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sleepless in Seattle

I was in Tacoma, Washington shooting some footage of a machine that senses the length of railroad cars and uses gigantic hydraulic arms to drag them one at a time into a building where they get dumped. I wore a hardhat, a vest and tried not to touch anything within a 10 foot parameter of a longshoreman.



When you see something as big as a freighter, tanker or super tanker your brain just can't wrap around it. My brain goes from big - like a super sized root beer at Burger King to bigger, like a full sized quad cab truck with an 8 ft box to super big like a semi. Huge might be a jumbo jet. Anything past that and my eyes throw back the findings but my brain just comes back with "really freakin big" and doesn't have anything to compare it to. I don't see things 600-800 feet, essentially a sky scraper driving around horizontally very often.



Another bonus about this hop out to the Seattle / Tacoma area was finally meeting Chan or D-fly-girl as I've grown to know her from her blog and posts. Turns out she works for a radio station and gave me a full tour and swag on a moments notice.
All around a good couple days. Thanks Chan! Check out her blog here.




Being back on a plane for the first time in a few months was a little unnerving. I was able to go to Europe, New Zealand / Australia, China, Indonesia and many, many trips to New York, LA and all points in between this year. Sometimes gone for weeks at a time, often hopping around within a country with a lot of time on planes. Enough that if I get a nervous tick when I hop on a plane now.



All I can think about is cramming a 6ft, 255 pound lard butt into a seat and personal space made for a Philippino jockey with dwarfism. Serving a 2-3 hour sentence in confinement wasn't so bad... even therapeutic. I forgot I had encoded season 4 of News Radio for Connie's iPod and left the episodes on my laptop. Man, that has to be one of the greatest sitcoms of all time. The time flew by.

So all around a fun couple days! It's great to be back in the saddle shooting video, astounding to get into the docks area and hang out with trains all day, fun to see the mountains and people you've only met in the blogosphere. It was a great way to make a living this week!

posted by wes @ 10:25 PM