NYC Marathon 2010

Level 1.
Crossing The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn

I signed up to run the this year's NYC Marathon with Team in Training. So yes I will soon ask for donations to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society for my eligibility to race. My goal is to raise 3,800. 00 for LLC. I truly hope you all can afford to be as generous as you were last year.

I've decided to animate background pans based on the 5 boroughs. For each donation marker reached I will add a new borough (or level for gamers) and the finished result will be crossing the finish line on Central Park West. I hope you all think this is a great idea.

As for my animation, work, and life.... well I'm trying hard to be positive. It's really not always easy. However, my stencil animation will debut on adasport.com within the next week or so. I have a new animation to board and animated. I've also applied to a small grant and studio space with Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. I can't imagine getting it on the first try, but at least I have an artist's statement to apply for more grants. Part of me wants to go back to school. Part of me wants to join the ny police academy. The police academy dream is really a civilian alternative to joining the navy for the purpose of surviving boot-camp. Speaking of the military...

My very tall baby brother Marcus is being deployed to Iraq this week. I'm going down to San Antonio to see him off. I'm both excited and scared. I've never been to SA and will be staying the first night alone. That's the exciting part. The scary part is that I'm worried about him.

grammery park painting

This painting has been rolled up since 2004. I just pulled it -along with everything else- out of storage. I can't afford to store my old paintings, record players, animation bond and suit cases anymore, so I rented a car by the hour, got lost for a few hours and brought the stuff back to my studio apartment.

First I used hook and wire as a pulley system.

Then I used the hollow closet sliding doors to add more ground to the dresser for standing the latter.
This was actually maybe the stupidest thing I've done in this apartment. I should have had a spotter because the doors were very weak and I weigh a lot. I had the saddest crash pad made of sofa cushions and laundry bags. I'm sorry I didn't take a photo of that.

Urban Stencil

Here a few storyboard frames, still frames and a production picture from my animation project. It's about 40 seconds long and will play on adasport.com website in the near future. I will be promoting it like crazy soon. The deal is my animation is apart of a dance contest where animations compete "you got served" style. Each day two animations go at each other. The public votes and the winner stays for the next day and competes against the next contender. Like Star Search. So I will be hounding everyone for their vote.

running dream

I'm at the library eying the table with an electrical power strip on one of the legs. I'm going to move to that spot when the guy there leaves. I'm very paranoid about my smell. I smell something not good. It's like BO and booze? OK it can not be me. I have not had booze since that karaoke night that Sara "sugar mama" paid for. And I just showered.

Last night I had a dream. I ran another marathon only this one was in the UK. I finished the race and felt pretty good about it. I was not in pain like I remembered in the Rome Marathon. In Rome, the last mile was complete agony without being actually injured. My feet, knees, hips, everything was in so much pain. But this time I felt great.

The end of the race took place on an Olympic size track. I didn't see my time after crossing the finish line but I was sure I made a PR. I went back to where the other Americans were set up and rested for awhile. The race had printed results of everyone's time sometime after their finish. That's very efficient now that I think about it. So I grabbed my sheet and took it to the locker room with me. I showered and got dressed in street clothes. Then I remembered that I hadn't looked at my time. It said 4:15:00. Oh shit, that can't be right. My Rome time was 5:25:** there is no way I shaved off more than an hour. So I was looking for an explanation and saw the distance 9KM. So I was trying to calculate the math in my head. That was about 6 miles. Oh great. It made sense to me now. My distance was missing about 6 miles.

So I grabbed my stopwatch and ran back to the track to finish my distance but I got held up by a security guy. I showed him the sheet and tried to explain that I somehow finished a while ago but somehow missed 9km. He tried to tell me that the 9km was probably the time difference between my Rome time and this time. That made no sense because it was a distance not a time. So when he realized what had happened he said it was too late to go back out there. Officially I had already finished and the clock would soon stop at 7 hours. Just be happy with my time. I still tried to plead with him that I came all this way to run a marathon and I am so close. That's when I woke up.

Ok I'm moving to the table with an outlet to work on my animation now.