It took a long time to cut together, mostly because I kept watching and watching the footage of the sharks and forgetting to put them in my timeline. After the break, you'll see my flying shark pic and then the video, which is almost 3.5 minutes long and pretty much full of sharks. It's all footage from my GoPro Hero3HD Black, with a few frames from the time lapse that I shot on the *other* GoPro (the Hero3HD White).
May 10th is almost over here in Joburg, but I didn't want it to pass unremarked.
It's been 13 years since my dad passed away, and not a day goes by that I don't think of him and miss him. He was one of the good ones.
As you know, I'm on tour with Bon Jovi. Over the last few days, I've been tinkering with this Google Maps thing where I overlay our tour dates on top of a map of the world. It's actually turning out kind of cool, so I figured I'd post it here. Maybe it'll help me visualize the scope of this tour. Wish I'd done this for last tour, when we did more dates over a longer period of time.
I know the title is nerdy, but it's an homage to the song titles from Bootie, which I feel like I'll never be able to attend again. If you click on any given pin, there may or may not be some info in the bubble. I can post images, notes, whatever, and had I done this before tour started, I'd probably be posting a bit on each show. At this point, it'll definitely be sporadic, but it's cool to know I can do it, anyway.
Click past the break for the mashup map itself, as well as some more details and musing.
I should be asleep, given that it's 130am, but I'm somehow awake. I already put laundry in, showered and made the bed, so now I'm sitting on it, waiting for the laundry to go in the dryer and then I'll try to sleep. We'll see how that goes. Anyway, I wrote this update on the plane and was going to post it tomorrow, but here I am, so here it is. No pics or anything - sorry about that. Next time, I'll give it visual aids.
But not how you'd think.
This time, I put my stuff through, and (it turns out) someone grabbed my bag thinking it was theirs. I waited and waited for my bag (which had been flagged as a possible explosive device), but when they picked it up, that wasn't my bag - just one that looked similar from the bottom. I had a mild panic attack that didn't really last, because it's only stuff. Good stuff that I like, but still, just stuff. Long story short, someone hurrying to a flight grabbed the first black backpack he saw and ran to his flight. Ironically, I even let the guy go ahead of me because he was in a hurry.
In the end, they figured it out based on some documentation in his bag and one of the security guys set off at a sprint to catch him before the aircraft door closed. He managed that, and brought me my bag, no worse off for its additional journey through Terminal 5 at Heathrow. Now I'm sitting in swank-ass comfort in the lounge because I have Int'l Business Class tickets, which came as a pleasant surprise at checkin at LAX.
An hour remains before boarding for a country I've never visited. Exciting!
What do you think of that? I've been in central Canada for a few days now, and I can tell you that it's cold here. Calgary and Edmonton were somehow warmer (despite Edmonton being further north) than Winnipeg, which is surprisingly still covered in snow for the most part. I mean, the city is clear, but there's old plow-piles everywhere and the trans-canada highway has snowy fields the whole way. Crazy. Or not.
Flew over the Rockies from Vancouver to Calgary with a cloudless sky, which was awesome. Photos don't really do it justice, but I still should have taken more. Ah well.
I've also been home for 5 days and in Vegas for 4 since last I updated. Maybe in NYC, too. I forget when my last update was. I'm still sleeping terribly and not exercising enough, I still have bad allergies after I wake up every day, and I'm still being uncreative. Not a good combo. Let's tackle some of those things during this leg, yeah?
So we're in Canada, and the show is in full swing. Montreal loved us, which is always nice, and we're setting up in Toronto for show #1 of 2 in a row. I love these days where we have a full day off and then two shows in a row in a single venue - it's like getting spoiled. Much better than the 2-in-a-row gigs that have us doing short across-the-border runs that have the very real chance of getting fucked up.
The only bad thing about days off is that I spend a lot of money. I'm trying to be better about it, and somewhat succeeding, but unlike last tour, this time I'm much more social and inclined to go out at the beginning. There's more to do, at least. I also can't claim success at working out more - I've done a little, but not enough to call "working out."
