Wednesday I got an email from Logan’s COVA teacher asking for any more last-minute volunteers for a scheduled tour of our local CBS news station on Thursday morning. How could I refuse? Field trip!
We arrived a bit early and met the other COVA family we were to do the tour with. Three other families called in sick, so it was just us.
The kids all waited patiently (and quietly) in the lobby, while a bevy of waiting business people made a big ruckus with their chatter and banter. We were glad to see them ushered past the “gatekeeper” after hearing them carry on and on for ten minutes! Soon enough it was our turn to be let into the mystical confines.
All this month I have to make some major repairs and maintenance on Da Big Bus to get it “road worthy” for our upcoming trip to the Bay Area. Sunday I went up to Harbor Freight to buy a mongo impact gun to take off the lugnuts. I lucked out on a big 1″ gun with 1,450 ft-lbs of torque on clearance for $99. I also needed a big hose and big sockets to take off the big lugs. To run the kind of air the gun needs in copious quantities, I also had to rig up a punk take to send the air en masse to the beast.
Several hours later, it sounds like a NASCAR pit stop in our back yard, and the bus nuts are whirring off the wheels and the compressor is straining hard to make air between brief clatters from the gun. Ten lugs per wheel. Maybe ten minutes, and the outside dual is off.
Logan just had to give it a go on the inside dual. I held the gun while he pulled the trigger… but not before I snapped this pic that makes him look like he’s doing this single-handedly.
Here’s our latest project… bring Logan’s book, The Ugly Wormling to life.
Logan wrote the book during the very neat, COVA Build-a-Book Workshop last December. Here’s a link to photos from that day when all of our kids were enrolled in COVA. I think Lo did a really nice job on the storyline and illustrations, so I put him in front of the camera to record him reading his book… sorta like the Reading Rainbow show on PBS. We also recorded some clean voice-over of him reading it, and then I scanned in all of the pages to animate it in After Effects.
So…. Stay tuned for the next blockbuster: The Ugly Wormling.
Last week I reserved us a spot on Half Moon Bay State Beach for six nights during our upcoming Bay Area blast in April. I went to great lengths to get a site that offers me a windshield view of the mighty Pacific. For some reason it’s important to me.
Six nights came in at exactly $157.50, or $25/ night + a small reservation fee. Darlene commented that this was pretty expensive. (?!) I should point out that the Ritz Carlton a few hundred yards up the Bay from us is $300 per night. Obviously, we forgo the heated towels, mud baths, chocolate on the pillows, et al for moonlit strolls on the beach, seagulls and roaring breakers lulling us to sleep, and pretentious-free solitude. Check out the video below for our beachside digs:
Caden went to his second basketball game last Saturday. Being his first year playing, he’s still learning the ball skills. He’s not doing too bad with passing and dribbling, but still could use some work on his shooting. Unfortunately, his old man never played the game… like, ever. So, I’m not much help.
The boys are in the basketball program and Bria’s in cheerleading this season (she can play b-ball next year). Our church where they play just adopted the Upward program, and it’s pretty cool. Very structured, organized, and well led by the LifeBridge staff and volunteers. Our kids will likely be playing it for a long time now. And their old man will have to get out on the court one of these days… and throw down the glove to pick up the big orange ball sometime.
Naturally, I’ve been shooting video courtside with my new camera. I’m still a bit jerky with some of the controls, esp. the manual focusing… which is the only way to follow the action when 30 people an hour come walking in front of the camera. I’m rigged up with the Tiffen Steady Stick support system that keeps me from having to lug “the sticks” (my mongo tripod) around. It’s basically a body-mounted tripod and shoulder rest… and makes it a breeze during extended shoots.
Anyways, I edited a little snippet of Caden’s game last Saturday. I took a bunch of footage, but just focused on him for this little piece. Below is the very down-rezzed and compressed Flash version. I also made a high-def version… well, higher-def version. It’s a 1280×720 size WMV, so it’s still down-rezzed quite a bit, and has a healthy bit of compression tokeep the file size manageable. For those that know (and/or care), this was shot at 30f (Canon’s 30fps progressive mode)… so there’s a decent amount of motion blur compared to the “video look” of 60i. For those of you crossing your eyes about now, enjoy watching the video!
After over four years with my ‘87 GMC full-size conversion van, and almost literally “driving the wheels off of it”, we bought me a minivan today. Yes… a minivan. It’s an ‘01 Chrysler Town & Country (stupid name, IMHO), and really pretty nice. Nicer than I’m used to, anyways. It can seat 7, is all-wheel drive, and even has one of those cool electric doors on the pax/curbside. Most importantly, it has a radio! And doors that fully shut. And cupholders. It doesn’t leak antifreeze every time I drive it. And… you get the picture. Big upgrade.
I told Dar, that with this purchase, my transformation is now complete. Case in point: I volunteered at Caden’s school today, babysat several rowdy homeschoolers at a theater class on Tuesday, did my first scrapbooking earlier this week, washed several loads of laundry yesterday… and now I have the prototypical “soccer mom” vehicle.
So it’s official… Brian now has a uterus! Oh… I gotta go now. Supper’s on the stove…
As an early Valentine’s Day gift to Bria, I spent a few hours tonight assembling some pics we took this week of her and Clifford (THE Big Red Dog, of course!). He’s actually not so big in his present incarnation… a stuffed animal from her kindergarten class at Longmont Christian. Every kid in her class gets a chance to take Clifford home for a week and do things with him… then journal or scrapbook about the experience for that week’s “show n’ tell”.
Well, I don’t “journal”… I blog. And I’ve never scrapbooked in my life (my Mom does all of ours *yeah!*), so I decide to try to scrapbook with Photoshop… e-scrappin’ I guess you’d call it. And who knew it would be fun! I Googled “Photoshop scrapbook backgrounds” and you should see the hits it came up with. There’s a lot of scrapbookin’ being done in PS out there. Who knew?! Anyways, I bought a little “girlie” page pack for $2.99 (yes, just three bucks!) that had a bunch of nice hi-rez papers, cutouts, and objects… some in JPG some in PNG from this place. They have a ton of papers, themes, and do-dads out there on the Net. Impressive!
A little drag-and-drop with their artwork, then I made some paper frames myself with the noise filter, quick mask a few brush stroke selections to “tear” the edges, stroke some rounded edge frames on the other page… and I made two pages in two hours. Not bad for an e-scrapbook newbie. Check ‘em out…
The secret to the “look” of most e-scrapbook pages I’ve seen, just like with much of the “grunge” look vector work that’s trendy in motion graphics right now: use a lot of non-orthogonal layers, create some separation between them with drop shadows and bevels, and make everything as organic as possible. Plan to look un-planned.
Tomorrow I’m going to e-mail these to the Walgreens photo lab down the street and get some nice glossy 8×10’s to insert into the notebook full of other kids’ experiences. And Bria will take Clifford and these pages back to school on Valentine’s Day. Scrap on!
