closer to stay­ing on schedule

Can this post count as a Wedne­day post? I mean it is Thurs­day, but I am still awake from Wednes­day. We had a really late night of Mar­tial Arts. Things are start­ing to develop for this skit. Sifu is really riding us because a weapons demo just ups the ante so much. Both because it’s more dan­ger­ous and because it needs to be clear. We’ll be ready though.

Right now I’m work­ing to really get things under con­trol. The last few months have been tough. I don’t think I’ve real­ized how much so until recently. By mid May I was really slack­ing off. To the point that it was effect­ing some of my rela­tion­ships with friends and family. I’m work­ing back from that point and I think I’m making real progress. But the next few months are going to be rough. I have a lot of com­mit­ments and I need to bal­ance them care­fully. Most likely that will require step­ping away from somethings.

boot to the head, ed grubberman

We’ve just begun to prac­tice the skit this year for Super Sum­mers (a big Mar­tial Arts event). Typ­i­cally in these I’m the comic relief. How­ever, this year Sifu announced that I was going to star. Which threw me for a bit of a loop. And then he also men­tioned that this year we’re demo’ing weapons.

Most of the people who attend Super Sum­mers come from a Karate back­ground. So, being Kung Fu folks, we’re already con­sid­ered a little wierd. Each staff member is asked to present a demo at a cer­e­mony on Sat­ur­day night. Most of the demos are pretty straight laced: kata/forms or some type of demon­stra­tion of tech­nique. Then there is us. We just don’t take our­selves seri­ously. And each year we try to come up with a dif­fer­ent “bad kung fu movie.” So this year it will be me fight­ing off people with swords using a staff (that will have boxing gloves taped to each end and the wooden ring. Only prob­lem is I don’t know either of those weapons. But I’ve got a month to learn them :-).

Spam!

Lately at kodak.com it seems like we’ve been get­ting spammed worse than ever. Now most of the sub­ject lines come across as junk like:

sub­ject: ulti­iate ode­ol­ogy dval yt

But every now and then one really stands out. Here are a col­lec­tion of some of the most recent standouts:

sub­ject: REPLY FW: fades away exist­ing stretch marks

This one was sent by “Meg_Ryan”. Not only do I remem­ber request­ing infor­ma­tion about my stretch marks, but I would think Meg Ryan would have better things to do with her time. The again after Kate & Leopold and Proof of Life, she might not.

sub­ject: Auc­tion Edu­ca­tion –>E B A Y< -- ethnic joke

Wow, learn to use E-Bay and tell Polish jokes at the same time… how could I pass this one up

sub­ject: Christ­mas is near, order your con­tact lens early

I got this one in early April

sub­ject: Trans­form your rod into a monster

sub­ject: EXTEND your meat pole

A two for one…. Actu­ally I just found the phrase “meat pole” funny. *snicker*

sub­ject: Feel­ing tire all the time?

Not since the bus rolled off of me

And last but not least, my favorite:

sub­ject: Jon dropped his load on my Bernius

Some­how I think that their per­son­al­iza­tion soft­ware isn’t work­ing quite right. Either way this one made me feel more than a bit dirty when I read it. I really hope that I was the only person who received this one

…meat pole… *snicker*

back on schedule… I hope

I think I’m finally back on the post­ing sched­ule I had set for myself on this Blog and Kaizen (my mar­tial arts jour­nal). Every­thing being equal I think I should be able to main­tain this….

I am not Matt. I am Devo

At Jenny’s suggestion… and per­haps my own sense of self dep­re­ca­tion, I’m post­ing pic­tures of myself from band­ing day. The Yellow Suit was to allow people on the street watch­ing the extrac­tion of eyases to see us better, not because of any haz­ardous envi­ron­ment rea­sons. How­ever, all the suits man­aged to do is make me look like I ate the Fal­cons rather than help­ing band them.

After the fal­cons were removed and the eyases headed down to be banded, I remained behind to clean and check the cam­eras. The DEC also asked me to clean some of the bird remains out of the nest. There are 5 eyases this year and they’re knee (I’m pretty sure they have knees) deep in bird bits. Need­less to say the nest STANK, and pulling bird­heads and wings out of it was not my idea of how to spend a morn­ing. Check out this picture:

I think the cap­tion in the next pic­ture says it all…

As for this one, I have no idea what hap­pened, but I some­how man­aged to gain about 100 pounds in under a minute. Come here Falcon, get in my belly!

All done

Band­ing Day was a suc­cess! All five chicks were banded with­out prob­lems. And this year I didn’t get clipped in the head by a falcon. I do have some movies though. So I’d say a good time was had by all. Well not the eyases (that’s the offi­cial name of a young falcon), but not to worry, they recover quickly from all the excitement.

Check out these films of the day’s activ­i­ties:

• Mariah buzzing me when we took the eyases out

• The eyases who have already been banded
• My friend Kenn band­ing an eyas (named Tlotli)
• Another eyas in the buckets
• Putting the eyas back
• Mariah sit­ting on the camera
• The fab 5 back in the nest

all of these are in quick­time, each one’s about 1.5mb.

back and birding

Hey all. I’m finally back and recharged. Today’s Band­ing Day here at Kodak. We’re going to be band­ing the Pere­grine Fal­cons that nest on the tower. You can watch the play by plan start­ing around 9.30am at bird​cam.​kodak.com.

I’ll be back later with pic­tures (if they don’t eat my head!).