Did You Know…?

From the Sky internet policy: “Sky Financial Group Inc. retains the copyright of any material posted on the internet.”

Any material? Anywhere? Better tell Viacom and all the other media giants that they’re infringing on Sky Financial Group’s copyrights.

In other news, last week’s trip to Holly MI was almost a waste of my time. I finally managed to contact Paul, my supposed ride, once I was 20 minutes from his home in Hazel Park. Got to his house, and he springs on me, “Why don’t we caravan? I have to leave early. Oh, do you have directions?” On top of that, his POS car can’t go over 70 MPH—so after stopping for a good 20 minutes at Paul’s house, crawling along I-75 (I would have preferred to go 80 with the rest of the traffic), and getting mildly lost in Holly, we ended up being a half hour late. Rehearsal only lasted two, maybe two and a half hours, then Paul left, and we discussed uniforms and rehearsals and other crap for a half hour. So, all told, I ended up spending twice as much time in the car as at rehearsal. Which, IMO, was pretty much a waste of my time. Everybody else lives in Michigan, and had to drive as far to this rehearsal as I usually do to the Detroit area. Boo-hoo. Ah, well. Next time, I’m carpooling with the Brass Caption Head / Board Member / Whatever-He-Is and his wife, instead of with Paul, who may or may not be back from his barbershop quartet convention by then.

*deep calming breath*

And now for something completely different… I’ve also discovered that the crazy insano out-of-control shrub in our backyard is a forsythia bush. I plan to take some cuttings of it before we chop it down and dig it up. It’s crazy. I should take a picture of it before we take it out. It looks like the previous owners tried to chop it down, not realizing that it would only come back stronger. And wilder. Hmph. I am bound and determined to have a nice, pretty-looking yard, dammit. You’ll see.

Home Depot

Yesterday, Aaron and I used our 10% off coupon for Home Depot to purchase:

  • a 6-foot ladder
  • hedge clippers
  • grass clippers
  • two rakes
  • a shovel
  • lawn soil
  • ryegrass seed
  • a Clorox wet-jet mop

Then we bought two 10-packs of leaf bags at Kroger, and spent an hour and a half raking and bagging leaves. And those were only the ones next to our driveway, on the fence. We now have 12, count ’em, 12 bags of leaves sitting by the curb, waiting for trash day on Tuesday. And we still have quite a bit of other work to accomplish this week… but at least the front yard looks a little more presentable. Aaron has this week off, so he’s planning to do some of it while I’m at work.

I have a hornline rehearsal up in Holly, Michigan today, and I’m supposed to be carpooling up with a friend from Hazel Park (Detroit), but he hasn’t gotten back to me about when to be at his house, or if we’re still even doing it at all. I gotta go call him now, because I’ll need to leave in about a half hour to be there in time, either way we do it.

I don’t wanna drive two hours up and two hours back myself. Ugh.

Landscaping and other randomness

I gave some more thought to landscaping the house today at work, and over lunch I drew our a couple plans for the front flower bed. I was thinking, for anyone into the whole HGTV-ish gardeny landscapey thing, that first we could hack down the overgrown bushes in the front to normal bush size. Then, I plan to mix some purple and some white flowering plants along with some white flowering ground cover, so as not to cover up the windows. I do have some ideas of flowers I’d like to use, like Lavender, Petunias, and Christmas Roses, among others that I haven’t decided on yet. The trick is going to be finding just the look I want, with flowers that like the shade, since it’s beneath an overhang on the north side of the house. I was also hoping to plant some stuff that blooms at different times, so there’ll always be some color out there… but that might be a little beyond my scope. Maybe I’ll save the rotating garden concept for when I tackle a backyard flower garden…

OK, girlie time is over. *whew*

The dude upstairs came home after I got back from my walk this evening (enjoying the weather), and proceeded to turn up his stereo. He doesn’t do it often, but it’s annoying when he does. So, I proceeded to fill my 5-CD changer with stuff—nothing too overbearing, though. Peter Gabriel’s latest, and Catherine Wheel’s last album, and 24 Gone (their only album), and Depeche Mode’s most recent album (I’m seeing a trend), and the Cure Acoustic Hits (which I think was their latest release, too. Weird). It’s turned up a little louder than I would normally keep it, but it’s by no means blasting. Just loud enough to drown out whatever music he decides to turn up every now and then.

That got me to thinking… I kind of miss college, but not really. I miss it in that pleasant nostalgic way, where the memories are fun to look back on (like radio wars, which is how my brain got from there to here). Not the kind of missing where I would want to do it again. Not like drumcorps.

Speaking of… I’ve been practicing more this week, when the upstairs dude isn’t home—more out of a need not to embarrass myself than to be considerate. 🙂 I’ve been getting better, and my relative pitch and pitch memory seems to be returning slowly but surely. The muscle memory is sort of there, but the endurance isn’t. I’ve been practing for about a half hour every day this week, doing a slow warm-up to try to rebuild my range (which wasn’t that stellar to begin with). After I warm up, I have about enough stamina and concentration to play through the warm-up tune once, the ballad twice, and to woodshed the march. Then I’m done, and I warm down with some pedal tones (reeeally low notes).

I’m also recalling why I stopped being a music major: I hate to practice. If I’m going to do this, though, I’ll have to crack down. Senior corps doesn’t coddle like Junior corps—and I can’t believe I can think of it like that now. It was so physically exhausting… but everything was planned out and served to you, from your rehearsals to your meals to your everything. Now, in senior corps, I’m going to have to practice on my own time, and hype for shows and parades on the weekends only. It’s a lot easier when it’s your entire life for three months. I hope I’ve still got what it takes. We’ll see.

And on a final note: On the front of my package of round Avery labels, the generic name on the pictured envelope is Tyler Durden.

“In the ear?! Why’d you have to hit me in the ear?”

New house and old chops

My weekend:

Saturday was house shopping day. We met Rebecca the Realtor at her office at 3:00 and headed off to look at the seven houses on our list. The first one, which we’d initially thought was one of the more promising ones, turned out to be just too damned small. Nice and bright and clean and open, but just too damn small. The other two that we’d thought would be just perfect from the exterior photos and their descriptions were actually the most skanky inside. Nappy carpets, smelly, and generally run-down. There was one tri-level that had some serious potential, though—of course, that house was owned by a cat-lover, and I made friends with the longhair in the cat window-seat. 🙂

The house after the cat-lady’s, though, was almost identical. The owners left music playing for ambience—sounded like something mellowish you’d hear on 94.5. At any rate, I think it helped our opinion of the house. As did the glass-pane door (French door?) down to the finished basement. We liked it so much that Rebecca inadvertently referred to it as “our new house” several times before we were even finished looking at the rest of the houses.

So, after we were done, we ended up going back to Rebecca’s office and making an offer on the house on Ventura. (!!!) After that, we went out to dinner with Kris and Jamie at Ruby Tuesday’s (yummy low-carb cheesecake…), then went home and began agonizing over whether the sellers would accept our offer… Well, not really agonizing, per se… well, not really at all. More contemplating how much more furniture we’re going to need to buy to fill up our new house.

Sunday was my day to drive up to Clawson, Michigan for the LakeShoremen brass rehearsal. Saturday night, I’d crammed for half an hour, getting the notes “under my fingers,” as they say. I hadn’t played in seven years, so I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to read the music as well as I should.

It should have occurred to me that my weakness wouldn’t be my noodley-finger-speed; it would be my unused chops. Like, the actual real chops. As in, my lips. OMFG. After one third of the rehearsal was over, my chops were already gone. I have no range left, very little pitch memory, and I feel like I’m having to start all over again. Like my year in the Bluecoats was someone else.

My lip muscles are so underused (hey, be nice!) that, since I had no endurance, I started shoving the horn into my face. For non-brassers, this is how you are not supposed to combat fatigue, but it’s an automatic habit. After a while, I just started blowing air. I tried to play, but got nothing but air. And I was so pissed off, because I had everything under my fingers… I just couldn’t make it speak.

My lips are still swollen.

So, back to the saga of the house: After rehearsal, I called Aaron on the cell, and he said that Rebecca had given word that the sellers had rejected our offer and made a counteroffer. He told me what the offer was, and I agreed that it was fine with me, so he called Rebecca and she wrote up a new Purchase Agreement. Aaron and I drove up to her office today, separately, to sign the PA and send it on its way.

So, barring a piss-poor home inspection, we (almost) have a house! Next on our agenda is paying the appraisal fee, getting a home inspector, and talking to the Teamster lawyer about coming to the closing with us. The closing will be no later than March 5th (hopefully sooner), and we get possession 30 days after closing. If all the cards play out like they should, we may not even need to ask the Smiths to extend our lease at all.

How about that.

Backblogged

I think that’s the term for when you’re backlogged with blog topics. Backblogged.

Mom wants me to take a road trip with her to Denver next summer. She says it would be fun. I say we would probably kill each other halfway there. Although, now that I see that the 2004 DCI Finals will be held in Denver, I say maybe I could put up with Mom if she could put up with a weekend of drum corps.

After going to the Dekalb drum corps show with corps alumni buddy Paul and his sister (who was my seat partner in ’95), I’m more seriously considering joining a senior corps before Aaron and I decide to have kids. Only thing is, I don’t think I’m ready to spend all of my summer weekends away from my honey-muffin, and I certainly don’t want to make a five-hour roadtrip one way just to march senior corps. (BTW, senior corps is like what I did in Northern Aurora and Bluecoats, except you can be any age from 15 to 60-something.)

Of course, then Paul (who sings barbershop) suggested that I find a chapter of Sweet Adelines to join. Sweet Adelines are like barbershop quartets/choruses for women. I did discover that the Pride of Toledo is the best group in the region, and I fired them off an email about membership. They rehearse on Tuesdays at 7pm in Toledo, on Holland-Sylvania, which is doable as far as getting out of work goes. We’ll see what happens.

I would also like to say that nothing quite compares with being berated for receiving accolades that were deserved by more people than just you.

See, a couple weeks ago, we received a payment for someone’s water bill that was astronomically higher than what they owed. Like, $15,000.00 for a $150 bill. The person who was prepping the work caught it, and brought it to Loni, and asked if that could possibly be right. Loni knew that the client banked with Sky, and knew their personal banker, who then said maybe we should make sure that was correct. So, Loni called the phone number on the check and left a message. Of course, Loni left work before I did that day, so when the client returned the phone call, I took it. He was soooo grateful that we caught his accounting error — his software had printed the wrong amount on his check, and had it been processed, it would have bounced a lot.

So, the next morning, Loni had me write him a note and mail the erroneous check back to him. I located some Sky Bank stationery on the intranet, typed the note on it, printed it out, and sent it off. I felt pretty good about myself, but mainly because I got to do something different. Something other than stomping a footpedal, typing in invoice numbers, and hitting return.

A few days later, Andrew hands me a card he got out of an interoffice envelope. It’s a "Gotcha Card" — Sky’s version of RCC Performance Points, or any other company’s relatively meaningless rewards system. The client’s personal banker had heard from him, and she thanked me for providing such outstanding customer service to Mr. LaRoe. I felt all tingly in my bum until Loni shot me down with "And who was it that caught it in the first place?" Not only Loni, but the prepper who did catch it in the first place both gave me shit for being the one who got the credit.

Hey, it’s not my fault that the last person to touch something is responsible for it. Take the credit or take the blame, but it’s always the fault of the last person to touch it.

I grow progressively more disenchanted with my job — if, indeed, I was ever truly enchanted in the first place.