I've got a BIGpost coming later on this weekend about what I'm currently up to at work.
Here's a hint: It involves me getting up at 3 a.m., nearly getting murdered by bovine and involves 1,800 pounds of nylon fabric.
What is it? The Tigard Festival of Balloons, of course!
What's the balloon fest, you ask? Good question. It's an annual summer festival where they bring in hot air balloons from all over the country to fly. There's also music and pancakes and rides, and I spend all weekend running around like crazy having a good time.
It runs all weekend long but before I give you a link to the details I wanted to show you this:
The festival is super fun and worth the drive out if you've never seen a hot air balloon before. The catch: They take off at about 6 a.m., so you've got to be up early if you want to see them do their thaang.
Details for this year's festival and more awesome photos can be found HERE. Expect my ACTUALBalloon Fest post with pictures and videos (and the story of how I was nearly killed by cows and then became an accessory to a crime) later this week.
For those not "hip" to Portland area news, here's a newsflash. It's been raining.
Yes, I realize for a state whose reputation for horrible weather rivals that of Merry Old England, this isn't of much note but here's the thing: It's been raining a LOT.
On Mt. Hood it's rained so much that it's actually driven people out of their homes.
I grew up safely in Suburbia, but Katie grew up near Mt. Hood. It's a wild place, filled with towns with silly names like ZigZag, and Rhododendron. It's the type of place where men grow beards for warmth and kill deer as much for sport as sustenance.
Katie lived in the city of Sandy, where I imagine she spent her days hacking through underbrush and killing small town sheriffs who foolishly drew first blood.
Which, in my mind looked something like this:
"Murdock... I'm coming to get you!"
But even the rugged mountain man spirit of Hood's roughest hombres hasn't been able to compete with mother nature over the past few weeks.
With heavy rains and melting snow, the Sandy River has grown to pretty intense proportions.
The river destroyed one of the few roads in the area, Lolo Pass Road, and the 250 people that live in the area now have to walk miles to get to their cars, those that were able to get their cars out of there before the flooding came. It's pretty intense, and makes for some incredible images.
This video isn't ours, but we found it online here.
It's a crazy amount of destruction. People who live on the road are focred to either relocate or walk miles from their home to the nearest road. According to some officials with the county it could be several MONTHS before the road is back to a workable condition that people are actually about to... you know... drive home.
Luckily, we know someone who's been trained to ignore pain, ignore weather. To live off the land...
Well, 2011 may only have one day on the books but it's already eventful. New Years 2011 is, by far, one of the most memorable starts to the year in recent memory. And it happened like this:
Every year the Portland Winterhawks hockey team holds a New Years Eve game to ring in the new year. Katie and I have gone for the last couple of years. They're fun, the game is usually good and it gets us out of the house without going to a lame party or drinking ourselves stupid.
(Note to all of my friends: I'm sorry. I didn't mean that, your parties aren't lame. Really).
This year's game was against the Seattle Thunderbirds, a bitter rival, and while there was plenty of the violence that you'd expect at a hockey game:
Exhibit A:
There was also plenty of the violence that you didn't.
The refs in the game were (admittedly) not very good, and called penalty after penalty against Portland. I’ll save you all the technical mumbo-jumbo for all you non-hockeyists out there, but needless to say when the sixth penalty was called against Portland (with NONE against Seattle) the crowd was starting to get a bit upset, and when game ending whistle blew fans were so upset that they started pelting Seattle’s goaltender with garbage.
Yeah. Half-drunk sodas, nacho baskets, beer... it was all thrown at the players at the end of the game, and when one of Seattle’s players was invited back out onto the ice for a special award he refused to come out.
Hockey fans are known for being a bit... extreme, but I’ve never known people to be so upset that they pelted players with garbage.
The fans anger even managed to make it onto the Internet with the official Winterhawks blog and The Oregonian commenting on it.
Then there was the MAX ride home, where a group of pissed off drunk 15-year-old girls were in the middle of a screaming match with a group of transvestites on their way downtown. It was pretty ugly, and disgusting, and lasted most of the way through Portland.
I’m not one to shove my opinions down people’s throat, but I think we can all agree that it’s wrong to scream at complete strangers just because you disagree with them. They aren’t hurting you. It doesn’t affect you. Just let them wear their fishnet stockings. Shut up.
Anyway that brought a pretty substantial downer feeling to the evening and much of the MAX ride was taken in silence until we left Portland city limits.
Nothing like a little homophobic bigotry to bring down an evening
We ended up counting down the new year in a parking lot just off the MAX in Beaverton. It was a memorable start to 2011 to say the least.
Here’s hoping that 2011 is a bit less... aggressive, but just as memorable.
It's time for another edition of Geoff's Kinda Crappy Videos. These are short documentaries that my newspaper The Times has started doing over the last few months.
This one is about Aloha High School football. The team went on to win the state championships this year, but back when we made this they had just made the playoffs.
For those not content with the piss poor quality of this upload, go here. Otherwise, enjoy:
A couple of weeks ago Katie and I went to Zoo Lights at the Oregon Zoo. A bunch of zoos across the country do something similar, but essentially they put a gazillion Christmas lights up around the zoo and you wander around after hours and enjoy.
It's something my family has always made a habit of going to every year, and Katie was always forced to sing Christmas carols at Zoo Lights in high school.
This year it was Katie's niece who was singing and we went and watched her perform. It was a fun time and I've managed over the last few weeks to string together enough time to make this: It's a short video I threw together of the performance and some lights.
Just to be clear, I didn't shoot this using my normal Nikon D60, I used this:
Also, this was taken with our super sweet new 35mm lens, but more on that later...
It's an old Canon Powershoot A710. They don't make these anymore, so the video quality isn't exactly going to be in HD, nor is the sound.
My newspaper The Times has started doing little videos to accompany some of our stories. This is one of the better ones. It's about a Beaverton woman who makes and sells brownies at the local farmer's market.
For those not content with the piss poor quality of this upload, go here otherwise, enjoy:
Okay, I know I said awhile ago that the next video would be about visiting a bookmobile, but I couldn't get it to load, so we're gonna do this instead.
For those not in the know, my newspaper The Times (serving Tigard, Tualatin and Sherwood) has started doing little videos to accompany some of our stories. This is one of the better ones. It's about a Tualatin blogger named Carly Cais, who blogs about her Do It Yourself fashion tips on her website Chic Steals.
For the last couple of months I've been working on short 2-minute videos for our website. They usually go with a story in that week's paper and are designed to draw people online.
Of course, we never advertise that we have a video on the website, so I'm not sure how much it actually helps, but so far it's meant that I've gotten the creative juices flowing and keeps me busy with film stuff -- I have a tendency to get a little stir crazy when I'm not doing something movie related. Usually the reporter and cameraman go out and do the filming and interviewing and then the cameraman and I try to put something together in the editing room (usually with mixed results). It's an interesting way to go about making movies, since I usually have no idea what the footage is (or even what the video is about) until I sit down at the keyboard.
But hey, that's the way it works sometimes.
So far we've made nine videos, only about four of which I think are even watchable. I'll post one every so often so you can see, in a new segment I like to call:
GEOFF'S KINDA CRAPPY VIDEOS!!
This was our first one. Personally I think it's one of our better ones (which, if you don't like it, could tell you something about the rest of what's to come....)
Sorry in advance about the quality... not sure how to go about fixing that.
