i am master chief's bleeding ulcer

I'm doing my best not to get sick.

With the 7th grader across the hall battling some variety of heinous illness, it does not seem likely that I will succeed. Now don't get me wrong, I harbor no ill will towards my diminutive quasi-sibling, but the manner in which she coughs is completely absurd. The sound is not unlike Daffy Duck trying to convince Elmer Fudd that he's dying.

It is loud, pantomimic, exaggerated, and most assuredly catapulting microscopic vermin directly into my larynx.

She coughs like an 80-year old 2 pack-a-day smoker choking on a jellyfish. She coughs at the dinner table, she coughs in my room, she coughs on the mutant dog-thing that travels all about the house. She even coughed on my Wii remote. Now I can't play Wario Ware until I get around to buying some Clorox wipes. Actually, screw it. I'll just buy a new Wii remote.

She stayed home from school today, the very same day that I was stuck at home miring through the 1,200 1,792 pictures that I took at that wedding. That's not as bad as it sounds, since roughly half of that number is one long series of some white folks trying to dance to Thriller. They didn't even do the zombie hand thing. Have you people even seen Thriller? From looking at the pictures, they apparently thought it was the hip-hop remix of Achy-Breaky Heart.

For the most part, I am pleased with the pictures. They have a certain action capture feel to them. More than just a collection of cheesy poses, you can progress through them and feel like you were actually there. Although the pictures of the dress pretty much suck.

Number 2 on the bride's list of things to photograph was "dress hanging up". Um... it's a dress. Just hanging there. How do you photograph that? Do you have to be a chick? Is a male capable of photographing a dress effectively? I guess I could take it out into the forest and hang it from a tree or something. That would be artsy.

And the deck was stacked against me in that the dress was hanging in the bridal dressing room. Upon entering the room, I noticed two major constituents: the obligatory menagerie of cosmetics, and an extraordinary quantity of snacks. It was as though a Drug Emporium had imploded. A room with terrible lighting, assorted lady-related paraphernalia strewn about in an unseemly fashion, and a half-dozen half-naked cranky dames running around giving me the hairy eyeball wanting to know why I'm all up in their dressing room taking pictures "because it's on the list, woman!" so just let me take my pictures and get out because I just stepped on a bra and I'm very uncomfortable right now! And the lighting was terrible!

So the pictures of the dress aren't that great.

And after a well-earned hiatus and a couple months of frustrating delays, Halo is back up, and causing me more stress and hair-loss than ever. This Saturday we'll be rolling out to Calvary Baptist in Hawthorne to do some stuccoing. Although I'm not sure "stucco" can be rightly used as a verb. I hate words that double as nouns and verbs. Like blog. Or party. Or photograph. A few weeks after that we're off to beautiful downtown Burbank, where we'll be painting. Yes, more painting. I hate painting. I'd rather put up ceiling frescoes.

But before that - we're going to Vegas. And we sure ain't gonna be fixin' churches.