Well, it has been quite a while since I posted anything.  Life got really exciting and hectic at the end of the summer.  The end of camp is always a bigger deal than you ever remember it to be, and this summer was no exception.  I had more things on my plate in the last week of camp than I anticipated, and I still have some unfinished ones that I really need to get around to, especially now that my hard drives are back in town.

Getting home from camp, I had the worst travel day that I have ever had.  It started with bad omens in that we missed being able to go to the post office to mail home one last box of stuff.  Why the post office closes early on Saturdays, who knows.  However, from there, things only went downhill.  On the drive down to the airport I managed to get in a car accident that basically totaled my parent’s truck.  Thankfully everyone was OK, but it was not a good situation (not that any car accident is).  It all started because i had to slam on the brakes as there was another accident that had occurred, and everyone was stopping.  It is probably good that I hit the car in front of me as opposed to going around it as the embankment was very steep and the probability of rolling the truck would have been high.

So, I call my parents, who rush down to pick us up and get us to the airport.  Amazingly, we get there with a little time to spare, which is a good thing.  Why?  Well, when going through security, I got stopped because something showed up when they put my carry-on through the X-ray.  Turns out that I had one of Ruth’s bags in my carry-on and it had her pocket knife in it.  Needless to say, the knife got tossed.

After getting on the first plane, things seemed to smooth out, and for the first time that I had done any major travel with Ruth, it was good.  On our connecting flight from MDW to SLC we managed to snag our own row, with no third person, so we were very happy.  However, upon our arrival back in SLC, there had to be one more thing that would go wrong.  One of our bags decided to take an extended trip around the country, so it didn’t make it to SLC that night.  In fact, when I walked into the baggage office and showed them the claim ticket, they already knew about it.  The good news is that they knew where the bag was and they managed to get it to us the next day.  For that we got a $50 travel voucher which is pretty nice.

That weekend did get better though because we had tickets to see The Lion King on Sunday night.  The Lion King is quite possibly one of my most favorite musicals ever.  The music is great, the costumes and head-pieces are spectacular, and it is just a fun show to see.  If you have never seen it, you should.  I had been lucky enough to have seen it on Broadway back when it was new, and I had always wanted to see it again and see how they would get it on tour.  Well, even slightly scaled back to fit in trucks and in smaller theatres, it was a great show.  I still have the music stuck in my head.

Come Monday it was back to work.  Possibly the first thing that my boss said after “hello” was something to the effect of: “Can you push your schedule up a week and hang the show early so we can fly our scenery?”  What was my response?  Well, in traditional me style I just said: “Of course.”  So now I had to round up a crew and get to work to be able to start a week earlier than I had planned.  That is life at the theatre, always unexpected.

So, things are finally starting to settle down and get back to a normal rhythm.  I have plans to go camping on Labor Day Weekend, and then I am helping to lead services for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and then we are doing the show.  I have to figure out my ski-pass situation and all the mundane things that come with being back in the swing of things.  Now that things are normalizing, life is pretty good.

The other thing that happened that is a major time suck is Words With Friends.  It is a iapp for iphone, ipod touch, etc. that is kinda like scrabble, and I love scrabble.  So I am totally hooked.  If you play or want to play, you can get if for free, and then look me up: Icewolf08!

On a side note, I did drop the ball on organizing Bloggerstock for August due to all that stuff I just mentioned.  So, we have pushed the August topic to September for anyone who is interested.  You can get the full scoop at the Bloggerstock Site.

It is amazing the details that you remember when things happen quickly.  The world around you can also change pretty darn fast sometimes.  That happened today on the way home from work.  Go figure that when you stay a little later than you had planned the shit hits the fan.  However, in the end, things could have turned out a lot worse than they did.

Well, you might have guessed at this point to what I am referring.  This evening, on the drive home from work I was involved in a car accident.  Fortunately none of the people involved were injured.  I was rear-ended, and I was the last of four cars to be hit.  Thankfully I had the presence of mind to keep my foot on the brake which, while may have caused a little more damage to the rear of my car, prevented me from hitting the car in front of me.

The woman driving the car in front of me was nice enough to offer to be a witness if needed so I collected her information so that she could get on her way.  At this point I hadn’t realized how many people had been involved, so when I turned around to see if the guy behind me who had hit me was OK I was quite surprised to see the two other cars.  If only I could make combo shots like that while playing pool!  The thing that really amazed me was that when i sat down to fill out the report for the police, I could remember hearing screeching tires and seeing the car behind me coming at me out of the corner of my eye in the rearview mirror.

The driver of the car that seemed to initiate the chain of events was a young girl who was quite shook up about it.  When it is your first car accident, it can be hard.  Having been in a much worse accident when i was a new driver, I think helped me to maintain a sense of balance.  Of course i have also been involved in other accidents non involving cars and I think that teaches you how to keep your cool and take care of business.  In situations like this I always remember what my boss said to me four years ago: “Equipment can be fixed, lives can’t.  So as long as no one gets hurt things are not as bad as you think.”

It is just a car, and cars can be fixed or replaced.  These are the words of wisdom that I tried to offer to this girl who was quite worried about what her parent’s would say.  Sure, it sucks and it can be a scary experience to be in an accident, but any accident that you can walk away from without a scratch on you is a good one, and all of us walked away un-injured.  Sometimes you just have to look for the positive sides of the situation.  I probably spouted off more stories than anyone wanted to hear, but I like to think that it helped a little.

So, hopefully the damage to my car is not bad.  it doesn’t look bad to me, but I am no expert.  If I can’t get everything fixed before we go to Moab next week, hopefully the shop will say that it is fine to drive that distance before getting repairs done.  We shall see.

I made my PTC stage debut today in quite an unfortunate situation.  We had a flying piece that snagged on one of our curtains as the curtain was moving and it broke one of the pick lines.  These pick lines are made of 1/8″ steel aircraft cable, so it take a pretty goodly amount of force to break them.  It seems that as our nice velvet drape was going out (up) it snagged the scenery, a lighted sign, and probably lifted it and then dropped it, breaking one of the two cables.  I think that my electric cables were probably bearing some of the load of the sign.

Well, we saw this thing swing into view and immediately stopped the show.  We cleared the cast off the stage and removed the piece of scenery.  In all it probably took less than ten minutes to do all the work, but it felt like forever.  The adrenaline was still pumping as I started to write this.

It is amazing how things slow down when you are in action mode.  I also think that it is interesting that some people feel like the shows problems can be solved with the biggest hand-held cutting tool that you can find in the shop.  All we had to do was disconnect the rigging hardware and unwire the electrics and the piece was free.  It was probably a good thing that I was mostly calling the shots with the removal of the piece or things might have ended up getting cut.

I remember getting out on stage and helping one of the ASMs get the piece on the deck.  Then there was some cheering from the audience.  Then I disconnected the electrical and rigging hardware and the crew took the piece off stage.  I capped the electrical and then they were about to take the lineset out when it finally occurred to me that the aircraft cable had broken and was just hanging on by tape.  So, we removed that as well and got the line out and clear.  The strangest thing was that I left the turnbuckle in the shop but for some reason I ended up taking the broken cable back up to the booth with me.  Stranger things have happened.

That was the excitement of the evening.  It wasn’t good excitement, but it excitement none the less.  One more show for the books I suppose.