When I get sad

I stop being sad & be awesome instead. True story." Neil Patrick-Harris, How I Met Your Mother

As a kid, I was never fond of summer. It was just too.... boring. I was one of the kids that would spend August redoing old math assignments, just to brush up. & reading books from the library, like Cam Jansen, Animorphs, and some other stuff that I can't remember anymore... There was only so much that I could read, though. I mean, the only book that was able to distract me from a week of listening to my body telling me it was hungry, etc. was the Lord of the Rings, way back in high school. Even now, the closest rival I have are the Wheel of Time series & the Dresden Files.... That's beside the point. I mean, I enjoy reading, hiking, playing with my dogs, & listening/making music. But there's only so much of it that I can handle on my own. What can I say? Even though I can be super shy at times (which is a terrible super power, btw...), I still need to be around people, preferably those my own age. Being in CA, though, does not lend to having very many people that I get to see during the day.

I've been working for the City of Rosemead for the past... 6 weeks. My last day will be on Wednesday, actually. In fact, even though the City Manager said that I'd be doing stuff with the public works/transportation, my entire time has been spent working for Parks & Recreation. Specifically, I have been working on developing a curriculum for the city-run pre-schools (which I also need to come with a cool name for, like "Rosemead Academic Tots" or something... RATs) since CA has no defined preschool standards. Good thing I've never taken a child development class in my life! It's been super rewarding and fun, though. I feel like a grown-up in a grown-up job for the first time in my life. I even get to enjoy the lovely 50 mile round trip daily commute getting stuck in SoCal's trademark traffic. Usually I spend those moments singing along with the radio or my plethora of CDs, which means that even when it takes me almost 2 hours to drive 24 miles (like it took me yesterday, when I resorted to taking side roads from Azuza to Claremont because the freeway had me averaging 4mph) it's still plenty amusing. M-Th has been great fun, full of busy times at work & nice relaxing in the evenings, often taking advantage of those things I love doing most. The weekends, though...

I've been lucky enough to make a few friends this time around in Claremont for the summer. In fact, I've been even more fortunate in that this group of people also plays Dungeons & Dragons, which I have developed an affinity for over the past year. I get friends, & I get my fix of D&D. Even so, games have been Wednesday nights, which means I need to do something to keep my spirits up on the dreaded weekends. My solution? Make a music video. Brilliant. I've wanted to make a music video for a long time. This lets me see friends, but also lets me plan things out, & have a side, non-work related project that I can keep busy with. Not really knowing much about how to edit & record things to the level of awesomeness that I want, I enlisted my brother Kyle into the effort, since he works at a place called Muddy Yellow Sneakers doing video things for kids or something, & some other stuff... I spent a loong couple of nights figuring out the words to the parody that we're doing, & then recording the stuff with my buddy Jarek in my brother's music recording lab thingy... We start filming a few random scenes this Saturday, & then doing a huge chunk of filming on Wednesday. I am so excited. What is this song we are doing, you ask? we call it, "DM Got Us Fighting a Mob", inspired by the music & music video of Usher. Don't worry, as soon as we get this thing finished in the next month, I will be posting it to Facebook, blog, etc. & by posting it, I mean... Kyle will probably upload it to Youtube or something & I'll share the link. So get ready for a world of awesomeness!