Sadly, a personal item forced me to leave before the concert was through.)  I suppose one could classify our group as “pre-beginner”, but to the audience it didn’t matter.

Our tune was about 2 to 3 minutes long and fairly simple but many in our cast had never played any kind of instrument before, much less performed in front of a couple hundred people with varying degrees of musical knowledge.  Our gang did pretty well, though.  Performing in an ensemble is pretty old hat for me, and while I was looking inward toward our group I could hear audience members clapping along to the rhythm.  The best feeling had to come at the end, when the applause came.  I’m a cynic with lots of experience at performing when the stakes are low, so in my mind I figure they were clapping in the same manner they would for a five year old spelling “school” properly.  Still, there’s a good vibe that runs through the bones when one is standing in front of people and receiving positive recognition for their performance, whether it be musical, acting, presenting, or any other show.  I even caught a couple fellows dressed in Caribbean garb standing & clapping.  That felt cool.

I now wait for WVU’s Community Music fall ensemble schedule to arrive in the mail early next month.  A lost part of me has been rediscovered.

Let’s see, other things happening here.  Saturday morning Garrett got to be on his own stage in front of strangers, perform, and receive applause.  He’s in a little kids karate class, and his instructors selected him and a couple others from his class to perform at Kid’s Day in front of the courthouse.  He did pretty well with his forms, and when breaking his boards his kiap was loud enough to be heard over the blaring music.  Another “Proud Moment” for his folks.  Perhaps he’ll get the Demo Team patch for his sleeve.  I’m holding out for a basketball game – the school did a demo during halftime this past winter.  Granted, it was a women’s game, but still…

I’m breaking in another new toy. VBL buddy sdot turned me on to a site called woot.com, where every day they sell one piece of merchandise, normally electronics but occasionally other stuff, cheap.  One day, one deal.  A couple weeks ago they had a Magellan Roadmate GPS on sale.  Brand new, but a hundred bucks less than anyplace else on the ‘net.  I debated it all day with my wife, and in the end I didn’t get it.  But no, the story doesn’t end there.  She gave me the guidance that I should consider all avenues of usage before jumping on this one purchase, and as I started researching I started to come across PDAs with GPS capacity.  Many have expansion cards with antennas, others have Bluetooth, and still others have cables to a GPS antenna.  One didn’t.  The Garmin iQue 3200 is a combination Palm PDA/Garmin GPS receiver.  It’s the smaller cousin of the 3600.  The 3200 does not have the “virtual Graffiti” box, so it’s a 320×320 screen.  No integrated headphone jack, so the MP3 capacity is shot.  It does come with a car adaptor standard in the box.

The other trick on the 3200 is that it’s discontinued.  I’m not really sure why, since it’s the same architecture as the 3600 that got rave reviews of reputable tech sites.  Both devices also get generally great reviews from consumers.  Garmin now sells a Pocket PC edition of the iQue (the M5) so perhaps they didn’t want too many devices out there.  I got my discontinued 3200 from newegg.com for $250 – less than the $330 Roadmate that started this in the first place.  It’s also a cheaper package than purchasing a PDA & receiver separate.  I looked at the Palm Tungsten E2 for $200, which can be paired with any number of GPS receiver antennas starting at around $80.  Car mount not included.  Or, for $200 more Palm sells an integrated antenna in a car mount.  For those counting at home, that’s $150 more than I just spent for a single unit.

This deal also stuck me because I finally realized that after nearly a decade of holding out, I really needed something to keep me better organized.  My work schedule takes me between Morgantown and Charlotte regularly.  My wife is getting more active with other local moms.  Garrett enters full time preschool (!!!!) this fall, where school activities are the norm.  My MIS classes resume in the fall, and there’s the Community Music program I really want to join.  Gotta keep it all synched up somehow.

The background of my existence is rooted in percussion.  Since the age of six I was playing some kind of drum or other striking instruments.  In junior & senior high I marched in the school’s drum lines and played percussion in the winter symphony ensembles.  I’ve tooled around in wannabe garage bands, played in jazz groups, and contracted out to churches.  I’ve played and marched from Williamsburg to EPCOT.  I’ve marched snares, ‘tris, and quads, and played keyboards, tympanis, brake drums, and all sorts of struck musical instruments over the years.

That all came to a grinding halt in the summer of 1993.  In June of that year, I tried out and made the drum line at West Virginia University.  I was a member of The Pride of West Virginia.  Any fan of WVU and its programs knows of the power and prestige The Pride holds., and I was going to be a part of it.

Briefly.

That summer, I went to a weekend camp for the drumline to start working out with their music and position myself for the instrument I would end up on.   Little did I know that one of my mental weaknesses – that dogs me to this day still – would lead me to make a decision that I regret to this day.  Working out with the full line, seeing the experience of the upperclassmen and the potential of my fellow freshman…it just blew my mind.  I couldn’t figure out why I was able to stand here with these guys.  The stickings were so intricate.  The sound was so precise.  My self-doubting side was screaming, “You have no business here!  You’ll never make it!  Quit now so your feelings won’t be crushed when you flame out!!!”

So I did.  I’ve quit other things I’ve done in life where I had a mental breakdown and felt like I couldn’t succeed in the task at hand, but this one decision by far was The Worst.  Unlike the other things, drumming was rooted in my soul.  It was a part of me.  Sure, for the first few years afterwards it didn’t bother me.  I was having fun in college and doing all sorts of other new things.  It was several years later that I finally came to realize just how bad that decision really was.  

Why do I bring up this pain today? Basically because I found out last night that the old adage that “you never forget how to ride a bicycle” is true.  Part of my Father’s Day gift this year was enrollment in the Community Workshop of the Festival of Steel, a celebration of the steel drum.  Few people realize that one of the fathers of modern steel drumming, Ellie Mannette, is an artist-in-residence at WVU, and has been for the last 15 years.  He has set up shop in Morgantown, teaching the magic of the pans and running a steel drum manufacturing company outside Westover.

Last night I joined seven other regular citizens for a 1 ½ hour introduction to steel drumming.  We meet again tomorrow night for another 2 hour rehearsal, then will be the opening act for the Festival’s final concert on Saturday night.

I had forgotten how wonderful a rehearsal could be.  Our instructors were expert players and great at teaching.  Just picking up the rhythms we were playing, the subtle manner of striking the pans for good tone, remembering how important it is to position myself correctly so that I can move from drum to drum effortlessly, making sure my sticking is correct to ensure efficient movement…I felt myself being transported back to a different stage of my life, one where (for moments of time anyway) I really had no other cares in the world.  I was immersed in the music, and that’s all that mattered.

I know that, inside, I will be sad when Saturday night is over, but this also presents me with an opportunity to reconnect with myself.  To reclaim a piece of my soul.  And that, more than anything else, will lead to the healing that lasts a lifetime.

Happy 230th birthday, America!

Technology is on my mind lately, either the things I want to do or the things I’m doing.

I finally plan to take the plunge later this month and convert one of my home lines to VoIP.  Since my move back to West Virginia VoIP had pretty much been a non-issue since there are no providers who have purchased 304 area code exchanges that I could find.  Vonage makes a funny commercial, but it obviously is not targeted for me since I want to maintain a local number for my office line.  Now, though, that may change.  A friend of mine from college runs a very successful tech shop, and he offers VoIP with capacity to port numbers from Verizon. Once the holidays end it’s porting time for me. I’m looking forward to testing out the service and playing with the added features I can have for not much more per month.

I really had no use for doing this little project, but it seemed simple enough.  For no good reason I started messing with portable apps and would up creating my own little personal hard drive of apps on my thumb drive.  I carry a drive with me to school and (when in Charlotte) to work, but the personal apps functionality I want typically aren’t there.  I had been reading lately about the portable apps and the U3 standard, so when I saw a 1Gb Memorex drive with the launcher installed on sale, I decided to take it for a whirl.  Firefox, Thunderbird, Trillian, Skype, OpenOffice, VLC Media Player, Sunbird Calendar, FTP, ZIP, basic image editing, basic web page editing…pretty cool in my book.  I haven’t really had much of a use for it yet, but it’s an easy enough thing to slip in my pocket to take places where I might not take my own PC.  Plus, even after all the apps I loaded there’s still about 500Mb left of my 1Gb – plenty of room to play with.

I really need to fix my network up.  The connection has been lost between my upstairs and downstairs machines, so the good printer I have down here isn’t available to my other machine.  I also need to fix it up so I can add that external hard drive I’ve been wanting.  We bought the second year model of the JVC hard disk camcorders, and I need someplace to archive the clips that build up on the 30Gb drive. That and the digital pic collection we have building up.  Hell, the laptop has a DVD burner, so if I get the connections repaired there’s a redundant backup to schedule – the files to the external and burned to a disc.  We’re beyond CD capacity.

And finally, I never have reported my entry into the MP3 player world.  Being a cheap-ass, I didn’t put out to be an I-Listener.  Instead, I bought the Sansa M250 on sale.  It’s a 2Gb Flash player with voice recorder, FM tuner, and equalizers.  The display is a little dot-matrix dated, but with the size of the device (roughly the circumference of a roll of quarters and half as long) it’s not overly important.  It tells me the song/artist/genre/etc, the time left, and the battery life.  What else do I need?  I’ve been using it for several months now and have been very pleased with it.  I’ve got about 260-ish tunes on it and have only used 1.2Gbs of space. I use it in shuffle mode, although I could do different genre playlists if my meta tags were better.  The FM tuner is decent – not overly strong, but I was able to find and hold the MSN broadcast of the Sugar Bowl when I was in the Georgia Dome.  I don’t think they make the M250 anymore, but it has been followed up with a similar line of players and the smaller versions of the M-line can still be purchased in the stores.