I Love This Guy

I feel cool....

Thanks to Major Dan O'Connor, who has hooked me up BIG TIME with an awesome photography gig in Chicago this weekend. A few months back he told me about this group that he did some "consultation work" with....hold on - first we need to talk about that. What exactly IS a consultant, ya know? It's like that episode of Friends, when everyone is talking about Chandler and how he's so successful and he's such a great friend and he has this great job and someone asks him, "What exactly DO you do, Chandler?" and he says, "Well, I'm a consultant" and everyone says, "Oh." BUT NO ONE EVER REALLY KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT THE HECK HE DOES.
Anyway, I digress....

Anyway, so he's telling me about this group, Jean's Marines, and how they run all these marathons together and he's thinking he could get me as their photographer and blah, blah, blah. At this point, I've only met the guy like, twice before and I have no idea what he's like or if he's completely blow'n smoke up my butt or WHAT, so I just smile and nod and say, "hey, yeah, that sounds great". But he keeps push'n it, and saying it'd be so much fun, and telling me all about it that I start to believe him and whaddya know? Three months later and I'm in on the gig and my tickets to Chi-town are booked for this weekend and I have a stomp'n ALL-ACCESS PASS to the entire race and I just feel like a freakin' rock star.

He's a marine and sometimes when he talks I have NO IDEA what he's saying - words like "critical incident" and "trigger mode" and "proprietary media" and "post-mortem update" and other marine-ish, testoterone-laden, military-minded, security-induced jargon spin around my head and leaves me feeling slightly dazed and confused (and with a strange desire to don camoflouge, paint my face black and yell "fire in the hole!" while doing a belly crawl ...on our beige carpet).

Meet Dan. He rocks. I love him. And I owe him big time. Especially since I googled his name and found this picture of him and posted it on the internet. :)