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Now that my vacation is almost at an end, I thought I’d wrap it up a bit with a few lessons that I learned.

1. You don’t have to travel overnight to have a great vacation.  It’s never too late to drive home to sleep in your own bed.
2. Vacation is most definitely a state of mind.
3. No matter how tired you are, you can always find renewed energy in just seeing the world as your children see it.
4. Planning for a vacation is a lot more fun when it feels like there is no plan.
5. Fish are cool.
6. IMAX 3D movies are cool, too.
7. We are neglecting our history and our traditions for the sake of “progress”.  Pardon me, boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo-Choo?  I don’t know, I can’t see it for all the shiny new stuff around the river.
8. Don’t wait 15 years before going back to visit the places where you grew up.
9. Make more time for long “lost” friends.
10. If your vacation is to occur during the summer, time must be allowed for jumping in a pool; preferrably one that is not crowded or even private.
11. Brand new movie theatres with 70mm high definition digital projectors and 40 million watt 78 speaker array Dolby THX surround sound don’t have anything on sitting in the front seat of your car watching a great movie through the FM radio with your wife and kids.
12. There are still people in Hollywood who, even when while they are blazing new technological grounds in digital, computer generated animated filmmaking, take the time to not lose sight of the thing that makes all those breakthroughs possible:  The Story.

There might be more later.  Technically speaking, we are still on vacation…

I’ve been a Twitter user for a couple of months now and I’m going to be honest, at first, I really wasn’t sure what to make of it.  At first, I just connected it to my Facebook account for status updates and that was that.

However, in the past couple of weeks, I began to see what the big deal was.  Ironically enough, it took reading a story about how several of our Congressmen and -women were “twitting” during Obama’s first non-State of the Union speech.   Then I started looking into who all is into the Twitter-thing.  It’s amazing who you can follow on Twitter.  I’m still finding more and more.  Not just people, but all kinds of organizations.

So, if you’re interested:  Twit me.  It’s not as dirty as it sounds.  Seriously.

It’s been a busy time around here.  Since I’m playing catch-up from my last post, I’ll give you the Readers Digest version of the past couple of months.

After being diagnosed with extremely high cholesterol, low testosterone and vitamin B12 levels, the doctor put me on a regimen of medications in the hopes of bringing everything back under control and bring me back from the brink of a heart attack.  I was okay with this decision.  The hardest part of the medications was the fact that Bekah gets to give me a shot every two weeks with a needle the size of the one in Gatlinburg.

So, I took the medications for nearly two months and invoked a radical change of my diet.  First of all, I cut out sugar completely.  This is a huge thing for me.  That means no sweet tea.  I’m a southern man.  Technically speaking, I think this is actually in violation of the Geneva Convention.  Second, I cut out all red meat.  See the first point.  Then, I cut out all enriched white flour and switched totally to 100% whole grain.  Everything.  This part wasn’t that bad.

This diet, along with the testosterone shots has proved to be quite a great thing.  The most important thing is that I went down two pants sizes.  I didn’t lose any actual weight, it just all suddenly turned to muscle.  I have more energy than I think I’ve ever had.  In short, it’s been incredible.

I even brought my cholesterol down nearly 600 points in two months.  My doc was shocked.  She’d never seen such a drastic turn around so quickly.

Here’s the bad news:  Just about the time I started getting all this energy and feeling great, I developed water on my knee.  This is incredibly painful and I don’t recommend it.  After tracking down my medical records from my knee surgery in Texas, I finally got an appointment with an orthopedist and got it looked at.  I was put in a leg immobilizer and on crutches – again, just at the time when I’ve got all this newfound energy.

I had a series of X-rays and MRIs all of which showed absolutely nothing wrong with my knee except the fluid.  In other words, there was no apparent trauma that cause the fluid buildup.  Strange.  So, the doctor drained it.  This is quite possibly the most excruciating thing I’ve ever been through.  Ever.  Then again, I’ve never given birth to a child.

He sent the fluid off to the lab in the hopes of finding out something there, but the labs came back clean.  No infection, no gout, no arthritis (which is good news, but didn’t explain my problem).  After draining it, the swelling went down a bit, but the flexibility had not yet come back and I could not put weight on it.  The next week I went back and he gave me a cortizone shot (again, very painful to have a needle stuck into your knee) and over the past 10 days, I’ve slowly worked myself down from two crutches to one, from one crutch down to my cane, and finally I’ve started leaving the cane at home and am flying solo again.  I go back in today for a “final” checkup on the knee and hopefully to be fitted for a proper knee brace.  I’ve been using the generic “OTC” knee braces forever.  They work okay, but I can never find one large enough to fit around my calf muscles.  They usually wind up cutting off my circulation throughout the day.

Every day since the cortizone shot has been better than the one before it.  I’m still not running any marathons, but at least I’m walking without any help.  I’m still cringing when I go up or down a set of stairs.

Ian’s speech keeps getting better and better.  We are still on the books for an autism screening in May at Vanderbilt.  He is making great strides.  He loves his speech teachers (both at the Bellwood School and at MTSU)!  Morgan made the honor roll and was named a Good Citizen at her school last month.  We couldn’t be happier with either of our kids!  Halloween pictures can be found in the Facebook gallery.  Ian made a pretty convincing Woody from Toy Story.

In other news, my office (which I share with John Mauldin) is being moved to a larger one across campus.  Get this:  I’m actually going to have an office in the theatre building!  This move should be happening in the next week or so.

No, it’s not what you think.

Those of you who know me well know that I’m a gadget freak. Almost to a fault (but, then again, who’s really going to admit to an excess of anything, right?). So, for Christmas, my present was a GPS unit for the truck. I picked out the Garmin c340, because it is a GPS. I know there are fancier models out there, but really, who needs their GPS unit to show pictures and play mp3s on that tiny crappy speaker? The price was right and I went for it.

Skip ahead to this morning. I found out that the 2009 Map Upgrade was available and I was going to pick it up since we are leaving for out trip on Sunday. I figured, why not have the most current map on the thing since we are about to take our first “road trip” in several years? So, I got online to Garmin’s website to see about ordering it. I went through the process and attempted to place the order and I got a response that told me that my order had not been processed. So, I gave up and decided to find if there was a store in town that had it on DVD and I would just install it that way. It turns out BestBuy had it, so I scurried over there and picked it up.

Then I get home to find out that Garmin Internation has charged my debit card for the amount of the upgrade 15 TIMES!! You read it correctly, my friends. Fifteen friggin’ times they charged my card and I only clicked the submit button once. Total charges equalling over $1,000. So, I got back online to find out what the hell was going on. I logged in to my account on their website and clicked on the link to track my current orders expecting to see 15 orders. The account showed no recent purchase activity on my account.

I called the bank first, to tell them of the error and to hold those charges. They told me there was something about the charges and they would have to wait to be posted to my account and then I would have to get the merchant to reimburse me. Oh, hell no.

I called Garmin. The droid that answered the phone was helpful, but was not very nice about it. If you know me well enough to know that I’m a gadget freak, you also know that I’m very patient – especially with customer service types. I paid my dues by being one of those people all the way through grad school. So, all I did was tell the same story you just read to the lady on the phone very plainly so there would be no confusion. I didn’t condescend to her, lose my temper or make any derogetory remarks of any kind. After telling me to treat her like a human being (oh yeah), she informed me that since there was no order number attached to those charges they would simply disappear from my bank account within 24-48 hours. I asked her what assurance I had that would happen. She replied, “It’s just the way our system works.” I told her that wasn’t good enough and she told me to call my bank if I had any more issues. I informed her that I had already been in touch with my bank and that they told me to call them. I further explained that if those funds cleared my account and the money was actually withdrawn that I would begin the process with the bank to have them labelled as fraudulent and her company could take it up with the FTC. She asked me if there was anything else she could do for me and I laughed – I never do that. Through my laugh I said no and she thanked me for calling and told me to have a nice day.

I called the bank back and informed them of the situation. Bottom line: the charges are incorrect and they must not be allowed to be withdrawn from my account. Period. The young man I spoke with, Braulio, was most helpful. He looked into the issue and verified what the droid at Garmin had said: more than likely the charges would disappear overnight and everything would be okay. No funds withdrawn; no potential for an overdrawn account. I explained that more than likely was not good enough. I asked him to make a note on my account that this was a merchant error and that I should not be charged any overdraft fees in the unlikely event of a further problem. He agreed and asked me to hold for a second. (By this point, I had been on the phone for over an hour, most of the time spent listening to hold music. The longest hold times were Garmin’s, not the bank’s.) When he picked up again, he told me to contact Garmin again and ask them to contact the bank with a magic six digit merchant authorization number and tell them to ask the bank to remove the charges. I thanked him and told him I would do that.

Let me be clear. At no time did I ask for, nor did I expect, Garmin to refund the money to my account. I understood that no transaction had actually occurred yet. I was simply asking them to make sure that no transaction took place at all.

So, I had to wait on hold again with Garmin (minimum hold time with them was 28 minutes) and another droid picked up again. I explained my problem again and she put me on hold to talk to her supervisor. When she came back, she informed me that she would have to get some detailed information from me and forward it on their accounting department. We did that.

Finally, everything was taken care of to my satisfaction, but not without a lot of gnashing of teeth in this household. I’m writing this to pass along this message to the world: Garmin makes some of the best navigation systems in the world. I own two of them. However, they haven’t figured out the world of online commerce yet. DO NOT purchase any Garmin equipment via their website. It is crap. You can log in to access free updates to software and “window shop,” but don’t give them a credit card number via their website. Go to a brick-and-mortar place and buy it there.

So, Bekah is prepping for her big scrapbooking weekend with the girls and she was going through our vast collection of family photos to have printed out at Wal-Mart. She completed her order, but there was only one problem. Some of the pictures she sent to be printed were photos that were taken at various photo studios all over the southeast!

When I got to the store to pick them up, they had marked some of the ones that they thought were in need of a copyright release. However, not all of the photos were ones taken by a photographer. They had tagged some of my own shots aside! So, we had to go through the entire batch of pictures and pull out the ones that were “contraband” and I was refunded the money.

When I got to the car, it hit me: Someone thought my snapshots were professional photos! Here’s a sample of some of the shots they thought weren’t mine.

Has this every happened to you?

I know what you are thinking. “Why is he posting on Father’s Day?” Answer: Because, I can!

Anyway, it’s been a pretty good weekend thus far. We had a nice, relaxing day and a pleasant dinner with the in-laws. Then, we finished Season One of The Tudors.

Today has been pretty lazy so far, too. Slept late (at least, as late as the kids would let us – in this case 7:45a), ate breakfast, read some in my book, and sat down at the computer for a little while before heading over to the in-laws again for the “official” festivities of the day.

I haven’t had a chance to talk about it yet, but I had a great time on the shoot last Thursday. The highlight of the day had to be meeting Mr. Abraham Lincoln. Not kidding. He was there on the shoot. Dennis Boggs is a nice a guy as you’d ever want to meet and is very enthusiastic and passionate about his duty as a Lincoln impersonator. He shared some snippets of his various programs as he presents them all over the Southeast. I don’t want to take away from some of the other’s I met on the set. Tony Morton and I had a great conversation about the world of teaching theatre both to high school students and college students. I also got to know Amanda Bailey, host of Inside Music Row. She’s a hoot and a real joy to work with.

I’ll post the video of the spot as soon as I get it in my hands!

…a year makes.

So, it’s been well over a year since I’ve posted anything new to this website. I promise it’s not because of a lack of anything to say. It’s just been that kind of year. Still, I’m again inspired by Sarah who seems to always take the time to post to her blog (which runs on the same software as mine) and always has something witty and clever to say.

Here are some of the highlights:

• we finally bought a place
• we moved again (obviously)
• Ian was diagnosed with speech delay and it’s not covered by our insurance unless he’s recovering from a stroke or something
  • we spent the better part of the past year trying to get him the therapy he needs without breaking the bank (again)
  • We finally succeeded and Ian is making amazing progress in a short time.
• Morgan turned 6. This means that we are only 10 years away from her driving.
• I lost even more hair. (See the previous bullet point.)
• I gained even more weight. (I attribute this to stress and no time to hit the gym. Oh yeah, and eating all the stuff that’s bad for me. I may write a book about this. Think it’ll sell?)
• The podcast has really taken off. We are now being consistently downloaded in 43 countries and at least 1000 times every Monday.
  • On that note, we went back to SETC (where they welcomed us with open arms) and we were invited to attend the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville. No really, as in like real grown-ups. We were invited to the major press weekend!
  • We are also coming up on our 100th episode of the show! I can’t announce it just yet, but we are working on at least one humdinger of a special guest. God, I really hope that works out…
• I’ve had to take a mild hiatus from auditioning for anything. It now costs me more in gas money to get to Nashville than the jobs I’m driving up there for pay. And, that doesn’t account for driving up to an audition that I don’t get.
• We got Morgan and Ian a dog. Jack. He’s a border collie/dalmation mix.

There’s even more crap that I won’t get into because I don’t want this to become a pity party. Suffice it to say that I’ve been a little too tied up to actually sit down behind the keyboard to write something that wasn’t for school or the show.

I’m not going to promise I’ll write more here, but I’ll certainly be posting updates on my work as well as a few belated pictures of the family and kids.

Thanks for still reading the site.

So, my laptop had been limping along for about the past year.  First of all, the battery died.  In order to use my laptop, I had to have it plugged in to an outlet, which of course, made it nothing more than a desktop computer on a diet.  In recent months, one of the drives (the DVD, I hoped) started making funny noises.  Well, not so much funny as downright haunting.  If you accidentally closed the lid to hard or bumped the table where it was resting, the drives would start screaming; sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes, it wouldn’t stop until you forced a shutdown of the system and reboot.   It served me well for the better part of five years.  However, toward the end of last week, it started acting…well…funny. 

The worst part is that I am leaving tomorrow to head to Atlanta for the Southeastern Theatre Conference where I’m going to be leading several workshops for which I have spent the better part of 6 months prepping PowerPoint presentations.  In order to present these, I must have a laptop!!  I could tell it wasn’t going to make it through the weekend.

Those of you who know me as a gadget freak will laugh at this statement, but I was literally making myself sick with images of standing up in front of a group of workshops attendees with a dead laptop and no way to present. 

So, I bit the bullet and got a new laptop.  This is not something I was planning on doing, but I could not get to Atlanta and be left in the lurch.  It didn’t occur to me that a new laptop would come with Windows Vista loaded on it.  This became an adventure that would last the entire weekend.  I have just now finished getting all of my software loaded on the new computer and transferring files.   You’d think that Windows projects would network, easily together, wouldn’t you?  Oh no.  Getting my old XP machine to even recognize my shiny new Vista machine, involved nearly two solid hours of tracking down an obscure software patch that Microsoft is not advertising anywhere.   You gotta love it…

Still, the search, daunting though it was, was okay.  I like “tinkering under the hood” of my computers.  I know just enough to make me dangerous, but I still enjoy it.  That’s why I decided to opt for another Windows machine rather than taking the plunge into MacLand.  I’ve played around on some friends’ Macs lately, and I’m just not impressed enough to make the switch.  I know Windows (even with the curve of learning where everything is in Vista).  

I’m not convinced that Windows Vista is a step in the right direction.  Sure it’s pretty, but it’s just weird.