Forty one today, forty one today. I’m the same age as the Superbowl.
I’m surprised that I haven’t updated my site, my bLog since September … I guess I have poured much of my offline time into my online vLogs on the OctaneCrew site … I’ve found talking into a camera much easier than doing this typing thing, but once all the video is recorded, editing can become a lengthy process …
So what’s new since my last post in September? Happy New Year!
Web Hosting: Nothing much new in the hosting world. I’ve been trying to get hold of Savvis to renew my contract. Three years has finally come and gone in December, but getting hold of my account representative has been more than difficult. I finally got him on the phone about a week ago and haven’t heard back yet. This has been the worst response from Savvis to date. I think their sales force is not as professional anymore, or I got the one guy who doesn’t keep up on things … I got a quote from them about a year ago for $250 less per month, but I was told I couldn’t renew my contract until it was up. When talking to my rep last week, he tells me the price has gone up. If this is the case, I will be switching companies, no matter how much the hassle.
The main Windows server crashed beginning of October. The machine went on its merry way into Lalaland … I was able to put the drive into an external enclosure and suck off the data onto a new installation which made the switch fairly transparent to those who just use web services … The mail handled by FreeBSD kept flowing, and the registry infomation that the Windows products keep there was able to be saved so no renewing of passwords, etc was necessary … What a relief that was …
Octane: Much the same as they continue to play every weekend on the Philadelphia club circuit. They did have a highlight November 30, 2006 when they appeared on the Opie & Anthony satelite XM Radio show where they played on the “walkover” … a deluge of CD orders poured in that I dutifully got out in the post … They were just on again yesterday morning, and again, the CD orders are coming in from across the country …
The crew is starting fresh in that the crew that I inherited when I started with the band are all but gone. The last remaining guy has given notice and will be done as soon as he can be replaced or he gets sick of waiting for us to find someone. My son started coming out to shows and he has fell into duties that he’s never done before … Of course this means I have to do much more work than before … It’s not been fun the last couple weeks … Hopefully we’ll find some new crew that can get the job done as before …
Father-in-Law: My father-in-law Edward Walter Andrews passed away January 2, 2007. He was born in December 29, 1925 … He had a building of fluid in his chest a week or so before Thanksgiving and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. He never came back out of the hospital. I thought for sure that he would have come home. For my children and I, that was the last that we’d ever seen him … My wife went daily to visit him in the hospital … Again, I thought for sure he would get past this … He was a big burly cement finisher … Never thought that it would get the best of him …
Since I’d known him, he didn’t work … Already retired … He did keep himself busy though … You couldn’t keep him away from tinkering with something … When I was dating my wife, he’d help with the car if there was a problem, or I should say the “report” of a problem … Like my wife would mention that I was having a problem with my brakes … While sitting there waiting for her to come out of the house, out he would come, “Problem with the brakes?” … and you would want to blow it off and say yeah, but I know about it and I am taking steps to rectify the brake trouble. “Pop the hood.” … oh no, well, I will humor him … He checks the brake fluid level and stuff … “Need to bleed the brakes” and then we spend the next 30-45 minutes bleeding brakes and it’s fixed … He wouldn’t take no for an answer when it came to fixing things … While the brake bleeding went well, sometimes everything didn’t go as planned …
Once we moved into our house, there were things around the house that were broken and I would sometimes come home to find my father-in-law working on things … I would ask my wife why he was here, and she would say that she told her mother of the problem and he came over to fix it … So, sometimes the fix would be quick, other times he would explain to me what the problem was and make frequent trips to the hardware store getting what was needed and trying the next steps on to fix the problem … While we may not be able to use whatever he was fixing at the time, eventually he’d get the right thing from the hardware store and off we’d go …
I guess I should have mentioned that he was hard of hearing, so in these processes, you would say something to him, and his reaction wasn’t always such that you’d know if he heard you or not … It could have been lack of hearing or determination, not sure which so that added to part of the mystery … He would sit at family gatherings and be in his own little world … While everyone is discussing something at some length, he’d blurt, “Th’say it’s gonna rain tomorrow.” or he’d comment on a sports player playing on the team that was playing on TV … He was a Philadelphia fan …
Although very silent while in the family gatherings, you could catch him beaming at his grandchildren … Not knowing what was going on in his semi-silent world of his head, but he was entertained by his grandchildren … From across the room, he would make gestures to catch the children as they would fall … Ah, he was a character … My wife would laugh when telling me of things that her father would do … He was a price watcher, often going to 3 different supermarkets to catch the sale at each one … Often times, haggling on prices when prices aren’t for haggling … Being concerned with parking spots on a street etc … Having conversations with people and when they’d gone lean down and ask, “Who was that?”
My kids have lost their Pop and we took the kids to the viewing, mass, interment and luncheon … While the 8 year old broke down at the end of the viewing, the 5 year old was just about at comprehension … There was debate on whether the children should have attended and I was adamant about them going … They hadn’t seen their Pop since before Thanksgiving and never visited him in the hospital with all the tubes in him … They needed to see him sleeping in his casket and laid to rest … They did want to visit him in the hospital, but my wife also expected him to come back home as well … I still can’t believe that congestive heart failure won him over as well … I fully expected him to live forever …
Well, that sums up my major life since my last post. If anything else comes up, I will update.