Lily got to enjoy the afternoon snack on the front porch with me. Peanut butter & jelly on saltine cracker! Yum!

See how good she is to wait till we tell her okay! I love the way she looks away but keeps her eyes on it intently.

So, we seem to have made it past the summit of the hot part of the season and have begun the descent into Fall. I think I heard we set a record with something like 21 straight days of 90 or above highs.

Anyway, the high today was 88 and a storm blew by just as it got up there. So, I grabbed my book and am sitting on the front porch watching clouds go by and enjoying the afternoon breeze.

Love working for self from home! Time for some water and snack!

This will begin a new series for what I hope will be consistent on Mondays each week. My post, Random Letter - Thanks to a Good Samaritan inspired me to see what other Craig Kendall’s in the world are up to. So I googled (actually I was trying cuil, a new search engine player) “Craig Kendall” and found there are a bunch of us listed. I’m not quite sure if this song is by Craig Kendall and he’s the guy in the video singing, or if the song is about a girl (what!) named Craig Kendall who lives in Australia. Either way, here’s today’s Monday Match…

So yesterday I checked the mail at our office PO Box and found I had received this letter. I wasn’t sure who I knew at Maritech Resources, Inc. in The Woodlands TX. I rifled through all the people I knew in TX as I drove home and no one whom I remembered the location of was in The Woodlands. So, I began to wonder if someone at Maritech had seen something on our business web site that prompted them to contact us by mail. Funny all the thoughts that race through your mind as you process something like this. I was even more baffled when I opened the letter to find the contents pictured above. It took me a few seconds to process what must have happened. Someone appears to have purchased a book titled Cat & Mouse (I found one by that title on Amazon by James Patterson) on June 12th and discovered the photo and the two airline boarding pass stubs. Being the Good Samaritan that he or she was (I’m going to say “she” from now on as the writing looks to be that of a lady), and assuming the photo was ours and was a cherished memory she must have obviously sought out a Craig Kendall on the Internet and found our series of sites that are out there. The only one with a physical address listed is the PO Box for the business so she kindly packaged up the leftovers from her used book purchase and mailed them to us at that address. How sweet. Thanks to you Good Samaritan for trying to return to us what appear to be keepsakes.

Now, some interesting observations from the encounter. I’m not sure who the picture is. I’ve not read Cat & Mouse. The boarding passes might have been mine as I have been to Houston by way of Phoenix and have connected through Minneapolis before. The dates threw me as I have only been to Phoenix three times that I remember and it was odd that none of the boarding passes showed a departure from Nashville, Dallas, or Denver which is where I would have most likely originated going into Houston. Then it hit me as my mind flashed back to my college encounter with a second “Craig Kendall” that lived in the same small college town I had been in while attending college. I realized I could look up the OnePass frequent flyer account to see if it was mine which it was not. So, from my side at least, the mystery is solved. Sorry Good Samaritan, but the stuff you kindly sent was not mine. I’ve posted them here and maybe some Craig Kendall searching his name on the Internet will happen across this and I can return the favor by mailing him the photo when he contacts me. I love the Internet! Here’s the possibilities I found on a whitepages.com search in the Houston TX area:

Well, sorta anyways. Maybe only the backs of our heads or something. On Craigslist the other day I saw a post for movie extras for a feature film being shot in the Denver area so I replied… and check this out! We got invited to come today. YAY! Have no idea what we are getting into. Hope it’s not some shady film production. We shall see! Heck, we get a free meal out of it and a final copy of the DVD.

Oh, and on a side note, referring back to my post about An Exciting Day for Kendall Media Group while we’re still waiting for expertvillage to get our videos online, I had to get some samples up for another similar service we are working to get set up with so here’s a link to some of the video we shot with Sam Brede of Carver’s Ski Snowboard Sports in Breckenridge CO on Feb 22. You can’t see them, but Julie’s on one camera and Amy Bierman, a.k.a. The Super Amy, who was visiting with us at the time we did the shoot, is crawling around on the floor holding the boom mic pole. Oh, look… I found a picture! Love ya Amy!

So, yesterday Julie and I were out shooting some test footage for a video service we are attempting to get set up to work freelance for when puffs of smoke appeared over our shoulders toward the highway. After finishing up some of the video I grabbed the camera, jumped the fence and climbed the sound barrier mound between our neighborhood and the highway to see a grass fire. Particularly interesting was how fast the fire crew got there and the fact that grass fires were a major problem down south of Denver yesterday. In fact, it seems a few people were killed in other grass fires in CO yesterday. Here’s some of the raw footage I shot while observing the effort to squash the flames.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdSrcDaeHFA[/youtube]

Why is it that every time I finish and submit my taxes, even though I’ve truly done my best to track and record accurately everything the IRS requests, I always feel a little sense of fear and concern over the potential for “the audit”. Funny, I’ve never been audited (Although my trusty TurboTax risk meter put me in the top of the yellow area for risk this year due to the fact that our business expenses were more than our income with all the startup costs, that we moved and had moving expenses, and that we sold our house) but that still doesn’t change the feeling it incurs. I hate that feeling… I hate whatever it is that makes me have that feeling. I guess, like you, I just hate taxes in general! Oh well, 364 days till the next time.

Oh, some good news: We’re getting a refund of taxes we paid in 2007!
And, some bad news: We had to pay CO state income tax on severance paid by my former TN employer for the months we lived in CO while getting the severance. UGH!

How about you? Did you come out on the refund side or the “please, take the rest of my blood, sweat, and tears” side this year?

Ever feel like your day went by and you got little or nothing done? Just for kicks I’m going to list what I have gotten done to see…

1. Tweaks to my wife’s newest endeavor craftygirlz.com (header text refined, added social bookmarking links, added Google analytics)
2. Set up several social book marks to craftygirlz.com myself… Facebook, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks
3. Initial set up on a podcast page for Denver and the Mile High Orchestra
4. YouTube page initial set up for Denver and the Mile High Orchestra (thanks to my friend Nancy Hawthorne who works with Kathie Hill Music for a promo idea I may pitch to Denver & crew).
5. Watched a tutorial about video specifications for a video service called TurnHere.com who we hope to be shooting some video for soon.
6. Checked to see if our first ExpertVillage assignment has been posted yet… ugh… it hasn’t!

Hmm… that’s it so far. Not good. Almost all non-billable. Not good at all for a guy trying to make his own way. Got a lot done, but not much of personal financial influence. Guess I better look into some billable stuff.

So this week I sort of “launched” our new HD stock video footage sales site econoclips.com . Hence, my radar is kind of up for anything related to stock video footage. This one came across my DIGG radar (P.S. I’m NOT into the political stuff so don’t comment or consider this an invitation to go into a political debate here):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXmYVRIpu2w[/youtube]

Sorry, this was just too funny and creative to pass up.