And thus, we bid adieu to another year. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

I guess I can’t complain. ’07 wasn’t that bad for me. There were highly annoying boss issues, co-workers getting arrested issues, still being single at age 37 issues… but I’ve paid off my car and am in better financial shape than I’ve been for many a year. Still relatively healthy, if not in the best physical shape; better if I can quit the 11 year tobacco habit this year. All in all, not too bad. We got the best reception we’ve ever had for the annual banquet video this year… although I think that’s more a function of our audience having low expectations than anything else.

When I went home for Christmas, Dad gave each of the kids a copy of his will. Nothing sinister; my brother-in-law’s brother died recently and didn’t leave a will behind, and it’s caused quite a bit of trouble for their family. I think Dad’s trying to avoid that. One thing that did surprise me, though, was his request in the will to have his ashes scattered on the top of Blood Mountain. Not that this is such an unusual request, but… Blood Mountain has always been one of my favorite places; someplace that I’ve been drawn to since the first time I climbed it. What I didn’t know is that it meant that much to my Dad, as well.

Time to let 2008 wet his nappies.

Did I say two months down there? I meant three months, apparently. Don’t worry, I’ve been busy, not lazy.

Well, OK, mostly lazy. But there has been a lot going on. For one, I underestimated the amount of equity I had in the house… by quite a bit. I swallowed hard and got an equity line of credit. Foolish, in this day of defaulted sub-prime loans and collapsing mortgage industry? Not really. I avoided the traps that led to a lot of foreclosures. With the equity line, I’ve paid off all of my debt, including the car, except for the house itself; and owe less than the house is worth. My monthly payments are far less than they were before the debt consolidation, so there’s more paycheck left for savings. Why didn’t I think of this earlier?

Of course, I still have watch my spending habits, and avoid using credit for anything other than emergencies. Hard to do with a toy fetish like mine. Speaking of toys… with all the demands from work for video footage-banquet video, recruitment video- I’ve replaced the old Sony DV camcorder with a Sony V1U high-def camera. Far more camera than my current skill level merits, but I’m working on it. As a side effect, I can’t watch a movie these days without studying the framing, camera movements, color correction choices, etc. Don’t know if it’ll rub off on my production values, but it can’t hurt- at least until I get too cliche’d.

Wow, two months since an update. Ahem.

The garden has been cleaned, tilled, re-bordered, and planted. I even got the borders around the house done halfway. Ian and his girlfriend have split, meaning the bills and mortgage have gone up, now that they’re split two ways rather than three. (However, the latest appraisal says we’re sitting on about $40k in equity!) I finally have a replacement assistant at work, and he seems like he’ll work out fine. We finished teaching one week of Senior Deputy classes with another week coming up and have somewhat of a lull, although I need to get Radar Instructor materials put together; and the Fall Citizen’s Academy and Banquet video are still hanging over my head. Just have to split some stuff off to the other guy and get busy.

I was in Forsyth at Digital Photography class when the I35W bridge collapsed in Minnesota. I predicted while watching it that there would be a slew of “Are our bridges safe?!?” stories and indignant outrage all over the media in the days that followed, and I was right. Not that this was an astonishing prediction. And I knew I would get annoyed by it.

Why annoyed? Because the fact that a huge percentage of bridges in the US are in bad shape is not news. We’ve known that for at least twenty years. I can remember news stories and articles from the 80’s discussing the need for bridge repairs and upgrades across the country and the enormous costs involved. The fact that one collapsed is not incredible, it’s inevitable. There have been major bridge collapses in this decade, in fact. But the trend lately is towards 24 hour coverage (repeating ad nauseum the same tiny snippets of information) and breathless “experts” rendering their opinions, which the general public gobbles up as pre-digested fact so they can avoid having to decide what they think about it. There’ll be some tsk-ing, some self-serving aggrandizing and grandstanding by politicians, and the issue will slowly fade away; or quickly, if some other news-worthy tragedy appears on the horizon. And everyone will forget what we’ve known for a long, long time- the nation’s bridges are in poor shape.

I’ve been a PC user- and, almost by default, a Windows user- for the past 20 years. While my first machine was a Radio Shack Color Computer II, my first PC was a Leading Edge 286. I had used 8088 IBM PC’s at school, but the 286 was the first one I’d owned. Windows versions ran from 3.0 to 3.11 to 95 to 98, 98SE, ME, and XP (with diversions into Linux and OS/2) and processors crept up to the 386sx, 486, and Pentiums. I’m by no means a PC or Windows expert, but I’m comfortable with them.

Then I went to Microcenter, looking at upgrade parts for my ailing PC, and glanced over at the Macs in the back. Now, I’ve always sneered at the Mac commercials- I’ve seen plenty of Macs that crashed just as often as their Windows brethren, and that smarmy, oh-so-hip advertising schtick always annoyed me- but when I saw the 24″ Core2Duo iMac running XP, I had to stop and look closer. XP applications seemed to run fairly fast, and with a keystroke (and a pretty nifty animation) I was running OS X and then back again. I ended up spending an hour playing with it, and ended up taking it home.

So, now I’ve got to learn a new OS; albeit a fairly easy one to pick up. I’m still tripped up by my XP habits, but it’s getting easier; and that display is gorgeous. There are native Mac versions of all the software I use the most, and if I miss the Windows only games I play, I can dual boot over to XP and fire them up; thanks to the Intel hardware. The only stick in my craw is having to purchase Photoshop again. They offer cross-platform switches; but they insist on a full-version serial number to de-certify. I’ve been getting the upgrade versions for so long that I don’t have the original version I started with. Sigh. So my photo editing is a bit hampered until I choke up $600+ for a full version of CS3; which only partially explains the poor quality of the above picture.

I was playing with Google Earth last night. Neat stuff. I rolled it over to the neighborhood I grew up in, and was shocked to see how much had changed.

Now, I didn’t grow up on the farm, or anything like that. Rome (Georgia) at the time was a medium-small town, but my neighborhood was a subdivision. Nothing like the hyper-neighborhoods, with 200,000 dollar houses on 2/10 of an acre (like the one I’m currently living in); but a subdivision nonetheless. The roads ran in a big square, a half-mile in circumference, with a couple of cul-de-sacs off of that. Our house was a 2-story cape cod, with a generous back yard that backed up onto 75 acres or so of woods. A gas pipeline right-of-way ran from the backyard up a hill through the woods to the main road, maybe a half-mile away. A creek, full of small bream and sunfish and crawfish, ran through the neighborhood. The subdivision had a pool in the center. As kids, we believed that we were surrounded by dangerous heathens and during any forays into the woods you had to be armed with slingshots and bb guns for protection against these dark forces (i.e., the teenagers who lived at the top of the gas line right-of-way). We dammed the creek at least twice a summer and once found a concrete mixing tub in the woods that became our battleship until a flood washed it too far downstream to recover. We were more fascinated than frightened by the water moccasins that shared our playground. On the other side of the subdivision was an unfinished road, with a hillside that had been cut away before whatever building project it was supposed to be was abandoned. We christened it “Daredevil Hill”, as it was a constant dare to ride your dirt bikes down the cliff-like hill. There was a convenience store perhaps a mile and a half away that we would cut through the woods to get to, as it had a stand-up Donkey Kong game and a slushie machine. This trip was usually risky, because it ended on Batsun Drive. The Batsuns had several teen sons who’d usually chase us off; we were convinced be’d become a gruesome sacrifice were we ever caught. But they also had Batsun Lake- really, just a pond- which harbored huge catfish and snapping turtles. Trips to the pool when I was young were always cause for celebration. As I got older, I’d enjoy floating on a raft in the pool in the evening, watching distant heat lightning lighting the clouds I could see just over Mount Alto; the ridge that rose 900 feet above the subdivision. After we were old enough to drive cars, we’d race each other in time trials on Radio Springs Road, which went over the crest of Mount Alto. In high school, I was on the school’s cross country team; so during the summer, after my 5 mile training runs around the neighborhood around 9 at night after the heat had abated somewhat, I’d have the pool to myself. We weren’t supposed to use the pool after dark, but in those days, no one really complained.

Daredevil Hill is now just another part of the subdivision, which Google Earth had shown me had grown into a sprawling mega-subdivision. I wonder how the kids there now entertain themselves? Do they still trudge up the creek through the woods, imagining themselves mighty explorers? Do they still build forts against the teenage invaders? I could see that our old house was still there; but who was living in it now that it’s 35 years old? Were those moldy porn magazines we found under a creek bridge still stashed under the insulation in the attic?

I kind of pity the kids in the neighborhood I live in now. 700 houses and a pool; there are still woods and the Mulberry River… but I never see any kids playing in them. Have yet to run across a fort, or see a bb-gun war. Yeah, I had an Atari 2600 game console growing up; but playing in the creek was always more entertaining than playing River Run… is that were all the kids are now? In front of an X-Box 360? I can’t say too much, as I now spend more time on my ass in front of a computer than running through the woods. Maybe I’m living their childhood… they should try living mine; I think they’d enjoy it more.

Wow, I’ve been slack in updating. I managed to write another 1000 or so words on the novel… not really outstanding. The annual busy time for me is here, with the Poker Run (already run, not too bad; although the route changed for the worse IMO this year), annual qualification (this coming week!) and the first CLEA class for the fall session starting tomorrow. That, and I still haven’t started pulling together the video for the annual banquet together yet. I can see I’m going to have to dump some more stuff onto my assistant and focus on the video for a while. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled.

Spent the weekend cleaning the house and fixing the warning lights on the G-ride. The rear strobe bracket broke and the light was hanging by the wires; unfortunately, the only other bracket I had was for the front strobe. So I swapped places front and rear and put up the other bracket for the rear, having to wire up new connections because the wire lengths weren’t the same. 90,000 miles on the car and it sounds like the wheel bearings are going bad; but with the county’s budget being what it is, I don’t forsee a replacement in the near future.

Been thinking about other, weightier topic as well of late… religion, and relationships… but don’t feel particularly up to putting that internal dialogue on (virtual) paper right now.

So much for the dire predictions of 90 category 5 city destroyers this year. Not that I’m pulling for a devastating hurricane; but as somewhat of a weather junkie the season has been rather ho-hum this year. But that’s ok… the fall silly season is just around the corner. Annual qualification, citizen’s law enforcement academy, poker run, annual banquet; all of which require me to work on some special project in addition to my normal work. And, of course, the usual crop of new-hires. I’m determined to take a week’s vacation this year, though; I haven’t done that for several years now.

Played with the new lens a little today, taking macros. A Tamron 28-75 f2.8 with a long string of acronyms after it’s name. Pretty sharp lens, and seems to work well with macro rings. I need to get off my fat ass and mess with the camera more, but it seems once I get home from work all I want to do is… sit on my fat ass. Laziness takes dedication. Newest pics in the gallery under macro.

A lot of times, I’ll have a television on in the background while I’m doing something else. Most of the time, it’s some bland show that doesn’t really attract my attention and doesn’t distract me from whatever else I’m doing. Why have it on, then? Beats me. If I really need to concentrate I’ll put it on an all-music channel. But I’ve found one show that demands my attention… and really shouldn’t. “How It’s Made”. Some Canadian show that, well, shows you how various mundane, everyday objects are manufactured. Really mundane items, like wire fencing, or swizzle sticks, or cotton swabs. Who cares? Why should I care how they manufacture valve stem caps? But… I can’t stop watching once it comes on. There’s some subliminal signal that turns me into a drooling vegetable that stares unblinking at the screen while an insanely complicated machine carves out popsicle sticks.

In other news, we had a fellow get in an argument with someone else and decide to drive past his house and shoot it up with an SKS rifle. Apparently this fellow was quite full of machismo, loudly proclaiming to anyone who would listen how he was the “baddest guy in the county” and could have anyone he wanted killed. He also had a habit of waving a pistol at anyone who looked sideways at him. Needless to say, all this earned him an arrest warrant with a no-knock provision- in other words, due to the higher risk in serving the warrant, we are allowed to enter without knocking in order to take the person by surprise. The tactical team served the warrant and the self-proclaimed baddest guy in the county was arrested in his underwear about 5 seconds after his door was knocked in with a ram. Guess he wasn’t as bad as he thought. Anyway, his mother, whose house it was, sought me out (as the team leader) and demanded to know who was going to pay for the damage to her door.

Umm, gee, ma, how about…. your SON? You know, the one who shot at a house full of people with a semi-auto rifle? The reason we were there in the first place? Maybe you need to think about telling him to find another place to live so your door doesn’t get knocked in again the next time we have to arrest him? Because if you think I’m going to politely knock and meekly wait outside while your son loads his guns, you’re quite wrong.

Argh. People.

I’m always amazed by the capacity of human beings to rationalize whatever beliefs they may hold, no matter how outre they are. Sure, I do it myself, but I think the Westboro Baptist Church folks take to unbelieveable levels.

I read this in the Athens Daily News this morning:

“Kansas-based religious zealots convinced America’s tolerance of homosexuals has invoked the wrath of God say they will picket today outside the Athens funeral of an Army sergeant who was killed in Iraq.

“Members of Topeka-based Westboro Baptist Church, claiming that God hates America because of homosexuality, on Friday said they plan to demonstrate against what they’re calling a “pep rally” associated with the funeral of Staff Sgt. Marion Flint Jr.. who was killed May 15 by a roadside bomb during combat in Balad, Iraq, about 50 miles north of Baghdad.

“Services are scheduled for 1 p.m. at Hill Chapel Baptist Church, 1692 W. Hancock Ave., with burial to follow at Evergreen Memorial Park on Atlanta Highway.

“Members of the Patriot Guard Riders, a motorcycle group formed partly in response to Westboro funeral demonstrations, plan to escort the funeral procession to the cemetery.”

Needless to say, I felt like this was one circus I couldn’t resist, and drove down to get some photographs. Not of the funeral itself; that family has enough to deal with and I stayed well away from the church, and concentrated on the protesters instead.

Of course, the Westboro folks are all one big extended family, and almost all of them are lawyers. They live for the hopes that someone will take a swing at one of them during one of these protests so they can sue everyone within arm’s reach.

Truth is truly stranger than fiction at times.