• My body has time to heal. I tend to be fairly hard on my body when doing shows. This includes both not stopping to be sick and throwing my body around with reckless abandon. Almost all shows that I have a significant role in, I end up bruised and aching. It’s nice to heal.
• Sleep: it’s kind of cool and I enjoy it.
• Home cooked dinner at the table with my wife. Somewhere along the way, having fast food 8 times a week stopped being the ideal way to eat. Now that we aren’t at the theatre every night, not only do we have time to get groceries, but we get to eat in our house instead of in the car on the way to the theatre.
• Who knew it was possible to go out and do fun thing or even do chores on random nights of the week?
• At no point do I ever find myself in bed/shower/work trying to peel mic tape off of my neck.
• It is actually possible to get a tan when I am not inside a a dark theatre every weekend.

Yes, I know you probably don’t find it funny at all. You probably had to be there. Maybe next time we find ourselves ordering chicken sandwiches with live music soundtrack and I forget to order Polynesian sause just as the music peaks, you can join us. You will probably appreciate just a little more why I love my wife so much.

I’ll leave you with a graph of my own personal price for gasoline from July 2005 – December 2009

This past Tuesday I was coming home from work, and was literally racing a thunderstorm. I was a particularly cool looking storm, or at least the leading edge was very cool. It was headed straight east, and I was headed pretty far north. I grabbed a fast shot of the front of the storm with my cellphone, but was trying desperately to get home and a real camera before the storm got there, or at least before it decended into just a grey mess. Well, I missed the front edge, but I did get some interesting texture. This shot is actually the back wall of the leading edge of the storm. This is one of about 7 shots I made before it started raining.

Flash forward eight or nine months, and with everything that we had going on and going on in the world at large, it was looking like we were probably going to be staying here another year. And even if we don’t end up staying, we decided that it was time we did a joint remodeling of sorts to make it truly our home. Add to this fact that we got some amazingly good deals on some very nice furniture and before we knew it, we had replaced half of our furniture. If the wife had had her way, it all would have been done at once several months ago. If I had been doing it on my own, it probably would have been over a year in the making. In the end, we had the money and compromised by getting things slowly over several months.

The first step was the dining room. We got it as floor clearance models, which means that a couple small nicks knocked off 50% of the cost. The set includes a table, four regular chairs, two arm chairs and a hutch. We got our first chance to add a leaf into the table last week, and that thing is long. Closed up it is around 5 feet long; and it accepts up to two 20 inch leaves for close to 9 feet of table. I have already been promised that at some point we are going to have dinner for two at either end of the mansion sized table wearing formal attiar just for the sake of doing it.

The hutch has actually been repurposed as our entertainment center in the living room. I have to say, I love our living room furniture. It is exactly the kind of clean, sleak, huge, modern furniture I have been looking for over the last few years. I don’t have a whole lot to say here except about the decorations.

We spent a couple of months looking for a good art piece to be the center of the living room with almost zero luck. In the end, we took our pillows to Home Depot and got some sample buckets of paint to match, and I went to town one off-friday. The result is what you see there, which I think is awesome even if I do say so myself. The window treatment were all my wife’s vision. The brown curtains were actually stuff I bought several years ago for my last bachelor apartment. The red drape was the result of my wife’s first adventure with a sewing machine. I like that whole thing too.

The bedroom was the biggest job to get ready. We both loved the furniture as soon as we saw it. I wasn’t entirely sure it was going to fit, but it does wonderfully. Still nothing quite prepared me for how much bigger they looked at home than in the giant showroom.

I was able to hold out on this purchase for awhile, mostly because I feel better about making big purchases when I do. Because of this, and the stores proximity to our church, we ended up making several visits to Ethan Allen so Amy could visit it. Once we decided to do the room, we ended up painting it, one color on the wall behind the bed and a slightly lighter color else where. The painting above the bed is an old favorite of Amy’s.

At this point, we are done for a good long while, with the possible expection of a nice, big TV, eventually, whenever I cave to her suggestions.

This is one of my favorite shots from Aida, several of which can be found on flickr. Because of several conflicts and such, I ended up being in this show and taking photos. I set up shop, sniper style, up in the old tech booth behind the balcony and shot most of the show at 300mm. There were two songs I needed to dance in during the show, so I would take pictures from the balcony, one scene before I went out, I would run downstairs and around the building, change clothes, go on stage and dance, leave the stage, change again, and run back to the balcony. It was an interesting way to do the show, to say the least.

For this one shot, I went to my wide angle lens, and made two exposures. One was a fast shutter speed for the stage. The other exposure had a shutter speed around 30 seconds that go all of the house. I then photoshopped them together to get this.  This was the Act 1 closing song, The Gods Love Nubia, which I was actually suppose to be in. I love the fact that it shows everything, the actors, the audience, the tech stuff, all of it.

My standard schedule ends up being work until the normal time, drive straight to the theatre, reherase for 4-5 hours, go home and go to bed. Lately, I seem to be making wierd choices for tech week. When Aida was in tech week, Amy and I were redecorating our bed/entire house (more on that is coming soon). This time, we ended up getting Amy’s car repaired from a parking lot hit and run, which means I get to play driver in the morning, which in all honesty shouldn’t be a problem, but I am a slacker about getting up in the morning. The other thing, which is kind of cool, is that I am becoming sort of the photographer of the Cocoa Village Playhouse, which means I randomly get called on to do a photoshoot for newspaper photos at short notice, which explains why I end up working on photos from the end of rehearsal until 2AM or so.

Now it occurs to me that this is sounding like some sort of grip fest. It is not. After all, it is pretty unlikely that I would volunteer most of my free time in 2-3 month blocks at a time for something I didn’t really enjoy. I have just found a good number of people don’t actually know what is going on when I say “tech week”. The most import thing, though, is that the whole time you know that Friday is a whole other ballgame. Actually it is the ballgame. Regardless of what is going on during tech week, you know that Friday it all changes. On Friday, there is an audience. Most show (some more than others), even on Thursday you aren’t quite sure how it is all going to come together, but it (almost) always does. For now, all I can say is lets get to Friday now.

Amy was out of town at her grandmother’s funeral a couple of weeks ago, and I was going to be at work when she got back, so I bought some flowers at Publix to have on the table when she came home. No sooner had I gotten them home that it occured to me that they might be fun to photograph. Several years ago I picked up some cheapo filter lenses for doing macro stuff. Basically they are magnifying lenses that screw on the front of a normal lens like a filter. They came in a set of 3 (a 1X, a 2X, and a 4X) They don’t have nearly the optical quality of a real macro lens, but they have some rather neat traits that make them fun to play with. If I remember correctly, this is using all three lenses for a total of 7X on top of the 50mm prime lens. For some reason that I don’t really understand, this is my favorite of the bunch from that night. Other than the crop, this is pretty much how it came out of the camera, and it has a cool aged photo look to it that I really like.