Home for Thanksgiving

After I had a few days to unpack from the trip, and get our footage processed at the office, I was headed home for Thanksgiving.  I arranged to carpool with H to save gas, since we our schedules aligned.  We left late Tuesday night, and arrived well after midnight.  She provided the car, so I provided the driving, and she slept most of the way.  My parents still had my old car, so I had a vehicle to use for the next four days.

 

Even though my parents were living apart, the plan was to celebrate the holidays together.  My mom wanted us to all go to the fairgrounds for Thanksgiving, to attend the large community meal that I used to work at as a Boy Scout.  So my dad reluctantly agreed to forego the usually feast at our house.  On the day of, my mom canceled for some reason, so it ended up being the rest of the family meeting there, none of whom had any interest in being there.  Unfortunately the event had declined in the years since I had worked at it, and was even worse than I remembered.  So no one was real happy, and it was a pretty rough day all around.

 

The next day I connected up with Rockstar, to hear his perspective on the events surrounding his wedding.  We had a six hour talk about all sorts of things, but it was a really good one.  I found it very interesting to compare the stories.  They agreed on all of the actual facts of the matter, and the events that took place.  But they still told totally different stories, and had very different views and analysis.  I felt a whole lot better after hearing the other side of the story, concluding that conflicts like that don’t just strike at random, they occur as a result of the decisions made by the people involved.  And therefore I didn’t necessarily have to go around concerned that something like that might happen to me, at some point in the future, without any prior warning.

 

The drive home with H was a bit tense at times, and I don’t pretend to understand girls, or what causes that.  That next week, D came up to check out my Bible study.  I had been offering up the fairly anonymous prayer request there that two of my friends were having some major relationship issues to deal with.  So when the topic came up, I was giving a quick update when I realized that it wasn’t anonymous in front of D, who was going to have been the maid of honor at the wedding.  It was one of those strange awkward moments where you stop mid sentence and re-evaluate things before continuing.  But it ended up being perfectly fine, and she even added a few details when we paired off to pray together.

 

When I got back to the office, I discovered that we had gotten a contract with the Marines to do a major shoot for two weeks in December.  It would involve four separate crews filming six amphibious assaults with twenty four cameras on two ships and four bases on the East Coast.  I would be on one of the land based crews, but oversee the footage and data for all of the crews in the operation.  I came up with a new creative way to organize the footage from that many cameras, and setup a new logging system.  I had done all of my onset work for the SEAL movie on my own volition, without any extra pay over my normal office salary.  But this was different, and I knew the time and stress involved, and now had the experience to justify a full position on the crew, including the usual pay.  But inquiries about how my company wanted to handle that were put off until my return.