I’ve been so focused on the smaller details these past few weeks: diapers, naps, drool (only some of it mine). As a result, I’ve barely taken note of the fact that we’ve reached a few milestones here:

Today is the one-year anniversary of Getty Images’ acquisition of Pump Audio. Seems impossible that was an entire year ago. I’m incredibly proud of what we built: a business that plugs thousands of independent artists into a global marketplace of production professionals in television, advertising and film—people who want to use their music and pay them for it.

Surprisingly, our deal with Getty Images went through, despite the fact that I had a wardrobe malfunction at a critical juncture. During our final meeting with Getty’s CEO and assorted top brass, I inadvertently exposed my bellybutton to the room for a good quarter of an hour before realizing it. In my post-red-eye flight/whirlwind preparation haze, I’d missed a button on my dress shirt, so that when I leaned back in my chair while I was talking, my shirt puckered wide open just above the belt. So I suppose it’s the one-year anniversary of my presenting my navel in the Getty conference room, too.

I’m also now voluntarily unemployed. That’s my former desk above, in the Pump church. I still need to clear it out, actually. We’ve been in England for what seems like forever now, so my last day as a Pump/Getty Images employee—technically two weeks ago—was incredibly anti-climactic. It was kind of like going on a long trip and getting quietly divorced from a seven-plus-year marriage over email.

But this was a happy, friendly divorce, mind you. I still love everyone there at Pump—I just needed to take some time with Evie and Emma and figure out what I want to do next.

Which brings me to the next big milestone: Emma’s and my second wedding anniversary.

We spent our first anniversary down in Cape May, where we got married on June 2nd, 2006. Emma was pregnant for the third time that year, both of the first two pregnancies having ended in miscarriage. Here was our third chance, though with her cramping badly (as was the case just before the first two miscarriages) we assumed the worst.

Luckily, every once in a while self-diagnosis on Google actually deflates panic rather than stoking it. I quickly googled “cramping and pregnancy” on my Blackberry, and found that cramping can often be a good sign, meaning that the body is stretching the uterus in preparation for a growing fetus. We agreed to a moratorium on further googling, and clung to this potentially positive factoid during our 5-hour drive home. We listened to music and talk radio, held hands a bit, and in general didn’t say much.

Our 2008 trip down to Cape May was different in two major ways. The first was that we brought along 4-month old Evie. Everything was okay, just as Google promised. She is a very sweet and fun little baby, although not yet much of a beachgoer. In light of the latter fact, the second major difference in this trip was that I never got to go to the beach. Not once. We spent an entire week on a beach holiday, renting a house a six-minute walk from the ocean, and I barely touched the sand.

The one exception to this was when Emma and I brought Evie out to the spot on the Cape May Point where we said our vows two years ago.

There’s been some considerable erosion at the beach, exposing some large rocks that weren’t there on our wedding day. I don’t believe in omens even slightly, and don’t mean this as a metaphor or anything, so I’m just making a completely unscientific meteorological/geological observation here. It’s super windy (technical term) at Cape May Point, so one might assume that with each passing year that beach is going to be progressively carried elsewhere on the breeze.

All I know is, I hope to see a day, years and years hence, when Emma and I drag a teenage Evie down to the point, stand on the bare rocks where the beach used to be, and gush over our long-ago nuptials while she rolls her eyes at us.

When I first heard the term, I thought it was “tripping the colors.” It all sounded very hippie to me, very un-royal. In fact, it’s trooping, and whatever you call it, it’s about the least hippie, most royal thing I could possibly imagine.

So here’s the deal: Centuries ago, when many of the troops were illiterate and needed to know what their regiment’s flag looked like so they’d be able to rally to it on the battlefield, soldiers would line up to have their “colours” paraded before them.

These days the colors are trooped to celebrate the Queen’s birthday (which is actually on April 21st, though due to crappy English April weather, the official celebration of her birthday is the 3rd Sunday in June). It’s an incredible display of the Queen’s Guard marching in huge formations in their red coats and massive bearskin hats, royals rolling by in Victorian era open-top horse-drawn carriages, and tight, diamond formations of fighter jets flying low overhead.

All of this runs the half-mile or so from Buckingham Palace to the Horse Guard’s Parade, where King Henry VIII jousted in his younger, leaner days. Anyway, below is a quick video I shot of the proceedings. Watch for the guards’ feet. They’re put into position by the regiment leader, who you’ll see measuring out precise distances with his walking compass. The guards then do hilarious James Brown-like shuffles and sidesteps to get into place.

So here she is, the Queen, who passed not thirty feet before us. I didn’t think I’d be that impressed, but the pageantry of the thing was overwhelming. As my friend Michael said, “No country in the world does this sort of thing as well as England does.”



Amazingly, up until the 80’s, the Queen would ride down the Mall on a horse. Sidesaddle. I sure wish I’d seen that.

We went down to Brighton on the last day of this trip to England. Em & Lo were filming some outdoor segments for the TV show, so Joey and I came along to take care of the little ones.

Here’s Evie, missing some of England’s finest countryside on our 90-minute train ride from London. I was thinking, if we’d missed our flight to England altogether and camped out in the parking lot at Newark International Airport for the past three weeks, as far as she’s concerned there would’ve been no difference at all.

As for Brighton, my expectation of the English seaside was that it would be overcast and chilly, with piles of rocks here and there along the beach. I was close, but instead of there being piles of rocks, the beach was actually just that: rocks. Here I am running my fingers through the sand.

It was a stark and beautiful setting, though. I enjoyed the gloominess and desolation of the place.

Fortunately, it wasn’t entirely desolate. Em & Lo were able to convince a few brave beachgoers to take part in their show.

A gaggle of French teens stopped throwing rocks at seagulls for a few minutes, and looked on as a two of their classmates took part in the shenanigans. I’m not allowed to reveal too much before the show airs, but the shenanigans involved a French maid outfit (or perhaps in this case, as it was worn by a Frenchwoman, it might simply be called a maid outfit—I’m not sure.)

I maintained a safe distance, as there’s nothing like a baby crying in the background to make a sound man go apeshit.

After a few successful hours on the rocks, the TV crew moved inland to a great little café district. Here there was a much steadier stream of willing participants. This part of Brighton reminded me of some combination of Key West and the East Village. (Note the three successive organic cafés in the first shot.)

By all accounts, the shooting in Brighton was a great success.

I’ve skipped over some significant moments, though, where early in the morning I forgot Evie’s bottles and all of the breast milk in the car on the way to the London train station, then bought the wrong kind of bottle (twice) at the pharmacy in Brighton, and subsequently dealt with a hungry, exhausted, hysterical Evie, who screamed for several hours straight. I kept wanting to move cafés to start fresh with a new batch of fellow patrons, but it was no use. The worm had turned, as Emma says, and as the cameras rolled outside, Evie was inside, shrieking holy hell while people sipped their organic soups.

At last, Evie gave me a short break, by which point I was in a mood. Joey found the whole affair incredibly amusing, as his little girl Elliette was an absolute dream for the entire day. (Then again, he didn’t leave all of her bottles and milk behind in London.) Here’s me with a tiny Winston Churchill popping up at the bottom of the frame.

So, Evie won’t remember any of Brighton, but she tried her best to see that Brighton will remember her.

Evie spent the first few minutes of her first plane trip trying out various high decibel, high frequency screams. Emma and I tried in vain to calm her, flashing the occasional apologetic smile toward our neighboring passengers. We’d only just started taxiing, and the flight was already shaping up to be a nightmare.

Just as we left the ground, however, the rumbling of the engines and the slight rocking movements of the plane calmed her instantly.

The flight attendants suspended a little cot from the bulkhead, and Evie proceeded to sleep for pretty much the entire 7-hour flight. If I had any sense, I’d probably have slept too, but I was too tired to have any sense, so I stayed up all night watching movies and making myself even more tired and less sensible. (It’s worth noting that they had all three Godfather movies, No Country for Old Men and Spinal Tap.)

Evie maintained this exact expression for a good eight or nine hours…

… culminating in a very startled meeting with her UK grandparents, who surprised us at Heathrow to celebrate Evie’s first time on British soil. Everybody but Evie was thrilled.

We stopped down at the beach on our last day in L.A.

It was fairly deserted, though there was some kind of pelican convention going on. I’m not sure whether they were tracking the migration of a massive school of fish, or were simply migrating themselves.

Here’s a pelican/pterodactyl coming in for a landing.

And if the shape of that head doesn’t convince you that these things are basically a chromosome away from the Jurassic Period, this ought to do the trick (warning: shocking animal behavior):

You should see what it looks like when she exhales and lets it all out….

On Christmas Eve, 2004, I brought Emma to her favorite place in Oxford: St. Mary’s Tower. I had a ring in my pocket, and plans to propose minutes later at the top of the tower, surrounded by incredible views of the surrounding colleges, hills and spires. My nerves were positively singing.

As the fates would have it—and contrary to what I’d read on the website—the tower was closed for renovations; a chain across the steps barred our entrance. This stroke of misfortune was punctuated by the sudden onset of freezing rain.

“Unbelievable,” I muttered. “This is just completely unbelievable.”

“Stop being such a baby,” Emma said, and suggested we head to Marks and Spencer to finish our Christmas shopping.

All worked out fine, as I eventually cajoled Emma into taking a walk with me (in the rain) into the hills behind her parents’ house later that afternoon, where I proposed on the hilltop pictured in the header of this site. The rain broke when it should have, and Emma responded as I’d hoped she would.

In any case, I had a score to settle with the tower. We returned to St. Mary’s on this last trip to Oxford, and had the main turret all to ourselves.

It was a different set of circumstances this time: a pregnant Emma climbing the steps in front of me; the ring on her hand instead of clutched nervously in my pocket; no fanfare, and no single moment more important than the rest—just a long, beautiful, unforgettable afternoon.

We drove down to the city Friday afternoon, plodding through some of the most intense rain I’ve seen in a long time, accompanied by moments of less than 20-foot visibility on the roads—not the best of driving conditions. In an instant, we broke through the worst of the storm into a strange hybrid of intense sunlight and scattered drops pelting the windshield. As we came over a bridge, we saw two massive, brilliant rainbows—both complete arcs, miles across, but impossible to fully capture in their scale and intensity with Emma leaning over me to take a pic with our pocket camera at 50mph.

We’ve been in the U.K. for the week, hence the lack of posts recently.

Last night we came across a street hustler in Covent Garden who had a great little game going. £1 bought two attempts to ride a bike from one line to another (about a ten foot span) without touching the ground. Anyone able to do this would win £10. The hustler glided across the distance with ease, then handed off the bike, which immediately turned into wet noodles when anyone else hopped on for their turn.

Here’s a quick clip of Ilan (Pump’s UK Director of Sales), Becky (my sister-in-law), and me giving it our best shot. I’m convinced that the guy has some hidden lever on the bike somewhere, as I know the first rule in street games is that they are 100% unwinnable. We knew this going in, but still had a great time trying….