This song makes me think about things

Check out the optical illusion in this self portrait… it looks like the lines don’t meet, but they do!

Have a great day!

My friend Shannon is really funny, these are two of the funny things she said to me after I posted the NYC blog… I think the reason I find them both funny is because no body else that I know would ever say anything like this

“You have really nice eyebrows, I mean it, they frame your face well!”

“You are far more attractive than that photo of you communicates.”

Haha, umm… thanks Shan

Here is a funny photo of her that I stole off of her blog.

Two posts in a day, now I am getting caught up

Have a great day!

I went to college with Stephanie and I am so glad that she remembered my name from when we sat next to each other in the toughest English class ever. She and her fiance Jeremy met me in downtown Rochester for a fun engagement session and here are a few of my favorites.

Stephanie is an English major, so I am going to proof read this post twice… sorry if I mangle the English Language with comma-splice errors and run on sentences

Have a great day!

I am a little behind in blogging due to a lot of work, I’ll be catching up this week

Here are some photos from my New York City engagement session.

Have a great day!

An excerpt from one of my favorite books, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It

Great people have a vision of their lives that they practice emulating each and every day. They go to work on their lives, not just in their lives. Their lives are spent living out the vision they have of their future, in the present. They compare what they’ve done with what they intended to do. And where there’s a disparity between the two, they don’t wait very long to make up the difference

They go to work on their lives, not just in their lives.

I believe it’s true that the difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next.

The difference between the two is the difference between living fully and just existing.

The difference between the two is living intentionally and living by accident.

Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Peace once said, “the difference between a warrior and an ordinary man is that a warrior sees everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man sees everything as either a blessing or a curse.”

I know how I live, which way do you want to be?

Have a great day!

I am in the process of converting one of my old digital cameras to infrared and the disassembly went great… the assembly, well, I just need a little more hot glue

Parts Lost: 1 (screw inside the sensor area, I hear it rattle… oops)
Extra Parts: 2 (I love it when manufacturers give extra parts, haha)
Broken Parts: 1 (nothing a little hot glue can’t fix)

The question is, does the camera work.

The answer is, kind of… everything except for the rear control panel works, and that will work as soon as I can fix the ribbon cable clasp

Have a great day!

I had an awesome weekend, this is some of what I did

FRIDAY

Wow, I can’t even begin to explain to you how long today has been!

I worked all day Thursday, got two hours of sleep, worked all day Friday and now it is 1am on Saturday. I had to rewrite this section of the blog on Monday because my thoughts were so slow and scattered that it didn’t make sense

I got into JFK at 7am Friday and have been going non-stop.

I think Leland went to hear Jane Goodall lecture while I was at The Phantom of the Opera, which was amazing! She gave Leland a Mr. H jr. chimpanzee who has been to 30-something countries. The story of how Jane Goodall first got Mr. H is great, I might share it later. I believe that we are supposed to meet with Jane in Danbury, CT on the 27th and then again in Tanzania in the fall.

I spent today with my friend Shannon. She is so great… I just wish we lived closer together. We ate lunch then went to the Museum of Modern Art and looked at everything, took silly photos of each other, then took a long cab ride to Penn Station, where she got on a train to see Norah Jones in Boston!

I have so many business cards in my pocket right now. It is going to take me half a day to follow up with everybody that I have met so far. I love just striking up conversations with people; it is so much fun to find out what I have in common with them

I saw the Phantom of the Opera tonight and it was amazing. It was the first Broadway show that I have seen and I am impressed. The costumes, the sets, the voices, the explosions and the characters are all great. You really need to see the show!

SATURDAY

I met my clients, Brad and Michelle, today at the World Financial Center for their engagement session. It turns out that they hired my good friend, Marybeth, to do the video for them. I am excited because she is so great to work with We walked all around Soho, Tribeca, Greenwich Village, East Village, Chelsea and Washington Square Park. When we were done we had a great brunch and I had an omelet with cheese, corn, peppers, onions and other vegetables.

I then went to Union Square and watched people for a while. I took a bunch of trains back to Manhattan.

Leland wanted to take me to meet the two old women who were the recent NYC mugging victims that made national news, but he called me 3-hours later than planned and I was napping. After he got back I met him and his wife, Rosetta, for dinner in the West Village. We sat around and talked for a few hours and after walking around Broadway I got back to my hotel at about 3:00am.

We talked about some future business projects and some world-trips with Manute Bol and Jane Goodall. I also gave him a great photo-book of when Manute, Leland, Brad and I did the work in Rochester with the Eastman House.

I was planning on having some amazing organic all natural pizza for dinner tonight but Rosetta and Leland did not want to eat any pizza for dinner… they wanted steak, so that’s what we had I’ll have some organic pizza next time I am in NYC.

In a city where most people have no cars… Leland now has two. One is a giant dark grey Mercedes and the other is a medium light gray Mercedes. I am impressed when he navigates that big car through all of the traffic.

SUNDAY

After an amazing breakfast it was pouring rain out and I didn’t have a jacket or an umbrella, and incidentally, as I walked out of the restaurant there was the only empty cab left in Manhattan stuck in a traffic jam 10 feet from me. I got in and had the best conversation ever with the most genuine Senegalese New Yorker that I have ever met. We didn’t exchange names, but he came to NYC 10 years ago and has been working ever since. He wants a real job but will drive a cab until then. He says that in Senegal, people don’t need money to be happy, people just live every day and are happy. He said that he would prefer not to drive a cab because there is too much traffic, too many bad drivers, rude customers and honking horns. When we got stuck on a one way street where a bus was off-loading people, instead of sitting there running the meter for 5-10 minutes, my driver backed up into the intersection and then took the second fastest route. He never once honked his horn, he was polite and let pedestrians cross, he stayed in his own lane and I never feared for my life. When I got to Penn Station I gave him a 110% tip and he looked at me and said, “Sir, why are you giving me all this money, please don’t give all of this to me.” I just smiled and said that he was a great person and was a pleasure to ride with.

I thought that my cab driver was from Sudan because he had the exact same skin color, accent and physical features as Manute.

I decided to take a train home today instead of flying. I like to experience different things that break up my routine and the train sounded fun! I drove a train when I was a little kid because my grandfather worked for Conrail.

I’m in Albany now and should be home early Monday morning, where several inches of snow have fallen.

The 16 year old boy sitting across the aisle from me has been flirting with the girl next to him for the past three hours and it is seriously irritating… she is completely uninterested and said that she has a boyfriend twice, loud enough for me to hear 8-feet away. I’d say he is persistent and optimistic, but he has been talking about death, stupidity and why he doesn’t fit in… hahahahaha, I’m sure he is winning her over with those conversation topics!

We have been in Albany for over 2-hours… it’ll be another late travel night A nice older woman named Fran is sitting next to me and has been since Penn Station in New York, she is getting off at Utica. She just gave me 8 cheese and crackers to eat and one of her old magazines to read while we wait, that is really nice! The crackers tasted really great too

Here are some of the photos from the weekend. For whatever reason, I never feel like photographing the sights in New York so enjoy the handful that I did actually take. Oh, yes, that one photo of Shannon and I is a real genuine Polaroid and I really did blink during the picture

OK Shan, time to look cute

View from the MoMA

Shannon

Shan in the cartoon room

Me in the cartoon room

People looking at the cartoon room

People in the cartoon room

Us by the purple cows

Shannon!

People walking around in the MoMA

Shannon lying on the desk

Polaroids, the real thing!

I blinked

Shannon and I reflected in a trailer

Me leaving the MoMA

Shan showing off her Polaroids

Cab ride

Shannon’s self portrait

Distractions

Reviewing

Shannon blowing a bubble

Looking out the windshield

Shannon itching her neck

Haha, Shan’s funny face

Me

Broadway

The Color Purple

The engagement session photos will be online later in the week

Have a great day!

I leave for New York in a few hours so it is time to get some sleep .

Manute Bol is out of town which means that the meeting with Jane Goodall has been postponed until the 27th, which should still be nice.

Have a great day!