RELAXing in TX

Happy belated Easter from Texas! Have not had the chance to blog lately but thought I would drop a few shots of the family at Easter. Glad to see everyone is Blogging so much. Here is an old shot of me too in the bearded days! RELAX

My Fellow Americans - or at least those of you who know how to RELAX.....

"And so I conclude with a few words about my friend Amy Martin. I knew Amy in Alaska. I worked with her for 5 years and was friends with her for all 12 years I lived there. She was a school teacher, she was a mom, she was a sparkling diamond, and she had a wit that could cut that diamond. Amy was Inupiat and Norwegian - she was 5'11" with blonde hair and those wicked high cheek bones that you recognize from National Geographic shows. Amy grabbed life everyday and shook it until a nickel fell out. She found out that, in addition to a baby boy growing inside her, she also had a tumor. 2 hours after giving birth, she began course of chemo to treat an advanced stage of ovarian cancer. Last week after 4 years of smiling through battle after battle, she lost the war. 300 people came to a memorial service at her school in Juneau. It truly is too bad you guys did not get to meet her. Remember when Kenrick invited his Detroit friends down to Daytona one year and he/us got see two worlds of buddies collide? Well, sometime I'd love to see my Alaska world meet up with my other worlds. But perhaps its the perspective of distance that keeps things clear. Can you recall last week any clearer than a Saturday night in the first floor apt. of Kenrick's FM Beach house?

The earth is not that big, gentlemen. Lets try not to step on the small flowers that grow underfoot and not miss the sunsets on a special day - which is today."

Of course, this photo does not go with these words, but it could have. I would swap, in a minute, the chance to have been at Amy's memorial rather than giving this presentation at a company meeting. Happy Easter - Christ is Risen. Christ is Risen Indeed

So he's probably drinking Molsen's

http://www.wildernessfirstaid.ca/staff.htm

So this place in British Columbia has Mike listed as a staff member.

They even have a handy email contact list here. Let's swamp the bum with an email from each and every one of us. You could even call the place 1-250-388-0633 (They're on Pacific Time)

I also backtracked the web site to find this info.

Domain Name: CRAWFORDPHOTOGRAPHY.NET
Created on: 08-Sep-03
Expires on: 08-Sep-09
Last Updated on:

Administrative Contact:
Crawford, Michael photodoc@shaw.ca
Michael Crawford Photography
1907 Chambers Street
Victoria, British Columbia V8T 3K5
Canada
2503852096

Scary how you can find this stuff with a little effort.

- Mark

The search goes on

So the people who interviewed me told the employment agency they "hadn't found exactly what they were looking for." I guess they weren't looking for an Emmy Award winning artist with years of top evaluation scores from all of his employers. Go figure.

Just because our life wasn't exciting enough - the landlord sold the house we rent. We started checking out different places. This included one that we drove out to see only to discover the backyard was - literally - a junkyard. The rent was kind of cheap but paying for the tetanus shots is what kills ya. Luckily Theresa's cousin came through and is letting us rent a place he owns. The only down side is that to make it all work we have to move this weekend. Hey, let's pack up the entire house and move in a week's time. At least this will let us save some money while I continue the job-hunting process.

With the move and all I will be off the web for a week or two. So I leave you with this little challenge - the above picture is of one of you bums. Can you guess who and where the picture was taken? The when is over twenty years ago - I'll give you that much.

Sleuthing

Ok, here's what I got. If you google Michael Crawford you get a lot about the singer that was in Phantom of the Opera. There is also a Mike Crawford who is a famous photographer that has written a few books and such but is not the guy we went to school with. There is the NFL's Mike Crawford, some musician with the same name and a realtor who is a bit more famous than our high school chum (at least in the world of Google rankings.) Keep on digging through the pages and you eventually find this link http://www.crawfordphotography.net/index.html which is Mike's site. There are no dates on the site so I don't know when he put it up and/or how old it might be. However, there is a contact email address. So we should all try emailing him here- doc@crawfordphotography.net

As an interesting aside - have any of you ever Googled your name? Four of the listings on the first page of search results actually refer to me. It is a bit easier that my name is not all that common. Although there actually is another Mark Neumayer who is also a graphic artist. I'm just the more popular guy. Here are some of the RELAX dopplegangers that I could find. We have a John Powell who composed the music for Shrek. John Egan's Big World Restaurant and Pub certainly sounds like the bear could be running it. John Kenrick the classical historian. The baseball stats of Kevin Pasley. Let's not forget Robert Stephan Hair Design in North Brunswick. Finally, the shark shows off his fine teeth as Bruce McArthur, DDS.

That's all for now,
Mark

Any sign of Crawford?

Any sightings in the past few years on Crawford? Does he still winter in AZ, take photos and then go slime fish in Alaska in the summer? I am headed back up to AK this summer with just my youngest, Maya. Perhaps I will run into him on the ferry dock or at a local coffee house....
Anybody heard a word from him in 5 yrs? Mark, can you connect to some master database and track him down? What about Shark? Where is he? He used to love writing all kinds of shit on the web/email/cyber tablet. Sharky - Where are you?

Keep searching calendars men for a weekend this summer to get together. If we can get some takers, I can arrange for my boss's cabin on a huge lake in the mountains - sail boat, cold frig, hot tub, hungry fish, and plenty of rooms. But I would need to nail it down before April 15 - he takes a lot of summer traffic up there and the weekends go fast.

Beside ourselves

One of the benefits of being under-employed is having the free time to work up craziness like this.