Home stretch

You can already feel it, right? It's in the air, it's in the pace of everyone's stride at the airport as they try to deftly sidestep yet another jackass who doesn't get the left side=walk/right side=stand international rules on the moving walkways, and its even in my gut. It's getting to be that time of the year.

I already wrote a "oh fuck, oh fuck, look at my to-do list" entry a few posts back... but I wanted to chime in again to celebrate a few steps forward (two steps back). (Am I the only one who misses that animated cat that danced and sung with Paula Abdul in her post-L.A. Lakers breakout album?) Anywho, there has been a lot of stress and a bit of drama these past few days in my world, but things are looking brighter. First and foremost, the girlfriend and I finally found a new place to live, which is very good and something that I was happy to cross off the big list. The new place is not nearly as hip or swanky as our loft, but it has more room and it should work well for us. Also in the personal realm, airline tickets have been purchased and plans made, and the girlfriend and I will spend Turkey Day with my family in Tallahassee. (read: time to cash in my Dad's new passion for collecting wine).

Notorious culture warrior, attorney Jack Thompson at his home in Coral Gables, FL. Thompson wages a one-man crusade against violence in entertainment directed towards children, especially in video games and rap music.

Also now officially crossed off the list, I spent several hours this morning doing some tweaking and re-editing to my portfolio website and there is a little bit of new work to be found. (The image above is one such example - I shot it last month for Rolling Stone. Unfortunately, the clip really isn't worth checking out). As other things are published (thus allowing me to share them with the rest of the world) I'll be adding even more, including a new project in the personal section. Now that the personal website is a bit more tidy, my evening will be spent re-shuffling my Redux portfolio on their website. So fresh, so... (it's like a musical revue this afternoon). And speaking of Redux, I heard back from Marcel this morning that he really likes my first draft of a new promo card (another to-do item), and so I'll get that finalized and off to the printer this week as well.

Blueeyes has been one of my main sources of drama recently, unfortunately, as the magazine has said goodbye to a couple of editorial board members. Drama really isn't the right word; it was more like just what happens when non-profit internet publishing meets extremely busy schedules. This latest bit of strife has put off my writing the 2nd part of my ongoing soap opera, As Blueeyes Magazine Turns... but it should be finished shortly, or as soon as I make some sense of how to explain why its so damn hard for us to find the content we are trying to support. The magazine itself, which is a lot more important than some post about it, is actually in decent shape despite the losses (I've also brought on a new member for the team this week too!) for putting out a new issue at the beginning of next month. We have some killer work waiting to see the light of day; I'm excited!

In the office I've taken advantage of my somewhat lighter editorial work load of the last two weeks to overhaul my digital workflow/storage system (that sounds a lot more complicated than my solution is) and also put some earnest work into building my PhotoShelter archive into an actual resource for my photography. Thus far I've really liked the way PS is set up and haven't had any significant problems. I've rerouted a few of my clients directly through using PhotoShelter to view and download high res files and they all seem to like working with it as well (but several others continue to demand that I FTP digital files directly to them). I guess this ended up being the big year for digital in my young career... not that I will ever be one of those people who say they are "all digital." My office mantra the past couple of weeks has been something like, "4 DVDs a day!, 4 DVDs a day!" which is to say that I've been trying to catch up on archiving my RAW format images on DVD (in duplicate, of course). Thus far I've only managed to barely get my toes wet into the St. Barths job three weeks ago; so that's not quite a done deal yet, as far as my list is concerned either.

And because I'm, well, me, I've left some of the truly HUGE jobs to taunt me until the very end of my list. The best I can say about my progress on the new print portfolio is that I've thought a little about it, which is a tad bit better than the process of converting my books into QuickBooks (I've tried to not think about that in any way). And worse still, I haven't even thought of not thinking about creating a new advertising print portfolio. Hmm, I think I'll keep that status quo right where it is for the time being. I'm now going to go crack open a beer (I'm on London time today), and not think about any of those things some more.

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