I had this terrific assignment to shoot in Belize in early June. The lovely Evon was able to go along as my assistant. It was a great late birthday trip for her and we even had a couple of days off in the middle of the trip to ourselves. Our itinerary took us to the rain forest for a few days and then out to Tobacco Caye, a tiny five acre island, for more shooting.

As expected, the rain forest was hot and humid. The camp where we stayed was a notch or two above primitive. We were with a bunch of scientists and as the evening discussions ran their course, the topic of botfly’s came up. Nasty little buggers, botfly’s are parasites deposited by mosquito’s which then burrow into the skin of their host to incubate their larvae. They can grow quite large and, thanks to several rows of tiny barbs, are difficult to remove. Of course the academics in the group expressed their desire to become botfly hosts for the sake of scientific study. Nuts!

So the trip went well and we returned home to New Hampshire without incident. Or so we thought. After a couple of weeks Evon had some mosquito bites that were still irritated and swollen. The talk turned to botfly’s. Then the reality came – she had three bites that were indeed, botfly’s. Ughh.

Now I would have happily switched places to with her and undertaken the botfly drama myself. But it never works out like that, does it? To make it worse, I was away for the weekend when Evon confirmed the presence of the little parasites. Yeah, I’m dirt. Somehow this whole thing is my fault. But that’s okay because we got the botlfy’s out and managed to get a little bit of video documentary to boot. Makes for a good story

I had the good fortune to spend a week at the Maine Media Workshops recently. I was there for a course in video editing with Final Cut Pro. Shooting and creating a video was not on the agenda, but it was a small class and the instructor, Josh Povec, tossed out the idea of shooting our own video rather than using “canned” clips.

Then Josh dangled some bait. He knew a local fellow named Swifty, who restores antique fire engines. Promises of interesting eye candy and quirky quotes accompanied the offer. That was just too good to pass up. I am always interested in meeting someone out of the ordinary. As it turned out, Swifty would make a suitable captain on the good ship Quirky Characters.

To my great astonishment, the other folks attending our class were not interested in Maine characters and antique fire engines. It was just Josh and I for the morning. Swifty did not disappoint. Helluva guy, as my dad would say. It was another fun day with a camera, except this time it was a video camera.

Enjoy.