Last week I traveled to Ohio to attend the content marketing world conference. It was a decent conference and I enjoyed John Cleese’s keynote on creative thinking. I imagine Cleese’s message was more appropriate for my old profession (artist) than my newer one (marketing/business), and it made me (as have a lot of things lately) question my marketing “career.” I may be getting burnt out, but nothing else is paying the bills. At least until more people start buying this.
A side benefit to attending the conference was the chance to spend some time with family. My mother did a lot of driving, picking me up from Cleveland and going back to Ohio, then from Marietta to Columbus and back, then to Cleveland again so I could fly out. All with a possible hairline fracture in her foot, which if I’d have known about six months ago I might have avoided a trip that caused so much driving for her.
On Saturday we went to the OSU/Hawaii game. Unlike last year’s chill and rain it was a nearly perfect day at the Shoe with sunshine and a nice breeze (up in the nosebleeds). Also unlike last year the offensive production for the Buckeyes was stilted at best, it was a sputtering first half against a mediocre PAC12 team, but as we found out on the way home, it wouldn’t get picked to pieces after the SECs miserable showing against community college teams the same day.
We intended to hustle back to Marietta for the Stern-wheeler fireworks, but as you can imagine, getting out of campus after a football game is anything but fast.
We missed the fireworks by at least half an hour, so I persuaded mom to pull over up the hill from the old power plant west of my hometown (on the route home). For decades I’ve come up over the hill on the way home from Columbus and seen the lights in the dark and wanted to photograph it. Now the plant is closing, so who knows how much longer the lights will even be there. Ironically on the night I finally tried to photograph it there was a heavy (and I mean thick!) fog everywhere. Maybe it made the photos more atmospheric and moody, you tell me…
Even though I missed the fireworks in Marietta, when Sam picked me up from the airport on Sunday we saw the last Hollywood Bowl fireworks show of the season from the freeway.
