Crispy, Part 3 8/17/09

I like to do a little light reading while I'm working on the engine.  Come on, you can't tell me you don't!

I like to do a little light reading while I'm working on the engine. Come on, you can't tell me you don't!

Monday night was back to work on the Crispy Project – getting the Chevelle ready to film the zombie killing scene for the local no-budget movie “8 Wheels of Death.” I had to really crank on it if I was going to get it done by Wednesday night. That book on the air cleaner has diagrams of where the wires go. When they get all burnt up like this you gotta go back to the original plans and figure out where the shiny new wire goes to replace it. I don’t have all that crap memorized. I’m good, but not that good.

This picture is utter crap, but I had to really work on the car, and getting this taken was the biggest photo accomplishment I had in me that night.

Smile 8/16/09

natnat

The band played at a car show on Sunday, and maybe because I’ve already shown pictures of cars recently, or because none of the ones I took really knocked me out, I decided not to use any of those event-identifiers, and instead went with this one, which is simply of a little girl enjoying the day out with her family. What’s not to like?

Button, Button 8/15/09

What happens when you push this thing?

What happens when you push this thing?

On Saturday I went to a machine shop that belongs to a friend and got a whirlwind tour. Unfortunately, though the machines doing the machining were many and awesome, I got about three minutes to take pictures before we had to move on. Most of them were far more mediocre than this one, but I like the wording on the switch. Machinist’s tools have very deliberate and descriptive names for all their controls.

Traveling Graffiti 8/14/09

Moving art, from coast to coast!

Moving art, from coast to coast!

Friday started my weekend of ridiculous busy-ness. The band was playing every day of the weekend, and two of the three gigs were out of town, so there was lots of driving involved. On this day I realized as I was checking my voicemail on my drive to work, that I was not going to have time to go home and change, rather I had to drive straight to the gig to make it on time, as we had an unusually early start. I didn’t take any photos on my lunch break, and only snapped a few out the window in the last fifteen minutes before the gig to try and get anything at all on film – or pixels, whatever. Anyway, you either were going to get some corn, or this graffiti that was on the side of a train which I saw when I got stopped at a rail crossing when I was only about five minutes away from the gig. I know, not much of a choice, but there you go. Sometimes days are like this.

Disco Tragedy 8/13/09

Romeo and Juliet at the Disco.  Dig it!

Romeo and Juliet at the Disco. Dig it!

I am finally, FINALLY able to update the blog after being deluged with other projects and activities for a week now! Here’s the first of the images.

Being in the photography club that I joined definitely has its perks. We have an organizer that puts together these amazing field trips where we get access to areas and events that normal humans would never be allowed near with lenses and megapixels. This, for instance is a shot (one of over 600!) that I took at the dress rehearsal for “Romeo and Juliet at the Disco.” It’s even more uber-fab and groovy than it sounds! And the death scene? Still sad, still tragic, still engrossing. I’d love to go back and just watch it without taking photos. Perhaps later I’ll come back with a few other images. You should have seen all the costumes! It was intense – lights and color and roller skates and bellbottoms and sequins and afros. Un-friggin-believable.

Holding It All Together

I just realized that no one’s asking, but I figured I’d put this up anyway. I’m not dead or even sick. I’ve not given up on anything. I’ve been taking photos every single day that I’ve not blogged. I’ve just been hella busy and not had time to put up any photos. In some cases I’ve not even been near a computer. The first time I was able to sit down and download everything going back to Thursday night was on Sunday night. Do you know how long it takes to download 919 pictures off of a Nikon using iPhoto and the sync chord? One hour and eight minutes. At the end of it, there wasn’t time to do anything else. Now I know why people have card readers. I also know why people buy spare batteries for their cameras, and why they have more than one memory card for same. Live and learn. This photo club is giving me experiences I’ve never had before.

So, tonight I hope to bring you some interesting pics from the past five days. I also hope to get the Chevelle running for its scheduled shoot Thursday night for the zombie movie “8 Wheels of Death.” I’m a little busy!

Crispy, Part Two

Some burned wire snippets, some carb cleaner - the makings of a beautiful evening, I tell ya.

Some burned wire snippets, some carb cleaner - the makings of a beautiful evening, I tell ya.

Yeah, it’s more burned wire, but see what I did? So how I “changed it up” for you? I put the wires ON THE GROUND(!!!!!), and then I *gasp* PUT A CAN OF CARB CLEANER NEXT TO THEM!!!!!! AND THE WIRES HAVE CRUSTY, GOOEY, CUT-UP ELECTRICAL TAPE ON THEM!

I know, you’re shocked. See, that’s how I am, always out there on the creative edge, thinking, planning, creatively creating. Yeah, it’s all in the composition, and the lighting, that too. You’re welcome.

(Any semblance between this carefully orchestrated image and the leftovers of an hour spent pulling filthy, burnt wiring out from under the hood of a ’67 Chevelle is purely coincidental. No part of this blog entry is based on real characters or events, especially if those events make those characters look like mechanical gastropods.)

With Steel

True heavy metal guitar.

True heavy metal guitar.

I played a gig last night. I almost forgot to take my camera, which would have been a very bad thing, since I hadn’t taken any pictures that day, and the only way to get in my one-pic-a-day was to shoot at the gig before midnight. I don’t know what to think about this picture. I guess I think it’s kind of nice, but if I post it on one of the forums someone will say, “It’s really red,” or something that I’d not realized or was aware of. Anyway, I have to keep at it. At least the subject is fairly interesting. It’s my bandleader’s National Steel guitar, which is one of the coolest-sounding instruments on the face of the earth, lemme tell ya.

In other news, I’ve not been getting much of anything done lately, or so it feels. I read about or see other people accomplishing stuff, and my life seems to be at a standstill. I haven’t completed anything in I don’t know how long. I don’t feel like I’ve overcome any obstacles or learned anything new in months. Stuff that wasn’t complete in December still sits uncompleted. Stuff that I wanted to learn last summer still remains unlearned a year later. I would love to quit my job and go to school full time, take about fifty classes a semester, learn absolutely everything there is to know about everything, that type of thing. I wish I’d realized just how much great stuff there was out there to learn about when I was young and had such freedom to pursue education. It seems I wasted so much time back then.

These days I have to do things like cut the fence row growth down out back, clean the house, figure out the bills, do laundry, go to the day job, get the tires and brakes done on my car, weed the front yard – all this stuff that doesn’t seem to do a thing for my life, but which I can’t ignore lest I want to suffer some unpleasant consequences.

There has to be a better way to do this. There has to be some way I can make this stuff work.

Crispy

It's really not as bad as it looks.  In fact, this is the good part.  The bad part looks terrible.

It's really not as bad as it looks. In fact, this is the good part. The bad part looks terrible.

“The Chevelle caught on fire,” my brother said.

That was what he told me over the phone right after I congratulated him on getting the brakes fixed up. Some mysterious wiring snafu took place the day he got the brakes all squared away, and the main power wire under the hood literally went up in smoke. My brother is awesome, and kept further and much more serious damage from occurring, but now the existing damage must be fixed. I don’t know what happened, but suspect it was just one of those things that happens to thirty year old wires. Something corroded or finally wore through, and a “situation” developed. I’m working on it. I only took four pictures today, and all of them were of wiring. This isn’t even the burned part, it’s just a soldered connection I needed to memorialize so that I can put it all back together when I replace the wires. Maybe you’ll get to see burnt wiring tomorrow. I’m sure you’re breathless with anticipation.

Highway High Roller

1941 Oldsmobile, slightly modified.

1941 Oldsmobile, slightly modified.

There was a street rod show somewhere between Indiana and Knoxville, Tennessee during our weekend on the road. The entire time we were in Kentucky and Tennessee we kept seeing them rolling down the highway, headed north on Saturday, and south on Sunday. A few, however, were actually heading the same direction we were, and I goofed around with the camera trying to catch some of them as they passed. In general, the lighting angles were lousy and I did a poor job of framing them, but this one was so odd I decided to put it up. It’s a 1941 Oldsmobile, and, no, they didn’t come in two shades of raspberry when they were new. I don’t recall ever in the last 20-some years seeing one of these in real life, or even in pictures. Sadly, I had to do a web image search to find it and fully identify it (though I am proud to say that it only took two searches to figure out the correct year = consolation prize for me.)

So, a day on the road with eye candy driving by and gorgeous scenery. Nice.