I slept a lot today.  I was so tired from yesterday.  Then I headed back down to Dartmouth.

My call time was 8 PM, I got there early and set up.  We had 1/2 to get it all ready.  They had a salsa band playing the last set, everyone was dancing.  And when they announced it was over and we were setting up the video, she got booed!

And then it was 9 PM.  I always get nervous when it’s time to start.  Is everything working, are the settings right?  Do I have the right button to push?  A lot of adrenaline, I really didn’t want to screw up.

The first video was of live-action Jules Fiffer cartoons, partially funded by the Hopkins Center.  It was pretty cool, I always liked the Fiffer cartoons.  These were of his dancer character, so you heard the words of the cartoon while the dancer was dancing.

The second video was a collection of Pixar shorts.  Their first one was from 1984 and done on a Cray and Vacs 100s.  It was 4:3, the rest were variations of 16:9, I think a couple were 1.78:1 the film aspect ratio.  They had one from each year at first, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1989, then they got more and more recent.  Finally they showed the one about the girl and the two one-man-bands vying for her golden coin.  We saw that one on the theater with Gramma Kay when we went to St Johnsbury to see ‘Brave’.  And they played Mater and the Ghostlight, which was on the Cars2 DVD.

Syndey Stowe was there and she was so impressed with how good it looked.  She was right, though.  The video sources were full HD, the scalar wasn’t processing it (too much) and it was sending full HD to the projector.  The recent short, like the one-man band, was so incredible.  Almost as good as film.

Load out was quick.  We started by 10:30 and were done by 11:30, but we had to wait another 30 minutes for Jeremy’s truck to convey the switcher and stuff back to Spaulding.

I took a new way home.  In all these years of driving, I got really tired of the route.  I used to just drive down Rt 89, but last year I wanted to find a different way.  I would go down 14 to Barre, then east on 302 to 25 down the Bradford, and then down 91 to Hanover.  But now that we are in Cabot, I was going across Groton Forest on 232 to 302, then east to 91 and down.  But I’ve come to really dislike that stretch of 302.  It’s so wide and flat and everyone drives so slow.  So now I add about 10 minutes to the drive, but it’s more fun: 232 to 302, but west on 302 to 25.  Last night I was coming home and wondering why I liked this more, and I realized that the roads were twisty and turney and much more fun to drive, you actually have to pay attention to the road, so it’s less boring.  On a boring road at 1 AM, you fall asleep, but on these roads I saw two cats, a deer and two skunks!  I didn’t hit any of them, thankfully…