Great big ball of fire....come on and heat this place up already!

Today I decided to eat my lunch at my desk. Then, five bites into my 3rd peanut butter sandwich of the week, a co-worker came into my office.

"Lounge. You. Five minutes."

The Living Room Lounge (I think I've written of it's charm here before) is a little bar/eating establishment just down the street from us. They serve slow chicken fingers, slow chicken sandwiches, and other bar/pub fare. I say slow, because any given day the service may take from an hour and a half to 3 hours. No kidding. No matter how big or completely nonexistent the crowd.

I ordered a grilled cheese sandwich that was pretty good. I've had the chicken fingers once, buffalo style, and vowed never again to subject my internal organs to such abuse.

The purpose of this post, however, is to comment on the nice weather we have been blessed with today. I walked out to the parking lot, and to my surprise felt a bit hot in my long sleeve, dark colored winter sweater. It's practically 65 degrees out there....a heat wave for the first time of the year. It got me excited...thinking soon it will be full-on-roll-down-the-windows cuz-it's-hot-and-not-cuz-it-smells-in-here weather, and I can't wait!

Sensory Memory

Today I noticed that our office received a big new box of handtowels for the bathroom over the weekend. I went into the bathroom in the morning, washed my hands, and dried them with the new handtowels. Nothing new or exciting here yet.

Then, when I sat down at my desk to begin work, I touched my hand to my face and noticed it had a distinct smell. Instantly an old memory came shooting to the front of my mind, from way, way back. It smelled like a sawmill. I closed my eyes, cupped my hands over my nose, and took another big whiff.

Instantly I was 12 years old, standing at short-stop position playing little league baseball.

See, the little league baseball diamonds in my home town were located directly beside the town's largest sawmill. In fact, one of the fields where we frequently played butted right up to the biggest heap of sawdust I've seen to this day.

Every Saturday during baseball season my mom and dad and sister and I would load up in the 1988 Isuzu Trooper and head into town for the weekly baseball game. The smell took me right back to those fields, standing there at short-stop, waiting for the next batter to come up.

"Hey batter batter, hey! Hey batter batter, hey," we'd chant wildly as the next kid stepped up to the heat our pitcher was throwing that day.

With the ping of the aluminum bat we would be sent into action, each of us in true little league form. That's when sports are sports. A flyball to left field actually meant at least a single, maybe even a double or triple, instead of an instant out when the pro outfielder picks it off easily.

Balls were missed, mis-thrown, or completely lost. A home run was a feat that only kings accomplished, and if you ever got one, it was legend.

If the pitcher was throwing a 55 mph fastball, you were dead meat.

I loved baseball. The last year I played I remember actually being good. I rotated between first base, short-stop, and pitching. I desperately wanted to pitch. I practiced all the time. My dad set up a backstop and a ring for a target in the back yard to practice with, but somewhere along the way I just wasn't good enough. I had a lot of power, but the coaches always told me I was too wild. Not controllable, or accurate enough. So I was a backup and probably only pitched a couple games. At short-stop, though, I remember being really good. There was a stretch where it took quite a hit to get one by me.

And then there were the rainy days on the field. The days when you would arrive, get on the field, and the first few big drops would start to come down, making little dirty balls of sand where they hit the fine powdery dirt of the field. It always reminded me of when you drop water into flour, and it makes those strange droplets that look somehow dusty.

You could smell the rain coming from a mile away, but everyone held out till the last minute, till the brim of your big foam and mesh hat started to sag from the weight of the drops, and the coach called you all into the dugout to see if it would pass. After the game, win or lose, there was always "The Scoop", where kids would pile into pickup truck beds and go to get ice cream. I made a lot of great friends playing baseball. Friendships that would eventually fade away, like the memories, until awakened by a smell or a thought or the sound an aluminum bat makes on a humid day in May.

The sawmill always smelled the strongest on the rainy days. Silently standing guard on the little league fields of Martinsville.

Hey, batter batter, hey!

Editing myself.

Ok, for those of you who missed out on my rant this morning, you'll just have to email me and have me send it to you if you REALLY want to read it.

I felt that I should leave it up for an hour or so, then take it down. Just for the sake of not having too much negativity on the site at one time.

So that's what I did.

Sorry!

St. Patrick's Day Parade

It was a beautiful day for a parade, that's for sure.

You can see some of my photos from this years event here. More to come. I was shooting film AND digital...because I wanted a wide angle as well as a telephoto. Since I only have one digital SLR, I used it for most of the photos. When I get the wide angles from the film back, I'll post them up as well.

To end it all...

Today marks the end of a long stretch - about 3 weeks straight - that I've gone without a real day off. I'm feeling it, too. All this week the smallest things seem to set me off. Don't even get me started on it. Everyone's totally clueless. But hey, it's a paycheck, right?

Every day this week I've brought my cameras to work in a triumphant display of baggage hauling; carrying my laptop, lunch sack, water bottle, and camera bag in tow. Every day this week I've been too busy to get out and shoot, too. So today, on this St. Patrick's Day, I'm bloody well going to go out and shoot.

I'm thinking I might walk down and shoot the downtown parade at 11:30. If I don't make it to that, I'll at least go out later to shoot. But the parade sounds like a grand place to be, to me.

Tonight we're eating dinner with Eric and LouAnne. That's always fun. They have a little group called the Restaurant Whores - just a group of people who eat dinner together on a regular basis. Sometimes we get in on the fun, other times it's just Eric and LouAnne, but it's always a good meal, and great company. Eric, I know you're reading this...so see you later! :)

This weekend I'm going to try to do as little as possible. My fence in the backyard is falling down...again. I never fixed it. I procrastinated about it all summer, then it was winter and it was too cold. Well, with the strong winds the last few weeks, it's worked its way horizontal instead of vertical. That's Saturday's project. It's also my mom's birthday on Saturday, so dinner will be had with her and the family. I'm looking forward to that, and seeing little baby Kasey. I'm sure she's walking and talking by now. It's been about 3 weeks since I saw her.

Happy St. Patrick's day to all, and may all of your beer drinking dreams come true.

24 hours.

At 5:00 AM this morning, I officially completed my 24th hour of being awake. I've been working through the night to get some videos compressed on the website. They were delivered to me at around midnight, and they were 10 minutes long - two of them. Each one has been taking 1 and a half hours to two hours to compress. I have to compress them into 4 formats. You do the math!

So, I'm down to my last video, after getting 2 computers running to compress them. One last video that says it will be done in 1 hour and 15 minutes. There's nothing I can do but wait until it's done. At that time, I plan on walking across to the other side of the hotel to the fast internet connection, uploading the files, check the site, and go to sleep until 10 am, when I'm scheduled to be back on.

The weather down here is a nice departure from Indiana, though, that's for sure. The rest of the videos are supposed to be shorter, so hopefully tomorrow (actually today) won't be so bad!

More updates to come!

********* UPDATED BY THE AUTHOR *********

I would end up working all night and through the next morning until 11:00AM. I was released for two hours, but ended up going to my hotel room, taking a shower, laying down and almost falling asleep when the phone rang. We need you on the beach. So off I went again, and I wouldn't get back to the hotel room until 11:30 that night.

The rest of the week followed suite. Up and at 'um by 9:00 AM till midnight or 1:00Am.

Two laptops and a portable hard drive.

Plus enough wire to make the TSA crap themselves when they scan my bag bright and early Wednesday morning.

That's what will be inside waiting for them. Well, the two laptops won't be - you have to take those out and put them in a separate tray when you pass through security at the airport. But inside my "work bag" - my self declared mobile war-room, they will find power supplies for said laptops times two, plus a power supply for the external hard drive, two network cables, a backup fire-wire cable, a back-up USB cable, a small digital camera, a box of breath mints, a steno pad of note paper, and one gel ink pen. On my person I'll have a magazine, a journal, and a mini-disk player. I should be adequately weighed down with all of this, I reckon.

So it's off in the wild blue yonder for Lauren and me on Wednesday. Off to the sandy Bahamas, where I plan on working the entire time I'm awake (and then some) and Lauren plans to lounge poolside all day, for 5 straight days.

If you'd like to keep tabs on what I'm working on down there, check out this site. If you're savvy, and/or interested in getting updates, sign up for either the VODcast (video on demand podcast) through the "Apple iTunes" link below "Subscribe to RSS Feed" or the text based news feed below it (the XML button).

Ten thousand things are running through my mind tonight, so I'm going to log off here soon, go home, and relax.

Until tomorrow comes.....