Wine hop

I am not above seeing something done in the movies, being influenced into thinking it's cool, and wanting to participate in such an activity myself. When Sideways was released in 2004 and it became the hit hip movie of the year, everybody--me included--wanted to drink pinot noir on the road with their friends and live out various misadventures. Well, the little muse of mine you see above and I had a little taste of such a cinematic experience over the weekend. We spent it with our friends T & C, who live in Richmond, VA. On Saturday the four of us and another couple drove out to the northwestern part of Virginia, near the scenic Blue Ridge Mountains, and visited four very distinct wineries. My favorite was the small one that was our last stop. By then the sun was low and somebody strummed a guitar on the porch. The owner, a proud new father from South Africa who seemed very content with his life, was generous with the tastings. All of the guests seemed to be in high spirits as they shared bottles in the picturesque locale. What a life. We probably didn't encounter enough "misadventures" to make a popular movie out of our day (you can't expect anything to go wrong when five out of the six people in the group are engineers with impeccable planning), but we enjoyed a nice picnic, good conversation, and a heck of a lot of wine.

Back in Richmond that night, we went to the late showing of The Last Kiss, which I liked less than I expected months ago, but more than I expected a week ago after hearing all the negative press. It's quite a different movie from Garden State, to which immediate comparisons are drawn, but that doesn't make it a bad movie. It conveyed feelings a lot of people my age can relate to, and it was surprisingly dark. I will say, seeing all the troubled relationships in the movie made me glad to be in such a happy one with my wife.

On Sunday we had brunch at the Tobacco Company Restaurant, said good-bye to our friends, and made the four-hour drive back home. Somehow we ended up getting on the wrong freeway near Washington and got a nice pass-by of the National Mall, especially the Washington Monument. I'm still getting used to the idea of having all of that so close to us. We're saving the D.C. tourism for another weekend. There's so much to see in this part of the country.

Anticipation

I'm sitting here with R in front of the tube, so this blog entry only has one third of my attention. That being the case, I'm going to keep it simple. Below are the five movies I am the most excited to see this fall. I'm also including the director and some favorite films from their past work, which should be enough to explain why their new ones are so highly anticipated.

1. Inland Empire by David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr.).
2. The Fountain by Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream).
3. The Prestige by Christopher Nolan (Memento).
4. Marie Antoinette by Sophia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation).
5. The Science of Sleep by Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).

Weekend recap

Greetings. Another weekend has passed. We spent ours doing the following:

• Eating a six-course meal at a Moroccan restaurant called (what else but) Casablanca. We ate the whole works with our bare hands. Dinner included entertainment from a stripper-like belly dancer.
• Attending the Oktoberfest in Newark, DE. It's a big deal around these parts. They even had carnival rides, which we rode by the way.
• Painting the inside of our garage. Actually, we only got as far as priming it over the weekend. Painting is next, and then we can finally install the garage door opener I bought three months ago.

So there you have it. Sorry for the lack of enthusiasm. I had one of those life-draining days at work today. In other news, my new web video is done! Well, I might still do some tweaking, but generally speaking, it feels complete, and I'm quite happy with the results. Unfortunately, I can't unveil it to the public yet. I'll be optioning it off to the magazine this week. If they accept it, it will probably be distributed to their online newsletter subscribers on something like YouTube. It will definitely be posted here as well. You can help rack up the play count!

'Shroom fest

I never really ate mushrooms until a few years ago when R introduced me and they won me over with their unique texture and taste (no, we’re not talking about the hallucinogenic type here). Who would have thought that one day I would attend an event such as the annual Mushroom Festival in Kennett Square, PA, which was held over the weekend? We spent our Sunday afternoon taking an educational tour of a mushroom farm, purchasing a variety of mushrooms to take home with us, and walking around the festival generally soaking up a celebration of the finest of fungi.

It was kind of a low-key weekend, but I'm not complaining. On Saturday morning I had a few hours to do some reshoots for my web video and continue with the editing. Later on in the day, we attended the Brandywine Arts Festival, where we found some gifts for the remaining weddings on our schedule this year. On Saturday night we went out to Feby’s Fishery so I could splurge on king crab legs and a hunk of filet mignon (as I have not been able to get last weekend’s steak out of my head). Then we burned off (some of) the calories on Sunday morning when R and I walked three miles for the American Heart Association’s Heart Walk along with some other DuPonters. All in all it was another good weekend. The weather was nice, and it was fun to stay close to home and enjoy what Wilmington and the surrounding area has to offer.

My new movie is coming along, although there is at least one problem--it looks like I'm trying too hard. I shot the action from so many different angles and have so much footage to choose from that, in the current cut, each shot last lasts a maximum of 2 seconds and you never see the same framing twice. It can be a bit disorientating to watch and difficult to follow the action, so I decided to tone it down a bit. The video still needs to move at a fast pace (you don't have much of a choice if you want to keep something like this under a minute in length), but the editing needs to be simplified and the setting needs to be more firmly established. So that's where it stands. I can't wait for you to see the finished product. Give me another couple of weeks.

The Hic-Cup

As mentioned in this blog before, when I get the hiccups, I get them BAD. My thoughtful mother-in-law recently sent me a device that she heard is supposed to be a miracle cure. It is called The Hic-Cup. I've tried just about every trick in the book already, and this one looks similar in concept to the one where you drink a glass of water with a spoon in it, but I'm willing--and hopeful--to give anything a shot. I will say I’ve never tried one that claims to use “sub-sensory bio-electric therapy to quickly re-establish proper function of the Vagus and Phrenic nerves for instant treatment.” How could something like that not work?

A night like this

There it is, folks--your first exclusive peek at the short web video I shot this afternoon. I have almost an hour of footage for a movie that should be about a minute long. That means editing will be no simple task, but I'm already working on it. I hope it turns out okay. The footage never looks as good as I expect; I guess something gets lost in the translation from imagination to video. I may have also messed up the lighting in a few shots, and even one misstep like that could ruin the whole thing. But, hey, viral videos aren't meant to look too polished anyway.

My weekend has been going well. I ate a steak last night that was sent from heaven--eight ounces of a New York strip grilled to perfection with a beer and a baked potato soaked through with butter. This is the kind of meal where you have to shut off your phone to avoid any chance of interruption. It's become a tradition for me to fix myself a steak dinner whenever R goes away for a weekend. If I had them any more often, I wouldn't appreciate them this much.

After dinner last night, I sat back with another beer and watched Sin City (which was awesome by the way) before falling asleep early on the couch. It was a good night, but this time, tonight, I need to get more desk time out of it. Call me a geek, but I could just sit here at my computer, with some atmospheric music playing, by the glow of my monitor, all night long. The real world's schedule has been doing its best to tear the night owl out of me, but once in a while, over a three-day weekend when I have the place to myself and nowhere to be, I can let it hoot freely.

Tomorrow is labeled "chore day" on my schedule and the weather is clearing up, so it would be good to get a jump on the day, get some things done, and get outside for a while. I hate to say it, but that's what's going to get me into bed at a somewhat decent hour tonight.

One last thing: the second in the series of articles on Jack of Clubs has been posted. Read it here.

Intensity rising

I can’t sleep. That’s probably a good thing because when I walked downstairs at 2:30 AM to get a glass of water, I found the front door of our house wide open—locked, but open, swaying in the wind of the hurricane… err, tropical storm… err, tropical depression. It must not have latched and we didn’t realize. It’s times like these I’m glad we live in a somewhat suburban-looking neighborhood.

For those of you who don’t know, R is still at home. She was supposed to leave after work for Minnesota (another wedding), but the weather was responsible for a delay that would have caused her to miss her connecting flight, so she's grounded and rescheduled to leave at 7:30 this morning, which means for an early morning trip to the airport. I should be in a good condition to drive her there as long as I don’t try to go back to sleep until I return.

I’m blaming my current state of insomnia on the stress of my new job. I can’t get into too many details about it here, but it has been quite an intense week. I worked extra hours every night. The one night I had something else planned (the Sneaky Peek on Wednesday), I had to come home afterwards and put another three hours in. This is the kind of job that can take over a person’s life. I don’t want that to happen, especially not this weekend. I’ve got a to-do list a mile long for this weekend (no, it’s not the list from four entries ago), and a few of the items do involve relaxing. For instance, I just added “take a nap” to the schedule for today. I feel like I can’t quite relax until I have all of my job-related work finished off. My boss did give me an assignment for the weekend, so I have that hanging over my head. I should log on right now and get it out of the way, but I don’t want my coworkers seeing my ID next to any early morning timestamps and thinking I’m some kind of crazy workaholic. So I’ll use this time to get caught up on my web surfing instead.

I love my wife and spending an extra night with her this weekend was wonderful (we went out for Mexican food after the attempt at the airport), but I’m really looking forward to having the rest of the weekend to myself. I’m still planning to shoot one of my viral videos, but I pushed it back to Sunday because I need more time to prepare. If all goes well though, I should have a rough cut edited by the end of the long weekend. Yes, that’s right—I said long weekend. My new company, unlike my last one, actually recognizes holidays. I worked the last two Labor Days in Mobile because I chose to save my earned time off for other vacations. Now I don’t have the choice. Well, I take it back—there’s work to do if I want it. I’ll do the one assignment my boss gave me at some point this weekend, but then I’m closing my work laptop and hopefully keeping it closed.

One last thing, a plead to Ernesto: you're a big, scary storm and all, but I'm begging you please don't make the power go out for any extended period of time this weekend. I'm going to be needing electricity.