I’m not exactly sure when my fascination started, but I love clocks. I have them all over my house. And the last picture is my collection of watches. Do you have an odd obsession with time, or timepieces? Comment below!
That time I was sucker punched in the face
Have you ever been walking down the hall of your college dorm, and someone you barely saw out of the corner of your eye sucker punches you?
All this fighting between the alt-left antifa and the alt-right white supremacists got me to thinking about the scuffles I’ve been in over the years. All one of them. Not including the wrestling between my brother and I where I clearly won every time (don’t verify this with him, please!), I was in one real fight in a dorm hallway on the campus of Florida State University. But I wasn’t in college just yet. I was on school grounds for a week-long baseball camp along with my brother and my cousin. We were probably, I don’t know, between 10 and 13 years old at the time. The three of us were bunked up together in one of the dorms and this is where the altercation happened.
There were a bunch of macho dudes in the hallway of this particular dorm (in other words, other kids that were attending the camp that week), and somehow a fight broke out. Maybe one kid said their girlfriend was prettier than Kelly Kapowski and got raging mad when someone said she looked more like Screech, who knows, right? 
My cousin jumped in to help defend one of the guys and hey, he’s not going to go in alone, so I joined to help my cousin because, ya know, family.
Soon after I got involved, I felt a strong blow to my facial area and found out later this punk kid who was standing off to the side decided to punch me even though he wasn’t even part of what was going on. What a punk!
The next moments are a blur but I remember there was someone on the ground, and I was kicking him. But when word came that one of the coaches was on his way to the brawl, my brother and cousin grabbed me as everyone scrambled back to their rooms.
No one got in trouble as far as I know, and no one really spoke of it the rest of the week. I guess when you get a bunch of knucklehead teenagers together playing sports, and all that blossoming testosterone, something like that is bound to happen? I’m just glad no one found out because getting in trouble there is one thing, but then having to explain to your parents why you were kicked out of baseball camp is a whole different ball game.
PS. I also caught pink eye and peed in a dorm room trash can. What a week! Did I even play baseball that week, I don’t remember.
-Out of the Wilderness
My very own epic fails, part 2
Sometimes I can really crack myself up. Especially when it comes to making dumb mistakes, like these:
Walking on, walking on broken glass.
I was working at a summer camp as a videographer. A task I had one day was bringing an expensive projector (in a large protective case) to another location, and using a pick-up truck to do so. No problem. Should be easy enough. We put the projector in the bed of the truck, shifted into gear, and began moving forward. THUMP! Well, it’s smart to actually close the tailgate, especially when you’re going up hill. The projector slid out the back of the truck, landing on the pavement. Even though I thought the case was good enough to protect it’s contents, I was wrong. The fragile lens of the projector shattered on impact.
Like a small boat on the ocean, sending big waves into motion.
There was a boat. There was an ocean. And the problem was when a Sony video camera I had fell off one and landed in the other. Who knew setting the camera on the back of the boat was a bad idea? Not me!
’cause your lips are movin’.
I had wrapped up a beautiful day of recording a wedding, a reception, and the special moments that lead up to the once-in-a-lifetime event. The couple were friends of mine so I was happy and honored to be hired as the videographer. For obvious reasons, this day was special, but even more so because some family members had flown in from overseas to witness the wedding ceremony. They hadn’t seen the groom in years and may not see him again after the wedding for very long time. Part of my wedding routine was to hook up a microphone to my camera and have guests offer up messages to the bride and groom; little tidbits, thoughts, nuggets of wisdom the couple would watch later and appreciate from their loved ones and friends. Now, because there were these special guests from another country, I knew recording their messages was a must. At the end of the day, I was very happy with my work. But then… my world came crashing down!
You know how some pieces of equipment have a start/stop button? The microphone I used had one of these, and I even had headphones I was using. But for whatever reason I didn’t use the headphones for the interviews with the overseas family, and of course when I went to listen to their messages that night… NO AUDIO!! I forgot to switch the microphone on before they started talking.
I can be a real piece of work sometimes!
-Out of the Wilderness
A walk through time, visiting an old cemetery
I don’t know if it’s just a way to honor people that have lived on this earth, or that I like the feeling of being mortal because it makes each day have a level of importance… that there will be an end to this life, that walking around old headstones creates a sense of urgency, a sense of nostalgia, a mystery of someone’s life that I know nothing about and yet what someone does matters to some people, even if it’s only just a handful, but then they’re buried and gone.
I can’t quite put a finger on why I like walking around cemeteries like this one. But I do. This one is situated southeast of Nashville, near a suburb called Mt. Juliet. Most dates began in the mid-1900s and ended later that same century, but a few were dated even farther back, and those are typically my favorites. Check out the one that says “Bone Head.” What a nickname. And then there’s one person who shares my birthday, December 26. That’s really awesome. And the N’s are backwards, but it’s charming.
Some barely missed making it to their next birthday. Some were not even 3 years old. But at least at this particular cemetery, there are lots of same last names. Even in death, family matters. Love matters. The dates are important, too, but I wonder how their lives were improved and made amazing by the family they had, the family they loved.
-Out of the Wilderness
Surviving Hurricane Andrew: 25 yrs ago today
It was one of the scariest nights of my life. The house was shaking. Water pouring in. Trees blowing sideways like they were Lincoln Logs. Huddled under a mattress not knowing how this would end. But as frightening as it was in the wee hours of Monday morning, just a day earlier couldn’t have been more different.
Put on your tie, it’s time for church.
We were new to Miami, having moved there from Stafford, Virginia only a couple weeks prior to this particular Sunday. So what does a church-going family do when they arrive to a new town? They try out churches, of course. We dressed up in our Sunday best, only this time we arrived to a church with no people. We soon found out the church was “closed” because of the approaching hurricane. Closed on a Sunday!? What is this, Chic-Fil-A? What’s going on here? Weird, I thought. But no church? Hot diggity dog!
I know, it’s terrible that I was excited about that.
Sunday afternoon went pretty normal. A few hundred feet from our house on the Coast Guard base in Miami, Florida, my brother and I and our new friend John played tennis. A mild breeze, partly cloudy. A beautiful August Sunday. All the schools were about to begin the new year, including where my brother and I were brand new students, a private institution called Westminster Christian School.
The weather people got it wrong.
The weather people down here must be crazy. I mean, it’s a beautiful day and they keep talking about a huge storm coming. Have they looked outside? There can’t be a hurricane coming, I thought. How bad can it be, I thought. Little did I know they were not wrong, they were not crazy. They were very right about the dangerous weather that was about to hit south Florida.
Evening came and still all was calm. At home that night was myself, my brother, my mother, and our dog Belle, the wonder dog. My two sisters were about 8 hours north in Tallahassee because one was starting her freshman year of college and the other was on a mini vacation. My dad, a captain in the United States Coast Guard, was called in to head up a search and rescue team, preparing for action once the storm hit, and for the aftermath. They were based in an underground shelter at the Cape Canaveral shuttle center. Check out some of his storm recollection here.
Predictions had the storm making landfall in the middle of the night, so we went to bed not really knowing what to expect at our house.
Boom.
The storm hit somewhere around 2 or 3am and it was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. My brother, mother, and I gathered with Belle and were shocked at what we were witnessing. It was pitch black outside, but what we could see were trees flying by our sliding glass doors. Sideways rain and wind blowing so fast. Our screened-in porch, well, we didn’t see that because it was gone. OK, at this point I’m starting to believe the little weather thing they’ve been talking about might be serious. We had the radio on, listening to Bryan Norcross.
Based on his expert advice for surviving a hurricane like this, we all climbed into the bathtub and tried to hold a mattress over us. Then we moved to the hallway and laid down side by side, three-wide. I was laying with my left side pressed up against the wall, and I kid you not, the entire wall was rumbling, moving side to side, the power of the storm shaking the entire house. We had the mattress above us, also trying desperately to keep hold of Belle, by her collar. She was obviously spooked by the weather, and kept pulling away from us. Eventually we let her go and she found safety under a chest cabinet in one of the bedrooms.
Then we felt wind blowing. Never good when you’re inside a house. And remember, it’s the middle of the night so it’s really hard to see anything. Was the roof coming off? Was the house about to be blown away? I had no idea.
Thankfully things calmed down, the radio advising to stay alert, though, because this was just the eye of the storm. In other words, we were only halfway through.
We were ready to hunker down again after a quick assessment of the damage. There was a hole in the roof, a hole in the kitchen wall. Water on the kitchen floor. The porch blown away. Backyard fence missing in action. Then the good news… we weren’t in the eye of the storm, the storm was over! As it turns out the Coast Guard base was just outside the path of the eye, so there was so much damage to homes and buildings basically next door to the base. I became very thankful for government housing, our home being built well enough to withstand this historic hurricane.
The next day we began cleanup around the base and also began wondering about how we would get food and water. Well, remember how my dad was preparing for the worst? The Coast Guardsmen showed up with water buffalo trucks so we could all have clean water to drink. Truckloads of Gatorade. Canned food like tuna and spaghetti o’s.
They were heroes to all of us.
Hi there, don’t worry about unpacking, your stuff is about to be blown around town. -Andrew
All in all, it was an unique and peculiar way to be welcomed to Miami. And on top of that, school was supposed to start that week! It didn’t. Public school started a couple weeks later, and at Westminster, it took a full 6 weeks to get things back in order. So I guess, as a middle schooler, that can be seen as a silver lining?
-Out of the Wilderness
Out of the Wilderness 