SACRAMENTO, Calif., USA - The list of things to do before going to Mexico in December never seems to get shorter, no matter how many items we check off.
Check off 'get car insurance' and you have to add, 'stash insurance docs into suitcase'.
Arrrrgggghhhh.
But some progress has been made.
The new Panasonic video camera is proving to be all that it was advertised as. A new, khaki-colored photographer's vest arrived (so I can look official). It will now be part of my general Mexico attire when filming this winter and spring. The video from the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear is finally downloaded and packaged into a short video. (The brief YouTube entry is below.) And the Tenacatita Bay Bugle website has been redesigned to make it more user friendly (and visually appealing) for this season.
Now if I can just get those 50 student projects graded in the next four or five days...
SACRAMENTO, Calif., USA - The next few weeks are going to all-travel, all-the-time, with a few interludes of teaching at the university for the Admiral and I, of course.
First up, is the wedding Sunday of Cherie Sogsti and Greg Retkowski, a three-day affair that begins Friday night with a hillbilly themed party and ends Sunday with most of the men wearing tuxedos at the wedding and reception. (Do you know the words to the song, The Beverly Hillbillies? Come and listen to a story bout a man named Jed...)
Because all this is taking place at a campground on the Kern River, northeast of Bakersfield, it makes the whole thing just that much more interesting. Yee-haw!
Taken outside the double-wide (photo from WheresCherie)
Cherie has a website, WheresCherie? that gets more web traffic that I can dream of for any of my blogs. She is one travelin' woman, and has been since we first met her years ago in Mexico, aboard a sailboat son Dustin was captain of at the time - Mistress (a San Diego-based boat).
And she marrying the perfect guy, because Greg loves travel, too, and even has a plane now to zoom them around the country, when not in their very upscale RV-motor home-land yacht.
The photo here is from their engagement party. The theme? Trailer trash. Hoo-boy!
At the end of the month, we are going to take a sojourn to Washington D.C., to check out the Rally To Restore Sanity, sponsored by Jon Stewart and the Comedy Channel. Of course, we will also be checking out Stephen Colbert's simultaneous event, March to Keep Fear Alive.
And we are going to D.C. as journalists to get a story, take some pictures and shoot some video with a new, very snazzy, Panasonic video camera.
The whole enterprise, including the writing assignments, are the first paying gig in our latest foray into the business of publishing and video.
The name of the new company is *subject2change Media' - something our children (and many friends) have said is a good description of our lifestyle. To paraphrase the Three Stooges, I resemble that remark.
No website up yet, but it's in the planning stages and should be up soon.
Or perhaps, that's subject to change, too.
Here's two brief test videos, taken with the new Panasonic:
Michael J. Fitzgerald has been a journalist for five decades, working as a writer and editor for newspapers, magazines and web publications. In 2014 he published his first novel, "The Fracking War," followed in 2015 with "Fracking Justice." In 2018, he published "The Devil's Pipeline." He has written a weekly column, "Write On" for the daily 'Finger Lakes Times' newspaper in Geneva, NY for 14 years, He contributes stories to the Contra Costa Pulse newspaper in Richmond, CA. He also writes essays on Substack under the title Write On and On.
