The Rest of October
Monday, 10-20-2003: Did some updating on my home renovations page tonight. There’s some new stuff on the Misc Projects page and my Office / Room page. Not much else to write about since I didn’t do much. So instead you should read these journals:
Stella’s Terra Join Stella and her journey to a sustainable lifestyle. This is a local friend of mine who writes in her journal just about every day. She’s very into saving all types of resources and her journal is quite inspiring to me, even if I’m not into that kind of thing quite as much as her. There’s lots of good ideas on this page if you want to save on every day expenses.
The Palatable Adventures of Mister Snee This is a journal that I would suggest taking a few days off of work and/or school so you can sit and read it for days at a time. There’s some truly good stuff in Snee’s brilliant daily rants.
Thursday, 10-23-2003: Worked, picked up the kids from school, mowed the lawn.
Friday, 10-24-2003: Me and Tricia had some Wendy’s for supper. Rented Scary Movie 1 & 2 and watched them both. Colleen took Emily to the dentist today so she either missed school or was late getting there. She had 2 cavities.
Saturday, 10-25-2003:
Today we went to the Wood River Holloween parade. Emily actually got to be in it with her girlscout troop, while me and Payton hung out in downtown Wood River scrounging for the candy that was thrown at us. The kids had fun but the parade sucked. There were hardly any cool floats this year, it was just fire trucks, police cars and regular cars. There were a few miscellaneous creative things, but 97.4% of the parade was pretty lame. Seems like everyone in the parade put very little effort into it. But at least we got a lot of free candy out of it. Alton’s parade next week will be better. The picture to the left is Payton waiting for the parade to begin. You’ll notice that not only was it a sucky parade, it was also pretty damned cold outside. The picture on the right is Emily in her witch costume. (Her arms are still wet from makeup.)
Oh yeah…I missed out on taking a priceless picture. As the parade was just getting started they had motorcycle cops coming through first to clear the road. They were probably going 5 MPH. But the first motorcycle cop was fumbling with his Nextel cellular phone while trying to ride his motorcycle at the same time. I tried to get a picture of it but my digital camera didn’t boot up quickly enough. I could have had a picture of a cop talking on a cell phone while riding a motorcycle! Damn digital, I should go back to 35mm. I could have had a lot of fun with that picture on notla.com.
Sunday, 10-26-2003: Got bored today so as usual I packed up all my camera stuff and went for a drive. This time I didn’t nearly get arrested. Instead I went to downtown Alton and took a lot of pictures. I ended up attempted to do a panoramic view of downtown from across the Mississippi. Here’s how it looks so far. I know the sky looks horrible because I tried to cut and paste more sky into the blank parts. I did the same thing to the water and it looks sort of okay. This version is 3000 pixels by 250 pixels. The original is something like 9000 x 800. So you don’t see as much detail. Here’s a 1908 panoramic view of Alton to compare it with. It’s a slightly different viewpoint. And here’s a few pictures of Alton that I took last year.
Last night was daylight savings which pissed me off because we gained an hour of sleep but I didn’t have anything to do so I go to sleep in anyway. So it was completely wasted on me. In 6 months when we lose an hour, it’ll probably happen on a morning that I have to get up at 6am for some reason. When I used to work the night shift in convenience stores, if daylight savings happened during your shift, you would get paid for an extra hour or you would lose an hour, depending on what season it was. I always thought that was bullshit. They should pay you for the hours you work, not dock an hour from your pay because you happened to work on daylight savings night. Of course it never bothered me because I just stole an hour of pay from the register to make up for it.
Monday, 10-27-2003: EvilCal arrived at my house from Texas at about 1:00am last night. We did some driving around today after I worked for awhile. We got some more footage filmed for the next Elephant & Bird episode which we hope to finish sometime this week. Here’s a couple of pictures that I took:
The first one was taken at Sears. I was busy changing a laptop display computer to scroll “This computer is $400 cheaper at Best Buy” on the screensaver while EvilCal was standing nearby. An old man walks up to EvilCal and asks him if he works there. EvilCal replies that he does and spends about 5 minutes helping the old man pick out some batteries or tapes or something. EvilCal kept suggesting that the internet would have them cheaper than Sears. I blew his cover by walking over and taking a picture. In the 2nd picture, that’s Tricia and EvilCal ordering some food at Jack in the Box.
Thursday, 10-30-2003: Got the kids to school, then worked for awhile in the morning. After that me and Cal did some more work on E&B #2. Later in the evening we took the kids (along with Casey, a neighbor kid) trick or treating for about an hour and then to East Alton’s Holloween parade. Earlier in the week we got the bright idea of printing up a ton of flyers promoting PLA and notla.com to hand out at the parades. So far I’ve printed 1,100 of them. I wasn’t able to participate in handing them out since I was with the kids, but Cal went a little nuts, jumping around, handing papers to people and screaming things like, “Do you like paper? Would you like a paper?? Screw this candy they’re throwing, take a paper instead!” The response was pretty good, a lot of people seemed to be pretty excited about taking our papers. Cal walked about 1/4 of the parade and gave the flyers to everyone. Tomorrow we’ll probably both do the Alton parade since I don’t have the kids. Hold your mouse over the pictures for descriptions, click on the pictures for bigger pictures.
Friday, 10-31-2003: Around 6:00pm, Cal and I packed my backpack full of cameras, flyers and costumes and headed towards downtown Alton. Tricia called and told me how bad the traffic was so I managed to avoid it all by taking a huge loop around the city and approaching downtown through a bunch of residential areas. We parked a few blocks away from Broadway (the parade route) and walked towards the crowds. We asked a food vendor where the parade would start and she told us it started by the police station which was about a mile or 2 down the street. Fuck. We’re an hour early so we start hiking towards the police station.
Slightly over an hour later, we’re in front of Fast Eddie’s (next to the police station) and waiting for the parade to start. When it finally starts, we put on our costumes and make our way towards the parade. We’re immediately nervous about the number of cops there are patroling along with the parade. So we decide to wait for a few minutes, hoping the cop action will die down a little as the parade progresses. It doesn’t. We finally decide to give up because we don’t want to get arrested. Minutes later, Cal changes his mind, grabs a stack of flyers and runs at the crowd screaming WHO WANTS SOME OF MY PAPERS?!? to everyone as I run along the sidewalk with a video camera, taping it all.
In the end, Cal papers pretty much the entire length of the parade, getting the crowds really excited about taking the flyers. We got about 40 minutes of video during the whole thing which we’ve already started editing and I’ll probably post on here once it’s finished. The cops didn’t seem to care about Cal at all. In fact, you can see in that last picture Cal is right next to a cop and he’s screaming his head off. In the video, you see Cal yell to that cop “DO YOU WANT A PA–” and then he realizes it’s a cop and turns away to keep offering them to the crowd. We also managed to get a downtown coffee shop to take our remaining flyers and put them on the newsrack for people to take. So it ended up being quite a productive and fun evening.