Here’s a slightly more comprehensive list of ways to enjoy a warm, sunny break in the cold of a January winter:
– clean the Garage Majal. I even vacuumed in all the corners of my man cave, going through at least two movies on the DVD player. I put in a bigger TV, too…but the refrigerator needs to be stocked with fresh Dew.
– bring my wife a rose at work. Girls like that kind of thing! I’m still sneezing from the flower shop, though.
– remove ice from the sidewalks. Whether it’s by ice chopper or by giant torch, getting rid of stubborn ice spots now will pay off when it gets cold and blustery again. Especially with two year olds using the sidewalk!
– Work. Holy cow have we been busy. Now that I’m not in television, I mostly work bankers’ hours…but there have been some evening shoots lately. The winter sun can be a challenge, so if you can’t control it, wait for it to go away. I was shooting in a building with a lot of windows, and sunlight streaming in made it impossible to balance the lighting correctly. Thus I made the call to shoot after dark, and the results were fantastic.
– surprise my wife with a clean kitchen. She wasn’t feeling well and went to bed early. I have the kind of hard working wife who can’t shake the fact that there’s a chore left to do, so imagine the load lifted when she woke up and the chore didn’t need to be done!
– be Daddy. I took my two year old to the airport last night to ride the escamalators (sic) and watch a couple of jets take off. He carried around the miniature pack of M&Ms that I gave him, since he had to wait until after dinner.
– write. I haven’t done any blogging since the Monday announcement, but I have polished up a magazine article and wrote a brief outline for an op-ed I might shop around in a week or two. I also occasionally contribute to some video / photo / animation forums, and recently there have been some questions posted which I can answer.
– maintenance. I’ve spent a lot of time in the studio tightening clamps on light stands and tripods, cleaning cameras, tuning boom poles, and other basic maintenance. I also came up with an improvement for our crane rig, one which allowed me to get some unconventional shots you’ll probably see on TV in the next couple of weeks.
– exercise. I did this in the form of chopping all the compacted snow/ice off our driveways. Fun. It was a solid 45 minutes of work, got the blood pumping, and I left one garage door open with a movie going as entertainment.
– play in the snow. This one hasn’t been accomplished yet, but I plan to take my little towheads out sledding or to make a snow fort and snowman. I even bought two new purple snow-block makers to assist in the task. That may have to be a Saturday plan so I can take them out during the warmest part of the day.
– Photography! I’m itching for this one, too. With the holidays and other things going on, my hobby has taken a back seat. It isn’t that there’s nothing to photograph in Bismarck or Mandan, that’s for sure. Hopefully over the weekend I can venture out and find something neat with the camera.
Enjoy the warm weather! Compact some snow and throw it at someone you love, or build something, or just get outside and exercise. I’ll post some more fun photos soon, including some I’ve been sitting on: a homemade P-51 Mustang airplane replica that seats one and is powered by a Geo Metro engine!