Time for a Change

I have been wanting to play more and more over the past few months. I practice daily now, trying to get my chops up and pull my level of playing up to at least a respectable level. I play sometimes after work and sometimes before I go to work. I go up to the school(UNT) and use their practice rooms on my days off. This has helped somewhat but what I really need is performance opportunities. There are several that I could perhaps take advantage of except for my work schedule.

Some have asked, 'Can't you change to days?' 1. The last guy who asked for dayshift waited for a year before the change was made. 2. The schedule would then be 7am-7pm which would still make it difficult to do any performing(I live in Denton & work is 35 miles away in Plano) 3. I would also not be able to go to church 6 months out of the year. 4. I am no longer interested in working in the command center(reasons are named in an earlier post).


So I've made a decision. On August 1st, 2006 I will quit and pursue a career in music.

This is a bit scary as I don't have another job waiting for me but I am more scared of seeing the life & joy drain out of me in what should be the best years of my life.

Financialy it will be tough. A 50% cut in income means that we'll have to tighten our belts so to speak and I will have to come up with ways to meet the gap between bills & income each month. I have come up with the following ways to make money with out compromising my ability to play.

1. Music Copying - I worked my way through grad school mostly by preparing composers handwritten manuscripts on the computer for publication. I am in the process of setting the computer up to do the same thing again.

2. Teaching private students - I'll need to get cleared by the local school districts to do this.

3. The occasional odd gig - might provide a few bucks but nothing to count on.

4. A part-time job - as the situation dictates


As far as playing goes, my foremost priority is to find a position with one of the local community orchestras. I really want to get orchestral experience. Also, there's a local trombone group around here called 'Slide Area' run by a local freelancer. That looks like it could be some fun. I also wouldn't mind being in a brass quartet or quintet. Lastly, I'll keep an eye out for any local musicals that need trombones in the pit.

My ultimate goal is to either 1. Get a full time gig with an orchestra or 2. Teach college full time. For #2 I'll have to back to school for a DMA but I'm not doing that just yet.

I had a lesson with Jan Kagarice on Tuesday(wife of my former UNT teacher). She is such a wonderful teacher. We mainly worked on breathing & relaxation. I've incorporated the exercises that she had me do into my daily playing routine.

I visited with Dr. Vern Kagarice a couple of weeks ago and he was very gracious and gave me some solid ideas for playing opportunities in the area.

Tony Baker(the other UNT full-time trombone professor) also had some good ideas. He was very kind in replying my email and also agreed to give me lessons. Tony and I actualy have a tiny bit of history together. We went to the same bandcamp one summer(Henderson State University). We were placed in the top band together. I was first chair, David Herring was second, and Tony was third. Now David Herring is the Principal Trombone of the Minnesota Orchestra, Tony Baker is a full-time professor and free lancer, and I'm...uh...well...I'm trying to get back into it.



That's it for now. I'll update this more as things progress.

Prodigy is first woman tuba player for top orchestra

Carol Janistch, 21, was just awarded the principal tuba position with the Philidelphia Orchestra. She just graduated from University of Michigan and now she has a $102k/year-10-week-paid-vacation job playing her tuba. She beat out 195 others auditioning for the position.

This girl just impresses the heck out of me.

I am worth $2,052,060 on HumanForSale.com

Here are the pictures that I promised.

Lets start with the Alamo. We went there when we were trying to kill time before out Temple session started.





Then we did our session at the San Antonio Temple. What a nice temple! A smaller one but well designed and very nice to look at both inside and out. Much nicer than the Oklahoma City Temple.

Here's a running total of the temples that I've been in(session, sealing, or some other ordinance:

Dallas
Houston
Jordan River
Laie Hawai'i
Los Angeles
Manti
Mount Timpanogas
Nauvoo
Oklahoma City
Provo
Salt Lake
San Antonio

I just need Lubbock and that'll complete the 4 in Texas! Its 5.5 hours way out in the barren west part of the state so that's not exactly a high priority right now. We don't travel these places just to go to the temple there, but if we are already somewhere with a temple that we haven't been in(visiting friends or vacation or whatever) we make a point of going.

We were getting bored of Denton, and the missus had just completed another school year so we decided to go out of town for a while. After some discussion we decided to go to Blanco State Park.

Blanco SP seemed to consist mainly a camping area and of two a sections of the Blanco River that was dammed off on both ends. Not much to it really.

So we get there Monday afternoon and set up the tent. We were a little rusty on this one as the last time we set it up was during our Grand Canyon trip two summers ago. We got pretty good at it too, but like I said, it had been a while. We swam some in the afternoon and cooked some steaks on the grill for dinner and just chilled.

The next morning we got up & took showers(the showers/br facilities were actually decent) and ate breakfast. Omlets & bacon. Yummm...the missus is good at that. Then we went to the park office and checked out a couple of inner tubes. Only $5 each and they were nice - handles and everything. So we took them to the upriver portion of the river(right by the 1st dam) and got in. Strange thing; we actualy started floating TOWARDS the dam that the water had just flowed off of. Not much of a current but it was there and we had to paddle against it. After about a hundred yards or so we decided that it wasn't working so we bagged it and got out. On a hunch, we got tried again down stream at the second dam after lunch and guess what? We floated up-stream quite nicely. Go figure. We had hamburgers & hotdogs for dinner.

The next morning we left dodge. I thought that the whole camp thing was rather boring as you probably can tell.

We then went to San Antonio and saw The Alamo. We will always remember it;-) This is the second time that we've been to it and it never ceases to amaze me how small it is. Not much to it really. A medium-sized room with some small ones, a couple of which are arranged as shrines. A good-sized gift shop though. We got a few pics while we were there that I'll post later.

After spending an hours at the Alamo we did a session at the LDS San Antonio Temple. It is a very nice & beautiful temple. A very well designed & constructed 'smaller' temple that the Church builds in addition to the larger ones.

Then we went and visited the missus' sister(K) at Heart O' the Hills Summer Camp for Girls where she is a counselor. K seemed deleriously happy to be there for which we were glad. K is head of the art program there.

Then we made the looooong drive home, courtesy of yours truely. Lots and lots of diet mountain dew. Lots of stops for urination purposes. We stopped once for dinner. Anhyhow, we finaly pulled into Denton around 3am Thursday morning. Its over. Yay.

Life Explained

Nash's MVP Trophy

A follow up on my last post

1. Its a data drive, windows xp is on another drive
2. In 'My Computer' it show up as a drive but when I click on it a box comes up that says; 'This Drive is not formated. Do you wish to format it now?' I called a local shop and the guy said that that meant that it was a bad hard drive.

My hard drive went bad this week. 10 years worth of photos(vacations, family reunions, holidays, etc) as well as my huge iTunes library - gone. All gone. I know I should have been backing up regularly(which I preach to others) but I really got caught with my pants down on this one.


I'm not very happy right now.

My wife got me a remote car starter for my birthday. It is super cool. I can start the car before I exit the apartment, before I can even see the car. Ditto for the horn & locks. Oh yeah, that's good stuff.

I got my wife an iPod Nano for her birthday(our birthdays are 4 days apart). She seems to like it. 100% flash memory - no skipping. The perfect mp3 player for working out.

My maternal grandmother's birthday is today. I sent her a card and talked to her on the phone tonight. She seems to be doing really well. She is such a wonderful person.

Woman ditches wheelchair, flees police

This story amuses me.



http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/05/11/wheelchair.runner.reut/index.html

I get too wound up sometimes when posting on message boards, mainly Cougarboard. Maybe I'm just wound too tightly anyways. Whatever.

The wife is looking for a position at another school. She's an Elem PE teacher but she wants a change of scenery. Also, I work close to Dallas and commute 35-50 minutes a day and we want to buy a house closer to the city. Her current school is a pretty poor one and many of the students have no or very little parental support. Not much in the way of a budget, either. She can put up with these things but she's just ready for something different. She seems to like being a PE teacher. I think that it would drive me stark raving mad, though.

My job situation remains unchanged although I had an interview 9 days ago. I haven't heard anything yet and I take that to be a bad sign.

Shawn Bradley & I(I'm 6'7", BTW).

Taken in the Spring of 1991 at the BYU Deseret Towers basketball courts. It was Shawn's Freshman(& only) year at BYU.

Keeping Emergency Rooms in Business

Oklahoma City
Day 2

The primary task that we wanted to get done on Tuesday morning is to attend a session at the OKC LDS Temple. We got there at 9:30 or 10 and had to wait for the 10:45 session.









We did get to do the session ok but it was rather tedious. I was waiting for 45 minutes or so and there was no chapel so I resorted to pacing up and down the hallway. There were a few other things too but I won't discuss them here.


After we finished at the temple, at 1:30 or so, we went to the National Cowboy Museum. There was SO much stuff there, some of it even interesting. There was an 'Hollywood' section, a 'rodeo' section, a 'calvary' section, and several more that I can't think of right now. Pretty interesting. Also, there was and extensive Native American bead art exhibit that was moderately interesting.

I took this photo out in the foyer. I had the wife stand in front of it to make it clear how humongous this statue is:




Then we had some bbq for lunch and it was on to the 45th Infantry Division Museum.

This was really interesting to go through although we only had 20 or 30 minutes until closing time. The interior(no pictures) had a large firearms collection, a nazi memorabilia room, US infantry vehicles, canons...all sorts of stuff. I wish that we had had more time to look through it all.
Outside was just as interesting though; there were all kinds of US armed forces vehicles & aircraft on display.







It was really cool to see all those vehicles.

After that we picked up some dinner and headed back to Texas. It was a nice getaway.

We're Back from Oklahoma City!

So we got back from OKC Tuesday night after 2 days of a rip-roaring good time. Not riproaring, really, but it was still an ok trip.

We arrived Sunday night after a 3 hour drive from Denton. I hadn't slept in more than 24 hours but we seemed to make it ok thanks mostly to copious amounts of diet Mt. Dew. It worked. We got to the hotel(Holiday Inn Express) and were too exausted to do anything else so we just watched tv.

Day 1
Monday we set off to get on the water taxi but got lost on the way there. We found the Alfred P. Murrah building museum & memorial, though, and spent a couple of hours going through that. It was quite a sobering experience hearing the stories of the survivors & the ones who perished.

The memorial:



On each end of the body of water(very shallow - at the most an inch deep) there were stone walls. One bore the inscription of 9:01 and the other, 9:03. 9:02 is when the bombing occured.


Another part of the memorial are the metal(bronze?) chairs that represent those who lost their life in the tragedy:



The upper left hand part of the picture where the chairs are is where the bomb went off. As you go left to right the chairs represent those who died in each floor.


Except for these chairs which represent the five who died in nearby buildings:






This tree was planted in gratitude for all those who came from far wide to help with the disaster recovery effort:



About 4 that afternoon we mosied over to downtown okc and the canal that ran for a mile or 2 though a section called 'bricktown.' From there we took the water taxi and the mini tour that came along with it.



As far as I could tell, Bricktown consisted mostly of restaurants. Those were the shops that were open, anyways. The canal ended at a Bass Pro Shop. Bricktown(and the canal for that matter) seemed like a lame attempt to artifically make downtown okc somewhat interesting.

The Pro Shop was pretty cool though. They had just about everything there related to fishing or camping. The coolest thing to me was the giant aquarium that was there.



I'll bet that it really helped with business.
They had several different kinds of 'fishfinder' radar equipment. Essentialy(from what I could tell) it could scan the bottom and tell you exactly where the fish is. Doesn't seem very sporting to me.

So we went out of the Pro Shop to meet the water taxi right on time, at 5:10 just like the driver told us. So we waited. And waited. Finaly at 5:30 we guessed that the taxi had already come and gone so we started walking. The canal really wan't that long anyways. So we walked over to the Sonic world hq building and went in and wandered around a little bit.

There was nothing to see, really, because everybody had already gone home and they didn't give tours anyways. We did go to the adjacent 'sit-down' Sonic restaurant and had some ice cream. They had booths and tables and we ordered by using this phone that was at our booth and they brought the sweet yummy goodness out to us.

Then we walked up the canal a little ways and were getting bored with ourselves. Then we spotted a movie theater(Harkin's) and decided that that would be a fun thing to do. We saw, 'The World's Fastest Indian' which was a fun movie. I was really impressed with the theater. Retractable armrest, big comfy chairs, and the chairs also reclined some. Primo movie watching conditions.

After the movie(which was a 6:40 showing) we went to Toby Keith's I Love This Bar and Grill. We like the name so much that we just had to go.

Toby Keith has a hit song called, 'I Love This Bar',BTW). It was nicely themed restaurant with a projection of Toby Keith videos playing overhead.

Later, they switched it to a live tv feed divided into 4 secions on the screen(4 diff channels). I liked the videos better. The food was ok but not great.

After we were done there we found the car and went back to the hotel.

I understand that the city is proud of the canal and bricktown but I just didn't think too much of it. An otherwise enjoyable day.

Oklahoma City Bound!

My wife is a teacher and since next week is her spring break we thought that it would be a good idea to get out of town for a couple of days. We kicked around some ideas about where to go until I mentioned that I had wanted to see the federal building memorial in Oklahoma City as well as go through a session in the temple there. It was only intended to be a passing idea but she really liked it. So OKC bound we are.

We are leaving Sunday sometime. I already have the hotel reservations(Holiday Inn Express - ff miles!) made. It could be a fun trip although I understand the okc is not the first thing that pops into people's minds when they are considering vacation destinations. We'll get back Tuesday evening.

A some interesting-sounding things from the okc convention & visitors bureau website that piqued my interest:

National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum
Oklahoma City National Memorial and Memorial Museum(Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building memorial)
Water Taxi of Oklahoma
45th Infantry Division Museum

It'll be nice to get away for a while and it sounds like there are plenty of interesting things to do & see there.

Yeehaw!

The following 15 Police Comments were taken off of actual police car videos around the country.


#15. "Relax; the handcuffs are tight because they're new. They'll stretch out after you wear them awhile."

#14. "Take your hands off the car, and I'll make your birth certificate a worthless document."

#13. "If you run, you'll only go to jail tired."

#12. "Can you run faster than 1200 feet per second? In case you didn't know, that is the average speed of a 9 mm bullet fired from my gun."

#11. "So you don't know how fast you were going. I guess that means I can write anything I want on the ticket, huh?"

#10. "Yes, sir, you can talk to the shift supervisor, but I don't think it will help. Oh, did I mention that I am the shift supervisor?"

#9. "Warning? You want a warning? O.K., I'm warning you not to do that again or I'll give you another ticket."

#8. "The answer to this last question will determine whether you are drunk or not. ! Was Mickey Mouse a cat or a dog?"

#7. "Fair? You want me to be fair? Listen, fair is a place where you go to ride on rides, eat cotton candy, and step in monkey DOO."

#6. "Yeah, we have a quota. Two more tickets and my wife gets a toaster oven."

#5. "No, sir, we don't have quotas anymore. We used to have quotas, but now we're allowed to write as many tickets as we want."

#4. "Just how big were those two beers?"

#3. "In God we trust, all others we run through CPI C/NCIC.."

#2. "I'm glad to hear the Chief of Police is a good personal friend of yours. At least you know someone who can post your bail."

And.................... THE BEST ONE !!!!!!!

#1 "You didn't think we give pretty women tickets? You're right, we don't. Sign here."

I'm down to 249 lbs! Yay for me. It seems like I was hovering in the low 250s for forever. I ultimately want to end up under 240 and maybe even less.

Its progress.

It was announced tonight that the guy who sits behind me at work got another job and is moving on. He's only been here a few months. I am jealous.

I'm taking a class at the local community college; "How to Buy, Lease, & Manage Rental Houses for Profit." I've been interested in real estate for about a year now but haven't really done anything about it. I guess I'm an unmotivated cad or perhaps just scared. That's a lot of (my)money to play around with. So I'm taking this class finally and it is informative. So far the teacher(a local real estate pro who has many properties of his own) has talked about the history of the re market in the dwf, including recessions and bubbles, depreciation tax advantages, some scams that are currently going on in the area(as well as a past one), and he talked a while about the recession of 1987, why it happened, and how it just killed the real estate market nationwide for several years. That may all sound dry to some but I found it quite interesting. There are 3 more sessions to go(for a total of 4 sessions). $89 for the whole class. Not bad, eh?

The wife and I are pondering over where to go on vacation this summer. Of course we could LUUUUUUUUV to go back to Hawai'i again(we went last summer) but we don't have the requisite ff miles(which is what we used last year) and neither of us wants to drop the considerable coin that the trip would cost. My idea was to go to the east coast and take in the colonial/Revolutionary war sights. Philadelphia, Boston, etc. And that sounded fine until I found out that Philadelphia was 1500 miles away. Yikes. That's quite a drive. I don't mind flying but we're not that into spending a lot of money on the heels of our Hawai'i trip. We're thinking about going to Big Sur or another of the many parks in Texas and just camping for a week. Maybe rent a jetski. Another idea was to go to Florida and check out the beaches & sights. Something to think about.

Does anyone read this? I've been on the air for several months and still not a single comment.

Dennis Miller, The Rants(1996)

I really enjoy Dennis Miller. The way that he thinks everything out and then strings his ideas together while all the time making the whole situation seem absurd, just breaks me up. He is a very intelligent comic(although that seems an inadequate term for him) who has a unique spin on the country and a unique way of explaining it. I got this audio book last week and have already listened to it 2 1/2 times. I prefer this book in audio format because its even funnier when Dennis deliver the lines.

Warning: Miller has a bit of a potty mouth. He uses the 'f' word about two hundred times in the course of the thing(gross estimate). I still think that its funny and introspective but maybe its not for everybody because of this.

Excerpt:

"The media just claim that they are doing their job, feeding the news apetite of the American people. And I guess that its not really their fault that we happen to be bulemic in that area. The key thing we must all remember about the OJ trial is that it is trial by flurry. Lawyers on both sides bicker incessantly over matters that have precious little to do with discovering the truth. This thing is going slower than Jimmy Stewart reciting the mahabborada on the back of an arthritic tortise that is munching a quaalude on a humid Sunday afternoon in a hammick hung between two trees in the intensified gravity of the planet Jupiter. And despite the fact that our belief in the American legal system has been stretch thinner than Robert Shapiro's conscience, we are simply going to have to wait for the cheap gears of justice to grind a decision out of this fake wood peppermill. But I for one am through will this trial and I have been for a long time. He's guilty. You know it, I know it, we all know it. So wait for sweeps week, schedule the jury's decision after Seinfeld, announce that he's guilty and throw away the f***** key. You're a PUNK OJ, you're a bad guy. You go to hell.

Of course that just my opinion. I could be wrong."

The World's Longest Trailer Mounted BBQ Grill - 87 Feet

We sighted this one while we were visiting my parents in Magnolia, AR(population just under 11K). We were just out one day on the highway that runs along the east side of town:




I thought that the rocket look was a nice touch.


This is the kind of thing that causes you to crane your neck around after you've passed it(and hopefully not have a wreck in the process) which is exactly what I did. Later, I went back and took some photos. I met George Black, the gentleman who built it, and had a very nice conversation with him. He said that it was 87 feet long and the longest trail mounted grill in the world. Here's a webpage that explains it more fully.








Anyhow, I took some pictures of that one as well as some of the many others that he had built.






This one has a metal hogshead mounted on the front. It shoots steam out of its nostrils when a button is pushed inside(Mr. Black performs the task here).






It had never occured to me that someone could/would make grills in so many shapes and sizes.







This is one that he made out of a riding lawnmower