How I Spent My Summer Vacation (2012)

Trip, Part I: Friday

The Eastern leg of the trip started before sunup on Friday, June 29th, with the goal of hitting Washington. DC, sometime around 5. (Paul drove down the night before and stayed with me.) This would allow Paul the ability to ride his bicycle around downtown DC while I wandered through some of the monuments: that last time I was ever there was about 40 years ago but things have both changed a lot and changed hardly at all.

After that, we stopped by the apartment of Paul’s friend where we would be staying the next two nights, then went to meet the producer and the talent. They were all at the house of producer, getting to know each other and getting the paperwork finished before the start of taping the next morning. It was a fun time, as I knew a lot of the people there but not by sight, and I needed to explain a number of things about the shoot for the talent, most of whom had never been before a camera before. Its something I’ve done a number of times in the past, explaining how the whole taping process works and giving them the encouragement to concentrate on performing their best and not worrying about screwing up, because we scheduled enough time to have multiple takes of each segment. Surprisingly enough, we didn’t need them: just about every first take was used, even though some editing in the middle was needed in places.

During the evening, I was showing off the prototype DVD menuing system I created for the eventual DVD of the videos. However, the lights went out in the room a couple of times, because the DVD player and all of the other electrical equipment active in the room kept tripping the circuit breakers. The third time it happened, however, the lights went out throughout the house.

Throughout the neighborhood.

Throughout the whole DC area.

Later reports indicated that over 3,000,000 people lost power, the result of the 2012 North American derecho, what is described as a horizontal tornado. Its high winds followed us down from the Midwest, leaving destruction in its wake. We didn’t leave the house until it passed, watching the scary weather displays on people’s iPads, then traveled back to the apartment for the night, which had no power and thus no air conditioning or fans, passing downed tree limbs and power lines all along the Interstates and city streets. (It was just as bad in Fort Wayne, where ancient 6′ diameter trees were torn up by their roots or just snapped off at the base like twigs: the winds were the equivalent of a Category 1 hurricane.)

Share
The short URL of the present article is: http://www.terryobrien.me/hDlwZ

Page 3 of 12
First | Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | Next | Last
View All