The 2008 Presidential Election

Well, it took a while, but I've finally got Nick's documentary and subsequent SlickRock award presentation video ready! See the previous post for other details about SlickRock.

Enjoy...

Nick Goes to the Track City Finals!

Nick went to the FUSD City Finals at Sunnyside High School last week (May 21st). He ran in the 4 x 100 relay and the hurdles.

Here he is running the hurdles. He didn't win, but he was in the finals which makes him a winner in my book!

The Lizard Whisperer

Nick and I were in Petaluma last weekend. On Sunday, we went for a little adventure trip to Napa Valley and the Sugarloaf Ridge State Park. We were going to get burgers at a place called "Taylors" in St. Helena, but the line was longer than the wait to get tickets to Indiana Jones, so we went down the street to A&W/KFC and got a burger in 5 minutes! Then we drove over to the Sugarloaf Ridge State Park, just North of Sonoma. We found a nice trail to go hiking on and set-out for some adventure (not really). It was a nice hike up a trail towards Bald Mt. Here's some scenery -

We saw a deer -

We saw many lizards as we hiked along. On the way back down, I came across a particular lizard hiding along the trail. His camoflauge hid him perfectly in the dry weeds. But I was able to feel his presence with my lizard sense...

I slowly moved closer to get a better picture. As I moved in, he made no attempt to run away. I thought I would test his resolve and see if I could put my hand next to him, he still layed motionless in the grass. I thought I'd see if I could touch him, and low and behold, he layed still as I stroked his tiny little back. I called ahead to Nick, "hey come check this out!" As Nick came over, I thought I'd see if I could pick him up. I went to reach under his little lizard belly, when he made a dash through the sticks, over next to my foot. As I stood up, he jumped up onto my leg!

I had made a friend! Did he want to come home with me? Or was he just looking for a free ride down to the parking lot where he might find some little Triscut bits left behind by snacking hikers? Perhaps it was my gentle lizard whisper as I scratched his back and became one with his little lizard spirit... the force is strong with this one...

I reached down to touch him and he ran around my leg and jumped onto my other leg. I started to get a little leary that he might run up my pants and crawl under my shirt, and as if on queue, he ran down and jumped back into the grass and rustled away with the wind...

A chance encounter with a lizard? A brave adventurous lizard? A lizard whisperer and his small reptilian friend, you be the judge.

Video Editing School

Now that I'm an aspiring videographer, what have I leared in the last 2 weeks? I've learned that a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 laptop with 512 megs of RAM and a Radeon 7500 video card doesn't cut the mustard when it comes to editing video with Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0. Isn't it funny, half of you reading this are saying, "well DUH!" The other half are saying, "what did he just say?" So I'm happily accepting donations toward a nice new Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Wolfdale 3.16GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor Model BX80570E8500! Everyone who donates $1,000 will get a free video shoot and final DVD of the event of their choice (within a 50 mile radius of Fresno, California, certain restrictions apply - I reserve the right to censor, reclassify, revise, edit or reject any video shoot request not meeting my standards of acceptance).

Eventually, I'll get this SlickRock video posted!

2008 SlickRock Student Film Festival Awards

We went to the 2008 SlickRock Student Film Festival in Visalia this evening. This was the 5th annual SlickRock Film Festival (or SlickRock 'V' as the Master of Ceremonies referred to it). The first year (2004) there were 18 films from 7 schools. This year there were 220 films from 39 schools. The students made films in these categories- Foreign Language Film, Animation, Documentary, Music Video, Advertisement and Five Minute Blockbuster. These were very short films - 5 minutes was the longest. Nick made a Documentary- "The 2008 Presidential Election". He won! He made off with some nice swag - a 4GB iPod Nano, a $25 Walmart gift certificate, an In-N-Out gift certificate, a Starbucks gift certificate (they give those to middle school students?) a plaque and of course the obligatory tee shirt. More pictures and video to come!

Other Blogs of Interest

Tonight, as dad and I were chatting on the phone, he was teaching me about a feature of Google's Blogger that I hadn't yet discovered. As we were perusing through the millions of blogs in Blogger cyberspace, I stumbled upon Sean Cooney's blog. Interestingly enough, at the exact same moment I found it, dad was saying, "you could even find a blog from someone involved with the Walk to Emmaus". It was a Twilight Zone moment. Sean passed away last March. A little more than a year prior to that, he received a heart transplant. Sean was a great guy! He loved God with all his heart and wanted to please and follow Him. The first time I worked a Walk to Emmaus retreat was November, 2000. That was the first time Sean worked too. We were on the same team together. Sherrill Ankenman was our team boss. I had heard that Sean had a blog, and I even searched for it after I started blogging this March. It's interesting to read his blog. I suppose it will be there forever now, unless Google has some kind of time-out where blogs are deleted after a certain period of in-activity. Let's hope not.

New and Improved Comments!

I turned off the 'must login' option for comments, so now anyone can easily leave comments!

Talk to you later!

More Family Pictures

Here's one of my dad and my other grandfather (my dad's father). Dad says this was taken somewhere around 1952 when he was 15. They were at a duck hunting club near the town of Niles which is on the East side of the San Francisco Bay. The duck club owners were Forest Davidson and Walter Jenkel. Forest probably took the picture. Apparently Forest was into photography. Forest and Walter owned an Optometry business which is where my dad worked sometime around this period. This picture was scanned from a slide. Dad says slides were just starting to be used back then. My grandfather was about 48 years old in this picture. Dad said they would arrive at the club at 4 AM! They would get into the duck blinds (barrels with camouflage covers) and start blowing their little duck quackers when it started to get light. Then the hunting began. By about 10:00 AM, the hunting was done and it was time to go back to the club-house and commence the drinking (not Coca-cola). Dad would go out and shoot at the mud hens for practice while the men were imbibing inside. Dad sent this picture to me with this comment, "Here are the other male genes that gave you your laughter, quick wit, and delightful sense of humor!"

Baby Avocados

Somewhere in these little buds are some tasty avocados we'll be eating this next December and January! There are truck-loads of these little bud-clusters on both avocado trees right now. They are sending little bud-bits all over the yard. One year, we got over 200 avocados. I wonder what this year will bring.

Old Family Photo

Here's a shot of my dad and my grandfather just before they left to go fishing. They were somewhere near Tioga Pass in Yosemite. This must have been somewhere around 45 years ago - is that right dad? This picture was taken by my mom. Grampy knew a thing or two about fishing. Dad was probably more interested in the geology and terrain. Any ability I have to fix things, organize, plan and come up with creative solutions comes from the DNA in these two men!