As we near opening for our next show at the theatre I usually find myself with more free time, though I think that this time around my time will be taken up by getting ready for my honeymoon.  This mainly will involve cleaning the apartment and packing.  I am really looking forward to this trip.  It is the first real vacation that Ruth and I will be taking alone together.  It Should be really fun and I am sure it will feel like it was too short.

We also basically just got back from our trip to Disneyland with Ruth’s family.  That was a lot of fun, and it has been quite a while since I have been to Disney.  Ruth and I flew out and met the family there to spend outs first day at Knott’s Berry Farm.  Smaller than Disney with big rides, but also way bigger lines.  We stood in some pretty long lines to ride the rides.  We actually took to calculating how many people the rides could move in the amount of time we waited in line.  We actually waited around 3 hours for one roller coaster that was about a 20-second ride.

After Knott’s, we headed to Co Co Ichibanya (aka Co Co’s), a curry house that is starting to make a US presence, coming from Japan.  Co Co’s was the Jones’ favorite curry house in Okinawa, so they will go out of their way to go there when they can.  I don’t have anything to compare to, but it is darn good food!

Then it was on to Disneyland where we had two days in the parks including staying till about 1:45AM on New Years.  Disney is a lot of fun even when it is wall to wall people. It is the place where everyone has fun, and if you take a moment to plan your day, you don’t have to spend forever waiting in lines.  We managed to break the Pinocchio ride, as soon as we got in the car, bells started ringing and lights started flashing and they had to evacuate the ride.  Then the fog rolled in so thick you could barely see 100 feet in front of you.  We couldn’t see the New Years fireworks, but we did managed to get stuck in the crowd.  We got to fight against the press and then this great little old lady helped us jump the ropes when the cast members weren’t looking so we could get out of the crowd.  Good times were had by all.

Sunset lights up Balanced Rock at Arches National Park

Of course the other big thing is my photo gallery opening that was last week.  For the month of January I have a display of Utah Landscape photography up at the JCC here in Salt Lake.  It was very exciting to lay out all the prints and see them big and up on the wall.  I don’t have the space to really look at more than one at a time at home.  The opening reception seemed to go very well, there was a good turn out and I have since received a few emails asking about the images.  If you are in the SLC area you should stop by and see the prints, otherwise you can see the images on my website.

Ok folks, it has been quite the long stint since I last posted here.  Every blogger says it on a regular basis, but life has just been totally crazy.  My last post was in May, before I went to camp, before I got married, and before the current season at the theatre.  It was almost before the summer really started and now winter is starting.  I have been kind of bad about lots of things in the digital world of communication though.  I have been very slow at responding to emails, I have been behind on processing and sorting photos, and apparantly I am behind on getting videos together from the summer to go online.  Then there are the actual things that I havent been doing, like going to the gym.  Great.

So, will this just be a feeble attempt to try to get things moving on the blog again? I have no idea, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

So, if you got through that first paragraph and didn’t have a “wait, what?!” moment, you probably either already knew that I got married this summer, or you just missed that part.  Yes, since August 25 I have been happily married to Ruth and life is pretty good.  The wedding was beautiful, and everything seemd to go smoothly despite being out of the state at camp for the two months leading up to it.  We held the ceremony and reception at the Alta Lodge and we were happy to celebrate with friends and family.  Good times were definately had by all.  The weather was beautiful, the montains were beautiful, and the over atmosphere was great.  With a ceremony that we wrote ourselves, we were married by a mutual friend in one of the most beautiful places I can think of.  Don’t believe me? Here, see for yourself:

Here we are standing under the canopy that was built by Ruth's father, with our friend Warren officiating our wedding.

Working backwards in time from the wedding, the summer at camp was not one of the best.  Maybe that is why I refrained from writing during it.  I don’t know that I will say too much, though there is plenty to say about it.  The camps were under new ownership as of this past summer, and for some that transition was not so easy.  Suffice it to say, I saw some good friends mistreated in a very public manner and it got dragged out for the better part of the summer.  While I managed to spend the summer flying under the radar, there were grumblings about me as well.  Camp can be strange like that, it is just unfortunate and really hard when friends get hurt.

So let’s not dwell on the ugly past.  The theatre season is in full swing so life has been very busy.  Getting Annie up and open was a killer, but now there is a little room to breathe.  So in the mean time I have been prepping a bunch of my photos for my first ever gallery display!  I will be showing photos at the JCC in SLC for the month of January.  This is pretty darn exciting.  I have the prints on order and should get them soon and I am really excited to see them.  I am having all the prints done on metal with float mounts.  The test prints I had made earlier look amazing, it is a really cool finished product.  It would be hard to show what the prints look like in a photo, so any of you who find yourself in the Salt Lake area during January should stop by and see the gallery!

With that, I think that I need to stop staring at this computer screen. I have spent a lot of time in front of it in the past couple days. Besides being warm in bed sound much nicer!

Happy mother’s day Mom!

I have to saw, I have an awesome mother.  Sure, there have been and probably will continue to be times that we don’t see eye-to-eye, but never the less, I love my mother.

Of particular note, this year she qualified for and ran the Boston Marathon.  Not only did she run the marathon, but she ran it is a great time.  I was a little bummed that I couldn’t be there to stand out on Comm Ave near my grandparent’s house like we used to do on marathon day when we were kids.

My mother does lots of cool things.  She has done some pretty cool trips in the past few years.  She has ridden the Trans-Siberian Railroad, gone to somewhere in Africa (I forget which country), and most recently Patagonia.  I hope that at some point I will be able to do things like that.

Of course really the important thing is that I have to thank my mother for the fact that I am ever here to write this.  I do my best to make my mother proud every day.  I know that there are things that I do a certain way because that is how I learned it from my mother.  The biggest thing I think that I have not done that my mother wants me to do is get a haircut.  I probably could use one, but not short like she think she wants.  It’s my hair, I’ll wear it how I want.

So, with that, here is to my mother!

I don’t really have much to blog at the moment, but the dogs (Ava and Zoe) are cute in the huge snow in Franconia, NH.  I wish that I was able to romp around in the snow with the dogs.  For now we can all enjoy the video!

This is the post where I am going to tell about the secret project I mentioned a few times, but that is going to be towards the end of the post…. (just to keep you reading)

Some of you may have drifted by the blog in the last couple weeks and wondered where I have been.  Some of you probably couldn’t care less, and those of you who actually know me probably spent the last two weeks in the same building as me for the duration of said two weeks.  Such is the life of theatre people, when we get into full swing on a show, well, there is nothing else in the rest of the world.  Heck, i didn’t even participate in this past month’s Bloggerstock event because I didn’t have time.  Speaking of which, we really need to come up with a topic for this month and I don’t want it to be something cliche about the holidays.

Right, holidays.  Today is the seventh day of Hanukkah, that means that tonight is the last night.  So for those of you who don’t actually know what that means, tonight we light eight candles (unless you follow the traditions of Shamai instead of Hillel) in celebration of the eighth day.  I have been keeping my menorah in the booth at the theatre.  I thought that it was appropriate as we are working on the nice Christmas musical written by a good Jewish boy, Irving Berlin.  The man was smart, he knew what would sell and he capitalized on it!  White Christmas was bound to sell way more tickets than White Hanukkah would, though you probably could write a similar story about either.  The show is far from dominated by Christmas related songs.

The show.  Well, this production is certainly one of the biggest of the season, it might be the second largest.  I have a feeling that Sunset Boulevard will be bigger in many respects.  However, as I wrote before, this show is so big, it doesn’t really fit in the space.  I can’t remember working on a show here at PTC that had so many issues as we were going through tech and into opening.  I mean even during Les Mis when things just started to fall apart, we made it pretty well into the run first.  Most of the early issues we had with that show were due to operator error or oversight.  This show on the other hand, well it never really worked right until last night.

From day one of tech, after three weeks in the shop and $350 of repairs my moving light that died during Hamlet was returned to us and we promptly discovered that it was not fixed.  At this point I went to the other repair shop in town, and while it took four trips down there and ordering a part that we didn’t actually need, they fixed it.  Turned out to be something so simple that I am kicking myself for not noticing.  One of the fans that cools off the lamp housing was broken and a bunch of the wiring had begun to melt together.  All things considered this is something that should have been noticed by the first shop tech when they had the fixture for three weeks.  Whatever, it seems to be fixed now and we are happy.  During the fiasco while we were in tech, all it did was serve to stress me out.

Then we had Thanksgiving.  Once again, the holiday fell right in the middle of our tech schedule which is a mixed blessing.  We only get one day off, so there would be no visiting my family, but luckily I have a girlfriend with a wonderful family who was happy to add me to their festivities.  There was one stipulation by one of her cousins though and that was that I make my chocolate-butterscotch pudding pie.  Well, not only did I make that pie, I made a gluten free pie for one of the aunts (the host of the festivities), I made a chocolate free pie for Ruth’s mother, and one other pie for a total of four pudding pies.  Needless to say, between Ruth’s father’s deep fried turkey and my pies, Thanksgiving was quite a hit.  Ruth also made some home-made hummus that went very well (I am not a big hummus person, but everyone else like it) and her brother made a blue velvet pomegranate cake that has become a family favorite.  Lots of good food, as it should be.

The next day we were back to work bright and early to try and keep up with the demands of our eccentric and stubborn lighting designer.  This was a day that I won’t forget for a while as somehow I managed to injure my left knee while, of all things, I was walking up the stairs to the stage.  I can’t remember what actually happened, or if I tripped, I just remember getting to the top of the stairs and being in pain.  My knee felt like it was popping when i tried to extend it fully and it really hurt.  I was literally floored by it.  My crew managed to get me off the stage and into the house where I spent most of the rest of the day on the floor, icing my knee.

“Why didn’t you go to the ER?” I hear you ask.  Well, it turns out that one of my crewtons is good friends with an Orthopedic Surgeon who also happens to be the head doctor at Snowbird.  We had been introduced last year and skied together, but I didn’t know at the time that he was a doctor.  In any case, we called him and I described the injury and he said that it wasn’t worth the ER trip.  Do what I was doing and follow the principles of RICE and then see him on Monday.  Of course after seeing him, he wants to get an MRI because he can’t make a definitive diagnosis based on the exam he did.  This is fine with me save for now trying to get workman’s comp to OK the scan.  Yeah, exciting.  The good news is that he thinks it is just a torn meniscus, and this could probably be fixed and healed in time for me not to miss the entire ski season.

So, now I am hobbling around the theatre not able to climb ladders and barely able to do my job.  Then we run into yet more snafus.  The network node that is our main control output for the lighting system seems to have died.  I spent a day trying to cobble the system back together into a workable state.  We did it, but it sure isn’t pretty.  I tried getting in touch with the manufacturer but they have yet to respond.  I did get int touch with the competition, who happen to have some of these nodes stashed under a desk in the factory, so they are sending me one at no charge.  I don’t know how to thank them for that.  We will hopefully be back in operation at full capacity by the end of this week.

To cap off things with the show, my grandparents came in for a visit on opening weekend.  They got to see the show on opening night, which was one of the better performances of the weekend and I got to visit with them before they head to Israel for the better part of the winter.  It was nice to get to seem them as I was not able to join my family for Thanksgiving.  In some ways, not being able to ski on account of my knee made it a lot less of a dilemma on spending time with them or skiing!  We had a good weekend together.

So, the last major thing.  This probably could deserve it’s own post and may get one in the next couple days.  I applied for a position at CalArts, they are looking for an Electrics Department Supervisor.  I didn’t want to talk about it here before I told my boss at the theatre.  I wasn’t really looking for jobs, this one just happened across my desk and it seemed like an opportunity that should not be passed up.  At the time, things were moving slow with their process, but now they actually are flying me out there for an in-person interview.  It is both exciting and nerve racking at the same time.  I think that I job like this could be a step in the right direction for me, I will certainly know more after I go there to visit.  Working in the educational arena is something that I have thought of for a while and this would probably be a great way in to that.  So, as things move along with this I will keep you all updated.

Yup, that is where I have been, stressed out, tired, injured, baking, and going to California.  By the way, what day is it?