Mark Hayward Is My Hero

Jay Gilligan and his buddy Erik Aberg are going to pass through town on their very brief Shoebox Tour on May 26th.  Lenore has been helping me hook up a space for them to perform at Herron School of Art, and the show is going to be incredible.  Now I just have to do some promotion and get people there since school is out, and we won’t be able to count on the students coming.  I’m letting the juggling and yo-yoing communities know about it, and I just made up some leaflets to pass out at the dog park.  We’ll see how it goes, but I sure hope a lot of people come.  Every show is better with a big crowd.

Although it is still in the beginning stages, the time has come to reveal my new big secret project.

RenewNews.com

It’s a site on renewable energy. The intention is for it to be a community where people can find all of the information that they need about solar, wind power, biodiesel, firewood etc. At some point we are going to run out of oil, and every night the national news has a story on the high price of gas and/or our dependency on oil from around the world. I think the time has finally come when more people than just the hippies and the big-thinkers are interested in renewable energy. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve been working for the last week getting RenewNews.com installed and working the way I want it to. I have so much more respect for computer people now. It’s really hard to get a lot of this stuff working! I have resources like Harper and Dylan who have more knowledge than I do, and I have access to the inner working of several websites that Harper and I work on together, and it was still hard for me to get this together. I’m working on a graphic for the top, and a few other things, but the site is up and running now. The community aspect will expand as time goes by, but for the moment we will have a few contributors writing articles that people can comment on if they want.

At the last minute Lenore and packed up the car, put the dog in the back seat, and headed up to Chicago on Thursday. It had been her plan all along to be there, but there were a whole series of problems with the show this year. The main one being that it appeared to be cancelled on the Monday before it was going to start. Shortly after that it was maybe back on, but they didn’t know where it was going to be. Since they didn’t have a location,

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I apparently got WRECKED throwing boomerangs this weekend.  I threw a toy at the dog park today and discovered that my arm still hurts from throwing the ‘rangs on Saturday.  Sheesh.

I better rest up, cuz I’m itchin’  to go a ‘rangin’ again!

Fortunately for me, one of the Indianapolis yo-yo guys is also a comic book artist. I ordered some custom Duncan Freehand Zero yo-yos (just the sidecaps really) and Rob did the art for me. On one side he drew me as a super-hero, and on the other side as a super-villain. I’m excited about them, and they are supposed to ship on May 1st, so it’s getting close.

I figured that since I’m doing the super-hero thing on the yo-yos, and since I got this domain name this year, I might as well just keep things rolling and have my 2006 trading cards be super-hero themed as well. This will be my fourth trading card, and you can see the others here. My wife Lenore was taking some pictures of me doing a super-hero pose, so that Rob had something to work from, when my dog Vader came and sat next to me. Lenore got some great pix of the two of us, so now, if the drawing goes well, the image on the card will be of me with Vader, each wearing our own cape. I’m pretty excited about it.

My new secret project with Harper seems to be taking shape!  If all goes well, this project will actually help a lot of people, and have a much larger scope than howtoyoyo.com.

Today was a good day for sure. It started with going to the dog park with Vader and Lenore. We met some of our favorite dog park friends there, and had a nice time. Especially Vader, who spent most of the time thinking about how much he wanted to eat the four very cute baby squirrels up in one of the trees.
Then came the big stuff: the yo-yo meet. Yo-yo players from all over the state converged on the Glendale Mall for Food Court delights and yo-yoing. We stayed there until getting kicked out, and then adjourned to Broad Ripple Park. There are not a whole lot of things more fun than spending the afternoon swapping yo-yo and top tricks, throwing boomerangs, hanging out, and eating birthday cake. Yo-yos and tops are always fun of course, but I had an especially good time today throwing boomerangs. I made a new friend today, who not only let me throw his tri-blade and his “Tailess Cat-a-rang” (a boomerang in the shape of a cat that had an unfortunate accident) but he also let me keep them. YAY!!! More boomerangs! I had actually been wanting a right-handed tri-blade and a boomerang in the shape of something anyway, so this was perfect. I am going to have to get out and do some more boomeranging very soon.
In return for fun, I did have to get a little sunburned, but it was worth it.

Tomorrow I get to go to another of the famed Indianapolis Yo-yo Meets! I really don’t know why they call them “meets”, since for the most part we don’t have any contests or anything, but it doesn’t matter. The important part is that I get to hang out with a whole bunch of yo-yo people.

There’s a really strong yo-yo community here, and a lot of the players are really skilled too. Most places are lucky to have more than three or four players who can get together; at the last Indy yo-yo meet I think there were 15 of us.

In other news, I’m working on a new secret Big Idea. If I can get Harper interested we might be able to change the world for the better.

I drove up to Naperville and back yesterday. Although certainly less driving than I had to do last year when we lived in Minneapolis, it was more than I really wanted to do yesterday.

I listen to a lot of audiobooks when I drive. It keeps me awake, keeps me from being bored, and maybe even makes me a better person… maybe. Right now I’m listening to Moby Dick. It’s very amusing to hear about the trials of whale hunting when you are stuck in traffic in a state-of-the-art hybrid car. The contrast is really great. Although I was wishing I had a harpoon when the cd got stuck in the player when I got home.

I just got back from Juggle Those in New York City and it was awesome. Those NY jugglers know how to have a good time. As it turned out, most of my favorite jugglers in the world were there. It was such a good time.

On Sunday a bunch of us went to the Barnum & Bailey, Ringling Brothers Circus. I found the narrative rather hard to sit through, but all of the acts were spectacular. I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but the motorcycle act was truly unbelievable.

There’s nothing like going and watching the circus when you’ve shown up with your own posse of jugglers and clowns. :)