Adam & Amber’s Blog

I posted my hail pictures a couple days ago, I also sent some in to the local news and one of them made it on! I admit it isn’t the most artistic of shots, but it is still cool to get something on the news

Can you believe that some people got paid to make this? I would have paid to help

The site is a bit annoying, but check it out here
I highly suggest getting past the annoying layout. You give it a short musical phrase on a piano and then they create a musical piece based off of that and you watch it all happen live. Very cool, almost makes me want to drink Vodka?

Here is my attempt at music, I am sure others will easily be able to top it

I remember when I was in high school everyone was trying to flip their pen. Those who could do it would taunt those of us who couldn’t by continually flipping their pen in class. I imagine if YouTube had been around back then, this video would have gotten them to stop being so cocky.

I normally wouldn’t post a video that would be embarrassing to someone else, but this is of a public performance, so I don’t feel too bad. It is strange that she appears to have worked so hard choreographing the routine and yet could play so out of tune. Anyway, the dancing, outfit, and playing combine to make a hilarious video, plus, using the trumpet as a gun, brilliant.

I was tooling around youtube a while back when I stumbled upon this video, I can’t explain why but I find it hilarious. This is just one in a series of videos, you can check out their site here.

Back in 2005 some friends and I had some fun playing with a light-up Frisbee and long exposure photography. The results were pretty cool (as you can see by looking at Andy’s Photos here). I ask you to please look at our humble pictures before watching the the following videos of the professionals. This first video is from a Sprint commercial (that I have never seen on TV).

There is also a cool making of video that shows you just how much work this art is (and prove that it isn’t just an effect). It really is a highly choreographed dance.

Finally, the non-commercial work of this art form can be seen here, in a very cool short film.

It has been exciting times this past week in Rochester, MN with the week-long Rochesterfest in town. Rochesterfest celebrated its 25th year this year and brought back many of my favorite events including The Midwestern Lumberjack Championships, The Grand Parade, and Mayor’s Cup Balloon Race. I realize that we aren’t talking Football, Fireworks, and Ice Cream here but the Rochesterfest events have a certain small city festival feeling that is pretty cool.

The week started with the Lumberjack championships, now I know that it sounds kinda Wisconsiny to goto a Lumberjack Competition, but it is cheap, entertaining, and in an awesome setting at one of the only Lake’s in Rochester. Plus, where else can you see One-Man Bucking? I would explain the events but it would be much more boring then just checking out the photos (you can also check out pics from the 2005 competition here).

As I said, Rochesterfest is a week long event. However, other then lunch on Thursday at the street vendor’s downtown there isn’t much that we goto during the week. Plus, this year the week was much busier for me because I was working with the Marching Band Monday, Wednesday, Friday as they prepared for the Parade.

Speaking of the Parade it took place on Friday night and both Amber and I were in it walking along with the Rochester Lourdes Marching Band (which we help out with). The Rochesterfest Parade is a very interesting experience, it lasts for about 2 hours and there are HUGE gaps between many of the entries. This year I learned one of the reasons why this happens. For many of the bands that march the parade, it is a judged parade competition (I am sure I will be writing much more about Marching Competitions once the field season starts next fall). For those of you unfamiliar (as I was), parade competition bands learn and march drill just like field show bands, the difference is they travel around to parades all summer competing instead of competing at shows in the fall. Here is where we get to the gaps, the band’s shows are designed to be performed in front of a judging station, this means every time they stop to perform it consumes about 5 minutes. The bands try to catch up as best they can, however I heard that this year one band had an 11 minute gap in front of it by the end of the parade.

Here is some video from the parade of the Lourdes Marching Band, they did well. Keep in mind that we just recently started rehearsals and will keep going through the entire summer, so this is just the beginning.

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Today we did our final Rochesterfest events, the Mayor’s Cup Balloon Race (no, they don’t actually race) and Breakfast on the Farm. We were up at 5AM to get out to the Balloon launch (which didn’t end up happening until 6AM). Why do we get up so early to watch hot air balloons? Because we are idiots Plus, it is a fun time and having to get up early just adds to the fun. As always the photo ops are a-plenty.

Seeing as how we were already up, we went to the Breakfast on the Farm. This was the first time we went to this event (it was the first year we were up early enough) and I have to say it was really impressive. It is your standard pancake breakfast, but they feed over 3,000 people. It was interesting to learn from Amber that they have never had this event at the same area farm twice in over 20 years. Kinda gives you an idea of the vast nothingness that surrounds Rochester.

For those of you who don’t know, Mr Wizard died yesterday morning at almost 90 years of age. For those of you that don’t know who Mr Wizard is (hopefully the graphic helps), think Bill Nye in a 1980’s setting, at least that is who he is to me. I can still remember watching Mr. Wizard’s World on Nickelodeon when I was a kid, the magical experiments, the corny animated transitions, and the even cornier futuristic 80’s music. Mr. Wizard is where I first learned about chemistry, physics, and probably the first place I saw anything resembling a computer or robot.

It wasn’t until today when I was reading up on Mr. Wizard that I learned about what a full career he had before the 1980’s. Mr. Wizard whose real name was Don Herbert was born in Waconia, MN (which is about 2 hours from Rochester, straight West of the Twin Cities) before moving to the Twin Cities and finally Lacrosse, WI. Mr. Wizard graduated from State Teachers College with a degree in English and General Science, but instead of going into teaching he decided to go pursue acting and moved to New York City in 1941. Being a young man in 1941, he did what a large number of young men did and volunteered for service, specifically he served as a pilot performing 55 bombing missions over Northern Italy before leaving the service in 1945. After his service, Mr Wizard went back to acting and various other jobs in the entertainment field before starting “Watch Mr. Wizard” in 1951 in Chicago. “Watch Mr. Wizard” continued with great success until 1965 when NBC canceled the series (that I never knew existed). For the remainder of the 60’s and 70’s Mr Wizard did a variety of things, writing books, making classroom videos, special appearances, and even a few other TV shows. In 1983 “Mr. Wizard’s World” was picked up by the new and fledgling Nickelodeon Channel and continued for 7 season ending in 1990, with reruns continuing until 2000. I can still remember getting up for zero-hour in high school at 6 AM and watching re-runs.

There have been plenty of educational shows for children, but Mr. Wizard was special because he never talked down to children. Something if you watch the educational programming on Nickelodeon today you know they do all the time. How they went from a man planting the seeds of interest in science, math, and technology to a talking television screen and a blue dog is probably something that should be examined. That alas, is not the point of this post. Today I say good-bye to a good friend from my childhood, Rest in Peace Mr. Wizard.

Check out Mr. Wizard’s Official site here, with all sorts of interesting information.

This is an interesting video from Liverpool. It is really quite an impressive piece of engineering considering it has no practical use at all. Although I have to say, if you are going to spend $900,000 on a piece of art, this beats a sculpture any day.

Our friends Andy & Darcy got married this past weekend (Congrats Guys!) and both of us were honored to be in the wedding party, Amber as a bridesmaid and myself as the best man. As an additional duty that I bestowed on myself I decided to organize a group gift among our Rochester friends.

Andy and Darcy have been together long enough that they have most of the things you need to run a household, which meant that they really only needed a few small things and couple big things. We of course decided to go big and bought them a Blue Ember Grill with just about every bell and whistle a person could ask for. However through the generosity of our group (and the large number of people that contributed) we had enough funds to buy the grill, every grilling implement known to man, a fire pit, and even a chefs hat for the cook. A large haul by anyones standard, but how to package it? Such a large gift deserves more then a simple card and bow, that is when genius struck.

I will now give a dramatic (and inaccurate) dialog on how Jon and I came up with the idea:

Adam: Hey Jon, I had an idea for how we should package the gift.
Jon: You’re an idiot
Adam: I was thinking that we build a box large enough to fit the grill and all the other gifts inside.
Jon: You’re an idiot
Adam: We would have to make it HUGE, like 7′x7′x7′ just to make sure we can fit the 6′ wide grill inside.
Jon: You’re an idiot
Adam: We can put it on their deck, wrap the entire thing and make some ribbon and a bow out of fabric to make it look like a gift.
Jon: You’re an idi……. Can we fill it with balloons?
Adam: YES!

And that has nothing to do with how the idea was born, other then that Jon and I talked about it and he thinks I’m an idiot

We had this crazy idea 4 days before the wedding, which meant that to pull it off we would need to find a group of people as crazy as us, people willing to put in long hours building something thats entire purpose was to be destroyed, people willing to work for pizza and laughs. Luckily, Rochester is just dull enough that we convinced a good chunk of our friends to help out.

After putting out a plea for cardboard, purchasing a crap-ton (it’s metric) of 1×2’s, finding silver table cloth rolls to use as wrapping paper, and getting strange looks by going alone into Jo-Ann’s (picture a large guy perusing the fabric section in the middle of the day) to get “ribbon”, we were set. We gathered 2 days before the wedding to pre-assemble as much of the box as possible. The plan was to frame nine 3.5′x7′ panels, cover them in cardboard, and individually wrap them. The tenth panel was the exception, it included a door so that the contents of the box could be accessed and would be wrapped on location after the box was assembled.

One of the best times when doing a project like this, is the moment when everyone buys into the idea (still realizing that it is completely absurd and insane). As I watched 11 people work for 2+ hours on this completely crazy idea I couldn’t help but think how hard it was going to be to convince them to help assemble it after the reception, being past 1 AM and having partied and drank for hours. But we had come to far, so this box was going up!

The wedding was of course beautiful, went off without a hitch, the women all beautiful and the men handsome. The reception was a blast, everyone danced more then they should have, ate more then they should have, and some even drank more then they should have. However, that is not the purpose of this post, all that is important is that everyone was well dressed, tired, sore, tipsy, and it was 1 AM.

It took another two hours but we got the box up (with the magic power of zip-ties), put in the gifts, filled it about half full of balloons (over 300), wrapped the visible surfaces one more time, slapped on the bow, and at around 3 AM called it good. Were we tired? Hell Yes, But we had accomplished something! We had build a completely useless, but impressive, 7′ gift box. Now all that was left to do was to go home, get my 5 hours of sleep and goto the gift opening in the morning.

Luckily there is video of the remainder of this story, so I can stop typing and you can stop reading. The reaction was completely worth the effort and I would do it again in a heartbeat. Congratulations Andy and Darcy!

Enjoy the video.