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Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Busy Arroyo Grande (Day 4)

Two New Slideshows!


  • Vacation Slideshow
  • It's 4.3 megs, so give it a while to download...


  • Melodrama Show Slideshow





  • Hey everyone, man was it a busy day for me. I'll try to get it all down, if not, I'll do more tomorrow. So here we go...


    This morning I woke up real early. I didn't get much sleep, and I was wide awake at 6:45. I walked to the stairs to check my computer for updates and email. Nothing, so I went back to bed. I tried laying down to get to sleep, but my mind was too busy in thought for me to get anywhere. I must have layed in a daze thinking, cause 15 minutes later, I got out of bed again. This time, I went upstairs to work. I look around on the internet, and started working on my slideshows. These things are really fun once you get them going good. I import my photos into iPhoto, and then put them into a folder. I quit iPhoto and then go into Comic Life program. I select quite create, selecting my album I just made in iPhoto, and within a few minutes, I have my slideshow done. I look ever it to make sure it looks good. Maybe changing a picture here and there to give it a nicer, smoother feel. I also add titles after that. Then, I export it as a quicktime movie. Once that quicktime movie is on my desktop, I watch it in Quicktime, then export that file again, but with a different compression. This step in Quicktime makes the movie file smaller, and in a different format so more people (aka Windows users) can watch it. I spent most my morning doing to get it just perfect.


    I did manage to get out around 10am to go check out Pismo Beach. Drove down with the top down. Man, thats a fun car. But as fun as it is, I make sure to drive the speed limit and be safe ( Hi Mom :-D ). But its true, when you get into a new car, you seem to drive slower cause you don't know the car, and everything feels a bit faster. So, listening to music, man that car has a good stereo system, I headed down to Pismo with my track jacket. I've been wearing this new jacket I bought if you hadn't noticed. Its really nice, cause it makes your warm enough at Pismo when its foggy, but you can also wear it as something light for the whole day. Anyway, at Pismo I walked to the end of the pier and back. Maybe 30 minutes in all. I took a few shots, and you can see all of those in the slideshow I made. Okay, I can home and did all that stuff I talked about in the last paragraph.


    At around 1 o'clock or so, when I was still fooling around on the computer, I got an e-mail from Monique. Reading the e-mail gave me enough courage to try to call Monique blindly. My heart was pounding as the phone rang. Her grandma picked up. I do my post to say, "Is Monique in the house" in portuguese. Like last time, her grandma starts talking to me like I know Portuguese. I feel bad, cause I really want to talk to her, but the only thing i can say is, "I don't know". I think she got the idea, cause she dropped the phone. Davide, Monique's brother picked up. I told him I wanted to talk to his sister and he went and got her. So I got to talk to my girlfriend for about 10 minutes. It had almost been 2 weeks since our last phone call, and the deprivation was kind of getting to me. We usually talk every night on the phone, for hours at a time, so these last 6 weeks have been quite unusual. We said our good-bye's and I was really happy after hanging up the phone. Somehow talking to her charges my battery, and makes me smile all day. You'll see that soon...


    After that, Julie had lunch ready for us to eat. We had a great lunch, really tasty. Salad, chicken, corn, baked potatoes. Yum Yum Yum. Some shots of us eating are in the slideshow above. After lunch we headed out to Office Max. We picked some some office supplies and 2 new digital cameras! They had a clearance on a certain type of digital camera, so Julie and Paul bought both Mandy and I each a camera. It was a really nice gift from them, and I want to say thanks. Tomorrow's pickers will be coming from my new camera. I'm so excited :-D. From Office Max, it was to another coffee shop for, you guessed it, coffee. On the way home, we stopped at Julie's classroom to drop off some stuff we got at Office Max. Some paper and pencils, that sort of stuff. I also got a change to educate myself with some second grade level lessons. I think what I have learned today will come in handy next week back at the junior college! Mandy got a good shot of me too.


    At 6:30, after getting some shots of Mandy's BMW Z3, we headed to something I had never heard of. It was Melodrama and Vaudeville show. I went into the room not knowing was I was in store for. once again, which seems like every day here, I was amazing, stunned, and had the greatest time! The room, about a medium size comedy club, was filled with tables in the middle, and grandstands on the side. It looked like a comedy club with little tables all crammed together between chairs. On the floor was sawdust. It had a very homey feeling to the place. We got in line for food right away. Good thing for me they had a chicken salad. The first thing that was cool, was when you ordered, they called out what you had ordered. Much like the SNL skit where they yell out "Cheese burger, cheese burger, cheese burger," this place took it one step further. Instead of "cheese burger", they had specialy names for each item on the menu. If I remember right, my order was, "Green clucker, and a skinny". The green clucker would be the chicken salad, and the skinny the diet cola. They had other great names for other items on the menu, but I only remember what I ordered. Once we had all gotten our food, we sat down at our table.


    The show started when an actor ran, jumping onto the stage as the lights dimmed. Looking very much like Andy, my dad's old drummer, this guy got the crowd cheering withing a few minutes and lead the crowd in a song. He went over what they show would be about, and did the usually, bathrooms overe there, no flash photography, and so on. All the while making the crowd laugh. Then they started to show. Now, a Melodrama is a play, I quickly found out that this is very much crowd participation show. The point of a melodrama is the boo at the bad guy, and cheer for the good guy. They do a play, which is quite interesting when you get to boo at the bad guy. It makes the show so much fun. These actors were really good too! There was about 8 actors total, ranging young to middle aged men and women. The play was set in the early 1900's in Ireland. They all had good Irish accents, and sometimes it was too good to make out what they were saying. Plus, they liked to talk a mile a minute at times. Overall, the story was great. Most of the picks we took were at intermission. There was 2 intermissions.


    After the second intermission, after the play, they had Vaudeville, which was a very funny bit of comedy set to music. Tonight's theme, in honor of 30 years doing all this stuff, they played tribute to the 70's. They did spoofs of actors, shows, and just random stuff from the 70's. What made it so damn cool was that the sang all the time in this part. They did 70's songs all in 70's costumes (well, clothes at the time). It's really had to describe but it was great, as well all had a blast. Julie, next to me, was laughing so hard, I thought she was going to die. But, everyone in the audience was eating it up. It was great, and I think everyone had a great time. Then it ended and we went home.


    At home, we all hung out here in the computer room. With 3 computers in this room (a desktop, my iMac, and a laptop) we all were busy with something. It was quite cool to have people talking in here as I worked away on this post and editing the slideshows. I showed Julie, Paul and Mandy this blog, and I hope they come back to visit. Its fun to show off your work. :-D And god knows I've put some work into this place. Making it all cool with slideshows for everyone to see. Its like your coming with me on vacation. In the future, I hope to add commentaries to the slideshows. But I guess I'm doing that right here. You just have to find in the pictures which part I'm talking about here. Tomorrow is me going to SLO by myself all day. I plan to hang around, walk around, shop, and have a good time. Probably head to a beach as well. We'll I'll take my new camera and show you all what I see. Until then, have a great day!


    -Skyler



    P.S. - I'll probley add even more stuff to this post and when I do, I'll remove this "P.S." message.

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