The Grotto

The Grotto

Lazy Sunday afternoon, Bick was sweeping the porch as I was trying to make sense of the clouds. Tick tock went the rickety tickety clickety click clack clock. "Dude for reals, we gotta motivate. Life's a wasting, we gotta grab on fight the coming of the nightchya know." Pack up the Focus hit the trail and away we go. We went on down to Malibu's infamous (really infamous?) g-r-o-t-t-o. Much to my chagrine there were no bunnies. Couldn't find any Irish either. What kind of grotto is this? Regardless we had a blast freeclimbing and splunking around in the dark. It was groovy fo' so'. Tickety clickety click clack clickety and along you go yo-yo yah yippety whippety ding dang diggity do da day. Right!

Anthropologue Extrodinaire des Polynésie Française.

La lumière d'en haut.

Sauvez-moi por favor!

Guerrier d'ombres.

Repose dans l'obscurité.

Bielles claires.

Dang Tooth

Dang Tooth

So I had this infection a ways back in some of the screws that hold my pretty face all together. We treated the infection aggressively and I didn't really think much of it. A few weeks later I had this gnarly pain in my teeth and my gum's were bleeding like a cheap B horror movie. Back to the oral & maxillofacial surgeon I go only to find that the infection had led to a pretty sever abscess. It just so happened at that time that I was in the midst of planning to summit Telescope Peak in Death Valley from the western reaches-- an attempt that not many in recent memory had tried. Oh yah and we were aiming on doing all of this in the dead of winter! Needless to say I really didn't feel comfortable having a few teeth drill out right before leaving. Who could say how I would react at 11,000 feet in sub-freezing temperatures with a new hole in my mouth. So I put it on the back burner.

Life as you would have rolled on. I put the whole abscess thingy out of my mind as much as possible. Things rolled on. It was on my to-do list. You know right between learning how to yodel and standing on my head and farting confetti. Well unfortunately for me this dang tooth had other ideas. I went for a little hike last weekend to stretch the legs. About half way through I slipped in the middle of a scree field and went slip sliding away down into the canyon. It was no big deal really except that I had this dull pain in my jaw for the rest of the hike. By the next morning that dull pain was excruciating. Out came the whiskey and Advil-- its an old home remedy I swear by. I figured things would get better in a few days or so. I just had to put on a brave face and weather the storm.

Needless to say the storm was never weathered. Four days later I was delirious with pain, so much so in fact I had vision of pulling out the stupid thing myself. I would ply it around with my fingers and tell myself I could do it. Fortunately I am a wimp at heart and never went through with it. Instead I scheduled an emergency extraction & bone graft. Once I actually got into the surgeon's office things pretty much went fairly smoothly. Out came the tooth without much of a fight and a follow-up visit to re-discuss the bone graft was scheduled. You see I couldn't do everything then and there because in a few days I am taking off once again for Telescope Peak in the winter and who the crap knows how a bloody bone graft will do at 11,000 feet and sub-freezing temperatures. That dumb graft is however on my to-do list...(grin).

This is what a periodontal abscess that festers in the supporting bone and
tissue structures of the teeth looks like after 13 months lingering.



**For some rad shots of the whole ordeal check out Bick's blog here. The oral surgeon was cool with it so he was able to shoot the whole play by play for those of you who'd like to see me suffer!

Log & Capture

Log & Capture


Log and capture, capture and log-- this was my lot for the last five weeks. One of the biggest reason why I am taking this house-broken break is to get a decent understanding of everything I have shot in the last ten months. That means pulling every tape into the computer and making detailed notes of what I have, what I don't have, what I need to re-shoot, and where I want to go with this whole mess. I have a little over 41 hours of video tape that I have never really had the opportunity to scrutinize. I also have a little over 5,000 still images to go through. This does not include another 12,000 give or take just for time lapses.

It is a big ball of wax. I knew before I got too far along I absolutely had to take an account of where I stood. So five weeks into the preliminary stage of post-production I have captured 10 hours of video into the computer and I have edited the still images down to about 500. Hopefully by the first week of December I will have all the video into the computer and have the images edited down to a more manageable 200 give or take. There is still so much more to do and so little time! At least an idea is starting to take form and I am most certainly in a much better place now in terms of piecing all this together.

10 Hours down & 31 to go

On the Road

On the Road
(with Obama?!? Heck yah!)

Tomorrow will prove to be an historic day in this nation's infancy. This of course signals the perfect opportunity for political tomfoolery. Y'all know I am always up for yanking someone's chain in grandiose style. So I have a boss as many of us do. He is much more then a boss admittedly, he is the campus President, the grand pooba, the high faluten, the end all be all really, and certainly a man not to be trifled with. Now I suppose none of you will really get this, it being an inside joke and all. And you see if you were in on the joke is that this particular campus president is rather proper. Not only is he rather proper in the stiff upper lip British sense but he is quite passionate about his propriety and indeed quite conservative. Conservative enough that I of course see eye to eye on most of his opinions. Conservative enough even that his office is appointed rather richly with paintings and portraits of GOP greats such as Reagan and Nixon and dare I say Ms. Olympia (see also Senator R-Maine, close friend). Conservative enough that he would never flaunt his affiliations nor be crass enough to ever wear his opinions on his sleeve (much less the bumper of his car).

That having been said I decided a few months ago to have a little harmless fun. A really interesting tid bit that know one would ever know about our president is that he is a huge Bing Crosby fan, not only that but I believe he once sang with the Bing Crosby orchestra. He has a beloved license plate holder that reads "On the Road with Bing Crosby." And so a plan was hatched. A tried in the cloth republican, our president would never ever consider voting for Obama, ever. I decided to create a pro-Obama bumper sticker and slap it on the big black Caddy. This morn we pulled off the coup!

Most people I work with never know when I am in the office or not. I sort of keep to myself. No one would ever expect the quiet hippy in the corner. (Its the quiet ones you have to look out for you know.) As of yet he still has no idea it was me. My only concern is that he does NOT read my blog...

Don't be afraid to be a part of history. Go vote!