I’ve been a fan of Philip Glass for probably fifteen years or so. One of the CD’s of his that I own is called Songs From the Trilogy, with the Trilogy being three operas he wrote during the 70’s and 80’s, the first called Einstein on the Beach and the last called Akhnaten about an Egyptian pharaoh (I guess that’s the only kind). Einstein on the Beach is probably the most famous because it was whole different take on opera and classical music in general. However, of the songs on the Trilogy CD, the ones from Akhnaten are probably my favorites. When Susan and I were considering buying season tickets to the opera, one thing I liked was that they were going to do an optional fifth show at Emory University and it would be Akhnaten. I still hadn’t heard the whole opera, just the four songs that made the CD.
Year: 2009
Danny Immortalized
In November 1999 I went on a day trip one Sunday up to see some covered bridges and take pictures for the web page at work. Jeb checked with Danny to see if he wanted to go and he was up for it, so Danny and I went to go look at bridges. At a bridge near Colbert, east of Athens, we went underneath the bridge so I could get a picture of the rock abutment that the end of the bridge rested on. Danny was wandering around under there too and got into one of the pictures. Most of the pictures on the website were kind of small but you could click on them and see a bigger version of the picture. So for fun I used the picture without Danny for the small picture, but if you clicked on it you saw a bigger picture of the abutment, only with Danny. Several years later our website was revamped and I didn’t want to have to re-write all of the covered bridge web pages, so our IT department took over the pages and rewrote them. Then, last year, we got another makeover, only this time they got rid of all of the pictures. My boss complained to IT that the whole point of the covered bridge website was to see pictures and get maps to the sites and those had been eliminated (and he has to field all of the public’s inquiries about covered bridges). I guess they agreed with this because just recently some of the pictures reappeared along with redrawn maps that look a lot better than the ones that had been done in Paint. The pictures now are small and can’t be clicked on to see bigger ones, but guess who has survived all of the edits and changes of ownership?
True Blue Schools
A co-worker and I switched natural gas suppliers at the same time when we got the really good deal from Georgia Natural Gas that I wrote about in October. He told me about a program that GNG has where they will donate $25 to the school of your choice plus $5 per month that you remain a customer. I think he had gotten a card about the program in the mail, but I was able to go to the site and sign up on my own since it doesn’t cost me anything and a school would benefit. I chose my local elementary school.
The program is called True Blue Schools
A week or so later they sent me an e-mail saying thank you for participating and congratulating my local school for getting a total of $0, with $0 earned to date. I think I must have missed the deadline for that quarter’s distribution because they were thanking me for nothing.
Zaino
While I was doing research on my car, I found out about a type of car polish called Zaino. It sounded interesting and is enormously complicated, which makes it even more appealing. I thought about ordering the starter kit (it’s kind of expensive) back when I wrote about car clay, but decided not to since we aren’t allowed to wash our cars and that’s a big part of the process. Then time went by and I felt like I really needed to put some kind of protection on the car so the finish doesn’t go bad like it eventually did on the Honda. I’ve paid to get the car washed a couple of times, but getting it waxed properly is really expensive and doesn’t last anyway.
On New Years Day, Jami forwarded an e-mail from an old friend of mine from high school who had contacted her asking for my contact info. Since the message had gone through Facebook, I didn’t have an e-mail address for him, so I went to Facebook to see if I could post something to him. But you have to sign up for an account first. So I went ahead and signed up, giving them my name, e-mail, a password, my high school, college, and where I live. Then I had to make that guy my friend to write to him and I gave him my e-mail address.
By the next morning five people put in requests to be my friends. Three of them were people who had gone to my birthday parties when I was like 10 years old, including Joel N. and David M., people I haven’t heard from since high school or even before then since we went our separate ways in high school. Today I got a friend request from a woman I had gone steady with for an hour in 7th grade and who is now married to my AP Biology lab partner. And they can all tell me what they are doing today. What a bizarre thing.
I’ve never joined any sites like this because I don’t really see the point, but it is kind of neat.