Mister Herman's Photoblog

We apologize for the inconvenience

2008-03-20T08:30:00.002-04:00

Most to be sorry for lacking of new. photos

Having take many picture many.

No post.

poop head am.

Da Baby

2006-07-30T10:52:00.000-04:00

Speakin' of kids growing up fast... this is our friend Beth's baby, Ashley Nicole. We got to keep her for a weekend recently as kind of an early taste of parenthood.

It's an aquired taste, kinda bittersweet but with occasional chunks of tasty nougat. I could probably get used to it.

Empty Nest Syndrome

2006-05-10T09:56:00.000-04:00

Kids these days grow up SO soon.

Watch the birdy!

2006-05-09T09:56:00.000-04:00

At the rate these things are growing, this'll be an empty nest by mid week.

Seconds after this photo was snapped, I was hassled by a loud and angry mama bird and once again had to flee for my very life.

Robins & Co. (a.k.a. "Hideous Beauty")

2006-05-05T09:52:00.000-04:00

More fun with the birdies in our tree.

The other afternoon, I glanced out the kitchen window and saw that Mom & Dad Robin had fled the nest to go dig for worms. The baby robins in the nest (Williams, Givens, Leach and The Boy Wonder) were sort of awake, lolling drowsily about in the nest with their mouths comically open. I couldn't resist sneaking out and snapping some shots.

Looking at them at full size I was struck by not only how hideous these little things are, but also how huge they'd grown! Just days ago they fit into tiny blue eggs and now they were twice their previous size. What the heck kind of irradiated worms were their parents feeding them?

Last night, I was back at the kitchen sink and looked out to check on our birdy guests. Once again, mom & dad were nowhere to be seen and the babies were up and active and chirpy. I thought it would be a fine time to sneak out and grab some action shots, so I snatched up my camera and headed out the door. There in the yard was Mama Robin, a fresh worm pinned firmly in her beak. When she saw me, she gave off a chirp of alarm and began pacing in the road outside our house. Within seconds, Daddy Robin had appeared as well, wielding his own worm. I decided to sneak back in the house and not disturb them, though not until after taking her picture.

Inside, Ash and I gathered in the window to watch the parent birdies feed their chicks. Oh, and what active chicks they were! As soon as a parent lit anywhere near them, what looked like Sandworms from Dune snaked out of the nest and began chomping at the air. (*Spiiiice*) I knew I had to get a shot of it somehow, so I waited until both parents had unloaded their worms and flew off, then I snuck out the back door and climbed up the retaining wall to get to their tree. Once there, I reached up and started snapping pictures, sight unseen. The chicks must have thought I was a parent, for they began lunging for worms and peeping.

After about three shots, I was reaching up for a fourth when one of the Robin parents practically flew into my face. I don't think they'd seen me before their arrival and it seemed to surprise the both of us. I had already pressed the button for the photo but due to my camera's slowness it didn't actually take the shot until I was hoofing it for the house. So my last shot is a picture of the flower bed as I flee for my very life.

Spring Drive

2006-05-01T08:15:00.000-04:00

It was such a gorgeous weekend that the wife and I hit the road for a Saturday afternoon drive. We had no destination, but just decided on a little road trip adventure. So we headed out, averting our eyes from any gasoline price signs we happened to pass, and wound up near Hinton, along the New River. We'd by then decided to see some parts of the new river that we'd not seen before, but wound up taking a wrong turn and found ourselves at a sign promising Sandstone Falls 9 Miles. Okay, sure.

So we traveled the 9 miles, down a badly paved road that ran along the New River. We passed lots of river side homes and lots where people had put their camping trailers up on blocks to serve as a fishing camp. It was a leisurely drive, which we made accompanied by Moxy Fruvous and the Barenaked Ladies.

Finally, we arrived at the falls, which were not quite what we were expecting. For some reason, I'd figured these falls would be more of a traditional waterfall, like pouring down a cliff-side style. Nope. This was a place on the New River where water has been erroding a layer of sandstone underlying riverbed granite, causing a waterfall in the river itself. While certainly no Niagra, it was mighty impressive and well worth the slow 9 mile trek.

Holy Birds' Nests, Batman!

2006-04-29T09:49:00.000-04:00

Spring has come to WV and that means the tweeting of birdy things. A couple weeks ago, a family of robins built a nest in the tree outside our kitchen window. Ash and I watched them build it over the course of a couple of days. The following week, we could see the blue of a robin's egg just over the edge of the nest.

"I went out there and looked at the nest today," Ashley told me after work.

"You didn't touch the egg did you?!" I said, horrified.

"Yeah," Ashley said. "I picked it up and rolled it around in my hands for a while."

"Licked it a couple times, too?"

"Oh, sure," she said.

For the sarcasm impaired, no, she didn't touch it. In fact, she couldn't even see into the nest because it was too high in the tree.

"You better go get a picture of that," Ashley told me.

"Okay, but I'll have to wait for mama robin to fly off for a while."

"Just go out there and take the picture. She'll fly away."

"No. I don't want to traumatize the birds! They're our guests and I don't want them to think it was a bad idea to start a family in our tree."

A day or so later, though, I happened to look out the window and saw that Mama Robin was not in the nest. I grabbed my camera and ran outside. I couldn't see into the nest either, but I was able to hold my camera above it and take a few shots. I'd only snapped the first one when Mama Robin returned and began tweeting furiously at me. Since I'd already pissed her off, I went ahead and took two more before retreating. Turns out the nest didn't have an egg in it. There were four, all bright blue and beautiful.

I'm glad I took the pictures when I did, because on Thursday we made a new discovery. The eggs have now hatched and there are four baby robins. Naturally, Ash wanted me to go get a picture right away, but again I refused because the mom and daddy robins were guarding the nest. Then, this morning, I looked out the window and mama robin was gone again. I rushed right out, snapped three more pictures and rushed away before any angry tweeting or the pecking of my eyes could befall me. The chirpers were sleeping, and it's kind of hard to see the fourth robin in the back, but I got the picture clear and free.

We're naming them Robins Leach, Williams, Givens and the Boy Wonder.

Opening Weekend

2006-02-18T10:26:00.000-05:00

Opening weekend for All in the Timing went off fairly well. We only had about 40 people in the audience on opening night and probably 50 last night, but they were a good audience, laughing at all the right bits. Opening night wasn't entirely smooth, as far as the plays themselves went. It seems that each of the 6 short plays had at least some minor bit of flubbing and neither of the ones I'm in was immune.

In my role of the title character in Variations on the Death of Trotsky I managed to leave out a critical word from one of my lines that fed the meaning of another actor's next line. We rolled with it okay, but it was irritating to have screwed up like that. Other plays during the night suffered far more distressing errors, at least according to the actors in them. The complicated dialogue and structure of these plays lends itself to error, but sometimes that very complicated nature helps cover up errors. Not so much with prop errors, though...

As we're doing six of Ives 14 plays under the AITT banner, we have to have six different (or, at least, slightly altered) sets. In order to do this most efficiently, we are using a revolving platform and have split it up into three pie pieces in which we can have three of the six sets at any one time, rotating the revolve to reveal the next one and then changing them out at intermission for the second act's sets. Our set for Trotsky is pretty slim, with a writing desk covered in books, a chair, a calendar, a mirror and a little shelf full of tschochkes. (Get it? Tschochkes for the Trotskys?) Anyway, I'm supposed to open our play sitting at my writing desk scribbling away some revolutionary theories in a journal which I then read aloud. Only when I went to sit in my place at the desk just prior to the revolve into place, my pencil slipped off the table and fell to the floor. Being as it was pretty much pitch black, I had no way of locating it and didn't relish the thought of feeling around on the floor for it to suddenly have the lights come up on me. So instead of writing as the lights came up, I just read aloud from my journal. Within a few lines, my character has to stand and move away from the desk, so I noted where the pencil was on the floor and retrieved it during the next blackout. Other than that, our set went off nearly without a hitch, and if that's the worst that happens to us, I'll take it.

So far, my initial concerns about playing Leon Trotsky with an axe through his head have proven to be non-issues. My biggest fear was that the prop axe that appears to protrude from my head would go flying off into the audience during one of the character's many stage-deaths, leaving me in a bad position for the rest of the play. However, due to the way the rig was built, that sucker ain't going anywhere—at least not so long as I have it bobby-pinned right. I do have to watch out that I don't strike the foam axe on bits of the set, or the back of the chair I sit in, but so far that hasn't been a problem.

As you might expect, I'm having SO MUCH FUN playing this role! It's absolutely one of the best roles I've ever had and has been something of a dream of mine to get to play for a while now. I first saw mention of this play sometime in the mid-90s while reading reviews of plays in a magazine. There was a picture of the actor playing Trotsky, mountaineer's axe jutting from his head at an odd angle, and I was just in awe of it. I said to myself then, I would LOVE to play that role. I don't think I even realized that VOTDOT was part of an overall arc of the AITT plays by David Ives, nor did I recall the playwright's name for more than a few minutes. So when I was asked to try out for AITT, I went into it blind as to what it was I was even going to read for. It wasn't until they handed me the Trotsky script that I recalled wanting to play that role and became very excited at the prospect. That excitement is still strong, particularly when the lights come up on me and I hear the audience's reaction to seeing this axe jutting out of my head as our play opens. Just fantastic fun to do!

Second Honeymoon

2006-02-06T10:32:00.000-05:00

Yesterday my wife and I celebated our 6th wedding anniversary. For the past few years, we've taken turns trying to surprise one another with neat ways to celebrate our anniversary and this year it was Ash's turn. Oddly, instead of trying to surprise me, she just up and told me what we were doing several weeks ago.

For the past few years, we've often talked about one day returning to our honeymoon cabin in Gatlinburg, TN, where we spent the week following our wedding. However, Gatlinburg is kind of a long drive for us, particularly when one of us has the kind of hospital schedule that she does. So Ash started looking around locally and found a fantastic alternative. Near Summersville, WV, is a place called the Good Evening Ranch, home of the Feedbox Restaurant. I'd heard of the Feedbox only because I'd passed the sign for it on my way through there, back when visiting Ash during her rotations in Kentsburg. What I didn't know was that the ranch offers a series of rental cabins and these are what struck Ash's fancy. She picked out one called Honey on the Rocks, which was a cozy cabin situated, as one might expect, atop some pretty massive outcroppings of rock.

What I didn't know was that the Good Evening Ranch is an Exotic Animal Ranch. (Which, let me tell you, is SO much better than Erotic Animal Ranch we visited a couple years back. Had something of an incident involving a garlic press and a Suggestive-Dancing-Bear.) So there were lots of cool animals to see, like emus and ostriches, buffalo, antelope, sheep, turkeys, goats, caribou, a Phyllis Diller Chicken, etc.

We rolled in Friday evening and found that the cabin was exactly what we'd hoped for. It was a little one-room cabin paneled in pine, with a small kitchen, rustic-looking pine bed, country decor and a back deck that featured a very large hot-tub. Granted, some of the country decor was a little inexplicable to us while other bits of it were downright deadly, but it was a nice place all the same. I set about taking photos, because the day was sunny and warmish and I had a feeling the weather wouldn't hold out. The forecast was calling for snow, which was just what Ashley wanted. She was hoping it would snow a foot. After a trip into town for some supplies, we wound up eating dinner at the Feedbox. It was a very good restaurant. I'm always partial to restaurants with a buffet, just for the sake of the mass quantity of available food, but this one was particularly good. It wasn't a never-ending brown-food buffet, but had a few select items (roast beef with au jus, chicken, fish, cheesy spaghetti) under covered catering bins, all of which were very good. We returned to our cabin afterward to have deep and meaningful discussions in the hot tub.

The weather did turn nasty, and much sooner than expected. In the middle of the night, the wind began to blow across the top of the cliff, making me wonder if we were about to be swept away. It blew so hard that it pushed the thick 50 plus pound hot tub cover off center on the tub itself. That wind turned to rain on Saturday and stayed that way for most of the day. We still found breaks in the weather to go and see the exotic animals and take more pictures, but mostly the weather was crappy, so we stayed indoors.

Saturday night, it began to snow. I found it enormous fun to sit in a nice warm hot tub with ice falling all around us. It was even better the following morning, when the snow was really coming down. Granted, it's not quite so fun when you're the guy who has to get out of the nice warm tub, tromp through the snow and lift the now icy hot tub cover back on afterward, particularly when your wife has, in a fit of evil glee, locked the back door on you when you weren't looking, just to see you dance and beg in the snow in your now freezing wet underwear.

All in all, though, it was a great weekend and a happy anniversary.

Christmas Card

2005-12-25T13:17:00.000-05:00

All Aboard, eh? (PART 2)

2005-09-27T08:50:00.000-04:00

Downtown Durbin is a ghost town on a Sunday night. (Hah! I kill me!) Not a single store or business was open including, as we later found out, the bar. But that didn't stop us from walking its length in search of something open. Other than the sounds of the train and some cool wind breezing through, everything was perfectly quiet. If it weren’t for the sole Coca Cola machine, which looked quite out of place set against its backdrop, we could have convinced ourselves that we'd taken a twilight zone trip back to the 1940s.

Eventually, after walking all the way down to the end of town and then back up, Devin and I found the bar. It looked closed from the outside, but one of the two doors on its storefront was unlocked. We entered to find chairs on tables, the lights dim and not a soul to be seen.

"Hello?" Devin called.

"Meow," a kitty voice answered. But no human voice returned our calls. There were some lights coming from beneath a door that appeared to be an office for the bar, but no noises came from within. We decided that they really were closed and that shotguns might become involved if we disturbed the place further, so we left, shutting the door firmly behind us. Only in a place like small town WV could the bars leave their doors unlocked on a Sunday night.

Back at the depot, there was a family waiting on one of the benches. We'd had a few curious on-lookers throughout the day, but at 9 at night these folks were determined to stick around in case anything interesting happened. I believe they were related to Durbin's mayor, who had welcomed us earlier and had been very gracious.

"Excuse me, but aren't you the man who was filming over by the train earlier?" a little boy asked me. "You helped carry that woman's bags?"

"Yeah, that was me," I said. The kid beamed up at me as though I was the most famous person he’d ever met. (In fact, I might very well be.) His sisters and grandmother were soon talking to me about the filming process and seemed very eager to hear what I had to say.

“Do you know when they're going to film the ghost on the front of the train?” the grandmother asked. She had heard that there was a scene in which the ghost, (i.e. Jessica), was to ride on the front of the engine itself as it rode down the track. Even then Jessica was getting into her ghost garb and was cinched up eight ways from Tuesday, not only in a corset so she could squeeze her thin frame into that even tinier wedding dress, (she couldn't even eat more than one slice of pizza because she had no room for it in there), but also with a harness with which she was to be affixed to the front of the engine for her upcoming scenes. The harness was woefully uncomfortable, difficult to remove for bathroom-break purposes and her ghost costume was not the warmest either. But she was a trooper

I told the grandmother that from what I heard there were several scenes that had to be filmed elsewhere before they would get to the ghost on the train, so it would likely be a good wait.

Then the grandmother surprised me.

"Would you mind, maybe, finding a piece of paper and signing it for us. Like an autograph?" she asked.

"Um, ma'am, none of us here are actually famous, or anything. We’re just from Lewisburg."

"Well, I know. But you might get to be famous. You're going to be on TV."

Only then did it truly hit me how surreal yet oddly cool this situation was. Sure, I might think it was absurd for them to want our autographs, but I was seeing the matter from backstage, where we’re just a bunch of community theater players. In front of the curtain, though, life was still glitzy and this little documentary program looked like the big time.

I went and told the cast that their autographs had been requested. They thought it was cute too. Devin suggested we sign a copy of the script, so I volunteered mine (hey, I hadn't used it so far, what were the chances I'd need it?) and we all signed our names and our character names. The family was overjoyed.

Eventually, a flat-bed car was attached to the front of the engine, Jessica was attached to the engine itself and the cameras and lights set up on the flatbed for filming of her first ghostly scenes. The family loved that too, Jessica less-so, as she spent much of the time wearing a very non-ghostly jacket over her ghostly duds.

Around midnight I was starting to get sleepy and my remaining scenes-whatever they might be, as I wasn't really sure myself-still didn't look like they were any closer to being shot. I tried napping on one of the depot benches, but didn’t get any sleep. So mostly I just sat up talking to my castmates, a couple of whom had played engineers and were just grinning from ear to ear that they’d actually been allowed to drive the train during their scenes.

Soon Devin came back to the depot and told us we'd missed out on all the fireworks. While the crew were filming near a small building just down the tracks from us, the wind whipped up and tipped over one of their $35,000 (Canadian dollars, mind you-probably about $10,000-$15,000 American) arc-lamps. It struck ground, went out and seemed a lost cause. Then, while rushing over to check on the lamp, the director caught his foot in the camera cable and down the `spensive hi-def camera went too. If not for the barn-door shutters on the front of the camera, its lens would have likely smashed when it struck one of the rails. Instead it was mostly fine and so was the light.

Our next technical difficulty came when Bob the Real Engineer announced that his steam-powered locomotive was nearly empty of water and thus out of steam. It would take an hour to fill it back up. This put the Director Bill into fits, as there were still several shots of the train moving in the darkness that he needed. He moved on, though, and wound up filming some locomotive perspective shots using a tiny gas-powered service car. I can't say enough good things about Bob and Al. They were fantastic and really seemed to enjoy the process.

Around 2 a.m. it was my turn before the cameras again. We set up several scenes on a boardwalk beside the stationary train, only to have Bob back the train out of our shot several times. By then the trains tanks were mostly full again and he was busy switching out the train cars we'd used onto side tracks in preparation for bringing on the more modern-looking cars and even a new engine which would be used for tours next weekend. So every time the Climax Engine backed up or came toward us, Bill would interrupt our shots to quickly get footage of the train passing. This helped him secure the shots he needed. Pretty smooth. We finished up our shots and Bill announced we were at a wrap.

Our actor carpool didn't leave until nearly 3 a.m. and didn't get back home until 5 a.m.

I don't know when or if my episode of Creepy Canada will be broadcast in the United States. If it is, it will likely be part of a program called Creepy Countries, on the American version of Outdoor Living Network or possibly the Discovery Channel.

All Aboard, eh? (PART 1)

2005-09-26T08:36:00.000-04:00

If you had told me last week that on Sunday night I would find myself walking the streets of down town Durbin, WV, looking for a bar while dressed as an 1880's train conductor, I would have first laughed at you. Then I would have asked where the hell Durbin was located. However, that is precisely how I spent part of my Sunday evening, and actually much of Sunday day too.

On Saturday, Jessica, a friend of mine from the local professional theatre at which I've done a couple of plays, phoned me up to ask if I wanted to go to Durbin and act in a Canadian television series from the Outdoor Living Network. She'd had a full compliment of actors, but one had dropped out. The job only paid $50 and would probably be filming late into the night, but it was a paid acting gig and I'd get to ride on a vintage train and hang out with friends of mine from the theatre. Sounded like a fun time to me, so I signed on.

Durbin, it turns out, is only about 13 minutes from Green Bank, where my family and I had taken a tour of the National Radio Telescope observatory, eight months back. It's a little town of about 300 people with an amazingly picturesque main-street, complete with a general store, a little bed & breakfast and a working train depot that runs scenic train tours using classic locomotives of the past.

We pulled into town around 3 p and stopped at the depot where we were to meet our Canadian film-crew. The crew works for a company called Creepy Features, based out of Toronto. They are the producers of a OLN show called Creepy Canada, though they are now branching out to film segments in the states and are planning to shoot some in Europe as well. They were in Durbin to film segments of a story called The Ghost of Silver Run Tunnel. See, legend has it that back in the 1880s a young woman was murdered aboard a train traveling near the Silver Run, WV. Naturally, her ghost came back and has allegedly appeared to people traveling in the area, often train engineers and other such folk.

Durbin, by the way, is in Pocahontas County, so we were in no danger of seeing the real Silver Run Tunnel ghost. The reason Durbin was chosen is because its tourist railroad depot is home to the oldest of two working Climax Model locomotive engines in the world, the very sort of engine that was part of the original legend. It's a great black, smoke-belching, steam-spitting dinosaur of an engine and is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. This engine was attached to four cars around and within which we would be filming. Bob & Al, the engineer and conductor, were tuning it up as we arrived and we spent a half hour watching it as we waited for the crew to arrive.

At 3:30 the crew pulled up in a big white van. John, the assistant director, came out, had us sign waiver forms granting them the rights to use our likenesses for the show, in any form it might take, etc. I was then immediately hustled off for a costume fitting and before long I was dressed in an honest-to-God conductor's uniform, which had been graciously provided by Conductor Al. I had the hat, the vest, the pocket watch and the big flappy gold-buttoned coat.

Now, from the script I'd read, I didn't think I would have much to do. The conductor was only mentioned twice in it and wasn’t necessarily the same conductor in both scenes. He certainly didn’t have any lines, nor did any of our parts since most of this action would be overdubbed later with narration. However, the director, Bill, had other ideas and soon I was in costume and being filmed assisting Jessica, our would-be ghost, in some pre-death scenes, the both of us improvising dialogue which was recorded by a boom mic over the roar of the train. I’m sure we looked atmospheric standing beside the enormous train-engine as it spat a steady stream of steam over us. After several different angles and close-ups, the director added the presence of the killer himself, played by my former local play director, Devin. He did look quite menacing coming through the steam and the atmosphere was lent additional creepiness by the overcast and rain-threatening weather.

We moved on for some filming in the caboose of the train, which we had to use for all the train interior shots as there were no passenger cars available. This filming wound up stretching on past sunset as the crew fought to get all their daylight shots done while they still had light, plus some day-for-night shots that would be darkened later in post-production.

As with any kind of project like this, a lot of our job as actors was to hurry up and wait, particularly after dark where every shot had to be lit, which was a complicated process as all the equipment had to be powered by a portable generator. I felt kind of bad for the others in our group who had to wait back at the depot doing nothing while Devin, Jessica and I filmed scenes in the train itself for a couple of hours, but I figured it would eventually be my turn to wait.

One of Devin’s scenes got to be a bit hazardous. Director Bill asked him to move along the side of the tanker car, which meant walking on a seven-inch wide grid of metal runner while holding onto a pipe for a railing, then step across into the caboose while the camera filmed. This was not an easy thing, as there’s a nice sized chasm between the two cars that’s constantly shifting length due to the jostling of the train. One wrong step meant potentially falling between the cars and getting ground up under the train’s wheels. Making matters even trickier was that the camera was set up blocking most of the way across. Devin did it just fine, though, and even looked menacing the whole while. We had several “Do your own stunts” occurrences throughout the evening, another of which was Jessica's "death" scene at a knife-wielding Devin's hands. It took a while to film and from my vantage point outside the caboose windows, looked pretty violent.

Around 8 p the train pulled back to the depot and we were told supper had been served. The crew had brought in around 8 huge pizzas and there was plenty to go around. It was good stuff too, particularly since it was not pizza from a major chain. After we ate, Bill announced that Devin was through filming as the killer and could change back to civilian clothes. Everyone else would be needed, but I wouldn’t be needed for a while as there were quite a few night scenes they wanted to get out of the way that didn’t involve me. Devin asked if there were any bars in the area and the crew mentioned that there was one across the street. He decided to give it at try and I decided to join him since it didn’t appear my services would be needed for hours yet.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Purrdeeeee

2005-07-02T11:28:00.000-04:00

Horse Infestation

2005-06-21T11:15:00.000-04:00

Shaking off the Coal Dust

2005-02-28T13:39:00.000-05:00

Our final two performances of the play what I'm in--well, what I was in--(which rhymes with "Wi-Manes") went very well.

I regret to say that we never achieved that much sought-after "perfect" night where everything went exactly as planned and all lines were uttered in their proper order and no flubs made. However, we also never had a much dreaded trainwreck night where everything went wrong either. This I can live with.

I also regret to say that we never had a show during which I wasn't sick liken unto a very sick dog. I really had punched through my cold of the first week's run. However, Ash had not only given me her cold, but also her bronchitis, which caught up to me a few days later. I'm still hacking and wheezing from that, but thanks to liberal amounts of Dayquil and Halls losenges I managed to survive this week's shows with no loss of voice.

After our matinee performance yesterday, we struck the set, dismantling our beautiful coal mine interior/exterior spinning walls and working conveyer belt set pieces. (See the cast picture above for a glimpse at our cool set.) We also threw all our costumes into the laundry basket for the final time. (And in the case of my pants, it will probably be the final time they're ever used, as they have numerous holes in the butt of them caused by the battery acid that leaked out of our coal-mining head lamp belt-battery pack. I was frankly glad I had worn dark underwear for both nights this week, as there were holes clear through to the skin. My own ass, fortunately, retains no superfluous holes.)

Final day on a play is always sad for me. I've been in a few shows before where I was glad to see final day, but this wasn't one of them. I really had a blast working with all of my fellow castmates, all of whom are quite skilled in the acting department, as well as the director and the other true pros who run the theatre here. We had fantastic audiences unhampered by any sudden snowy weather, which is always much appreciated.

I fully intended to lop off my moustache as soon as curtain call was over and I made much of that to my fellow castmates. Unfortunately, I made much of it to my wife as well and it turned out she is much against the idea. As much of a freak as the mustache makes me look, it is her considered opinion that the lack of a mustache would make me look like an even bigger freak, not to mention like a five-year-old, and I should just tough it out and grow the goatee back beneath it. And she's very very serious about this. I would much prefer just lopping everything off and starting over from scratch, which is why I should have just kept my big mouth shut about it in the first place and gone ahead with my plan. However, now that I know her feelings on the matter, I'm loathe to lop least I lose more than my `stache.

Winter Sunrise

2005-02-07T11:18:00.000-05:00

Dish of the Day

2005-01-06T13:22:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, as planned, we drove my family to the Green Bank National Radio Astronomy Observatory. You can check out their site for all the gory details as to what sort of stuff the NRAO does, but the short version is that the observatory is home to several small, medium, large and big honkin' mo-fo grande radio telescope dishes that allow scientists to scan the heavens and detect and record the natural radio-waves emitted by all matter out there. These waves can give a far clearer picture of what's up there than conventional visual telescopes are capable. The observatory itself is situated within the town of Green Bank, WV, a tiny community situated in a bowl-like valley in a county containing a population of around 9000 people. It also has government-mandated levels of radio silence to keep man-made signals from causing interference with the telescopes.

We got a late start in leaving for the trip, but this was something I'd factored into my planning. I told my family that I was aiming to leave at 11 a.m. in order to make the 1 p.m. tour time knowing full well we would be incapable of departure before 11:30. I was right. Still, we would have been slightly early for the tour had there not been a few come to a complete halt and wait 5 minutes for heavy machinery to get out of the way road repair delays in the journey. We wound up nearly 15 minutes late as a result, but the Green Bank folks let us join the tour late and let us watch the film we'd missed after the tour itself.

The tour was mostly by bus, which took us out to see all the various radio telescopes on-site. The largest of these dishes, the aforementioned big honkin' mo-fo grande one, is 100 meters in diameter. It's an impressive amount of dish, though there are plenty of others that would qualify as impressively huge if not for their bigger brother's shadow dwarfing them. Here's a picture of my "fambly" (sister, wife, step-mom, dad) standing in front of it so you can see something of the scale.

(West Virginians often used to joke that the state flower was the satellite dish due to the rural nature of the state and lack of proper television reception because of all the mountains. There's an ironic joke to be made in correlation to Green Bank, but damn if I've come up with it yet.)

My dad is a huge science nerd, not to mention an amateur radical theoretical astro-physicist, so he was just pig in slop happy to see this place. I'm not so much of a science nerd, but I thought it was plenty cool all the same. We were also very very fortunate in that we were able to see the big dish move while we were there. Normally, it doesn't spend a whole lot of time moving around unless it's operators are switching between projects, so most visitors don't get to see it in motion. However, we came on a day in which they were doing maintenance on the dish, and while we were standing out near it a klaxon sounded and the whole thing began a turnin'. For such an enormous construct, it moves with surprising speed and grace.

The real discovery of the day, though, was the exhibit hall back at the Green Bank Observatory tourist center. They had lots of different displays about radio telescopic astronomy, some of the discoveries made using it and other sundry stuff. What really caught our attention, though, was an infa-red camera display that you could stand in front of and see your heat-pattern on a large monitor. That was the coolest thing there. I'd never seen my heat pattern before and have only seen similar effects in the Predator movies, so I was locked in front of that thing. Even better was when I discovered I could put my camera on night mode and take flashless pictures of the images. Soon I had the whole family gathered around the camera to experiment, leave heat patterns on one another and have fun. We stopped just short of mooning the camera.

The parents loved it. The sister loved it. The wife and I loved it. All in all it was one of the more successful family road-trips we've ever had.

Dixie Fried

2004-10-26T13:28:00.000-04:00

Tucker's Tavern, New Orleans, a sports bar that sells a variety of stuffed deep-fried cheeseburgers. The concept alone of the deep fried cheeseburger is award-worthy and I was sold at the mere mention of it. However, the burgers are every bit as good as you'd hope they would be. They're not big bready chicken fried steak affairs either. There are several varieties to choose from and the ingredients of each are mixed into the ground beef which is then pattied, battered, deep-fried, then covered with more cheese. The end result is a hamburger with a scruptuous crunchy crust. I ordered the Big Tuck, which has bacon in it and is slathered in barbeque sauce. OH... MY... LORD was it good! Unfortunately, many of our party had consumed a goodly amount of alcohol the previous evening and were hung over and dehydrated, so the burgers wound up doing the gut bomb on some of them. A few Tylonols and a long visit to "the terlet" worked wonders for them, though.