Hello Again

It's been a while, I know. Not a lot going on right now. My mother had to have stomach surgery Friday. I'll spare you the details — and not just because I don't entirely understand them. My father has an incredible knack for updating me on the workings — or lack thereof — of my mother's digestive system precisely when I'm about to engage my own.

Trust me, this is not the kind of stuff you want to hear about when you're eating.

She got out of bed yesterday for the first time since the operation. She's still on heavy painkillers, as I would be too if someone cut open my abdomen and rearranged its contents, so conversations with her jump even more randomly from one topic to the next than usual.

My mother may know how to use the word segue in a sentence but I doubt that she has ever used one between sentences — no matter how unrelated they are.

I did cover two high school state softball championship games last week. There are six classes, each crowns its own champion. I've got the video loaded into the computer and just need to write and edit that before shipping it off. Deadline is next Monday.

I got the weightlifting story for the same show finished and sent off last week. The producers asked if I wanted to cover some of the baseball finals in Port St. Lucie. Unfortunately, Port St. Lucie is a three-hour drive away from me. That's just too far.

My decision to send my regrets was reinforced while covering the softball games. The two games were supposed to happen on Thursday but the second one was rain delayed and continued the following morning. Had that happened covering baseball on the other side of the state, any money I would have made would have evaporated.

I have collected all the material needed to complete my second (and final) demo family story for my personal documentary business. I've got three hours of interviews to transcribe for that.

I scanned more than 100 family photos. I made the file name for each a label of its contents and approximate date, e.g. "1964-BobKathyWedding.jpg" to help me keep track of them. I did this with the scans of my own family's photos and it helped greatly. The method should come in even more handy for people not related to me, though now that I've heard their life stories, I can't say I don't know them.

I put an ad on craigslist for my photography site. My website stat counter tells me that the ad has drawn a handful of people to the site. I've gotten a couple of referrals from a woman with whom I did one of my practice shoots. We'll see if either of those pans out.