That's all pretty neat!. The fun working with the  kids. You know , some where down the line, they'll be telling spouses, friends, of  castmates  about 'The Guy i knew , who helped  our school company"

The Bowling things is fun,  We had a Gold league  i ran at Navco, for  2 years, but  it died  when  guys ( me)  kept getting laid off.  I beat the  Big Boss in our head to head match, everyone said i should have lost on purpose..but it  did  serve  the purpose of getting to know  folks...people i didn't like i  disliked more... people i liked went the either way.. Bosses  , gained respect for me, because i handled  all the numbers and standings.

 My  Late  wife  didn't like to go to stuff  the Union had  or the post office  had,, i think she didn't like lot of the people. But the Union Pic nics  were fun..kids won prizes, i got to show off, and  My wife  got to talk to some  people  she ended up ,liking to talk to.

so..yeah?  do that stuff, even  if its   just to 'drop in and say hi", then leave. its good  for folks to know you , outside of things.

I tend to skip most of the employee parties these days.  They're geared to be entertaining for 14-18 year-olds, and I was long past that when I started at the park.  This is one of the few things they do that I actually look forward to.

I'm sure, had I said anything about "I'm going to the bowling party", there would have been some concerned words about priorities...but when push comes to shove and the chips are down, I'm there for the long haul.  Anyone who wants to complain about me leaving early, now, to go to an employee party, needs to come talk to me after lighting focus, when it's one AM and there's me, Security, and the grounds clean-up guys on the park, and that's it.  Since they're all home in bed whenever we're doing that, I don't feel bad about giving up an afternoon when we're still a couple of weeks out from starting rehearsals, especially when all of the major projects on my list are things that I can't do until electricians and carpenters are done putting our space back together.  Or today, when I was the one in the basket lift, almost twenty feet above the stage, balancing on the bars on the side of the basket (which we're not supposed to do...don't tell anyone...) because there's already so much crap hanging above the stage that I can't get the basket close enough to where I need to be to mount the anchor points for yet more stuff that's going to be hung (and could potentially make it impossible for us to get down a couple of our lights...that will be fun...)

I took advantage of the time that I was up there to strip out some of the old rigging (some of it, I had to, because it was in the way of what I was putting up), even though the last time we used it (five or six years ago), when I asked if I should take it down because we were unlikely to use it again and if we did, there would probably be better places to rig it, the director said, "No...we should leave it there.  Just in case..."  You get up to the grid over the stage (where we're hanging all the lights), and there's an absolutely revolting amount of, "No, leave it there...just in case..."  Half of it, we can't even use now, because so much other stuff has been hung underneath it that we can't even get to it anymore.  I understand the whole "we went to a lot of trouble to get that installed, and we could end up using it again, so keep it there" (I mean, I'm the king of "Don't throw that away, that could be really useful under the right circumstances!")  But when you have to move it around EVERY YEAR to get it out of the way of what you ARE using, and you haven't used it in almost a decade, and it could be EASILY rigged to be reinstalled if you decided to use it...WHY IS IT STILL THERE?!!!

Yeah, I was a little frustrated today.  It got even better when they wanted to use the basket lift to raise the subwoofers (the 'more crap' that I was rigging hanging points for) up into position, and I had to explain that I could barely get MYSELF in there.  Throw a 4x3x3 ft box up on the edge of the basket so I can't see where I'm going and there's even LESS room to maneuver, and I seriously doubt I can do that.  If the other speakers weren't already in the way...if I didn't have to dodge the antique-ish sconce lights (with legitimately antique glassware in them)...if they would get me trained on the other lift that fits in the theater--the one with an articulated arm on the end of the boom so I could get closer to the ceiling without worrying about crushing part of the main support beam around the outside of the theater...

If they would stop layering band-aid fixes on top of band-aid fixes...

But, the rigging work is almost all done.  We have one in position to be hoisted up, we have pulleys and ropes rigged, we have a maintenance crew that's supposed to show up to help us hoist it tomorrow morning (we tried it tonight, and there just weren't enough of us to make it work)...so, hopefully, by noon tomorrow, it will all be done.

That was part one of the good news.  Part two is, the kids did so well at rehearsal last night that the director/theatre teacher decided they didn't need to rehearse tonight, which would send them into opening night tomorrow all rested up (hopefully!  We ARE talking about high school kids, after all, and that's an age group that isn't well known for wise decision making.)  But I didn't end up sitting in a darkened theater tonight and almost falling asleep (again).  Didn't really get rest, but I did get to run a few errands for the things I was going to fix tonight and can now fix tomorrow night instead.

But I did have to deal with the group that rented our large screen for the late (9pm) time-slot tonight.  A realty group, sponsored by a realtor who specializes in buying flipped houses and then reselling them, and a bunch of the people who either flip the houses or provide services for those flipping the houses.  They were WAY more interested in talking to each other than watching a movie, and a handful of them only lasted maybe five minutes inside the theater and then came out and spent the rest of the night talking in the lobby.  I didn't realize how much I enjoy the solitude of a quiet lobby until they left...

Weaves through Zob's legs and nearly trips him up.

Thank you everyone.

Much as I enjoy special effects work, theatre in general, whilst fun is not where my heart is. I'm happier with students. I beat the email to a standstill last night, and there was an unpredidented number of grateful ones from students I've dealt with, some in this recent madness, and others I've worked with over the year. Even a formal Islamic blessing from one young gentleman. Back to marking on Monday, but for now curling up with my medals website - with inpeccable timing, I've been being deluged with images for the section I'm working on just when I don't have the time to work on them...

ok. Palindrome  week!.. from 4-25-24 to  4-29-24

now?  5 points is way too much to give up  for  number.

 BUT.....  evey one  take  2 points..anywhere, mix or match

Put at the bottom   PD424

PM  me changes.

Thank you Don.

Hey…power is out until 7:30 .I’ll catch up when restored.. tablet won’t work hang phone now

Penal says 9:30 now….thiey still
Don’t  know what happened…..I post whenever we have power.ot is amzonh how black the house is without all the gadgets lights

i got caught up in some real life stuff catching up now

still at the Ball..it  just started.

three weeks to go...

Okay...time to sound off before my annoyances eat me into an ulcer or something...

We've known for a few months, now, that the director wants us to install some 'cool neon' (LED rope light that looks like neon light tubing, but far less fragile, less hot, and uses WAY less power)...we finally got it yesterday and it's going to be a HUGE process.  He wants to run it around the front edge of several of the illusions (despite the fact that the instructional materials for it specifically say "avoid bending in sharp curves" and some of the places he wants it are just NOT friendly to electronic materials of that type.  Like, the instructions use a 90deg bend as their example of DON'T...one of the places on one illusion that he wants to use it is more like...140deg...WAY tighter than a right angle bend...)

Everybody is antsy about the fact that the stage hasn't been painted yet...this, despite the fact that we haven't painted the stage in, like, three years, now, and the last time it was painted, they basically built a tent around the interior of the theater and set up forced-air heating to keep the stage warm enough for the paint, and did it in February.  And every year, when they've scheduled it to be painted as part of the run-up to rehearsals, they've either got some renovation work, or the weather's too cold, or there are other projects that were higher priority...Yeah, we haven't painted the stage in a while, because we keep trying to paint it this time of year and it NEVER WORKS.  So why are we still scheduling it?

The lighting designer finally got me a list of the lighting gels he wants to use (which we may or may not have in stock...he tends to use the same colors every year, but he never tells us until the last minute, so we've used up most of his default colors and I don't know if we'll have everything he wants to use this time.  On top of that, he's decided that, now that we have all of the lights hung up in the ceiling of the theater, he wants to replace the gobos (design templates) in most of the moving-head lighting fixtures.  Could we not have done this back in January, February, March?  BEFORE we put all the lights up?  When they were easily accessible and in a workshop-type space where digging into them and swapping out internals would have been a super-simple process?

So we've got two of us tackling most of these major projects...the other guy is trying to get as much of the neon work done as possible (I just facilitated it immensely due to the fact that I bought metal-cutting blades for my miter saw, so he can make clean, consistent cuts without fighting the torque and kickback of the disc grinder he started out with...)  The carpenters are ALMOST done with the renovations, so I can start painting...if I can get them to stop throwing other projects in the way.

And I'm trying to work on another show while all of this is winding up (that one's fun...Zombie Prom...), so most days I have to leave by 4pm so I can get home, get food, and get to the school to get stuff ready for the show that night.  I'm only doing makeup on one person (the guy who becomes the zombie), so there should be no rush for me to prep...except that the makeup is happening in the womens' dressing room so I have to get there, make sure the airbrushes are all clean and the makeup is all shaken up and ready to go, and then get out so they can get into costume for the show.  And I'm having a whole lot more fun at the show than at work...but Saturday is closing, and after that, I'm up to my eyeballs until the cows come home or the last dog is dead or whatever morbid expression for 'the long haul' you want to use...

I hope this isn't the year that I finally hit the wall and just burn out on the whole process.  It's been good, thus far...but suddenly getting all this extra information about the neon and how we're supposed to install it despite the fact that the director is asking for something directly contradictory to that, and having the director say something this afternoon in production meeting about "I feel like this is the tenth year that we've planned to paint the stage and run into challenges" when the challenges have all been due to scheduling the painting at the second or third least convenient time of the year...yeah.  My frustration spiked tonight.

all that sounds nuts!

  as far as the install goes. Is there  a manufacturing  rule  of how they go up? If  you don't do it that way, does it negate  insurance?

  How do they paint the stage.. rollers?  spray?..spray would dry faster..right?  I dunno..i never  did anything  that was as  big as a stage!

 As far as  'hitting the wall'..i can only look at my  Lettercarrier  career... started out great. then  Postmasters  and  POOMs  they hire ( i can only assume , the lowest IQ gets hired there)..the shine started  coming off   real fast. Personal stuff missed out on, workign sick and injured  and  dumbass  Ideas from a VP who was someone's brother -in-law came up with...it wears  on you.

 you know what is needed, you know what you can do to make it better, or at least work.. butt some  dumbass holding a  cup of  coffee  with a dress shirt and tie says " no, you have to do it this way"

sadly,, in those years  where a Wall popped up... sometimes the wall has to fall on them, before they say... like the  Dog from old  Bugs Bunny cartoons.."...you know sumpin' ?  He's  right?"

 This could  be a wall year for you.. just hang in there... Knute  Rockne  was asked one time..how he  Picked his Back field , when he was at Norte Dame...he said " I got  brick wall at the field.. those who go through it..are Fullbacks,  those  who  go over it  are halfbacks...and those who go around it, are Quarterbacks! "

MAY DAY...MAY DAY!!!!..yep its  May day!

MAY I say...about dang time!

We use rollers for most of the stage.  There's too much potential for overspray making a mess of everything around it (plus, while it's covered, it's an outdoor stage...if the wind is blowing, the spray is going somewhere besides where you pointed the sprayer).

The neon install gets better...they were trying to get us to nail down specific numbers of what kinds of cables we needed to do the installation earlier today.  I started looking at what they were getting ready to order, and then looking at the controller unit they want to use for the stuff on the proscenium...and they don't match.  I was like, "Ummm...NONE of these will do us any good for the stage.  Their input doesn't match the output from the controller, so these are all useless for that particular project.  Now, maybe for the illusions..."

We did get the mounting track for the biggest section of the neon installed today.  The controller has two output channels, so we can hook up one other section.  I laughed a little when I looked at the diagram of where the director wants neon (under ideal conditions), because there's one piece that he says he wants that there's just no good way to get control to (he wants it all under DMX control...the section in question is at the base of one side, to get a matching signal to the base on the other side we need about 40' of cable and the longest cables the manufacturer makes are 10'...)  I was talking with the other guy and mentioned that I thought it was kinda ridiculous that they told us, back in January, that we would be doing this...but they didn't give us ANY kind of information about what we were working with or how it was supposed to be installed until just a couple of days ago.  I mean, yeah, I get not sending all of it out then, because it was freakin' cold and I would have been really eager to find just about anything else to work on instead, especially with a deadline at the start of May.  But my mind would have been mulling this over and figuring out the important questions to get answered BEFORE we even started, so we wouldn't be where we're at now, with a bunch of empty track, a bunch of LED neon, a DMX controller, and absolutely no way to get the controller hooked up to the neon.  I also have to figure out where to put the controller so that we can get power and DMX to it, preferably somewhere vaguely accessible so we can program it with the right settings...

We were already pretty much maxed out on available power circuits at that part of the stage (something I've told them for the past two years)...and now we need power for two subwoofers AND the controller, AND a bunch of additional outlets for at least one of the illusions (because it uses two hydraulic motors that are currently drawing more than enough power to trip the circuit breaker, although the electricians think there's something wrong with the motors because they shouldn't be drawing that much amperage but they don't do hydraulics work so they aren't sure what the problem is...AND THEN it also needs power for a fog machine and a bunch of lights.)  So I don't know how we're going to solve that...the outlets that are accessible for where they need to run power from will be running two TVs, plus the main hall lights backstage...there's only a handful of additional places we can pull power from at this point (we would have two more 20amp circuits, but when they installed the elevated stage floor about a decade ago, nobody paid any attention when I suggested that they do something to make the outlets in the old stage floor, against the upstage wall, accessible.  So, they're just sitting there...power's run to them, the outlets are live, and they're in a place where we could REALLY use more power because the director and the lighting designer keep stacking more shit upstage that needs constant power, without taking the time to ask, "Hey, do we have power available for this?"  And then we get the electricians annoyed with us because they get called in to slap together SOMETHING that will work for us, and then a couple of years later we're complaining about how their job looked even though they did three days' work in about six hours to get it done for us...  *sigh*)

Man? all this stuff! When do you guys open?  around here   the parks will be open  either Memorial day weekend, or the  week before. I keep getting   text as and emails from Hersey to get a 'membership" ( that's  funny..i think we went there like 2 times in my life , Cross country goes   there  during the  States weekend they are out there. )

Kennywood and  Idlewild normal open  for  memorial  day  weekend..that's only a couple weeks?

@justin I just realized that things moved forward quicker than I though after I posted lol

Yesterday was not even able to get on to check the rpol so sorry for the latest posts

In reply to Jason graves (msg # 130):

No problems. Your chatting with Corporal Gools.
This message was last edited by the player at 02:32, Today.

had a very good day today.. tired as hell, but it was a very good therapy today.
well sister dumped me off for my therapy (PT and OT). I started at this place almost a year ago and go 1-2 times a week. when I started I could barely do 100 ft in 6 minutes with my cane and nearly nothing without it.  It was not a progress test day or anything, just a regular sessions. well we did a 3 minute walk without my cane and did 257 feet. no falling, or stumbling, though did some weaving which is normal. also had to practice 'climbing'. go from standing next to an elevated mat and get up on it with my knees (using a pillow because I have crappy knees - no cartiledge), I did it but was rather slowly to stay comfortable. I told my PT therapist 'I am 'Slothwoman' to which got us laughing. made it fun. then had to sling these 5lb. yellow beanbags into a basket with my bad arm. well there went my 'bananas'.  lol. In OT I got to play plumber. plus we checked my hand grip again. On my good off hand I have a grip at about 40 ppsi, pretty normal. Back when I started my stroke side dominant hand was barely 10-12 ppsi, very weak. well 2 weeks ago the strongest it was was just over 14, still week and had not shown a lot of improvement since December. today out of no where I hit 17, 17.2, and then 19.4 ppsi.  I was amazed considering it was diagnosed with arthritis as well. it may not be big in the long run, but for me it was as amazing as when my hand started opening and closing over night last year.

Great!...any  forward movement is  good  Movement!

In reply to Admiral Hack (msg # 129):


Well, the park is open on weekends, right now.  We open one show Memorial Day weekend, and another show the weekend after that.  Right now is the annual insane push to get all the massive projects done before rehearsals start (we never get them ALL done...)

I pulled the rip cord this morning.  Got there and Macyn (the other tech guy I'm working with...I should start calling him my partner in crime or something) told me that after yesterday's phone calls where he talked with the director about needing different jumpers for the LED neon, to hook it up to the controller they had, the director suggested just cutting the default controller box off the set we had and wiring it directly to the DMX controller.  And at that point, I was like, "Ummmm...we were already in the deep end of the pool, and you just tossed me into the ocean on this one.  There are four wires...which may or may not match colors.  If they do, it's simple...if they don't, I'm going by dead-reckoning as to which colors should be spliced together, and I am NOT comfortable with that.  I don't know if hooking the wires up wrong is going to fry the whole thing, or screw up one color so we only get 66% usefulness out of it..."  So they called the park electricians to come look at what needed to be done, and since Macyn's been in communication with the director for a few weeks about it now, they had him take over as point man for the neon, which freed me up to paint the off-stage walls that have also been on the overdue list for a month, now.

In the same phone call where the director offered to have Macyn head up the neon, he asked if there was anything he could do better to help facilitate things, and I mentioned that it would have been nice to have had ANY sort of information about the neon (beyond the fact that we were installing something he was calling 'neon' but wasn't really) back in January or February, because I could have studied up on it a little bit and gotten myself mentally prepared for everything we had to do, instead of getting one day's notice and a couple of PDFs (they call them 'tear sheets'...basically, the kind of information pamphlet you'd hand out at a lighting designers' convention, with practically no useful information with regards to how to install it, what kind of power allocations have to be made for it, etc...so, a couple of short steps above completely useless for what I need to do...although I didn't go into all that detail about it).  He apologized...it was still in the "we'll do this if the park says yes to it" phase, but he agreed that he could have sent information about "this is something we're looking at using" instead of just leaving it hanging in Limbo.  So, we'll see.

But, hey, the offstage walls are painted (except for around one doorway...I was using a paint sprayer, the doors to the backstage area are being replaced, so those doorways were wide open.  I stapled plastic up around one, but I couldn't do the other without basically sealing off backstage and I'm not sadistic enough to do that).  Ten minutes with a paint roller tomorrow, and it's done.  We're theoretically painting the stage floor tomorrow, as well, because this weekend is the last time that there will be nobody on the stage for a couple of days until November.  If it doesn't happen now, it's not happening this year... (the floors offstage need to be painted, regardless...we had some renovations done and there are sections of the floor that are just bare plywood, at the moment, so SOME painting is gonna have to happen.)

Also found out that one of the illusions that they're planning to use this year might need a major overhaul...it uses hydraulics to elevate part of the illusion, and the hydraulic motors are running really erratically (until they blow their fuses, that is...usually when the part of the illusion is going up and about a foot to 18 inches higher than its default setting...and then it's stuck there until we replace the fuses...)  The electricians came and checked out the controller box for it and couldn't find anything, but they found out that the motors are drawing WAY more power than they should be.  Had some of the maintenance guys who work on hydraulics come down...and they're not positive just yet, but they think there's a very good chance that the motors are failing and that's what's causing the overloads and the erratic operation.  The director just bought this illusion a few months ago (the magician who owned it before passed away), so he doesn't really know the service history of it, how well it was maintained, how well it was stored, etc (considering Macyn spent a couple of days scrubbing crystallized cat pee out of the inside of another illusion from the same magician, storage and maintenance were not high priorities...)

So, yeah...it's gonna be an interesting spring...

reminds me of an old  WWII  movie   with an old, beat up warship going into battle. Most of the crew  are new.

 The captain calls  down for the  engine room to go ahead 1/3, and  the  offciers   don't  quite understand  the limits of the vessel and Crew. But  below dec the   Grizzled  Master chief  is  shouting orders  and  Jury  ringing Pipes  and sealing off  leaks , to make  everything  sail smoothly!

 Roy Just  got the call..." Flank  Please, Mr  Curtis, if you wiil"

Tarja has also come over to say hi

Maybe not quite as mad here, but it feels that way...

Finally got the selection process for next year's Final Year Projects started, only a couple of months after I wanted to. In January, Digital Services - who put security far before usability - moved the server the selection system lives on out of a publically-accessable part of the network, so it can only be accessed if you are on campus or using a VPN. As I have students doing their placement year as far away as Australia and Korea that's not real useful! When we asked why they said, "Security Issues" without bothering to define what those were and have been very unhelpful about sorting them out. Still haven't, so I've launched the process where it is and sent instructions on how to access it along with the regular instructions on how the system works.

All over the VPN of course, as I work from home on a permanent basis for disability reasons.

And it's peak grading season, with students rocking up to do their project presentations then expecting their reports to be marked.

Anyway, I sit at the beginning of a long weekend. I need it!

 enjoy it Mila!