After I left NYC, I dove up to Mystic, CT (home of Mystic Pizza for you movie fans).  This was my first trip to Mystic and the Mystic Workshops.  I had an amazing time at this workshop. There is nothing to do in this small town and the nearest 24 hour establishment is 45 minutes away unless you want to eat food from the Mobile gas station.  The local gas station has three grades of gas but it has five different Cannabis magazines.  Basically this is saying if you are stuck living in Mystic CT, then you just need to be high all the time to survive. LOL  The workshop takes place at the Mystic Hilton which is sort of like the hotel in The Shining (minus the creepy twin girls in the hallway and someone trying to kill us).  The great thing is the Mystic is such a crap town and it's so cold that we everyone just stays at the hotel and hangs out. The hotel becomes one giant educational seminar and party during the four day event. I was able to meet up with old friends such as Jerry Ghionis, Dave and Quin from DQ Studios, and all of my friends associated with Shootstyle on the east coast.   The learning was intense with the aforementioned greats teaching along with Mike and Cody from TriCoast Photography and John and Dalisa from AltF.   I came out so inspired from this weekend that I couldn't wait to put some new things into effect for 2010.

There are two highlights of this workshop.  The first high point was getting to finally meet Alicia Williams of Cordele Photography in person. Alicia and I met about six years ago online at a photography forum and we became friends.  We help each other with life and business issues and she probably knows more intimate details of my life and business than anyone with the exception of my sister.  The weirdest catch was until the Mystic Workshop I had never met her in person.  With hundreds of phone calls and thousands of e-mails between us over the years, it was finally nice to get to see her in person.   The next highlight of this trip was going out with Jason Groupp, Lindsey Thorne and Angelica Glass for a great 3AM adventure in search of food that ended with us buying subs at the Mobile gas station and eating them in the hotel lobby after not finding anything after 45 minutes of driving.  It was sort of a Harold and Kurmar go to White Castle type adventure.  I also really wanted to write a personal note to thank Jason and Lindsay for making me think differently about how I was shooting and packaging my photography. Thanks to Jason and Lindsey you will now be seeing a cool video mixed media aspect to our work which I think you will find pretty fun and unique.

A little background on this story:  I had a horrible case of Sleep Apnea back in 2004-2005 and I had gained a ton of weight.  I couldn't do anything but sleep almost 23 hours a day in total but I wasn't getting restful sleep due to the Sleep Apnea.   The only way to stay awake was to keep eating and eating. I gained so much weight that my joints hurt all the time and my muscles had atrophied and were so weak i could barely get out of a chair without using my arms to push myself up.  I had managed to bring back some muscle mass on my own but by December of last year I was just fed up with lack of progress.  I was fat, diabetic and had high blood pressure and high cholesterol. I would get tingling in my legs all the time from poor circulation.