Today started out kind of slow for me. I got up at 9AM and forced myself to stay up and not fall back asleep, even though I didn't really go to bed until like 3AM (caught up on some tv shows online... I really should be more diligent about not watching those as I go to bed, as they only keep me up). I sat around the apartment for an hour or so and then got dressed and headed out.

My first stop on my way to work was to my bank to change my address. I wasn't sure of the procedure to change the mailing address on file with my accounts, so when I approached the teller, I just asked. She asked me for a proof of residency or something but wasn't sure of the proper procedure either. One of the other tellers, Jodi, recognized me and was like "Oh we know him just change the address, it's no big deal". That was kind of nice... although what if it was someone who looked like me? I guess I just have an innocent looking face. What do you think? Would you trust me?


So, they changed my address for me and I left. That was all I needed to do there today. I stopped by Wendy's on my way to church, planning to just work through lunch. I am by myself a lot on Wednesdays now so I figured I'd just eat lunch and make it a long day of working. I got to the church around 11AM.

I started working on the video announcements for Sunday. I've got to get everything for Sunday done by lunchtime Friday because I'm driving up to Greensboro, NC this weekend to hang out with my friends Rex and Catie, which I am really looking forward to. Normally I work a lot on Friday night and on Saturday to finish things up, but I won't be able to, even though this Sunday is shaping up to be a big day!

I brought in the footage to Premiere from the hard drive recorder. The audio sounded pretty clean and it looked ok for the most part. The red backlight looked nice but all of the shots were kind of dark. I think I may have underexposed the footage some. Here's a before/after shot of Art Ringger (he reads my blog daily, so I figured might as well give him a shoutout) with the footage. I think that I was able to brighten it up significantly and improve the color.


I white-balanced the camera before I started but this camera tends to output a little bit green, I have found. It's not really a big deal because I can always adjust the color some in post-production. The only annoying thing is that one dead pixel. Can you spot it? Look at Art's left shoulder. It just sticks out, right there.

At 12pm, Matt knocked on my door (I have started shutting it to help me concentrate when I'm working) to see if I wanted to go to lunch with him and James to Jersey Mike's. I went along. I am usually the one who drives when we go to lunch, although I'm not sure why. I don't even really like driving, although I am exceptional at driving in reverse. Just ask the DMV. They should know, I took the drivers test 5 times to get my license and aced that part every time. The driving in reverse part. I failed parallel parking a lot. Who does that anyway.

I got a mini sub at Jersey Mike's but still spent like $7, however that works. I think I got scammed. But it was good. I kept it simple today with roast beef, turkey, provolone, and spicy mustard. And onions. I love onions and they love me. One time I ate part of an onion like an apple. That was a little off-subject.

When Matt sat down without his coat on, I greeted him with a "What's up, Sweater-Vest" and made him pose for a picture.


You can also see here that Matt brought in his own chips, which I think may be frowned upon in the restaurant business. I argued that they weren't losing any money if you weren't going to buy chips from them anyway. No one at the store said anything. We ate a quick lunch and got back around 1pm.

When we got back to the church, I spent the rest of the afternoon going through the footage for the video announcements, editing out parts that are usable, deleting what we don't need, etc. I worked for about 2 and a half hours but didn't really make a lot of progress. I spent some time trying to improve the contrast on some of the clips where a few of the pastors were wearing dark shirts. Charlie was wearing a black shirt, and against my black background, he literally looks like a floating head with floating arms to the side. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that, other than add artificial lighting gain and blow out the contrast so that you can see the shirt. It will make the background lighter too though. Boo.

I called Charter Communications today too to schedule a transfer of my cable service from the apartment to the house. I was hoping to convince them to do a connect at the house sometime soon and do a disconnect at the apartment toward the end of the month, but they said they had to disconnect first, than reconnect at the new residence. So, first I scheduled a disconnect for "sometime after February 15". I figured anytime after that would be fine. They scheduled it for the 16th. Then, we scheduled a connect appointment at the house. The furthest connect date was Februray 11th... a few days before the disconnect. So, either I persuaded them with the power of my words (and my cowboy hat was probably involved somehow) to do a connect before a disconnect, or they messed up. Either way, having them come out to do a connect on the 11th is going to be pretty inconvenient because I'm going to have to move the cable box and cable modem out to the house on that day in order for them to test the service. Boo to the second power.

I also contacted Duke Power and scheduled a stop-service on the electricity in the apartment for the end of the month. I wanted the power to stay on for a while after we moved out so that I could have electricity on to clean, etc.

Around 3:30, Tommy stopped by my office to borrow an adapter for a video shoot he was setting up for. I took a break and went out to help him get things set up. He was using the firepod that I fixed for them and connecting it to their Macbook to record the audio. The shoot centered around a discipleship time with Ruthie and a couple of girls that she disciples. Tommy wanted to basically set everything up and then leave so that they could talk without him being there distracting and interrupting.

I helped him get the cameras set and offered some suggestions on lighting as Ruthie and the girls came in. We had to spend a few minutes figuring out an audio problem and electrical noise with the camera. Ruthie borrowed my camera and took a few pictures. Here are some of the best ones of me, because, hey, this is MY blog, after all.



We started the recording and then left. Tommy came back to my office with me. I had about 20 minutes until I had to leave to meet Andrew for dinner, so I looked at the video announcement footage some more and then caught up on my blog reading for the day. I read so many blogs. Church leadership blogs, friends' blogs, professional video production blogs, and sometimes just random blogs that I find interesting. It's so easy too to have them all in Google Reader--I never have to go to each site to check for new entries. I just log into one place and Google Reader grabs all of the new entries for me. I subscribe to my own blogs too. I'm not going to lie... if I get bored, sometimes I read my own blog entries and they make me laugh. I think I'm hilarious.

At 5pm, I left the church to go meet Andrew at Oriental House for dinner. That place is so freakin' delicious. Is it ok to say freakin'? I suppose if we took the derivation of every exclamatory word they would all somehow lead back to a word we would choose not to use... so I'm going to substitute it with an entirely different word: delightfully. Delightfully delicious. I'm still trying to find ways to squeeze in usage of my new word that I made up the other day, "Splendarrific". You know, for when a moment is both fake (Splenda) and awesome (Terrific). Splendarrific. But there is nothing splendarific about Oriental House. Authenterrific maybe.

So, yes, dinner was great at the Oriental House. They're all about service there so different servers will keep coming and asking if you need anything, particularly drink refills. Within a span of about 2 minutes, we had three servers ask if we needed refills, so finally Andrew let one of them refill his drink and I asked for napkins. Third time's the charm, I suppose.

We left Oriental House around 5:45 and drove back to the church. I took an alternate route than the way I came, because traffic can be bad on Roper Mountain Road in the evenings sometimes. I thought we were going to have our "mental gel time" with the band/ensemble at 6:30, but that was cancelled to give more time for vocalist callback auditions and for the band to get ready and practice. I probably should start reading my emails for detail more often so that I don't spend all day anticipating to not have that time at my disposal.

I sat in my office for a while but found it hard to edit video with all of the AWANA kids screaming and being loud in the gym, along with the AWANA leader on the microphone leading them through the games. I always get a kick out of the discipline system they use... if the kids aren't paying attention, the leader will start counting on the microphone, "1!..... 2!..... 3!....4!" until the kids focus and pay attention. As far as I can tell, they just keep counting higher and higher and then scold everyone that they had to count that high that time. One time, as a joke, I decided to test the system and I yelled "ONE!....TWO!" from the stage and all of the kids stopped in their tracks and stopped talking. I laughed but none of them did. Oh well.

Andrew drew some more on the dry-erase board in the office. He can draw well. I, on the other hand, cannot. I can, however write with both hands. I'd like to see him do that. Anyway. Here's a picture of the dog he drew, wagging its tail, and the cat that I drew, which was apparently pooping. Don't judge me.


Band practice started around 7:30. I stood around on stage talking to some of the band members and then made myself available to fix issues with sound check as they came up. I introduced myself to one of the new band members who's son signed up to help with tech stuff. I totally forgot to contact him last week, and didn't want them to get to feeling that "we have all of the help we need", because I am always looking and recruiting if people are willing to serve. The more people we have, the more we can do. I only wish that I could schedule people to serve individual services instead of for the entire morning. I think more people would sign up to serve in a rotation if they weren't commited for the entire morning, but the problem is that we only have 10-15 minutes between services, and if they're running late or I have to fix issues, there is basically zero time to communicate technical things, and every service would feel like the first service... a dry run every time with no rehearsal.

Anyway. I started doing some light plots as the practice got underway but had to stop and run the slides for the vocalists. My friend Brian stopped by to hang out with me for a while. We talked for a bit and then I ended up showing him how to use the software so that I could go point some lights on the catwalk. When I came back down, I met Canon, a teenager who wants to help out with tech stuff on Sunday mornings. We talked for a few minutes and then I encouraged him to come back on Sunday morning so he could observe and get some training. Sunday is going to be busy!

Dan and Rachel stopped by after helping out with middle schoolers upstairs. Dan got a new schedule at work so we talked about that for a few minutes and then they left to go talk to somebody else. Ruthie stopped by as Brian and I were standing around and listening to the band and vocalists practice the Valentines song medley for this Sunday, which I think is going to be so much fun. Ruthie recorded this interview on my camera with me and Brian about Valentines Day, or, Singles Awareness Day. Be amazed at my ability to make up things on the spot.

I left around 10pm after talking to some other guys who had been helping out tonight with the middle schoolers as well. They invited me to join them at Brixx but I didn't want to stay out super late again.

Tomorrow, I've got some meetings as well as more editing I need to do. I really want to get it all done so that I can enjoy the weekend with my friends and not have to worry about work, even though I probably will worry anyway. I'm a champion worrier.

Later,

Joe