....captioning photos from October 2015. Back in 2018 I was 2.5 years behind. I'm currently captioning February 2018 in November 2022...almost 5 years behind! Nooooo!
Back in September of 2015, Lizzy came to my aparment to go through hundreds of my old music and nightlife photos as candidates for her then in-progress book! Five of my photos ended up making it into the final book....
...and killed some time before a meeting captioning some photos for this website. (I usually wrote captions at 3 or 4am when I can't sleep...but sometimes I do it before meetings if I'm all caught up on emails).
...going through my photo stream and editing out all the racy images before I publish them online. (I see Jane Anne's lil keyster in the bottom row of thumbnails! lol)
...in my new WEED DIARY! lol. Started keeping track of all my weed smoking in an attempt to slowly taper down the amount I was vaping to under 1 gram a day.
...working on the July 2014 Roundup! Back then I was only 2 years behind as opposed to when I'm writing this now and I'm over FOUR YEARS behind. Oooops, time gets away from you!
Spent Sunday evening working on The April Roundup 2014. Back in July 2016, I was 2 years and 3 months behind in my recaps. (As I sit here writing this, I'm 3 years and 2 months behind! Keep falling further behind!)
Spent early 2015 writing about photos from 2012 (right around the time Meredith and I split up). Sometimes a few years have to go by until you're ready to look at how you spend the past.
I spent Sunday evening watching a documentary Davo sent me about a Dutch journalist interviewing Iggy Pop as he walks the interviewer around my neighborhood in 1993.
Caught some funny references to other Shakespeare works in the background. Like this ad for Prospero brand Whiskey. Such stuff as dreams are made on! (Taken from my favorite scene in The Tempest!)
There's a really disturbing scene in the movie where one of the characters gets shot by accident, made more disturbing by the fact that Meredith was wearing the exact same outfit as the dead guy in the movie. Haha.
And we stayed up late looking at photos on my computer. Ellen gets tired waiting two years for me to post photos on this site, so sometimes when she's over she likes to get a sneak peeks into what's coming down the line (eventually). Hahah.
My grandfather, Hank Battjer, with his father Henry and grandfather Diedrich. I'm guessing this was taken after Hank had enlisted as a pilot but before he left for the Pacific.
Speaking of family resemblances, Ann & Walt have a few older photographs from my dad's side of the family hanging on the wall. I remember laughing so hard when I took this photo because if you look closely, the woman sitting on the man's lap looks like my dad in a bonnet! Haha.
I designed the new look in Photoshop, and then once I had something I liked, I spend a bunch of time trying to relearn CSS (shit keeps changing and it's harder and harder to keep up!) and make my code match my design. (Remember for years and years my site used to look like this?)
I spotted a photo comp of Dunmore, PA (where John grew up) hanging on the wall while wandering around that John used as the study for a painting he did that hangs in the living room (that I love dearly).
Sarah proudly showing off the BLING BLING circus portrait poster she romerced Charles into posing for. (BTW, Romerce = portmanteau of "romance + coerce"!)
"Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland...Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and simulation." Baudrillard, Precession of Simulacra.
I spent Monday night writing captions for the Nerve Party and Karaoke Times Two entry. (On my screen you can see the interface for the content management system that I wrote to publish this site!)
Oh, and she was also really into HUNTING FUCKING BEARS ON ATVs! HAHAHA. Holy fucking shit, I wish you could've seen Ellen's face when she first saw this photo and tried to wrap her mind around the fact that it's high-school Danielle proudly standing in front of a dead bear laying across the ATV she used to go hunting. WHAT?
Late on Saturday night I got an iChat video invite from Leigh. She and Geordon were DJing some huge mega party (in Barcelona?) and had their laptop facing the crowd - so when I accepted the video chat, I was immediately teleported into the midst of thousands of people going apeshit at some huge dance party. Hahaha. Then they turned the camera back around into the DJ booth.
...Iron Cross hub caps (with a skull in the center) and awesome "HONKY LIPS" graffiti on the passenger side, rear corner-panel. Someone paying awesome homage to...
Like I mentioned earlier, the photographer that Brett and Amy hired was on-point. Not only did he take sick photos, he had a laptop setup at the reception showing off some of his choice snaps from earlier in the day.
On Monday, Meredith and I went out to NJ to meet up with the rest of my family to attend my grandfather's funeral. After 2 long years of being in and out of the hospital and a long, slow, decline, he finally passed on. Love you, Grandpa. We miss you lots.
It's like a photo of Peter Griffin going skiing! (PS - Remember when Fatty and I borrowed all my parents old ski gear to go skiing and it ended up looking like we were going to an 80s party in Williamsburg?)
My dad's parents, Hank and Connie Battjer, with my cousins Chris and Steve. The one on the bottom is me blowing out birthday candles with my cousin Chris watching (and looking like a bug).
Also found a bunch of fantastic old photo albums. I snapped a couple of pics of my favorite pics. Here me with my parents and brother. I think this was from my 5th birthday - which would make it August 1981.
I laid down in my room to read and try to recover from the brutal afternoon heat. I had brought along an Amazon Kindle (so I wouldn't have to lug around a bunch of books). When ever you're done reading, the Kindle has all these "screensaver" images that appear when you "lock" it. I locked it after reading and look at the screensaver that came up!
I took a bunch of his drawings that he scanned and built him a website to show off some of his portfolio! Looking to hire a great illustrator in New York City? Check him out!
Check out the my mom and dad in 1975! (Grant, check out my dad wearing BIG BLUE! Big Blue is a ski jacket that I found in my dad's closet and fell in love with and wore it for like 10 years in a row and always caught flack for. Hahah. God, I love that jacket.)
Wendy showing off a zoomed-in pic of what she calls my "crazy eyes." We sang karaoke for about an hour or so and then around 12:30am they came in and told us the restaurant was getting ready to close. We decided to head over to Hanger Bar to see Sarah and Karen. Even though we'd only been drinking for a little while...
Siege gave us all awesome, limited-edition signed prints! Fatty got this portrait of himself (that was an out-take from Fiasco's first band photo shoot that Siege did).
On Wednesday night I got treated to waffles and ice cream by a college journalism student named Edwina who wanted to interview me about this site! Who says blogging doesn't get you things?
And then Ryan made art. (I'll end up getting a few laughs and a couple of high-fives. Ryan will probably sell his photo of this for lots of money. Holy crap, did I make a wrong turn somewhere. Hahaha).
As long time readers of this site know, I have a ton of bizarro-lookalikes: but the one that cracks my friends up the most, is the fact that I look quite a bit like Ellen DeGeneres. I was watching her comedy special and paused and thought I'd captured quite a likeness so I took this pic to immortalize it. Hahah.
At lunch I met up with Leigh and we went to the magazine store on Spring and Lafayette so she could show me her picture in a magazine. (I can't remember which mag this was...maybe Teen Vogue?). Well, needless to say, this was one of the first times she'd appeard in a mag and she was totally excited...since then, Leigh appearing in magazines has pretty much become a weekly thing! Why you gotta be so fashionable?
And here's us pausing the show to laugh about how Brandon looked like someone asked Jim Henson to make a human version of a Kermit the Frog Muppet. ("It's not easy....wearing this vest!")
Then later on that evening Ryan from Nightmare of You came over and we all watched his band's first appearance on TV that Sarah had recorded. Here's Ryan next to himself.
