Well, I was enormously dissatisfied with my newly minted DVD this morning. Turns out it took a day and a half to encode, and only 14 minutes to burn to DVD. Imagine that. Anyway, there are a lot of digital artifacts on the footage. My wife and Maralise didn't think it was a very big deal, but it bothered me a lot because like I said to them, I wouldn't even put my own home movies on there. So, I'm trying an alternate way to burn them, and it's encoding now. Except it looks like it should be done in about 6 hours, instead of the day and a half deal.

This evening, while we were enjoying Thursday night television and everything NBC had to offer, Alex let out a BURP that actually startled me and made my wife jump. It was the loudest burp I've ever heard, and I've heard some people let go some stellar ones. My wife and I couldn't stop laughing about it. The greatest thing was that Alex actually looked around quite a bit trying to found out what made that noise. Silly boy!

I'll have some pictures up soon once this DVD thing blows over, I swear. It's been too long since I've posted some pics!

I'm probably saying this partially because my wife is going to read this in about a minute, but I'm trying to flirt with her more again, showering her with barroom compliments akin to discarded pick-up lines like, "So, tell me... How do you get so beautiful?" It's cheesey as hell, but it makes her happy, and that makes me happy. I think that now that my weddings are starting to get done, I'm really feeling the weight starting to lift off me. It feels really nice to suddenly have free time again.

Last night I dreamt a weird dream. We were shooting a movie, and somehow Cody was involved, and somewhat I was either acting in it or directing it too. You know dreams, you're constantly being displaced in other bodies at your liking. So anyway, the scene was basically tear through a barricaded doorway, drag a woman down the stairs and plunge an axe into her or something.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Cody was involved.

So anyway, the dream is weird because I'm like thinking about how funny it would be if the killer would look through the barricaded stuff and get poked in the eye or something, stupid stuff like that. The actress had frizzy hair, and could or could not have been Mary Elizabeth Mastriatonio, the girl who was Miriam in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves with Kevin Costner. And the guy killer, for some odd reason, was the older brother of TV's Blossom. You know, the teenage girl on NBC in the early nineties. The older brother was the one who wasn't Joey Lawrence (Whoa!) and had Very Special Episodes of his drinking problem. So, he was in my movie, and there was some discussion at some point that no, he wasn't the guy from Blossom, he was a guy with a wife and two kids... and then I woke up.

This is why I have to write movies, or else these dreams will drive me batty.

I'm taking a break from my editing frenzy because I got stuck in a technical rut. Hobbes, my external hard drive that I use for editing got full because of a previous wedding, and since Calvin, my computer's hard drive, is nary bigger than 13 Gigs, I had to dump out old footage before finishing the LAST WEDDING I WILL DO IN MY LIFE PROFESSIONALLY. I tried transferring the done wedding to tape, but I soon discovered that my camera is seriously messed up. I put a new tape in and there's various blocking issues. So now I'm encoding the movie into a DVD and it's ongoing into the 2nd day now. Anyway, enough jargon.

These past few days have been kinda hectic for me, because the last wedding mom requested a copy of the wedding, and four days ago it wasn't even started. But now, it's a little past the ceremony and I'm fresh out of space. We even had Maralise come over last night to watch Alex so I could get some editing done, but no dice. Technical difficulties galore.

But the prospect that the wedding thing will no longer be over my head is very very enticing, and I dream about all these exciting things that I can do with my free time again. Burn DVDs, write scripts, watch movies, and of course, play with my son. Burn DVDs of my old movie projects and dozens of old home videos, and write out the two ideas that I have in my head. One's a comedy about... us. College grads stuck in a lousy rut. And the other's more of a thriller. A revenge flick without a lot of blood or gore. And movies - I have not seen a lot of movies in so long, it's ridiculous. I dubbed Bowling for Columbine and have yet to watch it. And my son - it will be so nice to just gush over him and take crazy video of him without feeling guilty for not editing. It's strange, but I don't even mind the idea of editing other things - just not weddings. Editing while worrying about what people want and expect is hard.

Been thinking a lot of a lot of things, like fatherhood, role models, and what not. Wondering what kind of teenager he would be - a respectful young man with tons of creativity, or some skateboarding punk who chain-smokes and swears like... me when I was a teenager. Admittedly, I do think that my parenting will be different than a lot of parents out there, because I don't necessarily subscribe to the "parent as friend" motto. A lot of kids out there wouldn't survive under my rule because of the way they disrespect their parents. It's not so much an authority thing, or a "do it my way, the right way, and the only way to do it because I said so," thing. It really is more about knowing your place in the world, that elders deserve more respect, that everyone should be treated with manners.

Well, enough of that. You're not my baby so I shouldn't be preaching to you. But anyway, being so close to finishing weddings is tremendously exciting. It's like my second graduation.

Hmm. I have a lot going through my mind but I shall refrain from just letting it pour out of my head unfiltered. There needs to be some sort of organization in my blog.

My wife took a bunch of pictures of him in clothes that he's outgrown for memory's sake tonight, some of which are really adorable. The baby shower one that my mom got him, with the baseball butt? He's already outgrown it. He's just outgrowing everything and learning to speak a little. Tonight he's dressed in blue stripes, kinda like a cold zebra.

Okay, I'm done.