July 4th, 2011
My best friend Max has a big, incredible family. They throw amazing events for major holidays, and happily for me, my infrequent visits home to Utah coincide with these events. Max’s older sister Maryann and her husband Paul have an annual 4th of July barbecue, after which they attempt to melt the asphalt of their street with glorious patriotic incendiaries. Max’s older brother Matthew and little sister Amanda, not content with igniting only inanimate objects seem possessed with a desire to take fire themselves. I happened to have my camera along, and did my best to record the show. Enjoy. 
July 4th, 2011 – The Sidewalk of Fire
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April 16th, 2011
I managed to get myself involved in a play this Spring. I had notions of trying to direct a play myself (Shakespeare’s Twelth Night was the leading contender), only to discover that someone else was ramping up to do this one, and would probably be pulling from the same pool of actors that I would have tried to cast. So I tossed my idea out and threw in with them.
I suppose you could say the whole endeavor went relatively well. I was cast in a minor role as one of the villain’s henchmen, which required me to do just a little singing in choruses and to pronounce my two or three lines of dialogue with a French accent. I think I got to speak the best verbal gag in the show (for those of you who know it, it was “Well…it spoke Latin”). For me it was generally fun, but not too taxing or overwhelming.
I actually wanted to be more involved than just that, so I volunteered to act as assistant to the director. I find that my efforts there weren’t really of all that much use. I tried to take copious notes of all the stage directions that she invented as she invented them. I say I tried because sometimes I was busy writing down the stage directions for my own character, or worse yet, I was busy actually trying to execute my stage directions, so I seemed to miss a lot. The few times someone actually asked me what my notes were, they tended either to be missing, or to contradict whatever the actor remembered such that I was summarily overruled. Despite the notes never getting much use, I found I got a bit misty the day I was asked to erase them all out of my folio. It must have taken me a full hour to get through it all, as I had very generously decorated every page of the thing.
A slightly more useful (albeit not much more) task I took on was the building of a website to promote the show. You can find it at magnificentproductions.net.
The site was fun to do because I got to play with some design techniques I hadn’t tried before…like having a multi-layered background (gradient over a tiled image, with one of the images placed right on the element). I also got to build a new interface for looking at photo galleries that involves a lot of auto-scrolling (in other words, you hover your mouse over the thumbnails in the gallery, and the thumbnails scroll up and down depending on whether you move the mouse up and down, without you having to click on a scroll bar or anything—too bad it doesn’t work on touch screens 
). You can see examples of this in the cast and crew gallery and in the performance and costumes gallery. I imagine about 12 people ever visited this website, but at least I can use it as a showoff piece for web development jobs.
The thing I did for the show that really was useful was craft services. I brought snacks to every rehearsal. I don’t suppose they were the greatest snacks of all time…I would usually just raid a Ralph’s before each of our big Saturday rehearsals, with a trip or two to Smart and Final to buy bulk items that would keep longer. You get a really good sense of what people want to eat vs. what they say they want to eat. Everyone always asks for healthy stuff: fruit, vegetables, bagels. But the donuts will always get devoured before the carrot sticks. I suppose then, that while I may have contributed a great deal to the ability of our cast to continue to function throughout some of our longer rehearsals, I may have also contributed to their girth. Sorry kids. Read more...
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The Scarlet Pimpernel.
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February 8th, 2011
The Fitts had the Stumphys over for Christmas brunch, and much jolliness ensued. Pictures below.
Christmas Morning with the Fitts
The pictures were all shot with a Canon 7D, mostly using the 18-135mm kit lens. Shutter speed was locked at 1/200 to avoid motion blur. I usually left it at the maximum aperture (somewhere between 3.5 and 5.6, depending on how zoomed I was). I set the ISO to automatic and let it adjust for the various levels of light. Thanks for the comments.
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January 30th, 2011
We kept it pretty simple this year…here’s the present opening ceremony Chez Stumphy.
Christmas Morning with the Stumphys
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January 30th, 2011
My best friend’s family is this really tight-knit group that, when together en masse, are ridiculously fun to be around. Every year one of their number provides a feast of Alaskan king crab, sausages, potatoes, and various other delectable yummies to the family. I have been a lucky invitee to more than one of these events, and this year I snapped some photos:
Christmas Eve with the Fitts
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