Adam & Amber’s Blog

It is hard to believe it has been so long since I wrote a blog post. Blogging is one of those free time activities for me, and when the free time goes out the window so does the blogging. I will use this post to get people caught up on what has been going on in our lives in the last month or so…

Marching Band
This is the biggest reason we haven’t had much free time. As I have mentioned before, Amber and I work with the Lourdes Marching Band (Amber as Color Guard Caption Head, me as Marching and Maneuvering/Visual Staff). We finished our successful season a couple weeks ago, which ended months of 2-3 practices per week plus weekend football games and competitions. Helping with the band is one of the highlights of my year, it is a fun activity, completely unrelated to computers or technology, and I get to spend a lot of time with my wife. That isn’t to say the season didn’t have its problems or frustrations, but it is a privilege to work with such a great group of students and staff.

Body Work
Unfortunately I don’t mean I am on a diet and exercise plan. Last week, while Amber and I were out for lunch and Hubbell House, my car was hit in the parking lot. Left a petty good dent in the driver’s side door. If that wasn’t bad enough, the driver was kind enough not to leave any information so I had the pleasure of reporting it to my insurance and paying my deductible (thank you anonymous driver). The car just got out of the shop today, so I was without personal transportation for much of the week, which isn’t really wasn’t all that bad. We still have Amber’s car to get around in, Andy and Darcy were kind enough to let me carpool (fun and eco-friendly), and as a result I am getting up earlier which is helping break my multi-month sleep-in-a-thon so I am back to a normal work day (and not ‘Jon’ work days).

Polka Music
Thinking that I was done with music for a while after Marching Band season was short lived. There was a need at work for a Polka Band to play for a site Oktoberfest event (the root beer kind). My friend Mike was on the committee that was planning the event and volunteered to get a band together, and me with my vast Trumpet experience (from 10 years ago) was an obvious addition. We were an unconventional polka band with a Tuba (Zane), Two Trumpets (Mike and Myself), and a French Horn (Jim), but we made it work.

I should interject that I am not a big fan of Polka, it is a fun dance in the sense that you can’t really do it wrong (as long as you are jumping around with the music) and I assume its popularity is set by the fact that it is easy to do when drunk. Polka music is ok, it is usually upbeat and fun, but I have always found it a bit hokey. That being said, I haven’t had an excuse to play my Trumpet in a while and playing music with friends is always sure to be a good time.

We played yesterday, and it was a blast. We weren’t perfect, but with only a couple weeks lead-in what can you expect. I’d like to think this would cause me to play my trumpet more, but realistically unless given a reason to practice it will be hard to keep up.

MythTV
I have been meaning to continue my mythtv saga, but with everything else going on it has been difficult to find the motivation. The box is still up and running fine, I recently added a HDHomerun network based HD tuner in honor of football season. Having HD on the Myth Box really makes a difference, unfortunately it also makes me change my recording style, from save everything to watch and delete (750 Gigs goes fast when you are recording as much as we do). I plan to write more soon on the final setup and how we are using it.

That is just a little of what we have been doing, I will try to get back to posting more interesting content now that I have some free time.