Aric

I was trying to think of some stuff to do next week when my family’s in town. They want to go up to Busch Gardens on one day, but there’s also a lot of other fun stuff around here in the summer time.

There’s a minor league baseball team in Norfolk and a minor league soccer team in Virginia Beach. The soccer games are 2-for-1 on Fridays with a Harris Teeter card. There’s an outdoor “arena race” on the fourth, they’re 1/2 size race cars (they race inside arenas in the winter). Indoors, there’s the marine science museum in Virginia Beach, and the Air and Space Center in Hampton. And there’s always the oceanfront, with free entertainment every night all summer.

http://www.marinerssoccer.com/
http://www.harristeeter.com/Default.aspx?pageId=48&promo=119
http://norfolktides.com/fanzone/
http://www.arenaracingusa.com/#4thojuly
http://www.vmsm.com/index.shtml
http://vasc.org/
http://www.beacheventsfun.com/beachstreetusa_web_site_060.htm
http://www.beacheventsfun.com

bouncy

I must be getting old or weak or something - April and i were playing Eye Toy last week - it’s a game where you plug a camera into the ps2 and you move around to interact with different little mini-games. And my arm and shoulder were sore for a few days afterwards — from a video game. Maybe I was just getting too into it - swinging my arm at a baseball and a ping pong ball.

Here’s the game:

Eye Toy: Play 2

Last weekend in Virginia Beach there was this thing called Freedom Fest - a bunch of local groups, mostly local churches, got together to have an afternoon in the park with free food, entertainment, games, and a speaker for military folks in the area. The turnout seemed okay for such a cool and windy day. I got a few pictures on my camera - most of the time I was videotaping so they could put together a little video for people, I guess to promote the event if they do it again and to show people who were deployed elsewhere that there were some things going on in their area.

They had a field of flags set up on the side of Mt. Trashmore (if you’re not from Virginia Beach, yes, that’s its real name - it’s a pile of trash covered in dirt that’s now one of our city parks, plus Lake Trashmore next to the hill which is the hole where the dirt came from) representing those military members killed overseas during the recent operations. When I was videotaping, I kept zooming in on one flag and backing out slowly till you could see them all, because I thought that would make a nice little dramatic effect. I did it from a few different angles and realized that it was probably enough. After that I didn’t really have any better ideas. But it was a nice tribute and it was neat to see some of the organizers praying over the last four flags that they put in the ground as they went around and put one in each corner. I definitely appreciate the military and the sacrifices our service members and their families make more than I used to, after living in such a miltary-dense area.

There was originally supposed to be two bands playing, but because of their singer’s wife giving birth, one of the bands didn’t come. The one that was there was called Chasing Elvis. For a group I’d never heard of before, they were pretty good. I guess most groups I’ve never heard of are probably pretty good, I mean you’d have to be pretty good to be in a group, right? And even better to actually be booked somewhere. Well, maybe you’d just have to be good to be booked somewhere more than once. I videotaped a couple of their songs. I was trying to get closeups on the guy’s hands while he was doing cool guitar stuff, so there’s probably a lot of zoomed in footage on hands while he wasn’t doing cool stuff. And there was a girl on bass guitar that was moving her hands around a lot in a couple songs, I think I got an okay shot of that.

April was making balloon animals (and swords) for the kids that came by, and she pretty much had a steady flow of kids for 3 or 4 hours wanting to get balloon animals (and swords). One kid asked for a snake. I got a little footage of the kids’ area, too.

One time for high school Spanish class I wrote a children’s book about a balloon dog, I think (it was in Spanish).

I put some more of the pictures from April and Kirsten’s trip to England up on crazysweet.net. I tried using this thing called SimpleViewer to make a little gallery, but it takes a lot of memory to have them all on one page, so here’s some, broken into 8 pages:

page1 page2 page3 page4 page5 page6 page7 page8

Well, there’s still like five or six hundred more, but I don’t think I’ll post too many more.

Oh, I changed this site around a little too.

Edit - I just tried it one of those pages in Internet Explorer, and it didn’t seem to work right. Sorry, I’ll try to fix it sometime this week…

Edit again - I think they’re working now, if you have flash.

1. Yay, April and Kirsten made it back from England just fine - Kirsten has some photos up on her blog already.
I have a nice new “London England” t-shirt. I’ll probably post some of April’s photos soon.

update (about an hour later) Here’s a couple links to a few photos:
Doors in Walls(reduced a little for looking at in a web browser)
Doors in Walls (Original size photos, for printing or other uses)

Probably more to come.

2. What’s up with myspace.com? My guess is peer pressure. A friend of mine recently (though reluctantly) moved his log thing from livejournal to myspace. Seems like you have to be a member just to look at the comments on somebdy’s posts. And then they’re going to want you to build like this fake social network of who your “closest” 200 friends are and see how popular you can get. Ugh. Sorry, not for me. I already tried 360.yahoo.com, and I made a fake livejournal name so I could post comments there occasionally (on the nintendo_ds community, I use an anagram of my name). On blogger.com, I am Super Luigi when I need to log in for comments. I think I’ll pass on this round.

3. The March madness - it starts today. I filled out some brackets online (not gambling, just contests) -
sportsline.com gives you 1
espn.com gives you 5 (my group crazysweet)
sports.yahoo.com gives you 1
foxsports.com gives you 3
si.cnn.com gives you 1
usatoday.com/sports gives you 1

So I guess I’ve filled out a dozen brackets online, probably all a little different. Whatever.

There’s some round-by-round contests at a couple places, too:
pilotonline.com
sportsline.com

Last Friday, some of us went to a fundraising basketball game at Summit Christian Academy, where my friends Amy and Chris both work (in different buildings though, the lower and upper schools, respectively). They’re raising money for a senior trip to Europe over spring break - it sounded like they had a lot of it raised. It was a students vs. staff basketball game, with the ladies playing the first and third quarters and the guys the other two. Except that they kept separate scores. It was fun, here’s a link to some pictures. The teachers had a “Semper Pi” theme, and each had the name of some sort of pie on their backs. At one point, a bunch of kids were sitting right on the sideline chanting “Pizza Pizza Pizza…”

April’s been busy getting ready to travel to England for a week with her friend from PA. I’ll go with her up to the airport (Dulles) on Friday. She’ll have my camera while she’s there, but all the markings have rubbed off the back of it from being in my pocket every day the first year or so that I had it. So instead of having something like this:

She’ll have something like this:

I guess there’s a lot of scratches on it, too, but I’m not quite sure how to draw those on realistically.

So I’ll find the directions or something sometime before she goes…

It’s Friday.

Here’s a couple links to funny videos on google’s video site:

a weird prank from a SciFi channel show called Scare Tactics

an appraiser’s mistake