Catching Up

Since I was just resent the blog invitation yesterday, I will write some brief shorts starting at a time long long ago. (visualize little squiggly flashback lines)

The day is 2 Sundays ago. We had a Jeep trailride scheduled with our Jeep Club HRJA (Heritage Region Jeep Alliance). The trailride was a Saturday/Sunday camping trip, but we (kristen/my wife and I) were unable to make the Saturday ride because I had a playoff roller hockey game at 2:00 wich we unfairly lost because the other team, the only team we were able to beat in the regular season(twice) gathered a bunch of ringers that were way too good for the league we are in and crushed us 10-2. So sunday morning we woke up around 6:30 to get ready and packed for our funfilled adventure. The trail ride was at Beaver Run up in Beaver about an hour away and we had to get to the location by 9:30 so we can get the Jeep prepped for the trail. Trail prepping refers to airing down your tires (taking the air out of your tires allows them to deform and gives them a wider footprint and allows the tire to wrap around obstacles giving you better traction, we air down to 15 lbs of pressure per tire) and "disconnecting. Disconneting means disconnecting your sway barso it will allow your tires to have more vertical travel so when going over obstacles you dont go on 3 wheels as often. At 10:00am we start off joining the mild trails group with about 20 jeeps. Since our jeep is not as built up as some of the other ones we had to bypass a few spots to avoid damage. We got to do our first rescue and pull the guy out infront of us that slid down a 3 foot embankmentand was on 3 wheels. a group of guys had to push on the side of his jeep so it wouldnt roll while we pulled him out. Around 1:00 it was time for lunch and we headed back to the trail head. In the afternoon only about 7 jeeps went out to do more trail riding, we were going to do some harder trails. There is another younger couple in our club from ohio, that jumped in our jeep for the ride. He broke the frame of their jeep in the morning and was not driveable, had to be trailered home. We did very well and all the other jeepers were very impressed how our jeep did on the more difficult trials even with the extra weight of 2 more people in the back seat. We did get stuck in one mud pit, because of the extra weight we couldnt make it out. We did however get me and dave covered in mud, splattered mud halfway across the inside of the windshield and all over the rest of the interior. When we got home from the trailride we went straight to the car wash and the carwash guy was not happy to see us in his stall because of all the mud. We then noticed we had recieved some body damage on the passenger side rocker panel (under the door, the must have dit a big rock). That was our first trail body damage so the next purchase for the jeep will be rocker panel protection.

Monday I went out and bought 2 new pairs of tennis shoes.

Tuesday I had 2 cats staying with us. My parents left for florida last week to visit my brother and they left their cat with me till this past sunday. Kristen brought her dads cat home to stay with us to get groomed on thursday. kristen and the cat got home late when I had to go to work. I was working out at Pgh Post Gazette Pavillion (referred to as star lake from here on out) for the Tom Petty and the heartbreakers concert. I ended up getting back home around 3:30 am.

Wednesday I woke up at 7:30 to get ready to go to work at cmu and the 2 cats were not getting along at all. I sat there and babysat them for a little bit but as soon as i would leave the room they ould get into eachothers business and the hissing growling and claws would start flying. I tried locking each in seperate rooms but they clawed at doors and meowed even more. So i had to stay home and moderate so they didnt kill eachother, hence the MIA at cmu. They calmed down by late afternoon after they got used to eachother.

Thursday after work at cmu Kristen brought the little girl she cares for over so we can go to sandcastle. We all got season passes since its only 10 minutes away. The little girl has downs syndrome and autism, shes 6, doesnt talk, knows few signs, her name is Mia. We go to sandcastle and meet my cousin and her boyfriend there and hang out for a while, until they left cause of sunburn. We went and got potatoe patch fries for dinner, mine had cheese and bacon on it, but when we got back to our chairs to eat Mia got up and ran a chair into the guy sunning beside us. It was Jeff Reid, the steelers kicker. He talked to us for a little as we were apologizing and he said it was fine.

Friday Kristen took the roof off the jeep because it was real sunny in the morning. I walked down the hallway at cmu and when I got to the end I saw it pouring outside so I called her asking if she got the roof up and she didnt. She was taking a shower when it started raining. There was a 1/2 inch of water sitting on the floor of the jeep. The rain did wash some of the leftover mud from last sunday away though, so that was some good news. Later that night it stopped raining and we took mia up to a church festival where she had fun riding the swing around ride.

Saturday was a long long day. I woke up around 10:00 and tried relaxing , which turned into doing yard work and working on other random projects here and there. At 9:00 pm I headed down to Heinz field for the 10:30pm production load out call of the Kenny Chesney Concert. The production load out is all the stage stuff (lights, speakers and props, etc). I also took the steel hand call which started at 3am which was taking down the large steel stage structure. All the production stuff was out by 2:30am at which time the steel hands got to go to the press lounge at the top of the stadium to eat dinner. It consisted of lunchmeat sandwhichs that were nothing great. We then started taking down all the steel stuff and rolling up all the fabric walls (skins) that wraped the stage. Then they lower one side roof that housed all the speakers. There are numerous vertical trusses that the roof slides on. So the roof slowly comes down the trusses then gets disassembled on the stage. The vertical trusses then get picked up by a huge crane and lowered down on the concourse are infront of the jumbo tron in the stadium. I was on the crew that was disassembling these vertical trusses. The trusses are about 60 feet long and 3'x3' weighing several thousand pounds. The second truss we satrted working on a new kid jumped on and everyone is yelling watch your toes, he didnt. We knocked the last pin to seperate the section and a pice fell 2 inches crushing his toes. We all felt terrible, we warned him to watch his toes, there was nothing else we could do. He got rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. Later the roadie guy was telling us that the same thing happened few stops ago but the guy had to have his foot amputated cause it was so bad, that story didnt help us feel any better. Never found out what happened to the poor kid. The rest of the stuff went smooth and I finally got to go home around 8 pm Sunday. So after a long 22 hour work day of hard physical labor and standing on my feet almost all the time in scorching heatand sun I got home had chicken for dinner and immediately crashed. Dont remember anything except for waking up at 7:30am to come to work at cmu.

Monday I got to work and taught a hew person Ishita how to do mocap and how to clean data, I was also the subject for a jumping jacks capture. Mo then had me pretend I was being born to be mocapped for his art project. After I was being born on the floor I got a call from my best friend saying his baby girl was just born, I thought it was kind of Ironic. When kristen got home we went to vistit them in the hospital and see the new little girl Layla Marie. Still being tired from work on the weekend I called it an early night around 11.

Sorry for the LONG blog but I had to catch up to everyone else and be up to date.