A different kind of nothing (Day 306/365)

Posted on by Dale

I’m claiming much of what I did today as creative, simply because much of what I did today has been based on years of creative problem solving in the role of assistant program director of GHP. No one gets as efficient as I am without figuring out how to make the whole thing flow.

Which is one reason I get very annoyed when others haven’t figured it out. That’s also my overwhelming greenness, of course. However, why should I have to remind myself to send specific emails a week before I arrive so that it will be remembered that I’m coming and that I will need a) keys, b) parking pass of a specific kind, c) a parking place, d) an ID, etc., etc.? Why don’t they have a production manual of their own, so that when that fateful day pops up on their calendar, they have something in writing that tells them: Get parking pass ready. Remind staff that GHP is coming and how they differ from our regular clients. Chill the champagne. I am amazed every year at the breakdowns.

I have one document entitled “What to Print and When,” and it does exactly what it says: it tells me day by day for an entire week which of the 30+ documents I need to print in order to have them ready for the next day or two. If I have it open on my computer, I can actually just click on the names of the documents, which I have linked to the documents.

I have another document, some fifteen pages long, which is literally my production manual. It’s a huge timeline, starting the week before I get here and going week by week through the program, and day by day at rugged points like opening and closing. It tells me things like Unalarm end doors and Prepare a sticky note for each returning staff member with name and preferred room number and Be in the Palms lobby to collect the preference forms.

So what is all this for? It’s so that as my instructional staff arrives, the amount of hassle they encounter is reduced. It’s so they will have the information they need to do their jobs, and within four days, the students will have the information they need to negotiate the opening of the program.

It’s also to protect my sanity, so I’m not caught flat-footed by my staff’s needs. This has taken years of notating and adjusting and readjusting. The Lyles Theorem of Process Development states that “It takes three years to get any process right, if you don’t change the process.”

I reminded myself of the Theorem today as I was trying to make sure all the instructional room keys worked, and trying to figure out which keys we are missing so I can request them, a task I thought I had done a couple of weeks ago when I was asked to submit a complete list of keys we needed, and I did. I reminded myself that part of the process of process development is building in recursion to cushion your process from external loose ends. I reminded myself how to figure out how to do that for this process in FileMaker Pro.

But that’s creativity for another day.

59 days to go.

A couple more goals (Day 305/365)

Posted on by Dale

It was not until this evening, trying to clear off the sofa in my apartment here in Brown Hall on the campus of Valdosta State University, that I remembered that I actually have two more creative goals for the summer:

I am now taking suggestions for texts for either or both.

60 days to go!

Setting goals (Day 304/365)

Posted on by Dale

Enough whining. Having packed up my life for the next seven weeks, it’s time to move through this gateway and get back to creating.

Herewith are my goals for the summer:

  • Write at least three songs for Day in the Moonlight. I know I’ve got 15 or more to write, but given the realities of time at GHP, I’ll be lucky to get three done.
  • Learn how to use Logic Express. I’ve had this program since January and have yet to discover how it works. I bought a book, but haven’t had time to read it. I’ll do that this summer.
  • Contribute at least twenty-five items to the 100 Things to Do Before You’re 60 blog.

This doesn’t sound like a lot, but I’ll be lucky to do this much. Time is our enemy at GHP, and I’m usually lucky to get two hours a day to call my own. Evenings are devoted to activities or working with faculty, and that’s my usual time for working. Sunday mornings are free, and I have been productive in the past during this time. Mostly, I have to get my brain trained to work during the afternoons, between 1:30 and 4:00, minors time, when everyone is in class and I’m not usually out observing.

61 days to go.

Beginning the shift (Day 303/365

Posted on by Dale

Other than waiting around for Brett Smith to come and discuss how we were going to solve the stove problem, I had time this morning to start making the shift to GHP.

In years past, I would be making this shift weeks in advance, but this year, I haven’t been able to give a lot of thought to the fact that on Monday I descend into the maelstrom that is the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program and won’t emerge until July 23. How I’m going to hold to my vow of creating every day remains to be seen.

But I have to prepare, to begin unlocking those parts of my brain that I keep stored away all year because they’d be an impediment in everyday life. Part of the process is welcoming all the new staff members, which I have done, although not all of them have acknowledged being welcomed.

Another part is going through my document files and changing the year in the headers of memos, handouts, etc. I haven’t done that yet.

And yet another part is cleaning out the van and packing. Years ago I began a database of all the stuff I needed to be sure to take. I have opened that up a couple of times in the last few weeks to double-check it, to add items to it, to delete some items. When it’s time to pack, I print it out, sorted by location. This makes it very easy to pull what I need from the kitchen, the closet, the study, etc., without worrying about backtracking or forgetting something.

So this morning I began that process as much as I could. The whole kitchen dining room are in disarray because of the appliance move-in, which of course won’t be finished until I’m gone. That means I don’t have as much staging room as I usually do, and I may be apt to forget something in the clutter. I must be especially vigilant.

Still, I managed to pull together all my kitchen and, more importantly, all my bar stuff.

The rest of the day was spent going to a graduation party down past Moreland that didn’t exist, then an engagement party in Marietta that did. In between we passed through Fayetteville to return the elliptical, which was still making grinding noises, and got a new one. So yet another source of stress: I have to spend part of tomorrow, my packing day, putting together another &%$*#! machine.

Is it any wonder that my brain is not ready for GHP?

Stress (Day 302/365)

Posted on by Dale

It’s beginning to get to me that I haven’t committed a creative act in a week. I know, I’ve been shutting down school, and today was given over to trying to get the new appliances installed and the cats to the vet, but still. My goal was to create something every day.

I don’t like failing in my commitments, so this is an underlying stress that is exacerbated by the very things that are keeping me from creating.

For example, the installation of the appliances. The guys from Sears showed up at about 11:30, and that was fine. It was no problem at all emptying the refrigerator quickly, I had already emptied the freezer and culled the contents of the refrigerator itself, and moving the old appliances out was a snap.

Moving the new ones in was a snap as well. Hooking them up was not a problem. But then the stove wouldn’t fit correctly in the cutout in the island. We looked it over and decided that however the old stove (with the same dimensions) had fit in there, the new one had to slide further back and was being stopped from doing that by the gas pipe. We decided that the gas pipe had to be dropped back down into the basement and the stove hooked up down there, thus allowing the whole thing to fit firmly into the island.

Only the Sears guys couldn’t do that. Were they telling me that all they did was bring the appliance into the house and plug them in, I asked incredulously? That was exactly what they were telling me. A call to Sears confirmed that when I paid for installation, what they actually meant was plugging in, something which I was quite capable of doing for myself, a fact I pointed out to the manager. Abashed, he volunteered to take the installation charge off the bill.

That did not solve my problem, which was that I wanted to have these appliances completely installed by the end of the day so that Ginny wouldn’t have to deal with it on Monday after I was gone. (The water line to the icemaker in the refrigerator was also nonfunctional.)

I did track down a contractor who could do the job, but he couldn’t come until tomorrow morning. I had to be satisfied with that.

On a more positive note, both appliances functioned beautifully. The refrigerator is quiet and the stove works like a charm.

On a still more positive note, we watched a lovely movie called Malèna which we highly recommend you add to your Netflix list. It had lain around the house for months, and we were never “in the mood” to watch it. Foolish, indeed. I can’t remember now why I had added it to the list, but it’s a wonderful movie. And Monica Belucci is stunningly gorgeous.

Concert (Day 301/365)

Posted on by Dale

Tonight was the Masterworks Chorale concert, so that’s my creativity for the day.

We sang An Evening with Rodgers & Hammerstein, a packaged thing from the R&H conglomerate. Great tunes, for the most part, and some very interesting, lush harmonies. I was very intrigued by their “waywardness” in harmonizing what I remembered as very simple melodies. Of course, this may not have been Rodgers’ original scoring but some later hired hand’s work. Nevertheless, it was instructive.

One way in which it was instructive was that it brought to mind the comments of some “real” musician who had graciously agreed to look over one of the movements of my Mass in C, many years ago. There was one passage in particular that he furrowed his eyebrows over and made some comment about my having gone from one key to another in five or six consecutive measures.

My only possible reply at the time was, “That’s what I heard.” That is, of course, the correct answer to any such sniffing. But I might just as well have said, “It’s something I picked up from studying Richard Rodgers.” That might not have reduced the sniffing in the least, but at least it would have clued me in on exactly what direction the snobbery was coming from.

Still in limbo (Day 300/365)

Posted on by Dale

You would think that on this day I would have made an effort to create something, but I’m still in that shutting-down-school mode, only with a Promethean board to play with, only it won’t respond to the laptop’s Bluetooth. And I still have to manage the county’s elementary school MARC records conversion with Follett.

And at some point I have to start getting into getting-ready-for-GHP mode, which I haven’t yet, and I leave on Monday.

And my van was in the shop, ostensibly to get a couple of lights replaced but eventually having brake work done on front and back, and postponing the “seepages” around the manifold intake until I get back. That took until 5:30.

So did I get any actual creative work done? Nope.

It’s a Monday, only on Tuesday (Day 299/365)

Posted on by Dale

[The blog has been down for two days, so this is late.]

We had dress rehearsal with Masterworks Chorale tonight, so that has to count as my creativity.

In other news, after three appointments and one session of uncomfortable tests, the neurologist Dr. Ni (no, I’m not making that up) has confirmed what I originally proposed to Dr. Smith two weeks ago: mild carpal tunnel. He wanted to do an MRI to make sure it wasn’t a stroke, but I suggested that unless I could walk out of that patient room and lie down in the machine at that very moment (“It only takes 30 minutes”) he would not be able to accommodate my schedule, especially since at each appointment I had had to wait for an hour. He had to settle for a CT scan, which was more or less my driving to PAPP clinic downtown and walking into the lab and lying down.

Pain (Day 298/365)

Posted on by Dale

A holiday. In this case, it means that I had a full day to clean house and to tackle the grinding noise of the new elliptical.

I had hoped that when we inserted batteries into the console, which thanks to the designers involves inserting D cell batteries up into the bottom of the console, that suddenly the magical magnets which create the resistance that will eventually turn my stomach flat and my chest into pure brawn, that those magnets would release their grip on the flywheel and we’d have no more grinding noise.

And of course that’s exactly what did not happen. By this time, I had vacuumed the house, and I had become aware that my lower back was not functioning. Probably something to do with all the bending over that goes along with assembling an elliptical on a previous occasion. Probably nothing to do with the mysterious numbness in my right arm spreading to my spine because it’s a dread disease that not even the estimable Dr. Ni suspects. Yet.

So now I was faced with kneeling, leaning, dismantling the heaviest bits of the machine, all with a lower back that refused to do anything but want to remain stationary. Not. A. Problem. I grabbed a footstool from one of the many pieces of furniture that for some reason have migrated to our basement from one or other in-law’s household (“It belonged to the Aunts” is the usual reason it is not sitting at Goodwill instead) and sat to my task.

After removing the hubcap, the pedal, and the flywheel cover, the problem was clear: the stanchion holding the flywheel was ever so slightly not upright. Bent, if you will. If I pushed against it with my foot, and somehow turned the wheel, the noise was gone.

So clearly what I needed to do was to provide enough pressure to bend a steel stanchion an eighth of an inch away from me without breaking anything it was attached to. With a nonfunctional lower back. Not. A. Problem.

I must confess that I also gave it a whack with a hammer. This was probably not a good idea, and I hope that in the future I am not startled by the entire flywheel assembly flying apart as I, buff and joyous, am charging along the path of most resistance.

But, hey, it worked. It whirs along with no noise at all now, other than the odd beeps from the console trying to give me information about something or other. If only my lower back were functioning; I might start getting buff.

Grumbling (Day 297/365)

Posted on by Dale

The saga continues.

Having left the elliptical machine in the back of my van overnight, I considered myself rested and completely up to the task of getting it out and hooking up the two or three main pieces of this thing. Ginny was going to go shopping for clothes, and I was going to get this thing together, maybe give it a whirl, and then spend some time actually taking a whack at a song or two for Moonlight.

Two or three main pieces: that’s what our very nice salesperson at Sports Authority, coincidentally named Dale, suggested we might find in the box. He was completely wrong.

There were a hundred pieces. The damned thing had to be completely assembled. Ginny apologized, then went shopping.

Understand that assembly holds no terror for me. My mechanical aptitude is higher than you might think, and the instructions were actually very clear, with life-size pictures of the screws and bolts, the most helpful thing ever. In fact, all the hardware came in a little egg-crate package, along with a piece of paper which told me exactly what was in which little compartment. Very nice.

All in all, it wasn’t bad. I did it outside so I could work in bright light and fresh air (rather than the dark corner where it will live, next to the litter box), and other than one tiny over-tightened bolt at the very end which prevented me from going back and putting on the pretty plastic piece which was supposed to be under that bolt, everything fit exactly as it should on a piece of precision equipment.

Still, it was four and a half hours of my time, time I had not intended to spend getting a piece of exercise equipment together. So you may imagine my feelings when I stepped on it and was greeted by a truly horrific grinding noise coming from the flywheel inside the plastic casing (the one part of the thing that came pre-assembled.)

I took a shower and made a vodka and tonic. Tomorrow is another day.