Quick update

by Matt | Dec 12, 2003 | Imported Entry

Small update while I have a second. Things are going well at work. The boss will be away for a week or so and I’ll be keeping the place from burning down. Shouldn’t be too hard. I’ve got plenty to keep me busy while I’m at it too. 5 or 6 weddings to physically matte and put into albums, a whole host of orders from the Miss Texas Teen Pagent that I need to get out the door. Etc. Elsewhere, Gold’s Gym in Merrimack can kiss my fat white ass. They’ve apparently turned me over to a collection agency for a debt that I don’t own them. My gym memebership has been canceled since July since, well, I’m not really near NH to be able to go to the gym. The last month was paid for and I thought that was it. Apparently they’re trying to collect for July AND August as well. They want one month I already paid for and a month AFTER my membership was canceled. I called and talked to them as well as to my folks. It’s “being taken care of”. Perry translation: Both Matt AND his father get to call and yell at people. Man, us Perrys sure love doing that. More locally, Lauren and I are getting a couch tonight. A big giant red one. Micro-suede even. It’s comfy. Should be a bit nicer for guests to sleep on. We’ll move the existing couch into the guest room probably. It’ll be a little tight but no more so than Nagle old dorm room. 324. So, we’ll have two couches, a guest bed (which is a trundle bed so it technically counts as two beds), our bed and two air mattresses. Damn. Anyone want to come visit? We’ve got your bed covered. Also, one of Lauren’s Christmas gifts came today. I won’t say what it is since she might be reading but a copy of Project Gotham Racing 2 just happened to accompany it in the box. That should prove to be some fun between now and the holidays. An early birthday present to myself of course. That’s about it. Gotta run. Supposed to be working.

Matt out.

A long time

by Matt | Dec 8, 2003 | Imported Entry

I’ve committed myself to writing this morning. I’m not sure what it will accomplish other than giving myself some sort of validation to sit down in front of this thing and play Call of Duty when I’m done. Which, in itself, is truely motivation. Things have been going good here in the life of Matt. The only mentionable downside to life at the moment is the breakneck pace at which it seems to be racing along. I get up in the morning, rush to work, work far longer than most people, rush home, have some food and try and spend quality time with my wife before colapsing in a tired heap. The next day, I do it all over again. I would say that 99% of you have the exact same life. That “work” isn’t really all that fun and that you spend you wholes lives going somewhere or working on something. My job is like that only its a tad bit unpredictable. From any given point, the day’s weakly conceived schedule can do a complete 180 and we start work on something completely new. There are also long hours. This past weekend for example, I didn’t get paid overtime. I should have, but I’m not really going to bring it up since my 3 month review is in 7 days. I worked until 11:00 two nights in a row. Now, alledgedly I’m going to get some sort of commission off the wedding I did on Friday, but I think that I was hired on a signifigantly lower price tag than my employer. Usually Paul’s wedding packages start at $2000 and go up from there. 15% of that isn’t bad as a bonus simply for doing it. I think I was hired for a few hundred. The actually number I’ve not been told. Now, realize that I’m not complaining (as I usually would do). I fully expected this and know full well that I need to get a few bargain weddings under my belt before I can personally justify $2000 for my time.

So, that’s pretty much how work is going. Which I’m sure is pretty similar to how everyones work is going. At home, this are just fantastic. Lauren and I are having the time of our lives and couldn’t be happier. There really isn’t any way better to describe it. I won’t take up valueable reading time with stories of how she made me cookies or played Xbox with me, because those would be redundant. Life is good.

On to other things. Are you guys still interested in hearing about the honeymood or has it been too long? I finally got around to writting that huge essay but I don’t know if you guys give a crap anymore.

The last few things are of course geek related. First up is the afor mentioned Call of Duty. Holy crap. Remember how completely stunned I was at the brilliance of Medal of Honor. Think better than that. If there’s one thing that should definatly be on your Christmas list, whether its for the PC or a console, or whatever. This is it. Next up is Simpsons Hit & Run. Now, I’m the first to admit that every other Simpsons (or other TV licensed) game sucked so bad it was an insult to the industry. This, however, is actually pretty fun. Its a mix between Crazy Taxi, GTA and the most acurate cartoon translation ever. All the voices are right, all the town landmarks are there, everything. You can drive to the QuickEMart, the powerplant, the school, the Tomaco fields outside town, everything. Its obviously not as gritty and deep (if you could call it that) as GTA but it’s fun. Missions include things like “beat Smithers to work” and “collect illegal fireworks for Bart”, that kind of thing. The controls of the PC version are a little clunky but, since there’s no guns that need shooting, the console version of it might be a little smoother. That was my biggest complaint with GTA on the PS2. There was simply no way to do those sniper missions. Take away that element and it was fine. That’s pretty much what we have here. A fun, easy to play romp through the town of Springfield.

Those are what I’ve been playing lately. I finished Max Payne 2, which was ok, and now I’m just waiting for Project Gotham Racing 2 to show up in the mail. If I finish CoD or Hit&Run in the next day or so I still haven’t finished SSX3 and I also have the new NWN expansion to try.

At some point today Lauren and I are going to head over to Fingers Furnature and look at couches that we don’t have money to buy. It should be fun. We really do want a new couch. We have one of those “someone elses old couch” kind of things going on and we’d actually like to have a real one in time for my family to come down. Have I mentioned that my family is coming down for Christmas. Yeah, they’re flying in Christmas day. Crazy huh? Apparently they wanted to get out of the snow for a little while. Our apartment my not be big, but we’re happy to have them come.

That’s pretty much all that’s been going on. Just day to day kind of things.

Oh, oh, and before I forget. This is sort of a delayed reaction but at the time I didn’t put two and two together. Nagle dropped me an email a little while ago and said that someone he met at a party had one of my photos on their desktop. That, I thought, was cool in and of itself, but then I realized that Nagle must have a link to my site up on his new project: OffBrand. Sure enough, there it is on the links page. So, I’m returning the favor and making sure everyone checks out Nagle’s kick ass new store. I myself (after I get paid on Friday) plan to order a limited edition shirt or perhaps have Nagle make me one of my own. Anyway, check it out:

It’s been a while

by Matt | Dec 1, 2003 | Imported Entry

Geez guys, I’m sorry I’ve been so bad about updating. If you knew what my weekend was like, you’d understand. Which, coincidentally, I’m now going to tell you about.

First, we should back up. I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. I know mine wasn’t half bad. It was my first turkey-day with a new family so there were some minor meal-based differences. They didn’t have mashed potatoes and the stuffing was corn bread based, stuff like that. Nothing that would keep me from stuffing myself of course. It was all pretty tasty. Lauren even made me an apple pie which was delicious (and which I’ve since finished all by myself).

Friday was my very first wedding to shoot. It was supposed to be a slam-dunk and was basically going to be my first step into wedding photography. I’m semi-reluctant to take over Paul’s wedding business since I’m really not 100% into wedding photography, its not bad, it’s just not really my thing. But the money is good and if I get good at it I can pull in a couple thousand extra each month, which is pretty important at this point. Anyway, the wedding was a complete disaster and basically sucked beyond all others. Thankfully it was all them and not me. I did fine. I got the shots I needed and did everything I could have. The bride and groom basically just screwed up their wedding for themselves. The groom locked himself in the bathroom, the bride didn’t want any pictures of herself, that sort of thing. The ceremony started an hour late, everything was rushed, the DJ sucked, the reception was unorganized and chaotic. I just took pictures of the chaos and watched the shit hit the fan. They may not want to remember their wedding, but they’ll have some kick-ass pictures of the bedlam. It was that kind of night.

Saturday was day 1 of the Miss Texas Teen Pageant. A collection of some of the most artificial people I’ve ever seen. 150 girls, ages 15-19, “competing” if you want to call it that, for the crown. Since modern beauty pageants have done away with the “talent” portion of the competition it’s not really that much of a contest any more. It more along the lines of “who annoys the judges the least”. But that’s just my opinion. I’m sure some of those girls might actually have a talent or two but simply standing on stage and smiling doesn’t cut it for me. Anyway, after getting there around 7am and setting up lights and a background we started taking pictures of the girls before their “interviews”. I’m not really sure whats involved in something like that but it can’t be all that involved if the time limit is 2 minutes. Regardless, the girls dressed up in their interview suits and talked to the judges for a while and we took pictures. More accurately, Paul took pictures and I printed buttons. Now, you’d have to actually go to a pageant to understand this button thing, and, since I’m suggesting that you never go within 100 miles of one of these, you’ll just have to take my word on this. Buttons, in the eyes of a pageant mother, are apparently the magic golden ticket. Seemingly, the more buttons you buy the more luck and support is magically bestowed upon the contestant. Or so you would think if someone came up to you and asked for 16 buttons with their girls head on them. Its not my job to argue so I started printing. Which, in itself, is a mindless task of finding the girl in the pile of thousands of pictures we’ve taken that day, picking a good one, cropping it to 3.5″x3.5″ and printing it out, 4 to a page. Oh the joy I had doing that. After a long ass day of that sort of thing, we got to shoot the show itself. Kind of. The “show” is technically the next day BUT when, in the first 5 minutes of that show, the contestant list is narrowed from 150 to 15, the prelim show the night before is our only opportunity to get a picture of every contestant. This is what we sell photo packages based on. So, that went on till about 10:30. I won’t go into boring detail about the show itself because, honestly, I know you guys just don’t give a shit.

Sunday was the “real” show and so basically it was a repeat of the day before, only thankfully shorter. We wrapped up around 5:30 and I was able to get home and have a nice dinner. Lauren, Robin and I went out to Olive Garden because I hadn’t eaten anything all day and Lauren was feeling like some pasta. After dinner we decided to check out Love Actually. Not a bad movie if you liked Bridget Jones Diary or Notting Hill. Same writer. Funny guy, British and what not. Great cast in this one too. But I’ll let you check out the IMDB link yourselves. The movie wasn’t bad and was pretty funny. I give it a strong “date movie recommendation” or at least a rental. The significant other will appreciate you being willing to see what is basically a chick-flick, which you can use to your advantage later when you really want to watch that action flick next time.

That pretty much rounds out my weekend. Today I’ve just relaxed a little. Done a little shopping, run some errands and checked out a little Call of Duty for the PC. I’ll let you know how it is.

Thats about it kids. Matt out.