Yesterday I mentioned having made a few minor changes to the Temporal Anomalies section of M. J. Young Net.  I did not mention, because I forgot completely until I was answering an e-mail today, that I also updated the Other Films page, where I list movies I have not yet analyzed, and give some idea of whether I am going to and what I think in brief.  It came to me because there was an e-mail awaiting me today asking if I planned to analyze a movie I just added to that page, Premonition, which is sitting on my television awaiting my attention.

I also dropped a note to Grey Vanaman of Audio-Clear, the man and the company who have (has?) helped Collision, and before that 7dB, so much with equipment, about getting an amp for our P.A.  I got his response today, and he’s got just the ticket, so I’ll probably try to pick it up when I go out a bit later.  This will make everyone happy, but particularly our distant drummer John, who has been told repeatedly that I can’t really bring the drums to rehearsal until I can hear the vocals over them.  We just moved a lot closer.

I’ve much to do, so I’d better turn my attention toward doing some of it.

–M. J. Young

…Not necessarily in that order.

As I mentioned on Sunday, yesterday’s plan involved driving north so that a son could spend his girlfriend’s birthday with her. This also would give me opportunity to visit my sick father, who although home from the hospital seems to have lost his voice (vocal chords not responding for some reason), and to connect with our drummer to give lend him the electronic drum gadget he’s been eager to use. It has also meant that the Monday workload got pushed into today atop the Tuesday workload, which is a lot of work.

The plan did not go entirely smoothly. I believe I got almost three hours of sleep by five in the morning, when the first to need to catch a bus was looking for his morning medicine, and then in somewhat disrupted and disjointed fashion pieced together my morning study and was on the road around quarter after seven. We grabbed breakfast at the gas station (which is not as bad as it sounds, since although Wawa has recently established a strong place in the retail gasoline market they are traditionally a deliconvenience store) and so reached the northern destination very shortly after ten.

Having fought for consciousness over the last leg of that journey, I locked the car and slept, fitfully with the CD player running, for about two hours. I then was unable to reach the drummer, who I think had not anticipated his wife and her Irish family monopolizing his time on St. Patrick’s Day–but my mother called, wondering why I was not already there, so I went there, ate lunch, and by around two was reading clippings cut for me.

Then, perhaps near three, I fell asleep again, and slept until my cell phone awoke me, my wife calling to see what arrangements I had made for several things she had expected me to address. Since it was by then almost six, my mother turned her attention to feeding me dinner and packing my car full of groceries. I still could not raise my drummer on the phone, I settled in to wait for someone to call.

The son called first–not the son for whose call I was waiting, but the son who hoped I would pick him up from his brother and bring him home for a few days. That was agreed, although the timeline was still uncertain. Then the anticipated son called, but to tell me that he was going to have dinner nearby before he was ready to go home. Then the drummer called, and the end of the stay up there was a somewhat awkward juggling of conflicting connections–but we made it.

The return trip put us in the driveway around two in the morning, if memory serves, and then there were some things that could not stay in the car overnight which had to be unpacked. My online work was limited to posting to the Corinthians list, and then I got to bed about an hour before I would be getting up again–but at least this time I correctly anticipated being able to return to bed after people were rousted and driven from the house. I think I’m reasonably rested at this point, but do not know whether I will be caught up by the end of the night or not.

To add to the confusion, my mother-in-law called. We just solved her banking problem so she can pay her bills, but now she has no stamps. Thus I have promised to bring her some tomorrow. Here’s hoping that’s not too disruptive.

–M. J. Young

Tomorrow is an anticipated disaster.  I’ve been tasked with dropping someone off three hours away by ten in the morning, which means I’ll be leaving here as soon after the boys are on their buses as I can manage, and then with bringing him home sometime after eight at night, which means I’ll be getting in around midnight.  This is not unreasonably because of a certain girlfriend’s birthday, and while I am in the neighborhood I am planning to visit my ailing faither (who is home now) and hoping to catch some time with my old and returning drummer.  I am not anticipating being able to do even the bare minimum of work here.

To compensate, I had planned to tear through a lot of tomorrow’s work today, tackling e-mail and getting everything in order so that I was on top of things, and then getting to bed early.  I did manage to take my mother-in-law shopping; but my wife had a meeting up that way, and so we went together, and one thing was added to another to another until it was very late, and I am very tired, and I will be lucky to manage today’s work today, unlikely to get to bed early, and probably not going to manage to get the things from the attic that I had promised to take with me when I went.  Well, maybe I can manage that part–but I’m pressing my luck as it is.

I’m constantly asked why I never plan to do the things that need to be done.  The reason is that my plans are irrelevant; whatever I plan, I can be pretty certain that that is not going to be done.

–M. J. Young

I realized this afternoon, as six o’clock bore down on me and I had not yet begun supper and knew I would soon have to get Baxter for our Collision rehearsal, that it did not feel so late as it was. It struck me almost immediately that we changed the clocks over the weekend–last week at this time it was an hour earlier, or was it an hour later, I can never get that straight in my mind. Thus I felt as if I should have more time before the rehearsal.

I have long thought that this idea of Daylight Savings Time was pretty stupid. Even the name makes little sense–if we are saving daylight, when will we use it? The government wanted everyone to get up and go to work an hour later during the winter, so that they would stay up later and use what little daylight we had to maximum advantage, so instead of asking everyone to change their schedules, they just changed the official clock. This meant that twice a year everyone was off schedule, because even if we remembered to fix our clocks we still had to adjust our biological clocks to match. Then gradually our technology caught up. Computers were the first devices to adjust for Daylight Savings Time automatically, followed by some wrist watches, video recorders, and now even clocks. Unfortunately, now that we have all this equipment that does this automatically, the government has changed the days on which the changes are to be made. This means the clocks are now wrong four times a year instead of two: in the Spring we have to adjust them ahead before the date they would adjust themselves, and then when they adjust themselves ahead automatically we must put them back, and then in the fall they will adjust them selves automatically and we will have to put them back, only to change them again when the new date comes. Tell me that this is not a stupid idea.

Rehearsal went well. Brittany was not here this week, because her mother is going in for surgery and life is a bit chaotic there at the moment. Baxter and Adam and I focused on the instrumentals, and made solid progress on some of the more difficult sections. I also gave Baxter a CD copy of the repertoire for himself and one for drummer Kevin, whom he expects to see on Sunday.

Otherwise, I am behind schedule, and looking ahead at a lot of delays. Let’s see what we can accomplish today with the time that remains. At least my body isn’t telling me to go to bed so early.

–M. J. Young

My wife is sick. I have been fortunate that my immune system usually wins against the diseases she gets from contact related to her medical profession, and so I am not also dreadfully ill. I am, however, dreadfully busy.

I lost yesterday to a long roadtrip, returning a young lady visitor to her home in the northern end of the state. While I was up that way anyway, I met over coffee with an old friend, who will be playing drums with Collision, and delivered to him a copy of that compact disk he has been eager to receive, along with many pages of song sheets and drum parts for his consideration. The time we spent together was both too long and too short–too long in that it was very late by the time I got home, and too short in that there was so much more to say.

Then this afternoon my mother called to let me know that my father was back in the hospital. No one is quite sure what is wrong with him, but they have half a dozen excellent doctors working on it.

Shortly after that I received the news that Ernest Gary Gygax, to whom everyone in the role playing world owes a debt of gratitude for his courage in publishing the original Dungeons & Dragons game and with whom I’ve had enough correspondence to feel that we knew each other, passed away early this morning. On the heels of the death of Larry Norman last week, perhaps the key figure in making Christian Rock acceptable and who impressed me in our one meeting thirty years back with his keen insight and discernment, this comes as something of a blow.

I am too far behind to try to do everything, and must make a trip to return another son to his work address tonight. More and more is being pushed into another day; may there be enough days to bring all up to date before I, too, am too sick to do anything.

–M. J. Young

We had company last night. My wife’s crazy schedule means that finding nights when people can visit is weird, and when they come, they always stay late.

For reasons I do not care to detail, it cut my sleep in tiny bits. I lay down around three thirty, was rousted briefly at four, woke to the alarm at five, and drowsed in the living room until after eight, slept again until ten and was called upon to drive a short errand which kept me up for half an hour, then pulled myself out of bed around quarter of two. I still haven’t been able to calculate whether I got enough sleep, and I’ve a long drive tomorrow evening, but I’ve got a bit more to do tonight before I can sleep, and church in the morning, so I’d better get to it.

During the party, not being much of a party person, I put the finishing touches on a midi recording of another of the songs Collision is doing, converted it to mp3, and e-mailed it to the drummer. He might call tonight to talk about the last three songs, about which I had not heard anything apparently because he has encountered some serious computer problems and is only now getting back on line. He has my sympathy.

Let me go; there’s still work to do.

–M. J. Young

I feel like I’m ahead of things today.

I probably have no practical basis for that feeling. After all, it is Tuesday, and I am supposed to be here pretty early on Tuesdays, as most of my Tuesday work is slated to follow. On the other hand, in recent weeks and in recent days I have been so far behind schedule that I have been going to bed after three, even after four, and pulling myself back into action at five, trying to stay awake until around seven (and last night was not different). However, I am awake, I am functioning, and I am progressing. I have even e-mailed one of our Collision songs to the drummer.

What will I do, being so far ahead of things? I will remember not to enumerate the total quantity of barnyard foul during their period of incubation, and focus on what I am actually doing instead of what I might do if somehow I wind up with time to do more.

–M. J. Young

This was a busier Monday than usual, as my afternoon was tapped for dealing with some important matters related to the son of a houseguest. I still had to take my mother-in-law to the store, but with the afternoon shot and supper to do it was nine at night before I reached her. Then on the way home I picked up my son from his brother–which is not really on the way, but completely the opposite direction, but still a lot less driving to pick him up while I’m there already than to make a separate trip for him.

I squeezed in the e-mail while making supper, which thanks to the premier of The Sarah Connor Chronicles (which I did not watch) had several letters concerning the Temporal Anomalies site, one of which was calling my attention to a special forum for it at the IMDB web site. I have begun the process of registering for that site so I can see that forum.

I ate supper while my computer was rebooting, which is a commentary both on how fast I wolf down my meals and on how slowly my computer functions, and now I’m trying to finish here and get some sleep before tomorrow arrives officially.

Oh, I’ve also sent a couple of music files to the drummer, so he can begin to get some idea of what I am hoping Collision will sound like. He did hear the one that is on the web, Holocaust, but I don’t know whether he got either of the ones I e-mailed him. Even so, I am going to attempt to e-mail another tomorrow, and am working on getting more of the music files converted to mp3 format (something I have not been able to accomplish on my computer, for reasons I have not been able to determine) so I can send him more.

–M. J. Young

I will begin to apologize here; I will have more apologies to make on the forum. I had planned to take a son’s girlfriend home, and while that far from here visit an old friend to talk about Collision, music, and drummers, then return home to finish my work Friday night. Part of the derailment was due to the fact that wives always retain the prerogative to rewrite all plans to suit themselves; part of it was that it took longer to do some of the steps than anyone anticipated. Oh, and the part about making the wrong turn on Route 46 and going fifteen or twenty minutes in the wrong direction when we had been not more than a few blocks from our destination also helped. In any case, it was almost dawn by the time I got to bed, and I did not get my visit, although the girl was delivered to her abode sometime after one in the morning, and I do not wish even to consider how far after one that might have been.

I had intended then to go to church, take the trash to the dump, and do the grocery shopping, and including in the cracks the delivery and retrieval of our dialysis patient to the hospital. I did not make it to church, and each of those tasks ran either long or late, and there was a phone call interrupting the process at a point that did not need interrupting. By the time I sat down to do my Saturday morning study in Corinthians, I fell asleep in front of the computer; I gave up attempting even to make dinner, bought pizza, did some Romans editing while waiting, and attempted to get some sleep. Even this was derailed, as once I got to my bed I became absorbed in an episode of House I had never seen, followed by the Hitchhiker’s movie which despite being a disappointment to fans of the BBC miniseries was still worth watching, and then I was rousted a few times for various reasons ranging from being offered ice cream to needing to track down someone’s buzzing alarm clock.

There was a directors meeting today, so that again set me back; but business is part of the job, and it was a reasonably productive meeting.

Now I’ve got to go offer apologies to people on the forum, and try to finish my work at a decent hour. I’ve been warned that tomorrow is not going to run on schedule, so I’ll need to get some sleep tonight if I’m going to function through the day.

–M. J. Young

When I went to bed this morning, there was still a lot of debate about how we were going to get everyone where they were supposed to be when they needed to be there today; when I awoke this afternoon, it had all changed, because one person’s plans shifted completely and everything else had to be rearranged around that.

On the bright side, it probably gave me an extra hour or two that will not be consumed by delivering people, even though I still have at least four to five hours of delivering ahead.

I also have a Collision rehearsal, the first with four of us at once in quite a while; it will be early this evening, and we have a lot to discuss including one of the most unusual problems I have ever had with drummers–we seem to have too many of them, and we need to resolve what to do about that.

I’ve got other things to prepare, though, so let me slip away and slip back, and maybe we can put everything in place in time.

–M. J. Young