First of all– Well done, Mr. Schuman, on the above photo. I can tell you right now, though, that there are some mommy bloggers (no disrespect intended) out there, who don’t approve of the way he is wearing that hat, all crooked-like. Hahaha. I bet Nigo and Pharrell don’t have to put up with that kind of crap. Not that I’m pretending to have fashion designer status, but I’m just sayin’.

Actually, thinking about it now, I’m guessing that most mommy bloggers probably aren’t into Bape or Ice Cream/BBC. So, this whole blurb is just a waste of characters. Aaaaanyway, I am generally not too fond of re-posting stuff (especially not from the Sartorialist, since he is probably the most re-posted dude in blogsville). But, aside from being the poster child for my hat rant, I really do dig that shot.

Random topic #2– Sometimes I swear that Jim Nelson and I share the same brain. I just barely was able to catch up on my magazine reading enough to crack the September issue of GQ, yesterday on the train. As I was reading Nelson’s opening commentary, I was thinking to myself “tttttttttttooooooooooooooooottttttttalllly.” For a minute, I was like “I should be a magazine editor. I think exactly like this guy.” Then I realized that the reason Jim Nelson is a magazine editor, is because he can write something that makes everyone who reads it feel like they would be Jim Nelson’s best friend in real life, and that they and Jim Nelson are extremely like-minded individuals. Hahahah. That is a skill that I definitely do not possess.

So, yes, September is here. Ads galore in all of the mags. At some point I’ll be posting some of my favs along with commentary. But interestingly enough, I have been a lot more taken in by the articles in this year’s September GQ than I have by the flashy fall looks. In addition to Nelson’s article mentioned above, I read another piece yesterday that I found interesting. It was about keeping the flame alive after marriage, kids, etc.. It wasn’t the typical Cosmo-style, “10 ways to keep your spouse at constant climax” sort of thing. It was about figuring out the logistics of “date night,” when you and your spouse both have insanely busy lives. I thought it was pretty cool.  The article is by Joel Lovell and it is called “How to date your wife.”

Reagan will probably punch me in the neck for admitting that a magazine article is what convinced me that I need to focus a bit more on spending structured “date” time with her. I might be safe, though, since I waited until this far into the post to admit it. She told me this morning that she doesn’t really read the stuff I write when it gets too wordy. Hahahaha. Anyway the article isn’t online yet. But, I found it interesting enough to recommend checking it out (if you haven’t already) when it does show up .

To wrap things up– I’m pretty excited about some of the stuff that I will be shooting for the rest of the week. One item in particular, is a famous tattoo artist who operates in NJ. I have never even been in a tattoo parlor before. So I’m keenly interested to see what it will be like. Tomorrow night college football starts (go Utes). And finally, as we all know, this weekend has three days. What’s not to be excited about?

The rain finally went away, today. It left us with some awesome high fluffy clouds. If you hate shots of fluffy clouds, feel free to skip this post.

^–Looking east. Below, looking west.

I have sort of taken the week off from blogging. Here it is Thursday and the last time that I posted something was when I was complaining about the weather on Monday. Part of my silence is a little bit because some recent sentiments have caused me to become slightly disenchanted with blogging altogether. Another part of it is because I have become more than a slightly disenchanted blah blah blah. Here is a list of positivities:

1. This was hump-week for my marathon training program. That’s right, only 10 weeks left after Saturday. My speed is not where I would like it to be. But, hey, I have 10 weeks to work on that
2. It is late August, which means that practically the entire firm is on vacation. This makes my schedule extremely flexible. I have been able to catch up on my real work, and even make some headway on my fake work.
3. I am lined up to shoot some pretty cool/fun stuff for the rest of the week.

When my alarm went off this morning, it was pouring outside. So, I didn’t get up and run. I only have 5 miles scheduled for today, so hopefully I will be able to sneak them in this evening. It looks like I’m going to have to have to get wet at some point this week, though. I just checked the forecast and apparently it is going to be raining until Thursday.

Yesterday evening shaped up nicely. We did a couple of videos for Reagan, then shot some stills (also for R’s hair blog) on the roof with umbrellas. Just when I had resigned to being a homebody for the day, I received a text from some of our friends to hang out at their place. We had a blast hanging out with them and eating some delicious food together. They live about a mile and a half up Broadway from us. Since we had the dog with us, we had to make the journey on foot. MTA doesn’t allow dogs, unless they are in a carrier. Plus, we learned the hard way that the little guy gets car-sick pretty easily.  So, all three of us had a really fun night-walk through the park in the rain, on the way home.

This has been a pretty strange weekend, for me. Not strange in a bad way, just different. I think that the rain today might have something to do with it. We had a huge day full of activities planned today, but as it stands, I have only made it outside today for three quick tasks. 1. Moving the car (when I shot the photo above); 2. taking our friends’ dog (below) for a walk (we are dogsitting, while they are out of town; and, 3. to do a quick and wet 4m. run. Other than that, I have been helping Reagan shoot another tutorial for her hair blog. Right now the battery is charging, so that we can do one more.

I suppose that I can take comfort in the fact that we had such a productive day yesterday. We had our long run in the morning, for which we incorporated the Summer Streets event. Summer Streets is when the City shuts down Park Ave to auto traffic, so that peds and bikes and ride all the way from 72nd St. to the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a really cool run. Apparently the training is paying off, too, because Reagan and I both felt fine afterward.

We headed up to see  Piper after grabbing some lunch. It was a cool visit, because one of our friends came with us, who was meeting Piper for the first time. We talked about Piper  and how proud we were of her accomplishments, for about 4 hours straight, hahaha. It was one of those overzealous proud-parent moment, that ended up being a lot longer than a moment. We didn’t get any photos of her, this weekend. Actually, Reagan snapped some really cute ones on Friday that she will probably share. But I didn’t get any.

I hope that everyone else had a great weekend.

Someone is barbecuing in our alley. It smells delicious.

I thought I would start this post with a photo of my desk. It’s a complete mess right now. I have been sitting here for a while, building some videos for Reagan’s hair blog. While doing so, I have realized a few things. First, Reagan has a serious aptitude for doing hair. She talks herself down to me all the time. She says stuff like “I don’t know. I’m just not really sure she liked it. And I feel bad because I talked her into the bangs.” After spending some hours watching her in action on video, it is pretty apparent to me that she is better at doing hair, than I will probably ever be at doing anything. I’m one of those people who can do a lot of stuff pretty well (besides shoot and edit video, apparently), but is not the best, or even REALLY good at doing anything (except for superfluous punctuation and parentheticals). Hehehe. Anyway, I’m really proud of how hard Reagan works, and I’m glad that one of us has the ability to really excel at something meaningful.

Now, let’s move onto the old–

I was browsing Facebook (I still haven’t summoned up the gumption to quit that site) and saw a pretty awesome photo of my brother. Here is a shot of Sam wearing a grill that he bought on eBay, while working at eBay. Ladies: he is single.

Hahahahahahaha. When I saw the shot above, it reminded me of a photo that was probably taken the same night as the mustache photo from the previous post.

Wifebeater: Shopko (possibly Fred Meyer)

Fedora: Vintage (Grunts and Postures [probably])

Why do all thrift stores have that same smell?

Front Teeth: Sharpie broad tip

Two left-handed boxing gloves: Tijuana street vendor

Duct Tape: Anderson Lumber

Nirvana Poster: Grey Whale

Ceiling Lamp made from Table Lamp: Custom Fabricator

Wallpaper: Transworld Snowboarding

This photo is for reference, only. I had to dig it out of the archives to help with the visual. I was probably 18 in that photo, taken by my brother Sam in our parents’ basement. It was one of those nights where we were making fun of SJ cowboys and documenting it.

Flash forward to yesterday. I had about a week and a half of facial hair going, mostly out of sheer laziness. It was time to get rid of it, so I shaved it into a handlebar mustache just like in the photo above, before hopping in the shower after my run. The only purpose was to make Reagan laugh, which she did (nervously). I had intentions of shaving completely before work this morning. I was able to carry out that plan, but not before taking a run down the west side path.

I woke up totally forgetting about the trucker ‘stache and hit the trails. Along the way, I came across a couple of friends who started laughing when they saw me. I was confused for a sec, until they complimented my handlebars. Hahahah.

About 10 minutes later, I caught up to this dude running in moccasins with duct tape on the bottom, who had stopped to be a good Samaritan and remove a dead rat from the path. To myself, I was like “oh man, I have to talk to this guy.” So I struck up a conversation with him, and we ended up running about 6 miles together. I learned that he is almost 50 and lives in my neighborhood, that his name is Barry and he grew up inspired by Prefontaine, but had only started running again recently after adopting the minimalist approach to footwear.

Barry is awesome, I wish that I could have kept going with him. When it came time for me to turn around and head back up town, I thanked him for the chat and said that I hoped to run into him again. Almost immediately afterward, I remembered about my mustache. Hahahahah. He probably just thought that I too, was inspired by Prefontaine.

I was able to kick off the week shooting the second phase of this really cool installation at the roof garden of the Met, for Curatedmag. It was really cool to A. be in the Met when it is not open, and B. have that exclusive view from 40 above the deck of the roof garden. More, over here.

Now, we turn to overcomma-fication. A while back (over a year ago), I decided that I was going to start using less commas. Yes, I feel like legal writing has pretty much tainted my writing style forever. I know that I destroy all of my sentences with the way that I punctuate the crap out of them. But the funny part is that I was apparently anonymously called out on it, yesterday. Reagan had this bright idea of putting an anonymous submission form on her blob. She had it posted for like 20 seconds, and one of the first questions she received included this: “can you please teach jake how to use commas? his blog would be so good, but he is comma happy.”

Hahahahah. Sorry, anon. If it is any consolation, I haven’t been able to stop saying “awesome” either (which was another item of things to correct, in the list that I linked to above). Here is an (redacted) example of the insanely long run-on sentences that I have to deal with on a daily basis:

MEZZANINE C CASH MANAGEMENT AGREEMENT (this “Agreement”), dated as of June XXXXXXXX, among XXXXXXX, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company (“Borrower”), having an address at XXXXX Street, XXXXX, Maui, Hawaii XXXXX; XXXXXXX BANK, N.A., a national banking association, having an address at XXXXXXX Road, Suite XXXX, XXXXXXX, California [zip] (“Agent”); and XXXXXXXXXX INC., a Delaware corporation, having an address at XXXXXXXXXXX, New York, New York [zip] (“Lender”).

You get the idea. After seeing that many commas in every sentence that I read at work, I must subconsciously feel like I’m not using enough of them, or something. I have pretty much been ruined. I think that part of it is the way that I haphazardly string my sentences together. It’s not that I don’t know what normal punctuation looks like, either. I read massive amounts of newspapers and magazines. What’s worse, is that when I’m proofreading a post, I will go through removing commas and it still ends up with way too many. I’m am so obsessed about it, that at one point I actually dug up some of my old articles from college, to see if I had the same issue back then. I didn’t. It really is something that has only started to plague me since law school.

So, anon, there, you, have, it. I don’t blame you if you can’t get past the commas, the “hahaha”s and the “awesome”s. But, at least you know I’m working on it, right? Hehe

After pulling out several hands full of hair (my own, hehe), and consulting with some of the most knowledgeable programmers I know (maximum thanks going out to Andre and Jansen), I was finally able to get the php garbage all resolved and running correctly. As a double bonus, I was able to eliminate all of the malicious scripts from the MySQL db’s. To top it off, I woke up today feeling quite a bit better. I’m going to hold off with running until Wed., just to play it safe. Things are looking up. Speaking of looking up, check out the image above, of the latest work by Os Gemeos (my favorite Brazilian street art duo), going up in Chelsea. I shot it Monday afternoon. It looks like they will probably be finished with it in another day or two.

Below is a sneak peak of some other stuff that I have shot recently. I was able to spend some time in the diamond district documenting some of the work that goes on there. I really enjoyed shooting it, especially since I have jewelers in my blood line. Props to my great granddad MJ. I’m sure that he could have given a lesson or two. If you enlarge the shot, you can see that the dude has tiny diamonds stuck to his hand with Vasoline. That is how they manipulate the diamonds without dropping them on the floor, when they are positioning them, setting them, etc..

Anyway, much love to everyone who has helped me out with this massive debacle, the last several days.

I normally just try to refrain from writing anything, if it is just going to be complaining. But, today, I couldn’t help myself.  In fact the title of this post is quite dramatic. But, I am feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment. Piper is fine. I’m still employed. Reagan is fine. But… I am sick again. To be entirely honest, I don’t feel like I every fully recovered from when I was sick two weeks ago. But at least before, I could still run, because I could still breathe. I haven’t been able to run since last Wednesday.  I missed the New York Road Runner team championships on Saturday. Today, I still can’t really breathe right. Which means, no Piper visit and no running. It is driving me insane.

To add insult to injury, the hosting plan that I mentioned in my last post, didn’t exactly workout. So, I am trying out a new hosting plan, with my blog as the guinea pig. The tech support guys are really nice, but it is an operation that is pretty new, and from what I gather, it is a pretty small shop. As a result, my request to modify the PHP build running on the server, has still not been addressed. Because of that, I have no GD or FreeType libraries, which half of my plugins require (if you have perused it in the past couple of days, you may have noticed that it has just been displaying the header and a php generated error message). That is why shortcode is appearing where all of the images should be, when a page loads up. The only reason that anything besides error messages is displaying, is because I finally broke down and disabled all of my image handler plugins. It’s like driving a car with no brakes.

As if that weren’t enough, all of the MySQL databases on our old server (i.e. the one where Reagan’s blob, and all of our other sites, including some paying clients are currently hosted), have been infected with a malicious script that is redirecting all of those urls, to spam sites. Awesome. The tech support guys are working on it. But, as of Sunday morning, things still aren’t resolved. To top things off, my (home) office looks like a tornado hit. At least I can control that one. So, as soon as this post is published, things are going to start looking up. Wish me luck on resolving the rest of the crap on the list. I hope that everyone else had a less stressful weekend.

Despite being ill, I went for a run Wednesday night, against my better judgment. I definitely paid for it. I felt like death, when I got home, then woke up the next day even more congested. Today I’m feeling a bit better, but I’m going to play it safe and wait until Saturday to pick up again with the training. Cross your fingers for me, that I will wake up tomorrow sans congestion.

Even though this was a relatively uneventful week, I’m really looking forward to the weekend. The biggest reason is because I haven’t been able to see Piper since weekend before last. I’m really excited to go spend some time with the little cutie, this weekend (I hope she still remembers me, hehe).

We have a couple of other fun items lined up for the weekend. Friday night, our friends Shakedown are playing at Pete’s Candy Store in Bk. Hopefully we will make it out to see that one. I actually used to play bass with them until Yoko, AKA Reagan came along and they had to throw me out, Hahahaha. Just joking about the Reagan/Yoko thing– mostly.

Saturday night, there is a b-boy battle at the Altman. I’m picturing various scenes from Style Wars, and hoping that Saturday night ends up being as cool as the movie.

Photo:  an e.5charlie koozy that I scored at Cargo, last week. They have some sick new stuff coming out in for the fall season. You can get it through their site.