Whoa!

That line in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure says it all. Not sure where I went for the last few months... whoa! Now THAT was a strange trip...

Hoping that the phone booth lands close to home this time. More soon...

Partly foggy

The fog is finally beginning to lift. Stay tuned for more exciting weather news.

Passages

It would be an understatement to say that it's been a completely transformational - and thoroughly challenging - experience since Ian joined us. It's exposed the hidden, revealed the true and shaken many of my foundations. I've got so many emotions swirling around in my head that I think I'll take a break from blogging for awhile and just journal. It may be just a week or a month, or longer. Not sure. Hope to see you on the other side.

Power Lunch

I was on national television today.

OK, so I wasn't really on television, I just "happened" to walk in the background as the broadcaster for the CNBC financial show Power Lunch was on the air.

As I mentioned before, I often pop over to the Mall of America to sit in the bookstore for my lunch break and to people watch. There is usually some kind of performance or presentation on the main stage. Don Johnson of Miami Vice fame once threw me a T-shirt as I walked past him on his publicity tour. Last week they were shooting a commercial there for shoe inserts.

I knew one of the guys on the crew, so we chatted a bit. The freelance community in this town is a tight-knot bunch, and our company uses a lot of them for commercials, promotionals, or training videos.

The gaffer (lighting electrician) at the Mall has worked on quite a few films as well. He owns the actual wood chipper used in the last scene of Fargo (I wonder how he got all the "blood" out of it). He likes to tell me stories about how awkward it was when Keanu Reeves and Cameron Diaz kiss in Feeling Minnesota or how Kathy Bates' posterior is much bigger in real life. He worked the camera dolly on About Schmidt. Or how Tim Allen hogged the props after the shoot on Joe Somebody, which a lot of other actors give away to the crew.

So where am I going with this? I don't know. But as I approach 40 in a few months, I have noticed on substantial change in my view on filmmaking. When I used to stumble onto a film or video set, like I did today and last week at the Mall, I used to get really excited.

Now I just look at all the equipment and think to myself, "That must have been really heavy to set up."

Now I've gone and done it

Pictured on the left is the actual 4-foot longboard that I bought on Craigslist last night. Fine. I've thrown in the towel. I'm in the middle of a full-blown mid-life crisis. But at least I'm not cruising Used Car lots, sitting behind the wheel of blindingly red sports cars, right? Or hitting on the bewildered waitress at our Applebee's restaurant? Cut me a little slack.

And you know what? It really does work, this reverting to your youth thing! Silvi and I drove out to buy the skateboard last night from a guy who moved here from California. It was a dripping wet humid night after a big thunderstorm, just like the ones in Florida when I was young and thin and could ride my skateboard around the deck of our pool for hours in a hundred percent humidity. As Silvi and I drove home in the dark, the music up loud, windows down (out of necessity; air conditioner is on the fritz), the longboard in the front seat next to me, there were exactly three whole minutes, the length of a song, when I felt exactly how I felt on those warm Florida nights.

(For those not familiar with soulboarding, check out this video on Youtube. Or you can look for the fat guy lying in the grass gasping for breath down at Lake Harriet.)