Pendleton Round-Up: A week of cowboys, horses and video

Once a year there lies on the calendar the longest week. It’s not officially named that, but to those that have the pleasure of enduring it, know this to be the law. It’s Round-Up week in a northeastern Oregon town of Pendleton. It just so happens that one of our paper’s, the East Oregonian, call this rustic town home.

We were knee-deep in the smells and sights of a good ol’ rodeo. From Indian horse races, to saddle bronc, to Main Street and carnival festivities, to world-record making parades of horses, Native American pageantry and dance and not to mention we sported the look. Yes, complete attire of cowboy hat, button-down collar shirt, jeans and cowboy boots. We all put long hours, retired to our hotel rooms caked with dirt, sweat and exhaustion.

I will through in the side note, that I truly believe that when in comes to the Round-Up, I am a jinxed individual. This is the third year in a row that my back has gone out right before Round-Up. Last year, I had to miss the festivities as I was under the knife instead getting my back operated on. This year was no different. We left on Monday, back went out just prior on Saturday.

Our most popular video

Through some mis-adventures at the Wendy’s restaurant the first night in town, that we were seriously thinking we needed to go straight to urgent care and get a round of antibiotics after eating there, to the grumpy old couple that nagged and waved their fist at us for setting up our camera to the right side of them to shoot the Westward Ho! Parade and we were blocking their view of the street which they were sitting on the curb, to catching on film the true spirit of the famous Let’er Buck phrase on Main Street Friday night, just to name a few.

I will admit a pretty miserable week, where my stubborness had the better of me and I pushed myself too hard. Which landed me the opportunity to sit in my hotel room during the championships and edit video on Saturday, instead of partaking. I was never so happy for Sunday to come when we were able to leave.

This year was the centennial celebration for the Pendleton Round-Up. So we had to go big. We brought on board four freelance photographers (Joe Duty, Cody Duty, Joe Tierney and Hollis Officer) from around the nation, two multimedia members from Astoria, two interns, an IT person, a couple more to help with a post-round-up book and the many talented staff members of the East Oregonian to pull off some pretty amazing coverage for a small newspaper company.

Here’s a list of what we put together:

• Special Round-Up section on the website
• Thousands of photos
• Great audio pieces
• 25+ videos
• A Facebook page specifically for our coverage
• Twitter account specifically for our coverage
• A magazine “Untold Stories of the Pendleton Round-Up“
• Two books
  • Pendleton Round-Up at 100: The comprehensive story of Oregon’s legendary rodeo
  • Centennial Pendleton Round-Up in Pictures

Rain, rain go away … come back again like next year

This is probably why I have a hard time falling asleep – stupid crap pops into my head & I have to act on it. It’s been raining here, day in and day out, for what seems like two weeks straight. Every one of those nights, when I try to fall asleep, it seems the rain becomes more pronounced. They say the sound of rain soothes? Ha!

I’m laying there tonight, staring at the ceiling, wind, rain, etc and this memory of a movie I saw when I was a child pops into my head. All I remeber of ithe movie is it rained pretty much the entire film, there were kids and the sun came out for a few minutes and then it vanished, not to be seen for years.

So immediately I had to dig around on the internet to see if this was actually a movie or if I was delusional from lack of sleep. Sure enough, “All Summer In A Day”, based on a 1954 novel by Ray Bradbury. The movie adaptation was a whopping 25 minutes long and aired in 1982 on PBS children’s series “Wonderworks”.

The story is about a class of school children on Venus. And it is constantly raining. The sun is only visible for one hour every seven years on the planet.

I even saw a few post that wonder if it was filmed at a fort in Washington state, but couldn’t find anywhere it stated the actual film location. But wouldn’t surprise me one bit if it was actually filmed here in this great state … where else would it rain long enough to shoot a short film?

Then naturally I had to jump on YouTube to see if there were any clips to satisfy my curiosity. Sure enough, I found almost the entire movie spilt in a few bite-sized chunks.

The beauty though, is I wrote and posted this whole rant from my iPhone, while remaining in bed.

Hooray!! Maybe now I can sleep.