Fully Awsome

So we went to a friend's 30th birthday party yesterday. It was up in Syracuse at a Lazer Tag arena.
Here's the scoreboard from the second game, when we ditched the teams as played all individually.
I think if I ever blow out an elbow or shoulder and can't fight in the SCA anymore, I'm switching over to competitive Lazer Tag.
We also finished our christmas shopping over the weekend and put up our lights, pictures of that coming soon.

Xmas preview

First, here's a movie of my son opening an early christmas present at the thanksgiving present exchange my brother's and I had.

If this is any indication, christmas morning is going to be very exciting for him. Actually it may be christmas all day, because I have no plans of rushing him through gifts and he likes to open and play with everything for a while. And since this is going to be his last christmas as the only child opening presents I figure we can let him savor it.

December

Well, Turkey Day was great. It's really a Wed-Sunday thing, with trips to Toga and Connecticut.
I won the weight loss contest with my brothers. Yay! Now we'll see if exercise and sensable eating will keep me at this weight.

Last Wed, before we left for Thanksgiving my son and I went to see the local mall Santa. He's a great Santa. He comes up from North Carolina to work as Santa for a month and my son has seen him every year, the the photo studio where I get most of my video work runs the photo/Santa village at the mall. Well, this is the first year that my son was willing to sit with Santa and tell him what he wants for christmas, he even had a question for Santa, "Where are the reindeer?" Anyway here's the picture of the Santa visit:


So the rest of month is a bit hectic. Some deadlines, christmas prep and it's about time to start setting up a training for crown tourney in May. And I'm hoping I can fit in some time to enter a couple of video contests this month. Finally I need to get my focus back to short films now that the video contests have gotten me moving again. So, I think I'll shoot for end of the year to have my short film from North Carolina ready and out for festival submission, at least one feature script far enough along that I could get and editor to help me polish it up and another serious short film project ready to shoot in January or February.
So that's three goals, we'll see how I do.

Is it christmas time yet?

So roughly twice a day my son will ask if it's christmas time yet. I think he's figured out that he'll be getting presents when it's christmas. Either that or he's just happy to see his holiday choir come out of storage. Here's a movie of him, well not really conducting, but at lest coordinating the singing:

On a totally different note, I'm trying to freshen up my magic card trick skills. I'm doing this mostly by just carrying decks of cards around with me and practicing the basics. Hopefully I'll have a couple of tricks down by Thanksgiving. Audiences always make it more fun, but I don't want to bring anything out if I'm so rusty I ruin the trick. We'll see.

Finally, I'm reuploading the video to the last contest. Mostly because I went to review it and thought "This looks like a black bear and a puma fighting on a moonless night." Or, in other words, it's too dark to see anything. And though I'm not so happy with the video, much like most of what I do after a few days, I'm just going to fix the brightness and toss it in again. I'm sure I'll re-link to it when the better version is up.

More, after Thanksgiving most likely . . .

Video Contest 4

Well, I've made my fourth entry into a video contest in as many weeks. I've put together a quick montage of SCA fighting that we did at a kind of super sweet 16 birthday party. I was also coordinating the video of the party, so we managed to get a 2 camera shoot of the fighting for bettering editing. Anyway the video can be found here. Don't be afraid to watch and rate it, though I don't know if that will have any impact on the contest outcome.

With Thanksgiving next week, I don't know if I'll shoot any personal video. But I suspect I'll be entering more contests in the near future.

No real pictures or movies to post right now, but there are some meat ones over on my wife's blog.

The only thing worse than a diet . . .

. . . is a diet that works. I'm in a weight loss contest with my brothers and I've started my secret diet for the last three weeks. I hate the diet, but I'm dropping weight too fast to justify anything else. Why can't exercise have this effect?

I've entered another video contest, but they haven't posted the video yet. So, I'll post the direct link when it's up.

And finally, two pictures of my son. One in normal clothes and one in his current superhero phase.

Parenting

I've noticed recently that my son, who is 3, is very easy to reason with. It really became apparent last week when he put a piece of plastic wrapper up his nose. At first he was freaking out and REALLY wanted the plastic out, but after one attempt to get it out with tweezers he changed his mind and said he'd rather just leave the plastic in than have the tweezers in his nose. But throughout the entire plastic in the nose adventure, which involved a trip to urgent care and about half-a-dozen more attempts by the doctors to get the plastic before they successfully extracted it, he would freak out if any of the extraction devices came near his nose. But if I told him that they just want to look with a light to see if the plastic was still there (and they really were just looking) then he would almost immediately clam down and become completely cooperative. The whole incident was so surreal, I'd love it have it on film just to see what it looked like from the outside.

I'd say he's becoming more independent decisions, but he's always been as unpredictable as he is opinionated. So, it's always been easier to let him make his own choices.

On a side note, I've entered a clip of him into a Parenting Magazine contest. I don't know if it should count towards my 4 contests in 4 weeks as it's old footage that didn't require any editing. I think I've posted it here before, and since the contest is decided by judges with no viewer tracking, I'll just post the link to his video:
Video Contest

Oh, be aware it will automatically roll into the next kid's video at the end of his. And so on. If you're not careful you could end up watching a lot of kids the someone thinks are cute.