Weddings in Memphis

The story of this trip I believe is in how things just fall together. I got to a Catholic shelter today, and one of the first survivors I talked today is getting married this weekend, at the shelter, in the chapel. Of course I'll be providing video of the wedding and reception. The community has practically sponsored the whole wedding, flowers, dress, catoring, rings, you name it. I'm just proud to be part of it, and amazed at the timing of how these things come together.

I've also possibilly got a paying wedding later this month, in Mississippi. A friend of a friend I met here in Memphis, a chance meeting, again, the story of the trip. Normal rates will mean I should have gas for the trip home.

12:40 PM 10/6/2005
I'm just sitting here in the parking lot of a strip mall in Memphis. I woke up in the parking lot of a truck stop this morning, just over the state line in Arkansas, across the Mississippi from Memphis. I had slept there the night before the Airshow, so knew it was a decent place to take a nap. Feel just a little bit safer surrounded by big trucks somehow. Better than alone in a dark parking lot maybe? Anyway, I checked with the cashier about showers, and they were $9 if you don't have a pass card. Since I have no idea where I might next need a shower, or what franchise will be there, I didn't bother getting the card, paid for my coffee and muffin, and went back to the van for breakfast. Gathering up my backpack, towel, and shower gear, I head back in, where the new cashier must have felt sorry for me, because she takes the time to ask 2 or 3 truckers she recognized if she could borrow their pass card, in the end I got a free shower. This is Thursday morning, the last shower was Monday morning, so I really appreciated the effort!
Now all cleaned up, I decided it was time for a serious short hair cut, so I thought I'd go find a SuperCuts. So I drive across the Mississippi again, wind my way back to the park I was at yesterday, got the laptop logged into someones wifi signal, and Googled for a SuperCuts. Had 3 to chose from, so punched the address into the GPS / Streets software, and decided the one in Bartlett looked easiest to get to. 6045 Stage Rd # 60, Memphis to be exact. Drive a few miles, find the mall, go get a haircut. Coming out I notice a Wolf Camera shop, so decide to take a chance and see if they know of any camera repair places. As it happens, the store manager does some camera repair, but is out at the moment. Being lunch time I decide I should go eat some of that bread and peanut butter I've been hauling around for a couple of weeks before it goes bad.
Now, I haven't really posted about this I think, but on the drive across the northern states, I wanted to do some time lapse video. I had run a few tapes through the D8 Sony Handycam I'm using for my backup camera, but didn't want to use up all my video tapes before I got any interviews. I had spent a day building a timer device for my D30 Digital SLR Canon, just for this purpose, but it didn't end up working, and I didn't have time to finish it off. Not quite ready to give up, I decided to just hit the release button on my cable release at a semi regular interval. That was working pretty well, so there I go driving down the freeway, taking pictures every 10 to 20 seconds. Not perfect, but I thought if I get a few thousand like that, then string them together as video, it should be pretty impressive. Anyhow, at some point the camera stops working, and I notice the viewfinder is dark, with an error code. It seems the mirror is locked up, so I think now that I took a picture at the moment I hit a big bump, and jammed it up. Anyway, with any luck, the guy at Wolf will know a trick to get it working again. If not, no big deal. I've thought about either just mailing the camera back home, as its taking up space and not working, or plan B, sending it to Canon and having it repaired. Then if I end up in a place for a few days, I could maybe have it shipped to me on the road. Or something like that!
Its a lot cooler today, or at least it feels a lot better, got some overcast, so maybe that's it. I'm also maybe getting a little bit used to it now! Plus having a nearly naked head sure makes it feel better. Just a little bit longer than it would have been in boot camp.

So far lots of ideas but no solid fixes for the D30. Found a great place that likely could fix it, but there was a $120 bench fee to even look at it. At that point, I'll just wait and buy a 20D! But it would be great to have this working for the trip. Phil at Wolf had another idea, so I called a different photo place, and the guy I talked to suggested pulling the batteries for a longer period of time, to give it a better chance of fully discharging and resetting. He also said it might be worth just giving it a good whack, might reset something if its out of phase. Hey, nothing to lose there! Stay tooned! Nope, still a dead camera... Oh well, save up for the new one I guess!

In other news, I finally called my contact at the St. Peter Home. Lauren, who had been one of my interview people, who is a volunteer at the Red Cross, gave me some people she thought would be good to talk to. I got side tracked with my camera repairs and hair cut today, so it was about 3 pm when I called the person from St. Peter, at which point she was busy, so will go out there tomorrow morning. (This is a bit out of order here, the wedding I'll be doing is at St. Peter Home, on Sunday afternoon / evening.)