2014

2014 is going to be a very strange year in a string of very strange years. The lease at the C street house is going to last until the end of August.

Wednesday and Thursday’s are now MTG nights. Marque with his injury over Christmas break is now carpooling with me to work, as in I pick him up in the morning and bring him home once were done.

Season Five

So, after sort of ascending years every year, this year isn’t going to descend, but as I said we kind of got the status quo figured out, and we’re cutting down on kids available for video. We are also getting a change on who is running the Leadership class in general, so things are going to be different, after having the teacher who wanted it added on, then working with Grabow/Taylor for years, we had to change up to fit the new organization of the class.

Luckily this wasn’t that much of a hiccup. Quarter one would have one very enthusiastic new member, Tylar, and feature Reed of Ethan’s little brother fame, holding onto his jacket in the new introduction. Plus with the success of the year before a lot of eager members. The only member sort of bland on the project would be Nina, whom I took because, even though elected to some part of the ASB leadership, she didn’t want to be in the class and I told the new teacher I would stick her in a job because I could handle attitude.

Surprisingly it would be her with the very excited Tylar that would sit at our anchor desk for over half the year. I don’t know why they worked together the best out of all the options we tried, but somehow the would sit there introduction stories to the kids this year.

That wouldn’t change until Nina eventually grew tired of video and was able to focus on something else. Then the hard part was transitioning away from Tylar, who was so into video we almost had to force her out to do anything else for any other committee. With that change I wanted to give the anchor spot to younger and more inexperienced anchors to, as Marque used to try and do, push kids out of their comfort zone to see what they could get done.

From this we got Brooke and Tara. Tara was the big push from me. She was a fun loving kid, but had a very cultivated personality that could use a shake up, but taking her free spirted silliness and giving her the news man role.

The first week got us a visit from the principal. Tara told Tylar in that weeks episodes, among other things, that she sounded like a spider. And so many adults watching the program wondered what was going on. After defending putting Tara up there in front of the school and the defense of her piers on the committee, I worked with her, toned down a bit of the randomness but allowed her to keep some of the humor, and her and Brooke would rock out the rest of the year.

A year later Tara would talk about how getting her to do the anchor position was one of the highlights of her junior high career. It was definitely not something she thought she would do as an eighth grader. And I still to this day she her around town and it seems moving her out of her comfort zone was a good thing for her. One of the better long term stories of the program.

Here they are with the purple and silver ties I used to help add comedy but the idea that they were trying to be serious characters when doing the news desk. Tara’s glasses were another prop for her anchor persona.

Now the downside. Evident in the intro for this year, the year before’s super hero special was well remembered. So much so that I promised to let them follow it up again this year at the same time. However, the group tasked with it couldn’t night organize themselves well enough, and in all the first eight or seven years of the media program, this was the one time a deadline was missed and an episode cancelled due to not getting the job completed. For what was mostly a good year, this mark sort of hurts it as a whole.

That second group though with Tara and Brooke did manage to build and keep the idea of the talk show host a permanent fixture for broadcasts to come. Their iteration featuring Amanda, and her Corner. If you’ve followed my story at all, you can see some of the images from years past on the wall behind her. Almost everything there was some product of some assignment over the course of the run, and it was sad when the box that housed all the memorabilia got thrown away over the summer without anyone’s consent.

A couple years back I mentioned how Marque and I set up the studio space once the famed hole in the wall was made. Then I mentioned that over time the setup got more streamlined. This is the year that it really was best organized, and we can see two pictures from the beginning of the year and at the end showing off how well we managed to work in the all purpose chroma-key set in with what was at the time Amanda’s Corner.

The in-action picture too was used for the new YouTube channel that the videos were now being posted on. Finally, after some work we were allowed to just post the videos in the easiest possible place for them to be loaded up during their release week at a teacher’s convenience.

The control room was also pretty solidified at this time. Of course in older pictures on the far left there was our second Mac, however the summer before it was stolen never to be found.

Magic and game night, which I think we were doing on Tuesday nights were a staple of winter and spring. Here Marque and I opened a box of Journey into Nyx the day it came out I hopes of bolstering the new gods he needed for his deck, and for a couple cards I was looking for as well.

With work, Tuesday night magic and carpooling Marque and I got a lot of time to discuss decks and set up people to play with, really launching the hobby for us from its roots of a game to play with friends.

The end of the school year also featured the carry through of a wager, or more a challenge. One part was Amanda getting straight A’s, the second was Tara getting a certain grade for a class I can’t remember. The reward was that they got to de-beard me. The second to last day of school they collected their prize. It’s hard to see in the photo but the had removed some of the beard at this point.

I then went home that night and gave them all this for the last day of school:

Yes, in probably one of the worst moustache fashion choices of that decade, I went full on NASCAR, and then gave Jaz and Bailey one last cheer kick to send us all away for the summer.

 

When summer roled around, now that Marque and I have had some much more time to do stuff, I bring up the idea of taking him and Katie to southern California since they hadn’t ever been down.

Being a veteran of these trips, I told Marque the plan would be for me to sleep all day, then we would leave around midnight from Davis and get to San Diego in the morning for breakfast and the world famous San Diego Zoo.

When I work up in the evening for the trip, I tried calling Marque to no avail. Eventually worried I drove to his residence and tried to figure out a way to get into his complex, since they had a buzz in system. Luckily while doing this Katie showed up on her bike coming home from work. I explained what was going on and she went up to check on Marque.

Then she came down to the side door that Marque used everyday during the school year to get in my car for work and explained that Marque was just upstairs in the apartment with the music on, drinking and watching Star Trek.

When I got up and asked, Marque said, ‘yes he was” doing that. And that he had decided in the morning with everyone gone he was just going to have a Marque only dance party and watch Star Trek all day while doing it. Which he was doing and just forgot about the time and figured Katie and I would figure it out.

Then we all went over the plan, Katie was a bit tentative, mainly worried that she had been to work all day and wouldn’t have any fun without any sleep. But we got out a sleeping bag, set her up in the backseat, and even though she didn’t believe it, within about 20 minutes down the interstate she was down for the night.

Marque on the other hand, still happy from his dance party, decided it was his duty to keep me awake while driving through the night. I told him that was silly since I slept all day. But at the Marque he bought a box of wine, filled up his Camel-pack with it and started playing Weird Al and Mc Chris songs as we zoomed down interstate 5.

We really did start to wonder why someone would have to player hate on IG-88. Marque did fall asleep a couple of times without realizing it. Most notably right before we got gas at Kettlemen. But nothing prepared me for his reaction to coming out of the grapevine and into Valencia.

As the sun was coming up, some of the early morning commuters were hitting the road, darting around lanes as they do. Marque proclaimed he couldn’t handle seeing these drivers, draped a blanket we had in the car over his head, and then almost instantly turned off like a canary with a cover over the bird cage.

And so Marque slept all the way through L.A. and Orange county, which we zoomed through surprisingly smoothly in the carpool lanes. I guess waking up enough to check on progress Marque lifted the blanket off his head right as we entered Camp Pendelton, right at the right time to find out he missed all of L.A. and were very close to touch down in San Diego.

I actually stopped when we got to San Diego at UTC. Snapped a quick picture of the old employer, and we had breakfast at that new addition in the corner there of the Corner Bakery Café. From there we would go to the Zoo. Where we were met with an early morning mating of the Galapagos Turtles, seemingly like they knew Marque would be there:

VIDEO

Then we basically spent a day at the zoo. Katie ended up being impressed with the size, and with her good nights sleep in the back of the car she found she didn’t have a bad time while going through the park.

By the evening we needed to get a meal. I don’t remember who it was that insisted on seeing the beach and ocean, but since the zoo is near downtown I elected to drive them back up to Ocean Beach, for a little Hodad’s action. Sadly though when we got there the line for Hodad’s was so intense that we elected to find another eating establishment, and had pizza and beer elsewhere. Then as Marque was happy to do we hung out on the beach.

Now there is a side story going on this whole time. I planned the trip for Comic Con weekend. One reason was Justin V. whom I had talked to a couple months prior said he was coming down for the con and that his new girlfriend had a place in the city which was crashable. However, I was finding him unreachable by phone. Now why he never answered the phone is still a mystery. I never heard back from him even though I left messages. One begins to wonder if the recent revelation that his ex-wife was dating Jim less than a year out from Jim’s departure of Jackie had anything to do with it is a wonder. He may not have known Jim wasn’t talking to anyone at the time, and their dating was a revelation to us all.

Either way as the night grew on our place to stay the night seemed to be gone. I desperately made a call to Jen, whom I expected might be in town for the con. She was but had no floor space and suggest Tim, from the Star Wars contingency. However, and this still kind of irks me to this day, he had room but was feeling down that night and didn’t want to house guests, even in an emergency situation. Seems, from seeing his posts about the trip, he wanted to go drink by himself somewhere instead of met, well Marque, which honestly would have done wonders for him.

I got desperate and on the prompting from Nephew Justin, tried calling Niece Krystle up in Orange County. The night had now started catching up with us, I had taken Marque and Katie to Callahan’s, which was kind of a fun place to hang out while arranging this. Of course Marque somehow borrowed the keys to get in the car then locked them in the car, so we had to call AAA. A pretty big mess. Eventually, with it being comic con weekend I started exploring hotel rooms. There were non in the city, because well, comic con weekend, so I had to book one in orange county.

So once we got the car keys back, I got the tired campers in the Corolla and we drove the hour back up the freeway and crashed out in a Hotel room.

With that disaster behind us, the next day wasn’t too bad. I had planned for us to partake in the outside of Comic Con silliness that goes on during the convention. Instead Marque was happy with drinking on the beach again, so we woke up a little late, went to lunch at the old Souplantation in Alhambra I used to frequent then continued on interstate 10 to Santa Monica, where Marque got to watch the waves and drink his wine. I don’t remember if it was here or Ocean Beach where Katie decided she wanted to go in the ocean, but that happened as well.

Then as it got dark, wanting to hit up Karl Strauss in San Diego, I instead drove the crew to the on in Universal City Walk and we ended the day with some Karl. Then like a mad man, I drove us back up to Davis so that we could all sleep through Sunday if need be, and so that Katie could be at work bright and early on Monday.

 

 

Moving out was a trial. I had nowhere, once again, lined up to go, luckily Claudine offered a space, especially since it sounded like I had another year without Dino coming and I could look for my own apartment instead of a room.

The downside was that while I was slowly filing things out into storage for the move, Jackie, still reeling from Jim’s decision wasn’t moving very fast on starting whatever was coming for her new phase of life. This got compounded a few times when Jim came over presumably to help “pack”, but instead became let’s hang out sessions, that then once Jim left became angry tirade sessions about Jim being off his rocker.

Which culminated in an awkward week in which once I got my stuff moved out, Claudine and my mother on a Skype call in Claudine’s living room forbode me from going back to help Jackie with the train wreck that was forming with her stuff. Followed by Jim asking if I could help, then cancelling on him because Marque and I after the first week of school was completed got stupid drunk and I instead hung out with Marque while he avoided his sister-in-law that same night.

This meant that by September first 2014, I wouldn’t ever hear from Jackie again, and it would be a while until Jim and I talked again. I didn’t have a lot of time to think about things though, since the new school year had started, we had new administration, and like I said word was that Dino wouldn’t be back again this year.

So I was managing a new year, a new media program, Dino’s hours and having to find a hopefully nicer and more stable living arrangement.

Then Halloween came, and out of nowhere and being told to plan on this being the norm, Dino was going to be back, so the only thing they could do was cut back my hours, changing the whole dynamic of what I was planning. Once again, planning ahead had proved to be a folly as I would now have to go back to the old norms for November and start looking for a room to rent.

It would take two months to find a place and I wouldn’t get fully moved in until the super bowl.