we live by a system, a perfect mold - people killing people who are bored and old

Road blog: Minnetonka - day 1,000

Today was the final day of the show that seemed to drag on forever - starting at 4:30am each day and included several hours of graphic descriptions of various horrifying uterine problems as well as some comedy gold that you couldn't write or couldn't get away with writing.
It reached ridiculous levels early on when the straight-faced COO was giving their State of the Industry address and actually spoke the words, "The peniles market is growing nicely"

nobody even blinked, meanwhile we were dying at the tech table.
juvenile? Sure - but C'MON!

It's over and I'm glad - now I can sleep at least a little more and get back to preparing presentations about uterine problems instead of listening to them.
That is all. I am tired.


Go see An Intimate Evening With Fotis at the Theater Garage - it's fucking funny and you know it.

you can levitate you know, as long as the money's good you're in

road blog: Houston - day 1

Back in Texas for work after very little sleep between today and last night's IAGG performance.
Nels, Lauren and I got up and did some silly, dark improv after a good rehearsal and much discussion of the direction of Five Man Job in terms of style and structure and the whole thing left me pretty stoked for what lies ahead.

today is nothing but travel and prep, actually the entire trip is prep since this is a practice session for the real show, which doesn't happen until August in Pheonix - this company flies me and the AV guys and all the speakers to Houston just to practice the show so in a lot of ways they're the most prepared client I have and they're a blast to work with.
My two direct client contacts are an art photographer and a youth outreach ballet teacher from the bay area, basically two really cool, old, laid back hippies that somehow snagged a gig running events for a massive construction conglomerate and will spend the next couple days referring to the end-client as "these fascists" to their faces. It's an interesting dynamic to say the least.

So today we met and basically spent the time waiting for the speakers to arrive and the big event dinner tonight talking shop and tomorrow we'll be in session all day with executives and presenters from across this huge company looking to myself, the ballet teacher and the art photographer as the go-to team for creative input. Time to get my game face on and walk that line between 'he's a creative guy that knows nothing about our industry, why are we listening to him?' and 'creative professional who is exactly who we should listen to' that always feels so strange.

Clenched fists, Black Eyes

Friday evening blog ??

After the work travels I spent yesterday "officing" from home, which meant a pretty full day of the wife and I taking turns with the boys, who are in a pretty exhausting phase right now and need to revisit naptimes in the middle of the day, so the other could get some work done. My wife totally got more of the "work" end of the deal and I spent the day mostly wrangling boys, throwing NERF airplanes, chasing frogs off the mini-golf hole and acting like it was a weekend.

Which is to say I wasn't really stoked for the office this morning, even though it was my one day in this week. I decided to make up for 25 years of negligence (holy shit) and FINALLY purchase The Crew by 7 Seconds on iTunes so i spent the afternoon and evening listening to punk rock that I should have been listening to all along and kicking myself.

This morning was spent listening to a client completely destroy them meeting they paid us to put together as I was sitting in the tech-support chair for an eMeeting and the client decided to ignore ALL of our instructions for making the whole thing actually "work". Oh well - it's their dime and you can only hold your clients' hands for them for so long, you can't care about their event for them.

I was alerted to the fact that my teenager is still being a teenage idiot when his grandmother called when she should have been at work and had me call to authorize a UA for him. As it turns out he was actually caught smoking in her porch and still tried to cop attitude the entire way to his UA about how it was going to come out negative and he had done nothing wrong.
Ah, if only teenage attitiude was actually powerful enough to bend space, time and reality like they apparently think it is - we'd be using them as fuel and travelling to distant stars right now and they'd be where they belong - in deep space.

Tonight was Stare Down and I have to say I was pretty damn happy with this one - my last one was a big ball of stress since I was figuring out the show while it was happening, this time I had a grip on it and was able to have fun and be more on top of my work and I think my part of the show was noticably better for it. Bullets galore. Yay for Stare Down for being my kind of improv show.

There's something very very fun for me in Stare Down when everything goes right and I think it probably reveals a little too much about my brain but I love adding a little window to the characters by how they shoot people. Some people pull their guns and talk and shoot when they have to or when it makes the most sense, some people pull them out and just fucking kill people without pause and I think it makes a difference in the vibe of the show. Whatever, if I can make a single mother character seem like the most cold blooded person on that stage it makes a difference for me. It's fun and I think the audience had fun as well.

I'm still trying to figure out when I'm going to see Hellboy and now I have to figure out when to see Dark Knight. Crap. My un-watched DVD of There Will Be Blood upstairs tells you how current my media intake is.

the New Five Man Job perform this Sunday, bitches.

After that I'll worry about the next work trip (the next day), my total lack of a contract for the Renaissance festival, when I'm going to wait in line for an iPhone and a few other things.

Well the fog's so thick that you can't even spy the land

I keep meaning to catch up on the blogging, I haven't really made any mention of the wife's birthday, the twins' birthday or a lot of other things other than how crazy my time has been and I've skipped the really important stuff.  I'll get to that in the next couple blog entries before some of these things get so far away as to become less relevant.

I meant to write more this week as well but my time ended up getting crapped all over by a client that seems out to purposely do everything as half-assed and last-minute as possible.  We didn't get number of attendees so we'd know how many keypads to bring, no idea of who our contact was to let us in with our equipment and when she finally called at 10 minutes to 5pm on Friday to give me the details I'd been asking about for days (since the meeting is 7am Monday) she hadn't even looked at any of the emails we had sent telling her what we'd need.  I am now stuck doing work over the weekend to make up for their total lack of consideration of what goes into their own show.

who the hell could possible run an event this goddamn disorganized with absolutely no regard for things like preparation??  

A group and event entirely based around looking ahead, planning and innovative future problem solving.

Irony is not a big enough word.

I'm a busy man, no free hand to hold a grudge

this is insane blog - 

June is both the most stressful and the most fun month of the year.

Today is my last day in the office for the week, took the rest off since I needed to spend my PTO before end of June or lose it forever and this week is packed completely full of festivities and leaves no room for things like "work"

Yesterday was another fun-filled eMeeting, this one was all mine and I get to spend today dealing with the client demanding that I somehow bridge the gap between her wanting to give the thumbs up on every little thing that goes into the meeting and her wanting to blame someone else when she doesn't like the end result.  I understand the compulsion that leads people to micro-manage but I can't relate to the psychotic break required to take credit for the good results and place blame on everyone else for the negative.  I'm so the wrong guy for that conversation.

the meeting didn't even go poorly.  it actually went very very well and there were no major bumps.  So now we're down to passive aggressive second-guessing and crap like that.  Also, not my area.  My favorite....the client came back with an issue over some of the text.  Rather than say "I think that text was wrong" this is what I got:

"I know the type was really small so I could have missed something but is that the text we agreed on?"

Yes, rather than just have direct discussion on wether the copy was right or wrong we're going to entertain the idea that the typeface was so small that is ACTUALLY BECAME DIFFERENT WORDS.  This is my day today.  

anyway - it's the last day before the week takes off

tomorrow is the wife's birthday and she's pretty awesome and deserves complete and undivided attention even though her birthday has totally been eclipsed by the twins' birthday being the very next day for five years now (and it doesn't look like it's going to change anytime soon).  

That means that the boys turn 5 on the 5th and their golden birthday is going to be an insanely cute celebration of our crazy little geniuses, inflatable bouncy houses and gold birthday cupcakes.

almost as soon as the candles are blown out (ok - not really, actually the next day) I depart for Chicago to perform with HUGE in the Chicago Improv Festival. Things with the TCIF have been heating up and most days my brain has completely jumped over CIF, which used to have me all freaked out for at least a week prior.  I'm sure it'll hit me once I arrive Friday afternoon or I'll spend CIF trying to get TCIF work done from the road and miss the fun entirely.

CIF kicked off on a sad note yesterday with the death of  Paul Sills

All I know directly of the man is that he once ripped a notebook out of former Five Man Job member Nick Condon's hands during one of his classes and scolded him that "This is just PLAY!  You don't take notes on how to PLAY!"

I think that's a pretty awesome take from someone that made pretty incredible contributions.

There's more - so much more.  But I've got ruffled feathers to go tend to.  

Just when you thought my work was done- you had to go and pull it

Thursday blog pt. 1

Had a semi-hectic day in the office yesterday covering a number of things and found myself signed up to train a client on technology I had not yet been trained on myself.  When I asked about the points I was going to teach someone better qualified wisely stepped in and took it off my hands and took a moment to wonder why in the world I was going to go ahead and do something like that and not panic or freak out or ask if there was someone better to do it.

Improv training vs. real workplace strikes again.

You can be flexible and step up to challenges and say yes - all those good things that we teach people in improv and corporate 'this is how improv can make your workplace better' workshops all you want, that doesn't mean your job is the place to do it or that they're ready for people like that and your boss won't give you the 'WTF were you thinking' stare.  I think I would have done just fine.

Afterward I made it home in time to catch Owen walking across the driveway with a beat up instrument case in hand looking very much like he was ready to run away and hop a train to blues stardom.  Turns out the boys had talked their grandmother into unearthing a coronet that had been in storage for 15 years or so that belonged to their grandfather and their mom used to have to play back when they made kids play music in school. 

So before dinner we opened the case up and cleaned off the mouthpieces and I began explaining to the boys how tricky it was to get sound out of the trumpet and what they needed to do with their lips to start....while I was talking Aidan put the trumpet to his lips and blew a note.  Then after about 10 seconds Owen did the same.  Apparently they're natural bluesmen.  They spent some time playing with the instrument, getting more consistent each time, until we packed it up and spent dinner telling them they need to listen to a man named Miles Davis.

ah, my crazy little geniuses.

the savage mutilation of the human race is set on course

it's Metal Friday blog - 

there is just some weird kind of anarchy in the air today, woke up to the maniacal laughter of the twins down the hall, which was unsettling.  I'm glad they wake up happy and all, if only I knew it wasn't because they get each other so riled up that someone or something is going to get slammed in a door, tossed down the stairs or otherwise broken.

Turns out they were playing in their bathroom, filling up bath toys in the sink and spraying water all over the place.  That was a nice way to start today.

Little fucking Hellions.

I was pondering taking a home office day until I realized that there was no coffee in the house.  There is, however, coffee in the office so the office won.....for now.  Once I'm more caffeinated I may have the energy to break free and thanks to it being METAL FRIDAY in our office again I can guarantee I'll be in the mood to sit at a desk very very little today.

Ah, Rocket Queen.  

I'm pouring a cup of coffee, doing imaginary work long enough for it to kick in, rocking out and then heading home to play with the kids before Punch Out.

Mustache Rangers vs Family Night (Hannah and Doug N from CSZ) - are you kidding me!! - it's going to be completely awesome.

11pm | $10 | Brave New Workshop