Marvin the Monkey

Wow... has it really been a whole week since I posted? I guess that's how easily it can all slip by. I just can't believe it.

Now, the difficult task of remembering what's been happening since the last time I blogged! Seeing that I just opened up an explorer window and by the time I went to type in the url I forgot why I was opening it, I don't know how successful I'll be!

Last Thursday I ended up not going to the auction because my partner couldn't go and neither could my girlfriend. I came home and I think just hung out with my girlfriend. Friday I went to work and came home and edited the movie for a little while, then hung out with the girlfriend. Got up early on Saturday to go to a beekeeping class. While it wasn't my ideal way to spend Saturday morning (that'd be sleeping!) it was interesting. The reason we went is because my girlfriend wants to get bees and put them in our yard because she wants to "participate in pollinating the flowers" and also she looks forward to lots of honey!

She has a conference to attend this past week, so after the class I took her to the airport and sent her on her way. In between the class and the airport we ate at Fudruckers in Annapolis with her dad (man I love those fries with cheese on them!) and I also bought a Kinect off of Craigslist. What a great buy that was! I went home and edited until early in the morning. Sunday I had to work for 8 hours, was pretty normal stuff for a Sunday, which is to say we watched the Ravens unfortunately get beat and get knocked out of the playoffs. I'm not a big NFL fan, but I do root for the local teams, so it was a disappointment. After work, I went home and edited and also signed up for Netflix so I could watch over the xbox. Welcome to the future! Controlling the movies or shows I watch with my voice, now that's cool!

I have been waiting on notes from the director of The Maladjusted off and on over the past few days. So, when I'm waiting for him, I've been watching movies. Now that I have Netflix, I've watched more movies in the past week than I have in the past 2 years! Sunday night, I was sitting in my papasan chair editing when I was stretching and coughed at the same time and something popped. I felt like I had broken my sternum. It seriously took me about 10 minutes to get up and I could barely walk for a couple of days. It's still not great, but is much much better now. Because of that pain, I wasn't able to sleep and I ended up watching the 3 swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movies (7.5 hours worth of movies!). Really good movies, I enjoyed them a lot. I ended up falling asleep around 530 in the morning and had to get up at 630 to drive to Baltimore to meet the new real estate agent for my girlfriend's house.

I was hurting at work, both from lack of sleep and my chest, so I left around 430 and took the kids to eat at Bill Bateman's Bistro, home of the best Crab pretzel I've ever eaten. Then I went home and passed out and pretty much slept on and off throughout the night. Tuesday & Wednesday I was off. Tuesday was a mixture of editing, watching movies, and more editing. I watched the always super hot Natalie Portman in No Strings Attached. Mmm, that girl is so cute! Not a terrible movie either. I think I also watched a couple of comedy specials, which led me to discover Louis CK. Damn that dude is hilarious, not sure how I haven't really known about him before.

Wednesday Kiros and I went to Crumpton, a huge auction about 45 minutes from my house. They have the most amazing things there every week, it's hard to believe that there can be that much cool stuff out there, but it just keeps on coming. Dealers come from as far as Florida to this auction, so things can get pricey. This is where Marvin the Monkey comes in. We got into a bidding war for this awesome little 100+ year old taxidermized (is that a word?) monkey.



As soon as we get him cleaned up (well, the glass anyway) he'll be up on Ebay for a nice hefty price!

After we got back from the auction we watched some of the recent changes I'd made to The Maladjusted and made some more corrections. The rest of the night I took pictures for Ebay and worked on the movie. Got up this morning, worked, it was boring, ate at the buffet with my kids, then came home to take more pictures for Ebay, cleaned up in expectation of my girlfriend coming home tomorrow and then listed a ton of stuff on Ebay.

Now it's time to try to get some sleep, I'm looking forward to Erica's return tomorrow night!

Until tomorrow...

Hump Day Was a Good Day

Ok, I'll try hard to never again on this blog use the term, "Hump Day", just thought I'd go ahead and get it out of the way!

Yesterday, Tuesday, was a pretty normal day. Got up, worked, came home, ate the crockpot venison stew we made, then watched some TV while I listed some things on Ebay. I was pretty tired and unmotivated to edit. I didn't feel like it would be quality, so I chose to get some sleep and prepare myself to edit today. So, that's what I did.

This morning I woke up feeling great, immediately started editing and with the help from Director Chris Kiros' notes, was able to kick a couple of scenes asses. After rendering them out and uploading them on Vimeo for him to see the progress I made it over to our store, gossiped with the ladies there for a bit and then headed off to the post office to drop off some Half.com & Ebay sales. Then I picked up the kids and upon the request of my daughter we went to the Mexican restaurant. Mmmm, Cheese Quesadillas (of course said the way Napoleon Dynamites grandma said it... Kay-Sa-Dill-Us).

After dinner, I went to drop the kids off and for the first time ever I let my 15-yr old drive the car. I stopped about a block away from his house and asked him if he wanted to. He gave me an incredulous look and I think he said yes, but I couldn't quite hear due to the shrill screaming from my daughter in the back seat. She was pleading for me to let her just walk home. It ended up going fine... he was a bit heavy on the application of the brakes, but he did a good job.

Tonight was pool night and I got to our local bar a little early, so I popped into the store across the street called DJ Liquidators. Holy cow, they sell some cheap stuff! Great place to go when stocking up for a film shoot. I got a couple cases of Diet Sundrop ($5/case of 20oz bottles!) a bunch of tuna snack packs for $.74 each, and some big boxes of Ritz cracker pretzels. Then I headed over to pool where I played first. Didn't play as well as the last time, but still played pretty good. The other player played really well also and I was lucky enough to win on the very last ball when it was either him or me. I felt really good about it. After that I came on home and we watched the first episode of American Idol in super fast forward and now I'm opening up my Final Cut Pro to continue editing for a few hours before getting to sleep so I can go to work tomorrow. Looking forward to going to the auction in Laurel tomorrow night. Hopefully we can pick up some great stuff, especially since we learned today we were able to add more space in our antique store, so we have to buy more stuff!

Until tomorrow...

Clever Title Goes Here

I always struggle with what to title a post. No real story here... that is all.

Yesterday I worked on a couple of scenes from the movie and before I knew it, it was time to drive the hour to my friend's party. It was being held at another friend's mansion... yeah, that's right a mansion that was built in 1873! This thing was amazing, stuffed with treasures from around the world. We got a great tour of the house with ghost stories and all! I think at some point throughout the night I tried to buy everything in the house, but he ain't sellin... yet!

Very much didn't want to get up for work this morning, but once I got there I had a good enough time (thanks to Captain America, & Moneyball! After I got home Erica and I made dinner together as well as prepared a meal to put in the slow cooker during the day tomorrow. After eating we settled in for the new show, "Alcatraz". I watched this 100% because of it's connections to "Lost". We both really liked it and hope that it continues along it's intriguing path.

I listed a few things on Ebay, now it's time to sleep... more work tomorrow!

Until tomorrow...

Tebow has been forsaken...

I think we all learned an important lesson tonight. I don't think God really cares about football. I think Tim Tebow is an outstanding young man, a great role model, and an amazing athlete. For all we know he could be running dog fights and doing blow every night... I doubt it, but if I've learned anything in my 36 years is you never know what a person is thinking or doing behind closed doors, no matter what they portray to the world. But, I do know that I'm tired of hearing people say that Tebow & Denver were winning because of God. What about the Christians on the other teams, did God not care about them? What about the true hero of those games, the kicker who continuously hit big FG after big FG. What's his relationship with God? He's the one people should have really been talking about! Either way, it's over now. Good luck to Tebow in the future.

Thursday I spent the day with Kiros driving around to different storage auctions. Thanks to the show, every single locker went WAY to high. We were one bidder away from winning some promising ones, but just seems like people are willing to pay too much money for potentially empty boxes and bags of clothes that they think money could be in.

After a long day of storage units we hit up Fudruckers and had an amazing Buffalo Bacon & Cheddar burger, mmmmm!

Friday was a day of work and once I got home clean, clean, clean and the finale of Dexter! Now we are Jonesin' for season 2!

Today I took a whole bunch of pictures for Ebay & Etsy, went over to the store and put some more items in... saw that a commercial building next to our store opened up. It's a great location, so I'm going to pursue opening up an antique store there!

I took my son and his friend to The Dear Hunter concert. It's his favorite band and this was a present in his stocking. Great band, the lead singer has an amazing voice and he is in the middle of a 6 CD project telling one big story about a guy known only as The Dear Hunter. Really cool stuff. We had a good time AFTER we finally got in. Doors were supposed to open at 6, we got there at 625 to find a line that wrapped around the building. We finally got in the doors around 715, turns out the power went out on the stage during sound checks, so we had to wait out in the cold. Once my feet thawed out it was enjoyable.

Once I got home I listed my USSR Art book stuffed with prints of Renoir, Picasso, Rousseau, Monet, Van Gogh, and many more. Very cool book I've been holding onto for a while because I really liked it, but figure it's time to let it go. Hopefully it'll sell for good money. The only mention of this book is in museums & really big time libraries. Here's the listing on Ebay: French Moderns from Moscow Museum Ebay Auction

I think the cold wore me out. My friend's birthday party is tomorrow, should be fun! Time to hit the hay.

Until tomorrow...

Forgetfulness is bliss... sometimes.

This is exactly why I have set out to blog as much as possible. I didn't blog yesterday and for the past 10 minutes I've been sitting here thinking about what the heck I did yesterday so I could include it in my blog today. If something horrible happened, then that'd be a great skill, but I'm pretty sure it didn't, so it'd be nice to remember!

Let's see it was the day after Alabama utterly destroyed LSU in the National Championship Game. I don't work on Tuesdays. Ah, yes, I rolled out of bed around 1130 after editing late into the night before. I edited The Maladjusted for a few hours, then I took some Ebay stuff to the post office, took over to the store a Pennsylvania Rail Road oil can that has been converted to a lamp. After I dropped the Ebay packages at the post office I picked up my daughter from school who is there late on Tuesdays to get better at math... God help her, I was TERRIBLE in math and completely avoided any class that had anything to do with it after the 10th grade! Math classes and my avoidance of them are the only things keeping me from a Bachelors degree... I have over 160 credit hours and all I need is to take a couple of math classes. But no thank you!

After I dropped her off, I came back home and worked on the movie some more, took a bunch of pictures for Ebay and then the lady and I watched the next to last episode of the first season of Dexter... damn it was good, can't wait to get started on the 2nd season, but first have to watch the finale!

Today I got up, went to work, got off work, took the kids to a crappy all you can eat buffet... used to be a good one, but has seriously gone down hill. Dropped them off and came home to check on our chickens... yes I have chickens in my backyard. The shed has been leaking and I tried to fix the leaks and since it was raining today I was eager to see if the leaks were still there... actually I think there were more of them than before! So, I placed buckets under all of them. I'm coming to the realization that I might have to just get up there and replace that roof!

After the bucket placement fun I spent the rest of my night cutting up our closet doors to make them fit better on the carpet, pictures for Ebay, Packaging Ebay, and editing the movie, which leads us to right now! Tomorrow should be fun, going to a bunch of storage auctions then a huge auction that is about 45 minutes from my house. Hopefully we'll find lots of great antiques and treasures for the store!

Until tomorrow...

Roll Tide Roll!

What a day! I woke up this morning after 4 hours of sleep, took my kids to school, then took an hour nap in my car in the parking lot at work. Then all day at work, all I could think about was getting home so I could watch the National Championship game.

I was nervous, I predicted Alabama to win 21-14, but I thought it was going to be close. I don't think anyone could have predicted that unbelievably dominant defensive butt whooping that Bama put on LSU, but at least I got one half of the score right... 21-0! More importantly Alabama beat them in all phases of the game including special teams that EVERYONE thought LSU would dominate. Roll Tide, it's great to be a Bama fan right now, 2 in 3 years, 14 total championships and expected to be right back in it next year! I think AJ McCarron will end up being one of the all time Bama greats. If Trent Richardson were to come back he could be cemented as the best running back to ever play at Alabama, but since I doubt very seriously he comes back, then Eddie Lacy will just have to spin his way into the Heisman talk instead! The game was also a great story of redemption for the Tide kickers, especially Jeremy Shelley who missed a couple in the 9-6 loss back in November. What a great game played by the best defense ever!

My whole day pretty much was just leading up to the Bama - LSU game, not much happened besides finally taking Hangover II back to Redbox and taking a few pictures for Ebay. Now at 130am, it's time to get back to editing the movie. I have off tomorrow, so that's what I'll be doing for the next few hours.

Roll Tide. Until tomorrow...

Weekend's Sailing Away

Weekends really fly by, don't they? I never, ever have enough time in any day, but seems like I get home from work on Friday and before I blink it's time to get up and go back to work Monday morning and that just stinks!

All in all, this was a pretty good weekend. Spent some good time with my kids and my lady, got a lot done. Today after rolling quite unwillingly out of bed around 11am I worked on making our Indiegogo video for The Maladjusted. Kiros came up with a good idea for it so I'm rolling with that & I like it!

Around 1230 my son & I left to go to an auction. My daughter stayed home & played with her friends. We spent about $350 and stayed until it was over at 5pm. Got a lot of really interesting things including a great old coke cooler & a ton of old US Navy instructional books. Should be able to at least triple our money!

Got home had dinner & finally took out the Christmas tree. After packaging up some EBay items we settled in to watch 2 episodes of Dexter. We are nearing the end of season 1 (2 episodes left) & things are getting tense!

The biggest downside to having my kids is having to get up at 620 to take them to school. That's in 5.5 hours. UGH.
I'm usually pretty exhausted after I drop them off & take a nap before work. I'm sure tomorrow will be more of the same.

Until tomorrow...