7/10/10

We all must learn to face our failures in life.  It's not an easy thing to do, but it builds character.  As I write to you this evening, it's quite clear that there's no freaking way I'm going to watch every James Bond movie before my vacation is over.  One more in a long list of failures, I reckon.  Nothing on the agenda for tonight though, so at least I might be able to scratch one or two off the list.

7/9/10

I received a postcard from Con-way Truckload today, thanking me for my four years of service.  I lol'd.  A nice enough gesture, I suppose, but I've never been one to put much stock in symbolic acts of whateverness.  I do a job and they pay me for it... except when they don't... and so on... and so forth.  But, you know, it's a really pretty postcard.

I also received a picture message from my sister today.  This one made me laugh as well, but for a better reason.

That's my little nephew Darek.  Uncle Joe got him a bunch of musical instruments for his birthday.  (Rule of thumb when buying gifts for kids - make sure the parents will be annoyed.)  Instead of tapping on the little drum with his hand, Darek wanted to bang it with a stick.  No drumsticks were included with the kit though.  You can see from the little hole in the side that it's a handheld deal.  I had a wire hanger with a cardboard cross member lying in the back of my car, so that cardboard tube became a pair of drumsticks.  Apparently the little guy was the big star today at his sister's soccer practice.  "One, two, ten!" he would shout, then unload on the drum.  Pretty funny stuff.

My Tigers beat the Twinkies tonight, staying on top of the division for at least another day, so the evening was a good one.  I have some stuff to do early tomorrow though, so I'm not too pleased about that part of the deal.  Midnight is supposed to be the time when things start to get fun.  Now it looks like I had better get a little sleep.  Boo.

7/8/10

Coming into this evening, I had two questions - Have 30% of this blog's readers really been arrested and would anything useful be accomplished today?  Obviously I have no way of knowing if you degenerates are voting accurately about your criminal histories, but yes, something useful was accomplished today.

As I went to bed last night, my 'director's cut' of the holiday fireworks show was being uploaded to YouTube.  I had taken out all of the dead spots and found that I had twelve minutes of video.  Since YouTube videos are restricted to ten minutes, I then had to cut some actual fireworks footage in order to get in under the limit.  I did my best though, and the result was pretty solid.

The other issue to address was the soundtrack.  As much as I may have laughed at my sister's running commentary, it didn't make for very good video viewing.  People don't watch fireworks in hopes that my little nephew might pull down his pants and pee on the grass.  That's not how it works.  So I spent some time producing a better audio track to accompany the video.  I started with the Dropkick Murphys playing Scotland the Brave on the pipes and other accompanying instruments.  Then I transitioned into the Murphys performing Heroes from Our Past.  That song sums up Independence Day as well as any other that I've heard.  Next in the lineup was Van Halen's Right Now.  I used the instrumental portion because I liked the sound of it, seemingly building and building but never really requiring a payoff.  The final audio track was Lee Greenwood performing God Bless the USA.  Call it hokie if you must.  I tend to agree with you.  There's not an American holiday that can be experienced without that song playing somewhere in the background.  Be that as it may, I like the song.  So it went in the final position of my fireworks soundtrack.

When I woke this morning, I looked at my computer and saw that my video had finished uploading.  I also saw that I had violated someone's copyright.  Even relatively obscure music, used without any profit potential, mangled and mixed to suit a specific purpose (like a family fireworks show), is apparently restricted.  Fucking stupid.  The song that triggered the copyright violation?  God Bless the USA.  Yeah, no shit.  You can't wipe your ass on the 4th of July without hearing that song, but my video was somehow a problem.  Go figure.

Given the amount of time that I had spent editing the video and getting it posted, I was quite disturbed at the thought of starting over again.  Instead, since most music that I own has probably been subject to one copyright or another, I decided to take the easy way out and use one of YouTube's licensed audio tracks.  By "easy way out," of course, I mean "pain in the ass."  Once I narrowed the song choices down to those that would fit my ten minute video, I found that each of them sucked ass.  I listened to song after song after song.  Some sucked fat sweaty hairy ass while others were less so, but each of them did indeed suck ass.  I picked the most appropriate song that I could find in the authorized library.  Here you go, RIAA... dickheads...



There was a more substantial accomplishment today as well, but you're going to have to wait for the scoop on that one. Some people have decided to try and play hardball with me. Hardball is my game, as luck would have it, so the game shall be played. I'll have more for you when the time is right.

My buddy and I packed a cooler with beer this evening and headed to the drive-in. Some spy movie starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz was paired up the The A-Team. I didn't expect much out of either flick, so I wasn't disappointed in either flick.  Funny how that works.  I am pretty pissed about B.A. being a pacifist, but that's a discussion for another time, I think.  Good night.

7/7/10

Nothing was accomplished today.  Not a single damned thing.  And you know what?  I'm pretty happy about it.  My vacations tend to involve a little too much of the old hustle and bustle.  Since I still have almost a week until I rejoin the ranks of you working stiffs, I'm more than content to do as little as possible for now.  No more road trips.  No more errands to run.  None of it.  Just pure, unadulterated laziness.

7/6/10

Movies are an interesting part of the fabric of my life.  I've always enjoyed watching them but I've never made much of an effort to do so.  Most recently, there's the case of the 007 saga.  I still intend to watch each of the movies (including the old Casino Royale) before I leave home.  Yet, whenever it looks like I may have some time to kill, I can't seem to convince myself to sit still for two hours and watch the next one on the list.  If I happened to find myself inadvertently looking at a television set though, I would watch any of them without hesitation, and probably would enjoy it.

After a day that found me doing very little other than basking in the comfort of my air-conditioned home, I headed over to the CTL terminal and retrieved a laundry basket from my truck.  On the way back, I swung by the local supermarket and grabbed a few groceries.  Then I was back home and wondering what to do.  Ballgame at 7pm.  Clock says 5pm.  Might as well watch a movie then.

My youngest brother had mentioned to me that Hot Tub Time Machine was quite funny.  As a self-appointed connoisseur of humor, I had my doubts.  I fired up my DVD player and watched it anyway though.  Assuming that there were any memorable lines, I didn't want to be left out of the loop.  One of the old favorite pastimes that my brothers and I share is the extemporaneous exchange of funny movie quotes.  Each of us has quite a mental library from which to draw.  Unfortunately there were no memorable lines today and the movie wasn't all that funny.  Win some, lose some.

After the movie was over, I found a video stream for the Tigers game.  I set it up and everything looked fine during the pregame show and the commercials.  Then, once the game began, my internet connection went to shit and I wound up listening on the radio.  Luckily I had bought beer and food before returning home, so I wasn't at all disappointed by listening to the game (a riveting victory) and working on some other things.

Then the ballgame was over and it was time to find something else.  My buddy went to his closet and returned with a DVD to watch.  The Big Lebowski.  No matter how many hundreds of times I see that one, I can always watch it once more.  Yet I don't ever think to pop it into the DVD player and watch it.  Just one of those things, I suppose.  "I don't know about you but I take comfort in that. It's good knowin' he's out there. The Dude. Takin' 'er easy for all us sinners."

There's nothing particular on the agenda for tomorrow, so I'm free to spend whatever is left of tonight trying to come up with a presentable video of my fireworks from Independence Day.  The story goes as follows: My sister was trying to take pictures of the fireworks as they went off, using her cell phone.  She couldn't ever time the photos properly to coincide with the explosions.  Then she decided simply to start recording video and held her phone in the air, pointed at the part of the sky where the explosions were occurring.

The resulting video footage lasted sixteen and a half minutes.  Our entire show had taken somewhere in the nighborhood of twenty-five minutes, so one might conclude that my sister missed the first five or ten minutes as she was trying all of the still photo options.  While we were still up north, I managed to send the raw 3gp video file from her phone to my phone via bluetooth.  (The file was much too large to use as an e-mail attachment or a text message.)  Then, after I got home, I couldn't find the USB cable for my phone, so I had to send the file to my old computer again via bluetooth.  (No bluetooth on my new computer for some reason.)  This way I was able to get onto a USB flash drive and ultimately onto my current computer.

The process of e-mailing the video to everyone was another pain in the ass.  I use free e-mail services, so my attachment sizes are limited.  This meant that I had to split the video into four parts and send four e-mails.  Then, in case anyone wanted the actual raw video file, I had to put it into a three-part zip archive and send a few more e-mails.  Then, in order to come up with something that would be workable for internet posting, I had to do some editing.  I trimmed the fat and got the video under ten minutes in length, making it suitable for YouTube.  I toned down the volume of my sister's running commentary, during which we hear discussions about my little nephew peeing in the grass and how "fucking pissed" the cows were.  And I added a couple of songs to fill in the quiet that had been created by lowering the main track's volume.

I'm still working on getting an exported file of decent quality that I can post to the web. Until then, the four parts of the original video (in wmv format), complete with dead air time and my sister's goofy audio input, can be found here, here, here, and here.  I'm not sure exactly how I inherited the role of A/V editor here, but I'm not too thrilled about it.

7/5/10

I think that the smartest decision I've made lately was telling my employers that I won't be back until the middle of next week.  The good old 'vacation after the vacation' should come in very handy.  As tends to be the case after a long weekend of carousing and so forth, I'm pretty worn out.

After a shaky few hours of sleep this morning, it was time to head back to the farm where we launched last night's fireworks show.  It was too dark to clean up the mess last night, so my brothers and I took care of it this morning.  Then we spent a few minutes cleaning up around my parents' house.  Then, after a cold shower failed to prevent any further sweating, it was time for me to drag my ass back home.  A man can only endure a lack of air conditioning for so long.

Today's drive back down was a little less congested than Friday's northbound trip had been.  There was some heavy traffic going through the first few little towns along the way, but everything was smooth once I got to the freeway.  Good deal.

Now I'm going to try the exceedingly difficult task of going to bed before 1am.  I'd kinda like to get a few things accomplished tomorrow, so a full night's rest would do some good.

7/4/10

You already know the topic that will comprise most of tonight's blog post.

That's fourteen 200g cakes, fourteen 500g cakes, and fourteen 3" mortars.  My sister shot some rather amusing video that I'll be able to pass along once I have the chance to get it transferred, but for now you'll just have to take my word for it.  More accurately put, you'll have to take one word for it - phenomenal.

You'll notice that Lake Huron is nowhere to be seen in the picture above.  This part of the deal didn't occur without a bit of controversy.  After the family headed out this afternoon for a parade and a visit to the beach, neither of which held any interest for me, I managed to catch a nice nap.  When you go to bed for the night at 5:30am, an afternoon nap on the next day is always a good thing.  After they returned, my youngest brother and I headed over to my aunt's place to scope out the lay of the land.  We had a lot of work to do in order to get the fireworks ready, so we needed to have an idea of what we would be facing.

My aunt has a strip of property that runs right down to the waterfront.  There's an area that once was part of the lake, but now is mostly cattails and mud.  The geologists tell us that the earth has been springing back since the glaciers receded, so the lowlands are constantly rising and forcing more water out into the oceans.  Al Gore tells us that our cars and deodorant are the cause, but either way, the lake is smaller than it once was.  That's a fact.  Our hope was that we would be able to set up the fireworks on the dry lake bed.  After today's scouting session, I had to nix this idea.  There was no solid ground over which my brother and I would be able to walk.  Everything was swampy and inconsistent.  It would be impossible for us to get out there and set up the display.

Since we wouldn't be able to get out into the cattails, we were forced to look for a launching spot back on shore.  My aunt's lake frontage is rather narrow, but the house next door is unoccupied, leaving some extra space in which to work.  We examined the area from various angles and tried to figure out how we could make it happen.  In conclusion - we could not make it happen.  There were tall trees overhanging the area and there were no wide open spaces.

Since my aunt had been looking forward to our visit this evening, she was rather disappointed to hear that we would be forced to seek another location.  In the end, this other location turned out to be a farm that is owned by one of my father's drinking buddies.  Given that this would be the venue, in place of her sister's house, my mother was less than pleased.  What are you gonna do though?  I do get a kick out of fire and explosions and such, but I'm not about to put people in unnecessary danger.  I needed a lot of space and the farm provided a lot of space.  End of discussion.

My brother and I had a combined zero years of experience in the pyrotechnic field before today.  We had a lot of fireworks though and a bunch of people who wanted to see them explode.  We loaded three big sheets of plywood into our father's truck and piled the fireworks on top, then headed over to Tony's farm.  We had a general idea of how we wanted to organize the show, so we divided the fireworks into three groups and then got to work with the fuses.  We had some cannon fuse that burned very slowly.  We had some Perfect Fuse™ that burned at a quick but steady pace.  And we had some quick-burning fuse that covered three feet in less than a second.  A foot of this one here, eighteen inches of that one there... we set up what we hoped would be an entertaining display.

After heading back over to my parents' place and waiting for nightfall, it was time to haul everyone over to the farm and see the show.  My brother simply had to light one fuse, walk away, and hope for the best.  If we had done a good enough job of wiring everything, then the single main fuse would proceed steadily through the three firing stations and everyone would have a good time.  We hoped that this would be the case but we really didn't know for sure.  Neither of us had ever tried such a task before tonight.

After about a minute of waiting for the initial segment of cannon fuse to reach the first cake, we saw our first few mortars heading into the sky.  One after another, the segments of fuse worked exactly as we had intended - sometimes picking up the pace and sometimes slowing it down.  Once the final barrage had exploded and received a round of applause, we each looked at each other with a grin of satisfaction.  Flawless performance.  First try.  Feels pretty good man, I can't deny it.

Of course I should take at least a moment now and recall the meaning of the "bombs bursting in air" aspect of this holiday.  Still an impressive story to me, no matter how many years go by and no matter how twisted my country's perspective becomes.  Happy Independence Day everyone.