Eating Coke can­dy for break­fast this morn­ing may not have been the great­est idea, but I think the virtue of hav­ing some­thing to chew (and decid­ed­ly yum­my, at that) was the only thing keep­ing me awake after film­ing two wed­dings in two days, and hence alive after my dri­ve back to Ottawa on only a few hours of sleep.

Sheer force of will kept me going through the week­end, though I’m sure that remem­ber­ing to stay hydrat­ed helped too. I want­ed so bad­ly to pull it all off, just to know I could do it. At one point, dur­ing a gap of time when the wed­ding par­ty was tak­ing a break, I went to my car, put the seat back, cov­ered my eyes, and passed out for about 25 min­utes. Normally, I can’t sleep except in the most com­fort­able of con­di­tions, but such was the extent of my exhaus­tion.

Beginning the sec­ond wed­ding was the most men­tal­ly chal­leng­ing part, know­ing I had anoth­er 14 hour day ahead of me when I bare­ly got any sleep and my body was start­ing to feel the sore from run­ning around with so much cam­era gear strapped to me the pre­vi­ous day.

 

I was lucky enough to meet Mike, an assis­tant pho­tog­ra­ph­er and cute Italian guy who car­ries this casu­al atti­tude about him that lets peo­ple bring their guard down around him. I’ve need­ed to meet some­one like him for so long, just to remem­ber the world isn’t all tragedy and cyn­i­cism. I also got to see Preston, and even though I nev­er had a chance to catch up with him, it was good to know he was doing alright.

The final tally for the last two days and nights:

Hours slept: 11
Hours spent film­ing: 30.5
Number of movie clips tak­en: 939
Gigs of footage tak­en: 116.93
Number of pounds of cam­era gear car­ried on each day: 19.5
Kilometres dri­ven: 1376.13
Courses eat­en at recep­tion din­ners: 15
Red pock­ets received: 1
Cousins seen: 6
Names for­got­ten: 3
Kitties pet­ted: 1
Hugs given/received: 7
Canon 70–200mm lens­es seen: 5
Cantonese words spo­ken: 29
Years since I last saw Preston: 8
Chocolate cov­ered espres­so beans eat­en: 10
Chocolate cov­ered straw­ber­ries eat­en: not near­ly enough
Ukuleles strummed: 1
Words exchanged with dad: 34
Kisses from aunts: 1
Number of bite marks on fore­arm from try­ing to stay awake dur­ing dri­ve home: 4
Painkillers tak­en: 3