man, it seems like in the last few days i’ve done everything there is to do! but whenever i wanted to write a post i just wasn’t in the mood.

anyway, so on saturday i went to an amateur boxing fight night organized by the baltimore boxing club — one of the guys with the club gave me a free ticket at the last roller derby bout and asked if i could show up and take some photos that they might use for a calendar or a poster or something to promote the club and make some money. that was fine by me, especially since i was interested in taking photos of the boxing fights sometime but i didn’t know what sort of access i might have, and if they’re going to give me a free ticket, close access and pay for my photos then why wouldn’t i show up? it was kind of funny when i first arrived, they gave me a regular wristband pass since i had a regular ticket, but the guy who was helping me out worked things out so i’d have a VIP wristband pass so i could get in the VIP area right next to the ring. at first i had both wristbands on, but after a bit i took off the first one and kept it in my pocket and wore only the VIP wristband. the next morning i took a close look at the original wristband i was given and it says it’s for the crazy horse saloon, “world famous brothel”, bahahaha… that’s a souvenir!

the boxing was kind of weird. not really “weird” as in “creepy”, but when the first fight has kids that had to be about 8 or 9 years old fighting it out (“and in the red corner… weighing in at 60 lbs…”), how can that not be weird? before the fights started when i was scoping out a place to shoot from, i was standing up next to the ring and a guy who looked like a seedy old politician (in a suit and everything) came up and told me that i shouldn’t stand there since i was blocking the ring. i told him that i wasn’t going to be standing there once the fights started, and he shuffled off. it looked like he had his wife and 20-something-year-old son there with him, and none of them looked like they were having any fun during the evening. why bother paying $75 each for VIP seats if you’re not going to have fun?

the spot i was pretty much relegated to at the corner of the ring ended up not being a bad spot at all — not only did a get some great shots from there (and the ropes began to angle upwards at the corner, giving me a little extra room between the bottom rope and the mat to take photos), but the hustler club sponsors the event and several of their girls are the ones who enter the ring in between bouts of the fights to hold up the signs to show what bout it was, so i had a nice view of them and straight up one girl’s skirt whenever she’d step in the ring as well.

i was there from about 7 pm to midnight, and not only did i get some good photos of the fights, but i also got some free pizza out of that deal. i haven’t done much editing of them yet — i’ve imported them into iphoto and into a folder on my computer and did a quick look-through, but i need to buy the latest version of aperture before i can do some serious editing with them. i need to get a canon 40D though, since i had to shoot at 1600 ISO and i know the output is just garbage with my current camera, and the 40D can go up to 3200 ISO with much better noise correction.

sunday cynicalscribe and i went to see the cherry blossoms in dc, since it was peak bloom season. we took some photos, but since mine are on film and i haven’t yet taken them to be developed, and her photos are on her digital camera and not yet online, you’ll have to wait a bit to see the pictures. the tidal basin was a zoo, but that’s to be expected during peak bloom anyway. so many of the visitors were being lame and climbing in the trees and taking flowers and stuff like that, and we wanted to knock some sense into some heads since that’s not what you’re supposed to do with the cherry trees. i said that next year we should make sandwich-boards and wear them around the tidal basin to tell people not to abuse the trees. 😛 afterwards we headed to bowie and met up with bruno_boy and went out to duclaw for dinner with musical accompaniment.

i had the day off of work on monday, so i went into baltimore to go see the orioles’ opening day game against the tampa bay devil rays. met up with producer_chris downtown, and our first plan was to try to snag us some free radio station giveaway tickets, but when we saw the crowds we figured that was pretty futile, so we settled for having some beers in the crowd at pickles pub and then went over to the stadium to get our seats. well, “seats”, since we ended up buying the $10 standing room only tickets and hung out at the flag court, but it wasn’t bad. it started to drizzle a bit and chris had snagged a poncho tossed to the crowd at pickles pub, but by the time he had unfolded it the rain had stopped. the orioles ended up losing the game, though. maybe that’s a good thing since the last few years we’ve won the home opener and have had pretty crappy seasons, so who knows how we might do this year.

afterwards, we went to a pub by the stadium for another beer and chris got some dinner, and we talked about photography and recording setups and tech for a while before i caught the light rail back to the car and headed back to the apartment.

yesterday i found out that one of the supervisors for my team is transitioning to a different team, and the analyst for my team is going to be acting supervisor, and us coordinators will get a chance to be analyst for a few months at a time to expand our skills. i’d like to be an analyst, but i’d like the pay increase that would come with that position if it was an official promotion and not just for a few months. we get our raises as of friday’s paycheck (i figured mine out to be 4%, and it seems the rate of inflation is 4.28%, great.), but that’s only a cost of living increase.

went to class yesterday night and thought i found a super-secret ninja parking lot with plenty of spaces, but turned out i parked in the faculty/staff lot and that the student lot was the next lot over. no permit is necessary for the student lot after 4 PM, but the faculty/staff lot needs a permit for that lot until 4 PM, and a valid faculty/staff permit after 4 PM. i returned from class to find an envelope on my car, but it’s only a “friendly ticket” marked as a warning. i don’t know if i need to check off the boxes on it like it says you should do if it’s an actual ticket or what, though.

last night i signed up for netflix. i was pooh-poohing netflix before because i figured that redbox was good enough for me (especially when their free rental mondays where they’d send me a code on mondays for a one-night free movie rental), but redbox can’t beat netflix’s selection. see, the reason why i signed up was because after hearing so much about the show “the wire” i decided to watch it myself. but apparently you can’t just jump in anywhere, you have to start at the very beginning, and i didn’t want to buy the whole first season just to see what it was like and if i should watch more. so, checked itunes, but they don’t have HBO shows for sale. then i looked in newsgroups, but couldn’t find anything there to download either. even checked bittorrent, and though i found a torrent of season 1, it was downloading at a maximum of 20 k per second and would take about 66 days to download the whole season (about 4 gigabytes). so i signed up for netflix, and my first movies are being delivered tomorrow (not “the wire”, unfortunately… there’s a short wait on the first dvd of the first season. :P). no, i’m getting “ghost world” and a blu-ray disc of “kiss kiss bang bang” and the first disc of the first season of “deadwood” because i loves me some deadwood.

on a side note, netflix is addicting. damn you netflix for making me want to keep rating movies to see what else you’ll recommend to me! i think i’ll like it, though. i like movies, but i don’t really like going to the movie theater — there’s crowds, people won’t shut up during the film, tickets and food cost too much and they show commercials before the movie. super lame! but here i’ve got my hi-def tv set, surround sound, and dvd / blu-ray players, so all i need is a bag of movie-theater butter-flavored popcorn and i’m set; i don’t really have the ability to check out a neat theater every day for a whole year like kevin murphy did in this NPR bit, so i have to settle for what i can get (which, in this case, is 3 movies at a time through netflix).

the grand raggidy derby girls said ok to licensing my photo for a bout poster, hooray! discounted it down a lot since it’s going to be more of a source image for an illustration, but it’s enough to cover my flickr account renewal or a batch of business cards.

today was same ol’ same ol’ at work, more details about the supervisor transition but nothing unexpected.

after work i went to hang out with cynicalscribe — she broke her wrist at roller derby practice and has to go into surgery tomorrow. 🙁 🙁

my throat has been hurting and my nose has felt stuffed up, i hope it’s just allergies. my legs have been hurting too, but they’re just sore; it might be a case of restless leg syndrome, though. my feet sometimes cramp up under certain circumstances too, i wonder if they’re related at all?