Evan’s day care had an Easter Egg hunt on Friday, though it was held indoors since we had nasty storms blow through on Thursday night (of which more in a bit). What a haul! And what the heck is some of this stuff? Eggs with little cars in them? Eggs with Play-Doh in them? Man. It’s almost becoming a cliche at this point, but they didn’t have stuff like that when I was his age – at least not in Easter Egg form!
The tornado sirens sounded across Crawford County on Thursday night although the portion of the county that was really getting hammered amounted to one small corner. I like the National Weather Service’s attempt to switch over to a warning system that draws out hurricane-forecasting-style probability cones/corridors, but the problem is that the local emergency infrastructure – much of which is automated – still fixates on county-wide warnings. There was no reason for the sirens to be going off in Alma for a storm that was racing through Figure Five. Part of me – the part of me that lived through the 1996 tornado in Fort Smith – thinks “better safe than sorry,” but the other part of me – the part that’s seen how the public digests the products (and sometimes unintentional byproducts) of the local media – worries that we could be in for a “boy who cried wolf” effect if they fire off the sirens at the drop of a hat. I’ve compared life in tornado alley in tornado season to combat readiness before, and it’s an apt analogy: the last thing we need is for people who could be in harm’s way to start blowing off warnings.
And sometimes, you get one so big the warning doesn’t help. There were three deaths in Mena, south of Fort Smith, whose downtown was all but completely destroyed. There are buildings gone. There are people gone. That situation still hits a bit close to home for my memories of ’96.
As for me, it’s 10:30pm on the night before OEGE, and by all rights I should be in bed, but of course I’m still working on the Loop. The Loop is an endlessly looping DVD that runs all day at my booth at these shows. It runs through clips from each of the DVD projects that I’m selling copies of, and it’s pieced together a little bit like a puzzle: the Loop turned out, this year, to be almost as much of a prodution number as the DVDs I’m actually selling copies of! It’s also a delicate balancing act: I’m selling two DVDs released this year as well as flogging copies of a DVD I released a year ago…how much of the old one do I show vs. clips from the new ones? Without making the Loop so long that I’m still working on it a week after the show?
Also within the Loop are two things that are basically full-fledged TV spots: one for the Brown Box collection (both volumes of Phosphor Dot Fossils in one case) and one for theLogBook.com itself. I’m very happy with the latter – it’s kind of neat. I’ll post it sometime next week when I’ve recovered from the show.
Speaking of the show, I’ve rented some wheels to get me to OKC and back; it’s a nice black Chevy HHR which I’ve been told gets amazing gas mileage (i.e. Dallas and back with only one refuel). It has the room for everything I’m bringing – a lot of that space is taken up by TV screens and Sparky* to say nothing of the huge heapin’ boxes of DVDs and games I’m taking to sell – and it’s comfy. I’m just not sure my car, which has been acting up lately, would’ve been up for this trip – and in any case, I wouldn’t want to wind up on the side of the road in BFE, Oklahoma trying to play the odds on it surviving. So a reasonably cheap weekend rental it is. Nice little car – I’m so not used to a vehicle with some real “oomph” to the accelerator. 😆
Olivia went to the vet on Friday; we’ve noticed her losing weight and not showing much interest in food. She used to be a nicely rounded little puffball and now it just seems like she’s wasting away. She’s also been pooping where she’s not supposed to (mainly dirty clothes left laying around); the other day I cleaned up a fresh “incident” and noticed a little bit of blood in the stool that I was cleaning up. I instantly thought “worms” and the vet agreed. She’s now been “wormed,” and Oberon and Xena both got some medicine of their own as a precaution.
Anyway, I’m working on the Loop now – the Avid’s part of making the thing is finished, and I’ve shut it down. It’s all down to my Dell PC, which I used for authoring. Hopefully it all looks and sounds sharp, and the disc can burn while I’m sleeping. I’m going to get up at 5 and get out the door – car’s already loaded up. Dunno if God’s gonna be my co-pilot or if caffiene is.
One last note – I was perusing the excellent Bear McCreary Battlestar Blog, written on a detailed, episode-by-episode basis by the man himself, accessible to everyone from serious music scholars to plain old film music fans like me who couldn’t sight-read music manuscript to save their mortal souls. Looks like this’ll be a great year if you like some Battlestar music: McCreary is scoring both the pilot and series of Caprica, with the music from the DVD release of the pilot out in May, the BSG season 4 soundtrack out in June/July, and a CD of the music from Razor and The Plan due this fall (around the same time as The Plan lands on DVD, I’d reckon). Best news of the batch? The season 4 soundtrack will be 2 CDs, following the lead from the excellent Lost season 3 soundtrack: highlights across the entire season on disc 1, and the full, unedited, every-note-recorded score for the series finale Daybreak on disc 2. I’ve occasionally expressed reservations about other aspects of Galactica, but the music is brilliant – it’s one aspect of the show that’s absolutely unassailable, right up there with the two lead actors’ performances. I’ll eagerly add these releases to my “stuff I’m looking forward to in 2009” list.
Okay, off to finish up. I’ve got heaps of DVDs and games to sell tomorrow (at ridiculously reasonable prices – there are some find-of-the-year prices on truly rare items, simply because I hope to find these games a better home where someone’s got time to play ’em properly), plus I’ll have my original Magnavox Odyssey and a genuine imported Nintendo Famicom set up for play and display, complete with their original packaging and – you guessed it – the ever-popular, informative and awfully professional looking PDF signage. Drop by and say howdy.
P.S. Extra special thanks to Evan’s aunt and uncle for looking after him tonight and tomorrow (one of his first overnight trips away from home!). I bet his cousin Katie will enjoy running the little guy ragged. 😆
+ There are no comments
Add yours