A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup

Listen Up!
BIG News, I've landed a gig for 4 days performing at the Iselin Fair! More details later! :: I uploaded a new batch of photos to DeviantART, finally. They're pretty good shots this time around, and I've got another batch ready, so look for that in another week or two. Link :: The Tech.MCC club sumer meetings are starting to seem like a mediocre idea. Less and less people that are not officers have shown up over the past few weeks, and when I announce a new meeting place and time for members who can't make the Panera Bread Thursdays, noone shows up. That was fun indeed. I think I'll still keep having the Panera Bread Thursdays, if only so that the officers can get together face to face and hammer out the details about the fall semester. :: So now the only huge projects I still have to work on are JoJ Season 3, and my website overhaul. At least for the moment that's everything. We'll see how long THAT lasts...

Daily Life:
Well, let me explain the title of this post. Over the past week, I have gotten less than 20 hours of sleep total for the 6 day period. Why? Because the Acme Railings (the machine shop I work for), began installing two massive jobs that took up all of last week and part of this coming week. The first was a medical center where we were ready to install the glass panes into the railing frames. Sounds simple, right? Thing is, it was a 200 foot+ length or railing and required moving at least 30 panes of glass. To make things nicer, the panes were 1/4 inch thick, 4 foot by 3 foot panes which weighed 50 lbs a piece. To top it all off, the nearest parking space we could work with was halfway across the center, and we don't have a proper glass cart.

I know, that still doesn't explain why I suddenly went through a huge lack of sleep, I'm getting there. Basically, this job took 3 days to do, and I have to be there at 7:30 AM. Not a big deal for most people, but for me it's hell because my regular schedule is sleeping from 3AM to noon, and it's that way partly because I'm never able to fall asleep before 2:00 AM, even when I try. So basically, I get to sleep at 3:00 every night (or 2:00 and I finally lose consciousness at 3:00), and wake up at 7 to get there on time. Then I would proceed to heave half of the panes around for 9 hours or so, and leave at around 3 or 4.

That went from Monday to Wednesday with the big panes of glass at the medical center, and then what happens? Exactly the same thing at a veterinary center nearby for the next 3-4 days. Luckily this time though, there wasn't a hell of a lot of heavy lifting, seeing as how we were installing the main railings, and that's it. However, the schedule remains the same. So bottom line is that I'm down on sleep, I'm on edge a bit, and I find myself napping during the day when I get back from work. Granted, I love napping, but I know that it only screws with my sleeping habits even more, it doesn't help anything.

Juggle This:
So I've just landed a charity gig with the Iselin Fair here in NJ. Hooray for craigslist!
Basically, I'll be one of their shows that will perform on stage for every day of the fair, which lasts for 4 days. The timing was perfect too, seeing as how I was in the middle of coming up with some outlines toi double check my new routine and making new promo material including a flier and posters, not to mention my promo video and a new website for potential customers. The fair is on the 14th to the 18th, so I've got plenty of time to get everything set up and ready, and we'll see how that goes. I'd really love to, if I could, to have Joe Jaeger join me on stage for maybe one or two shows and we could just do an improvised show. That'd be great. Oh, and here's the website link BTW, WEBSITE!

Also, I have to mention, I hit another 7 ball milestone today, one that I'm not sure how many other people have done. I've qualified 7 balls again, only this time standing straight up underneath an 8 ft roof. I got that on camera, so it's going into the next [Juggling] series video. I was strangely surprised at how easy it was, it actually felt easier than the other 2 times I qualified 7 balls. Strange...

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And now, to lengthen this post even more, here's my recent response to a blog post by Mike Karas:
Karas: "Rings are an unpopular juggling prop because they have the highest chaotic potential. Basically, they wobble too easily and that makes them harder to logically catch than any other prop. This makes them unpopular." (obviously, I'm paraphrasing because I don't want to copy his 2 page post on the subject. You can read that here)

I'm not so sure about that. I'm definitely not disagreeing with your whole "chaotic potential" / wobble effect theory, but I have a different idea as to why "rings suck". They are a boring prop to audiences and to the unimaginative.

Take a club, any throw whether it be a helicopter, reverse, single, flat, or double are not that much different in how hard they are. They're all difficult throws to make, and there's no huge difference between them (it's not easier to do a 4 club cascade than 3 club helicopters, to illustrate my point. Don't take that literally)

Now switch to the ring. A standard vertical throw with a ring is very easy once you figure out controlling the forward/backward aim. However, any other throw with a ring is LUDICROUSLY hard. Pancakes, flats, intentional wobbles, they're all twice the difficulty of the standard throw. I can run a 6 ring fountain, but I can still not even qualify 3 ring flats, or 4 ring cakes.

That makes them boring, because most jugglers are turned away by how hard anything other than a standard throw is with a ring. And unlike balls which you can make any kind of body throws or strange manner of catches and throws with (including siteswaps), rings aren't exactly the best prop for making "strange" throws with. So most jugglers will only juggle rings with the standard throws, at least that's what I get when I see people juggling rings almost anywhere. Not being able to do any sort of "strange" throws and only one type of throw, leaves a lot of jugglers kind of bored and confused as to what to do with them besides go for numbers, pirouettes, and basic patterns. And that's MY theory, who knows if it's true or not.

A Day In The Life Of A Peanut Butter Cup ~ Reeses2150