Started off the weekend by trying out a new restaurant I learned about. What you’re looking at is my sushi-grade grilled tuna on a bed of linguini and a tomato sauce of some sort. It was FANTASTIC. I’m a big sushi eater and having this large a portion of fresh tuna was a treat.The rest of my weekend was spent busy with stuff around the house. I did up-teen loads of laundry, washed my car (futile in the pollen) and gave my dog Kelsey a bath.

Church was good this morning although Dave had all sorts of issues with technology… projector issues, mic problems, people problems, etc. While I’m sure it was frustrating for him to go through, so many things were happening at the same time it was kinda comical. Music went off without a hitch for the most part. Busy when church was over as we cleared the stage for a makeover. More room and better looking is the goal.

Speaking of bands… Kevin and I were having one of our stupid conversations when he mentioned something about his cats – I laughed as I thought of the band name “Catbox 20″. Kevin chimed right in with our first single – “Rock the Catbox”. Another variation of that was suggested by Lemon Tootise (LT for short) – “Stock the Catbox”.

Any other ideas?

Hope everyone had a great weekend. Looks like we just skipped spring altogether and went straight to summer. Geez.

When I’m talking about pollen being bad down here, I’m not kidding. Here’s a dark colored car just COATED with pollen. The dark color is easier to show in a photo taken with my pocket camera. My car is white and it doesn’t show up as well in a picture but trust me, it’s covered also. I just washed my car yesterday and it’s already yellow again.

Imagine breathing all that stuff in…

As we get ready for a new series at church, I went off last evening to get a photo of a location we’re going to use as an element in the series. This place is a few miles from town in a somewhat isolated area. There will be a story to go along with this later on – don’t want to spoil it for anyone that goes to church with me and reads my blog.

Anyway, has anyone notice just HOW MUCH pollen there is in the air right now? My car is COATED with the stuff. I’m definitely keeping my windows up and A/C on till that dies down a bit. It may be some time though because no rain is predicted till sometime next week. Hopefully that will clean up the air and also knock pollen still in the trees down to the ground and into the sewers. I feel bad for people with pollen allergies. It’s brutal out there now.

Here’s a shot of me and the Higginbotham’s all scrunched into about a 3′ square area Saturday night. Dave and I took turns standing, sitting and balancing on the floor, railing and bench to keep our legs from going numb. I think we both managed to do the gentlemanly thing and always made room for Anna on the piano bench. Oh yeah – we were sharing a piano bench.

Whew! What a week it’s been. I’ve finally been able to sit for a minute and post. Most of what little free time I’ve had lately was spent putting together a presentation for my dad to use when he’s visiting different places. Spent a day or two recording and editing the narration then the rest of the time adding music and then synchronizing about 80 slides to the soundtrack. The tough part was having to get familiar with two different programs, one for audio and the other for the presentation. Thanks to Kevin for loaning me his Lexicon Omega so I could connect a nice mic to my PC. Also thanks to Kyle for loaning me a mic more suited to vocals. Most all my microphones are specific to percussion. Now that I have a good handle on how to do this sort of thing fairly easily, next time won’t take as much effort.

Fun stuff last Thursday night hanging out with friends at Maria Bonita. Despite the poor service, the food was good and the overall atmosphere was nice change from the other hangouts in town. If they can just get the wait staff to step it up – SEVERAL notches, that place will flourish. I was only going to have a drink or two then head home but it turned into dinner. I did manage to head out by 8:30 though so I could continue working on the aforementioned presentation project. I finally got that finished and burned to CD and DVD late Friday night. I even managed to squeeze in watching the F1 qualifying at the season opening race in Australia.

Yep, Formula One is back on again. My favorite driver – Fernando Alonso, has switched from the Renault team over to McLaren/Mercedes this season. Ultimately in the race he finished 2nd. His teammate and rookie Lewis Hamilton did well also finishing in 3rd. Kimi Raikkonen who moved to Ferrari FROM McLaren/Mercedes finished first.The Ferrari package is always a strong one. McLaren/Mercedes looks to have a competitive package this year after performing very poorly last season. Renault, my favorite team for the past few years seems to be lagging in performance here at the start. Hopefully, they’ll have some upgrades to their package and improve quickly.

Saturday night I went out to dinner in Huntsville then came back to Decatur to watch my friends Bishop Black play at Simp McGhee’s. Ran into plenty of people I knew. I didn’t have my camera on me but hopefully some of my other camera toting friends will send me some of the shots they took – at least they said they would…

Weekend’s over with. Hope everyone did something memorable coz tomorrow’s Monday and you know what that means.

Now that I’ve had a chance to fiddle around with capturing video from our HD cam, it’s not quite a complex operation as it was last time I did it. Here’s video from this morning of us playing Evanesence’s “My Immortal”. Their songs just “fit” in this message series we’ve been going through.

Sound is much better this time since the camera got a feed from the sound board, but it could still be improved a lot. Taking baby steps as we learn.

Today has definitely been stellar in the way of weather. I got a chance to get out and enjoy it this morning because of a photo thing I had to do at a local tennis tournament. I was needing to get a shot from the air so a lift truck was arranged to meet me there. The tennis complex had a number of courts on them I needed to get in the picture and the only way to do it was to get up high. I found three spots to shoot from and proceeded to get the truck into position. Ed, my boom operator – asked if I was afraid of heights. I’m not afraid of heights, just falling and splattering. And it’s really not the falling that concerns me so much, it’s just the sudden stop at the end.

I took some shots yesterday of a gentleman that runs a small local airport. He’s been retired 20 years but took up running the airport to keep him busy in his retirement. He was a joy to talk to – full of stories and wisdom. The facility had a really nice feel to it – sort of a down home friendly kind of vibe if you know what I mean. I may go back out there and have lunch with him one day to just hear more about air travel and how it’s changed in his lifetime.

Spent this evening grilling out with friends. Despite it getting cooler than we were expecting, it was a great time to just get together and enjoy each other’s company.

Today in church we had some unique things going on with our music program. Kevin and Dave had a dialog going on discussing musical eras and such. We’d pause then go into a song – the first one was Come Together (The Beatles). Mainly a bass driven song but I Added Something(tm) to it since I had no idea what the drums in that song are supposed to do. It fit I guess. Next was Sweet Home Alabama (Lynard Skynnard). Following that was Jump! (Van Halen). Kyle did a great job with his guitar solo. Kevin’s keyboard work was good too. We wrapped that up with Interstate Love Song (Stone Temple Pilots). Sat down after that and let Dave tie all that into his message.

I’d post some video on here but… someone didn’t get the camera set up. Anyway, the crowd seemed to like everything and got into it pretty well. That was fun.

Last night was the annual Addy awards hosted by the Tennessee Valley Advertising Federation. Lesa and I went to represent… our company. Plenty of our friends were there – it was a nice time to relax and enjoy the evening. We came away with several silver awards and two GOLD addy’s.

This year’s ceremony was held at the Huntsville Marriott right beside the Space and Rocket center. The decor and stage were nicely done. I didn’t bring my BIG camera along, just my small pocket one otherwise I would have gotten more photos. I think there was someone else there taking photos that will be posted later on – we’ll see if those show more of the place.

All week long I had been trying to get Lesa to tell me what she planned on wearing so I could somewhat coordinate what I would wear. She at least narrowed it down to black or blue… until 2 hours before I was to pick her up and she texted me “I’m wearing chocolate”… Sigh.

Came back to town and hit up Simp McGhee’s where we spent the rest of the evening with good wine and good friends.

Ok folks… I’ve been messing around with trying to get some video of a song we did last week online. Most of the fun was centered on how to take high-definition video and turn it into something I could stream on the web. I finally was able to get a combination of settings to work although I’m not convinced that they are the best settings yet. I’ll fiddle around with it a little more and see if I can get some of the quality to improve. I may end up just reducing the video window size.

If you see a line asking you to get the Flash Player, then you don’t have it currently installed. Follow the link to get and install it then you should be all set. You’ll eventually need it anyway so nows a good time to get it installed.