or (The "interesting" posts about my job will have to wait for a private entry.)

In this entry:

I want some new lights.

But they're really expensive.

My legs are really sore

But Emily's happy.

Adventures In Lighting

I recently spent three days redoing the lighting grid at POG to rearrange the lighting fixtures into more logical positions. It's funny that when volunteering at POG I never bothered to go up on the lift and have a look at it...though perhaps it isn't. The entire stage had a big cyclorama behind it to provide a background, and so the layout of the lighting rarely changed. Anyways, when we finally got rid of the cyc (We always called it the scrim, but that was an incorrect term.) when Chris left, I suddenly had to deal with lighting a whole new stage, and the old lighting positions weren't very good anymore. This process was made extremely difficult by the complete lack of a catwalk in our building, and so every lighting fixture has to be focused one at a time, which is both extremely time-consuming and ineffecient.

After moving a bunch of the fixtures around and re-focusing them, I realized that my plans for better color washes and key lighting were not going to work. The color washes were in horrible positions...the blues and ambers were all PARNels on the outside and rear pipes, and covered the stage adequately, but the red wash was made up of...ellipsoidals (What the crap?) right in the middle of the stage, pointing downwards, creating a huge splash of red light in the middle of the stage, and not much elsewhere. After re-gelling pretty much all of the blue and red fixtures I assigned seven groups of three PARs for color washes in logical locations around the stage. Most of the color is coming from the back now, which adds color without making the performers look like crayons.

I'm still dissatisfied with the lighting, though. (Of course I am, I'm the TD! I won't be content until every fixture up there is an intelligent, color-mixing fixture in a moving yoke!) The range of colors that we can project is limited by the number of fixtures that I can assign to be a color wash fixture...seven at the most, and the fact that if I want to change a color, I have to go up on the lift and re-gel every bloody fixture. The solution? High End Systems Studio Beam fixtures. Fully color-mixing and insane light output in a moving yoke fixture. (Drools) Only $6,500 a piece. Hopefully I can get some of those into the capitol expense budget soon.

On Ghost Runners, and Other Softball Phenomenon

Children's minds are truly wonderful things. Emily was back in the hospital for three weeks last month, and we spent several nights together. We played softball out inn the hallways, and...have you ever heard of this? Every time she got a hit, she'd run to whatever we'd designated as the base, she'd declare "Ghostie!", a shortening, apparently, of "Ghost runner". She claims is a rule whereby one can declare that due to lack of players, the base that one got to is now considered occupied. Of course, I claimed she was full of it, although it's not like she really needed this rule to beat me.

Anyways, she's doing well. Hasn't really grown much from the last time I saw her, though that's symptom of her disease. We spent our time watching Shrek 2, playing softball (of course) and playing various video games while she was receiving her treatments. I'm getting better at Mario Kart...I actually won a few games, which I got to flaunt to Emily and some much-bemused nurses. Good times, and mom and the nurses were grateful for someone to keep the hyperactive bundle of energy company.