Mark Hayward Is My Hero

Lenore, Vader and I are in Wisconsin visiting family, and this morning when I woke up the digital thermometer read -0 dgrees.  When Lenore got up it had warmed up all the way to 0 degrees.  I’ll take any improvement I can get.

Yup, I’m in the news again.  Thankfully, once again it’s for juggling, and the photo is not a mug shot.

Article in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review about the Not Quite Pittsburgh Juggling Festival this weekend.  I’ll be in the gym hanging out and juggling, as well as closing the show on Saturday night.  Maybe I’ll see you there.  (QuakerValley Middle School in Sewickley.  Show starts at 6:30 pm Saturday.)

If you live in the USA make sure you vote today.  A lot of great Americans fought and died so that we had the right to vote, and this election is the most important one in most of our lifetimes.

If you’re not sure who to vote for, I’d recommend Barack Obama.

Long thought to be extinct, and to live only in its natural habitat of Southern Australia and the island of Tasmania, a fine specimen of Tasmanian Tiger (aka Thylacine) was spotted and photographed in Pittsburgh!  Amazingly it was also in my front yard… during our pumpkin carving party… and it’s wearing a collar… and looks suspiciously like someone just panited our dog.

Real Tasmanian Tigers are incredibly cool animals.  For more info check out the Thylacine Museum.

I just redid my pumpkin carving page.  If you’re carving a pumpkin and would like some tips, I bet I have a couple that will help you out.  The best jack o lantern ever: isn’t that what we all want?  This year I think I’m going to do another one with its face on fire, as well as one with a laser vortex coming out of it’s mouth.

Fire-face, from 2006

The cover is drawn by John Higby, and the photo on the back was taken by me.  Incidentally, the yo-yo in the photo on the back was also painted by John Higby.  I’m pretty excited about the whole thing. One of the best parts about the card is that on the inside of the arm on the sunglasses I’m wearing in the photo it says, “Cash Money” in gold ink.

If you want a card, go here: http://markhayward.net/html/docs/tradingcards.html unless of course we already have an arrangment… you know who you are.

I spent this last weekend in Chico California at the National Yo-yo Contest, and it was a lot of fun.

The official Duncan Crew photo for Nationals 2008.  No one else was around but Mark McBride and me.

The trip out was more than a little brutal. First of all, any voyage with three different flights is going to be  difficult. If you do take a trip with that many flights, I recommend that you don’t eat a bad sandwich in Las Vegas and then throw it back up on your next flight like I did.  Not fun at all.  It is very hard to puke on a plane and not get any on yourself. I still had another flight to go too.  Once that horrific ordeal was over, the rest of the weekend went really well.

Whenever I go to a yo-yo contest or a juggling convention I usually have a goal in mind.  For this contest I wasn’t really sure what my goal was until I looked at what I had packed. The most normal thing for people to bring to contests is a fairly big case full of yo-yos, and for some people, a few tops as well.  I was trying to travel light to avoid the airline baggage fees, and I realized that I had packed a mere 4 yo-yos but I was bringing 8 tops.  During the course of the weekend, two of the yo-yos never even made it out of my bag.  I guess I’ve got tops on the brain.

I spent most of my time hanging out with my top-spinning friends. It was awesome.  Alan Gray, Eric Wolff, Jon Gates, Jorge, Hans, Catherine and I had our own little posse of spin.  We shared some tricks, and had a good battletop contest.

Alan, Eric, Me, Hans reflected in the spinning Silver Surfer top (a highly polished Quicksilver).

One thing I always forget about Nationals is how short it is.  I got out to Chico on Thursday night, watched the Vice Presidential debate, and then hung out with the few others who were there.  Friday it rained, so the prelims were moved to Saturday. The result for me was that the contest felt even shorter than normal. Since almost everyone goes home Sunday morning, the contest really felt like one day this year.  It’s a lot of effort and money to get there for just one day.

There were some delays on my flights home, and I had to literally sprint through the Denver airport (at altitude, ug) after they called my name on the intercom. It took over 30 minutes to recover and stop coughing, but I made my flight.  In the San Francisco airport there was an awesome exhibit about the space race and its effect on popular culture from the 30s through the 60s.  They had toy robots and space guns and flying saucers and lunch boxes and all kinds of incredibly cool stuff.  It was one of the highlights of the trip.

All in all it was a good weekend.  I just wish Chico weren’t so far away from Pittsburgh.

Three days after the giant fur wad, I brushed this pile out of my dog. I could’ve gotten more too if he hadn’t been so interested in those stupid squirrels. Also in the picture is the rake that I use to brush him.

This is from just one brushing. No trick photography or fur-fluffing here either. That wad of fur really is bigger than his head. I am astonished at how much fur came out of my dog in the course of an hour. Normally he takes several days to lose his coat, but this seems to be most of it in one go. The fur wad is from yesterday; I brushed him again tonight, and while some more came out, it is negligible in comparison.

I wasn’t sure what to do with the giant fur wad, so I put it in a bag with a note that said, “With love, from Vader” and hung it on the neighbors door handle. We’ll see if they think that is funny.

Zephyr, Wylie, and Vader

This week I’m house-sitting and dog-sitting while I’m in Milwaukee performing at the WI State Fair. I always stay with my mother-in-law for Milwaukee gigs. It’s awesome. Partly because I can bring my dog (he gets along really well with Lynn’s dog), but also because it’s so much nicer and more comfortable than staying in a hotel for 11 days. This year Lynn and my wife decided that it would be a good time to take a trip. They are off in Yellowknife Canada (WAY up there, almost to the Arctic Circle), and at the same time my sister-in-law and her family went on vacation too (without their dog). So here I am with three dogs. It’s just four guys hanging out. Not much talking going on, but there’s lots of sniffing and wrestling. It’s pretty great.

When working at the fair my hours can be pretty variable, but basically I am home a little after six or seven each evening. Monday was my first night where it was just the dogs and me. On my way home from the fair I had meant to stop at the store to pick up a couple of things. The reason to do it on the way home is so that I didn’t get the dogs all riled up with my arrival, and then immediately leave them again, thus making them more crazy. But I was already home and didn’t want to leave the dogs again, so it was time for a bachelor adventure in the car. Two of the dogs (Vader and Zephyr) are fine off leash as long as there are no bunnies around, and the third dog (Wylie) has to be on-leash all the time. I put Wylie on-leash and the four of us got in the car and went off to the store.

It was a nice, quick little adventure, and we were pulling back in to the driveway in 15 minutes. As I pulled in I saw that there was a bunny sitting within 6 inches of the edge of both the street and the driveway. I rolled Vader’s window up enough so that he wouldn’t jump out, and he gave that bunny the major “I’m gonna eat you” stink-eye. Amazingly, even with Vader leering directly overhead, the bunny didn’t move. We got to the end of the driveway at the back of the house, and forgetting about the bunny, I got out and opened the door for the dogs. Vader had not forgotten. I was reaching for Wylie so I could put the leash on him when Vader made a break for the bunny at the front of the house. My momentary distraction of trying to call Vader back meant that I missed Wylie’s collar, and then Zephyr got past me as well. Three dogs on the hunt. It was 9pm, and the street was dark so I didn’t think there would be any car traffic, but it was warm enough that the neighbors had their windows open, so I was trying to not yell too loudly to get the dogs back. Big surprise, that didn’t work.

The bunny sprinted across the street and under the neighbor’s porch. Vader and Wylie were in pursuit, and when Wylie got right up next to the neighbor’s window he let out one of his astonishingly loud, blood-curdling bark-howls. And then another. And then another. In a matter of moments Wylie’s bark-howls and my yelling had all four neighbors out of their houses. I had gotten Zephyr by the collar, and I was trying unsuccessfully to get Vader and Wylie under control. The neighbors, who I had never met before, were all very nice and helped me get Wylie on-leash. Since I only had the one leash with me, I got the other two dogs excited about running home with me, and we were off as I called a thank you and an apology to the neighbors. It was more than a little embarrassing.