My grandfather once told me that it doesn’t matter how well you plan things out, there will always be unexpected events to trip you up.

Of course, we were talking about finances, but I think that his lesson applies equally well to life in general.

Oksana and I have been looking forward to going on a vacation together since last December. Finances are really no longer a problem as we can save up vacation money fairly easily, but getting the time off from work is an entirely different matter. I have the university calendar year to plan around, while Oksana has to give consideration to her job at the Mendenhall Auto Center.

Fortunately, we knew far ahead of time what we wanted to do. There was a family reunion (on my father’s side) scheduled for late June in Daytona Beach, and we also wanted to visit my mom parents on the beach in N.C. We asked our respective bosses early and were lucky enough to find two weeks in June that we could both afford to be gone.

Even though we had such advance warning, Oksana and I made a mistake. Instead of booking our tickets as soon as we’d received permission from work, we procrastinated. We thought it would be okay since we still had more than six weeks to go V-day, but we underestimated the number of people who go on vacation in June. The flights weren’t full yet, but we lost our opportunity to purchase a “saver” ticket with our accumulated miles.

Further complicating matters, we needed to take a roundabout flight path. Alaska Airlines (where we have a mileage plan) only flies to a handful of cities on the East Coast, so in order to spend a week in both North Carolina and Florida, we decided to fly round-trip to Orlando and purchase another ticket to Norfolk, VA, on the side. We could have done all that by cashing in 40,000 miles and paying $144 each on airfare.

Instead, we ending up cashing in 73,000 miles, paid $175 to purchase 7,000 extra miles, and spent $250 each on the additional FL-to-VA tickets. Lesson learned.

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Warning: This one is long. I wrote this… wow… about a year ago now. I’ve been meaning to post it on my wedding page, but I still have some writing to do that chronicles what happened before this stuff. I had been waiting (in vain?) to complete that first. I’m posting this on my ‘blog, today, because it has some background information that not every knows about. Unfortunately, it’s background information for some bad news that I need to post tomorrow.

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Sunday
The day after our wedding, Oksana and I awoke in our opulent room at Pearson’s Pond. The room was expensive, but it was also comfortable a quiet. Lying there in the late morning, enjoying the distinct lack of stress, I decided that it was worth every penny. My only regret was that we were not able to stay there much longer – our checkout time was rapidly approaching.

The day before, Oksana had dropped off an overnight bag in our room. I was glad that I’d married a smart woman – it meant that I wouldn’t have to wear my tuxedo again. In fact, because I was back in casuals, we dropped it off on the way home.

Our arrival back at our apartment was a rather rude awakening. It seemed as though every item from the wedding and the reception was piled in up our living room and kitchen. Flowers, clothes, decorations, leftover cake, and computer gear was everywhere. For some inexplicable reason, there was a pair of men’s dress shows on the kitchen counter.

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I’ve been looking forward to today. May is over and it’s time to check the web stats for my Photoblog site! Let’s see what we’ve got:

The final count of unique visitors for the month of May was 37. If you’ve been reading along, you’ll recall that April had just 21. Remember, too, that April’s numbers were essentially “unadvertised” hits (those that came off the links I semi-discreetly placed only on my own web pages), while May’s included a mini-campaign to tell my online contacts about the Photoblog (via this ‘blog, e-mail signature tags, and changing my contact name in MSN Messenger to “photoblog.arlomidgett.com”).

Looking over the details of my statistics, it’s interesting to note that the majority of referral hits came from the web log you’re reading right now. Those days where I wrote about the Photoblog site show definite spikes – 19 alone hits came from this ‘blog’s index page. The next biggest link referral came from www.arlomidgett.com, no surprise there.

Something I didn’t notice before were the number of return visitors. April had 60 visits from the 21 visitors, while May had 116 visits from 37. I can make a loose assumption that there are a fair number of people coming back to see more. That’s great!

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The video club of which I’m a part has been working lately on finishing some of our first-year projects. One of them, entitled Once Upon a Time on a Dark and Stormy Night, is worth mentioning simply because I’ve invested such a large amount of time in it recently.

In our first year, we adopted a certain operation for our club. Each month, a new member would step up and offer up their own idea for a project. That person would often take on the role of writer/director and the group would rally around them and offer whatever help they could on the day of the shoot. Other responsibilities, especially those that require work outside of shoot dates, would invariably arise, but essentially, participation for most people would amount to an evening planning meeting and a daylong production schedule.

Every project will also have the typical post-production editing, audio, and music related tasks associated with it. What makes Once Upon a Time on a Dark and Stormy Night different is the amount of time we’re putting into extra effects.

Amelia Jenkins is the proud owner of Once Upon a Time on a Dark and Stormy Night and from the beginning she visualized it as animated. We discussed doing stop-frame animation, claymation, and the like, but ended up discarding those ideas because we suspected that they would be too time consuming. I suggested that we plan a normal shoot and use a combination of digital effects in post-production to achieve the animated look-and-feel she was after. Although I haven’t seen the movie Waking Life, I did read up online about how the director supervised the post-processing of the film. I was confident that, after the shoot was behind us, we could find something that would work.

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Bleh.

Continued from here.

That weekend, I began the daunting task of diving into some of the material my professor friend had sent to me. I picked up the Builder’s Guide for Cold Climates only because it looked very professional and had a lot of drawings. Boy, was that over my head.

I guess I should have had a clue with the words Builder and Guide included in the title. I’m not a builder. I mean, I’ve got enough tools and know-how to put together a particle-furniture that comes from the store complete with instructions, but anything beyond that is, well, beyond me. The book itself was well-written and quite explanatory, it just had a different audience in mind.

Before giving up on page 100 or so, I did sort of enjoy trying to figure out what they were talking about. Each chapter concerned itself with a different part of the homebuilding process; the foundation, insulation, electrical, plumbing, etc. All of it was geared towards building an extremely energy efficient, durable house in a cold weather environment. I got the most out of the first part of the each chapter where they gave an overview of what they were about to address. The rest was simply graphical variations on a theme. Unfortunately, the diagrams far outweighed the informative text. It wasn’t uncommon to find references to Figure 5.62 in a ten-paragraph chapter!

The sheer number of diagrams made it abundantly clear that many, many things need to be considered in order to properly build a home in our environment. As a prospective buyer, considering having my own home built, I worried that there was too much information. When it’s time to lay hundreds of thousands of dollars down, how can you trust your general contractor to make sure that all these little details are followed?

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I just (re)discovered something that might have a detrimental effect on the newfound proliferation of my web log entries… 

Straightforward sunbathing is awesome.

The weather here has been truly spectacular lately – the bank thermometer next to my apartment read 77 degrees yesterday – and I’ve been taking advantage of it every change I get. Which isn’t exactly all that often when I have to work 40 hours a week. Nevertheless, I’ve been using my lunch breaks to plant myself in a warm, quiet corner on campus, crank up the tunes, and use my laptop to pound out these entries.

Today I was a bit hungrier than usual, so I went to Subway first and grabbed a sandwich. When I got back to campus, I had maybe a half hour left on my lunch break. I sat down on a bench next to the library and started typing Part III of that “Buying a House” thing I’ve been blathering on about lately. The day was hot, though, and wearing a black t-shirt didn’t help matters. What’s more, I’d left my sunglasses at work. With them it’s difficult to make out what’s on my incapacitated-by-sunlight LCD screen. Today I found that it’s pretty much the same without them, there’s just more squinting involved.

Anyway, after all of 10 minutes, I gave up and simply lay down on the bench and closed my eyes. The sun blazing down was heaven and if I’d had more than 10 or 15 minutes left, I’d have probably let myself fall asleep.

I’ve only been living in Juneau for 10 years or so (A decade already? Damn!), but I’ve heard that the best time of year is always in the spring. Thinking back to 2003, I can believe it. As it’s been the last couple months, April and May last year were exceedingly clear and sunny. Unfortunately, it was also quite cold. I remember taking advantage of the good weather by playing disc golf and having to skate on the icy trails well into May.

Not this year. It’s been perfectly comfortable with highs in the mid- to upper 60s almost every day. The only downside is that my apartment gets quite a bit of afternoon sunlight and if neither Oksana nor I remember to go home to open the windows and turn on the fans during our lunch breaks, we’ll come home to temperatures (seriously) around 90 degrees. Not that I’m complaining – it’s a fair trade, in my opinion.

In all likelihood, this divine weather will not last much longer. In no time we’ll be back to Juneau’s typically depressing wetgreychilly summer. It’ll be depressing, sure, but at least I won’t be tempted to sleep through my lunchtime writing sessions.