Some of you may know that in a previous life (read: ‘back in the day’) I was a drummer. For all intents and purposes I’ve hung up my drumsticks for the forseable future, but I still have a very high appreciation for those folks who have a real talent on a drum kit.
I was surfing around a bit today and found the video that I’ve linked to below. I spent the entire 7 min. 56 sec. of the video with my jaw on the floor.
This kid is so young with MAD MAD MAD drum chops. See for yourself:
So Janey and I just returned to my apartment after a wonderfully fun adventure.
The story all starts with Janey spending last night feeling quite ill. While that in and of itself is not so wonderfully fun it does set the stage for a post work trip to the doctors office. To make a long story quite short I will put it in a few bullet points:
So as you can imagine I did give Janey a hard time about having to have blood taken, and work with that little plastic cup. Little did I know that the masters of the universe were planning their revenge.
On the way home we planned a little stop at a 7-11 or similar convenience store to get her some lip balm and me a good sized beverage. It’s been the sort of day that I want to reward myself with a good half-gallon of diet coke. (really… did you know that those 64oz. cups are a half-gallon of liquid!?! nuts!) So we reached the establishment with Habib and Akbar behind the counter waiting to ring me up. All went well with the transaction, and we were off to the car to head home.
As Janey and I were completing our vehicle entry ritual of a quick kiss before I close her door, I stood up and accidentally hit the top edge of my beverage bucket on the car door. If you can picture the shape of a 7-11 64oz. cup you’ll realize how top heavy it is. Well nature (read: gravity) was working against me and in one very slow motion moment I watched the container flip as it fell to the ground. The lid came off and all 0.5 gallons of brown nutri-sweet sweetened goodness found its way onto, and into, my right shoe. I couldn’t help but join in Janey’s laughter when I turned around to see the mini river my diet coke had made out to the middle of the parking lot.
so the moral of the story?
You reap what you sow… so be nice dammit!
As I’m reading back in the last few posts on this blog I realize that I haven’t updated you at all on what I’ve actually been doing while I haven’t been posting. You’d think all I do is go to movies and play online… …wait, that sort of is what I do. But there really is more! REALLY!
Lets go back a ways… How about from when Janey and I got back from Florida. That was a ways back. Early October if I remember correctly.
Right after we got back from Florida I had to hop right into work. There was a group in town that let us do some wonderful things for a multi day event. We had a great big beach bash out on the Grand Californian Hotel lawn complete with sandcastles and a killer surf band. A killer video dance club for the teens, with a very modern Monte Carlo feel thanks to the blackjack, roulette, and Texas Holdem tables out on the terrace. And I rounded out the night with a really really wonderful late night event just for the adults.
I mentioned this in a previous entry, and unfortunately I can’t go into too much detail online, but this event was the absolute highlight of my time so far producing events. We did a tour of an attraction with the core team of Disney Imagineers that actually created it. It was sort of a reunion for them, and a real treat for me and our guests. It was an experience that very few on this planet have been able to do. It’s hard to explain, but picture riding through a Disney attraction at about 1/4 normal speed while an Imagineer gives you a first hand account of what went into developing and building the whole thing. That is really just the tip of the iceberg too! They had the chance to visit the maintenance bay and see the real nuts and bolts of how it all works day-to-day. It was really fun.
So moving on… Very shortly after that my wonderful family made their yearly trip out here to CA. Normally the trip would have happened sometime in November, but there were a lot of factors working against that time frame, so October it was. They came down and we had a really fun time (as always). There were a few funny spots… like when my girlfriend and sister decided it might be fun to go try on wedding dresses… **blinK, blink… gulp* It’s alright… it made for several interesting conversations.
So once the fam left, Janey and I were pretty quiet for a few days. Then I had to dive, or more accurately I was pulled kicking and screaming into a bit of an event mess. This is the super-dee-duper tough client that I’ve been talking about a bit in past entries. I have no interest in talking about the client much (mostly because I never want to think about them again), but I would like to chat about the event.
It was a very sizable event with lots and lots of elements. I hesitate to go into too much detail, but I will provide a few photos. You’ll see some great shots of several destinations (they don’t have anything to do with each other… and trying to create a cohesive event out of it was a nightmare… but that’s another conversation entirely). Here are some photos of that event (the first 13 photos are all one event)
I really got emotionally wrapped up in that event (in a bad way). More so then any before it. It was very easily my most challenging (though by no means the largest) project so far.
So I guess that brings us up to today.
We’re planning a wonderful Thanksgiving meal that will occur the weekend following the actual holiday since I have to work on the ‘real’ day. I’m really looking forward to Janey’s first turkey. She stresses out when she tries something new in the kitchen but it always turns out great. She even made four pumpkin pies that were fantastic and it was her first try.
So while your having a good time around the table with your family, think of me making the rounds at the Disneyland Hotel making sure our guests have a magical family holiday.
This has been a super long update… and if you made it this far I consider you a true friend! 🙂 If you read this blog, but you’ve never commented, try it this time. Just leave any old comment just to introduce yourself.
Until next time…
R.
As you may have already seen on my Photos page, Janey and I have decided to combine our photo posting efforts.
I was actually planning to add a photo gallery of my own just like Janey did some months ago. But since we are always coming home with the same photos, it seemed silly to have two sites with the same stuff. I pitched the idea to Janey, and with only a little bit of coaxing she came around. 🙂
I really need her help with it. She’s already thought out how to lay it out nice and logically. And shes done such a great job with hers, that I couldn’t help but try and convince her to help me with my first run at an online photo album.
And so without any futher chatter, I’d like to introduce Janey & Rustin.com!
So some of you may have noticed two things:
Let me address both of these.
I have been living my real life (rather then my online life) much more then usual the last few weeks. As you may have read in a previous post I have been working with a very difficult client to get an event together that really taxed my patience, and pushed me to the very brink of a serious freak out moment. So in keeping with the idea of “keep it simple” I needed to cut a few things out to accommodate the extra space this event was taking up. It did turn out pretty dang nice, and I will get some photos up to prove it.
This actually brings me right to the next point on the list. The new button will be the place I will start sharing photos. I’m going to start using a service I talked about on this site a little while ago called BubbleShare. I would have had a lot more of it done, but Bubbleshare seems to be having trouble making albums for me… or more specifically it’s the iPhoto plugin that I’ve used before that’s giving me trouble. Without getting too geeky, here is what I will say. It’s broken now, but I will see if I can sort it out and upload some photos for you all to see.
OK. That’s all for now. More to come.
So I came home from work today feeling a little blue. I have been traveling a very long road to a difficult event with an incredibly difficult client. It all came to a head on Monday (event day) when I had nothing but praise from the event guests, and nothing but very nasty complaints from the actual client. It was a super high pressure situation that really pulled my emotions out from the little storage box they normally stay in when I’m in my event ‘zone’.
So it’s the clean up period after this event and my stomach is still tied in little knots. I really needed some kind of release. I was surfing around online and decided a movie was the ticket. Just something to take me out of my reality for a few hours.
In reading some reviews on Movies.com I found that one I had never heard of was on the top of the critics picks. I ran it by Janey… but I think she just wanted me to make the decision. And so we were off to the theater!
We saw a wonderful little movie called ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang‘ that did exactly what I needed it to. It’s a very dark movie with too much foul language, several murders, major suspense, clever mystery, more plot twists then you can shake a stick at, and the thickest most wonderfully written script that I’ve seen in ages. It was like one big brick wall of dialog that was constantly flowing at you, and if you were quick enough to catch it all you’d be rolling in the isles with laughter. Did I mention multiple corpses, severed finger, a hungry dog, a body (or two) in the trunk, mean bad guys, false trails, etc etc?
This movie is absolutely not to be seen by kids or people who can’t handle ample amounts of violence. But if your up for that sort of thing, and could use a good laugh while watching the underdog win… go see this movie.
I’m happy to see that today Disneyland made podcasting a monthly thing. These are a great listen.
So I found this great little photo sharing website tonight that I wanted to try. It’s called Bubbleshare. It makes it super easy to share photos online without all the hasstle of creating accounts and other kinds of crap.
so as a little tester I put up a great collection of about 50 candid photos of Walt Disney. Let me know what you think.
So it’s about 5:00 in the afternoon on Halloween. I just went with Janey to have a relaxing little lunch at Boston Market then we stopped at the grocery store to pick up some supplies to make a distinctively holiday themed meal.
So now I’m just sitting on my couch sort of half-watching a documentary on Vlad the Impaler and I decided to do a little blogging.
I’ve never been a huge fan of Halloween, but this year especially it seems to be driving me nuts. For the last few weeks the general populus has been subjected to the idiotic stylings of some untalented hacks convincing people to become weekend party planners. So everybody and their dog is playing Martha Stewart. They’re running around with a bag of dry ice and some green cake frosting spouting pseudo-words like “Spooktacular” and “BOOtiful”.
Now now, I know that I don’t have much room to talk since parties are what I do for a living, and the company I work for has made a science of creating words out of complete thin air. But for some reason the general cheap marketing packages I see at this time of year are just starting to drive me up the wall.
There is absolutely no point to this rant whatsoever… It’s just what’s on my mind.
More to come.