In the work life, you battle lizards, snakes, alligators and all manner of predatory animals. But is there a job out there where one can have nice animal coworkers? Yes. Yes there is.

May I present my suggestion for my next career change:

Check that out. Work at the aquarium and your coworkers are penguins and fish. They give you the uniform, so you don’t have to worry about conforming to a dress code and you are outside all day. Sounds pretty perfect to me!!!!!

Hilarity ensues!!!!

Well, anyway, here goes. So I’m going to write about my family up here. I guess after eight years of having this blog, I guess its time to introduce some kind of characters that surround me. My dad loves baseball. No, actually that is not true. My dad loves Cheers and the character Sam Malone and through that he learned a bit about baseball.

Now here is the funny part. In his company, he has won baseball tickets pretty much every year since he’s worked there. He’s always passed them off to my mother and I to go because he had no interest in the game. Well, when he finally became an American citizen a few years ago, I implored him to attend one baseball game. ONE.

Finally, he gave in and we attended a game between the Boston Red Sox and the Evil Empire. The Evil Empire was in town being evil, the Red Sox were themselves. My father was surprised by how much I knew about baseball, but I’ve been to about 10 Red Sox games over the years and visited the stadium 30 plus times.

We took our seats and they were as luck would have it not covered in beer or popcorn. My dad brought along his binoculars and asked all kinds of complex questions that I could not answer, like what exactly is an RBI and does the designated hitter ever play in the outfield. I thought the designated hitter is just the third hitter off the bench, but it turns out he does not play outfield.

Speaking of DHs, my dad had some funny reactions to my enthusiastic greetings for David Ortiz all the time. I love Big Papi. Who doesn’t love a man who sings and smashes bats in Dunkin Donuts ads with human golden retriever Rob Gronkowski? Well, my dad had some funny reactions to Mr. Ortiz too. Namely — hey, your guy isn’t hitting the ball. He would kind of swing and miss and swing and miss and then finally hit the thing pretty far.

At one point the ball got pretty close to us. A lot of home runs were hit. It was a great game to take a person to who for years told me that the only baseball player he knew was Sam Malone.

Ernie Pantuso, this is your big moment:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, there is a story. To which the moral is — never get too damn excited about anything.

So some weeks ago, I went to the zoo early in the morning with one of my young charges. We would feed the giraffe, there would be giraffe selfies and my god, would golden sunlight reign upon us all.

Except it didn’t. Yeah, I got these photos of the giraffe at the giraffe experience where we were supposed to be able to feed the giraffe BUT THESE WERE ALL THE PHOTOS I GOT. A famous person in Hollywood said “never work with animals or children.” I’d add — never rely on animals. Children, yeah, all right. But the giraffe wanted no part of the experience and stood there for that split second. It was a very wild and interesting morning, to say the least.

You get up on the radiator at the side of the Prudential Center observatory and photograph as quickly as you can until someone tells you to get down:

I met this cutie on the beach on Friday. I went over to pet her and asked the owner if she was a Boston terrier. She goes “of course.” Then I said she lived in the perfect place and he said “it’s her city. We just live in it.”

And she got curious about my wide angle lens so she moved in close and I got this excellent shot:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, OK I ripped that one off from you know the bible. I’m not religious but I make a lot of jokes about religion because I can. Well, I try not to be offensive but I like a good joke about religion here and there.

Like here in this photo (which I did not take):

The alligator must be ringing the doorbell because he is curious if you accept that Lord Alligator as your lord and savior. My answer to that is NO. I do not.

I accept the Lord Lobster as my lord and savior:

Arvydas Sabonis, if you read this blog (and I know you do) a couple of days ago, I finally understood the thrill that you must have felt playing basketball. For those of you who aren’t Arvydas Sabonis, Sabonis was the star player of the 1988 gold medal winning SOVIET basketball team (even though he is Lithuanian). Further, he went on to represent his native Lithuania in 1992 when they won a bronze medal by beating Russia, I mean the Unified Team.

Yeah, I mean I have this insane encyclopedic knowledge of his games because I’ve watched the movie “The Other Dream Team” about a thousand times.

Paragraph three and we aren’t at what the whole point of the entry was. Well, here goes. Last Friday, I got to go on the floor of the TD Garden. It was something I thought I would never get to do. It was like seeing life from a whole new perspective, a whole new way, from the point of view of an athlete or a singer going down on the floor to perform. It was an enormous thrill getting to do that. I got chills when I was down there. I mean it would have been yet more thrilling if it had been the old Garden where Magic and Larry Bird played on the warped parquet but this was amazing too. Sabonis probably played in the TD Garden at some point, so I probably trod the same floor as he had.

Let’s get to the pics. I mean there are always pics. Why wouldn’t there be. I took some panoramas of the whole thing. Japanese camera manufacturers, could you please up your game panorama photo wise? No panoramic camera costs under $1,000. These are all right but hopefully one day I will visit with the power machine. These were more about capturing the thrill of being there:

So, as I mentioned today I visited Hammond Castle, created by a man named John Hammond. The Wikipedia tells me that Mr. Hammond was the inventor of the remote control and that he got his first fortune the old fashioned way — he inherited it. Well, Mr. Hammond also turned out to be a pretty decent inventor. Without him, I’d have to walk six feet right now and turn the Roku box back on and then sit back down and keep writing this entry. For that, I thank you Mr. Hammond.

Now, let’s talk about his home and laboratory at Hammond Castle, where the aforementioned Renaissance Faire I attended was held today. I love visiting old houses and America is full of these half European concoctions created by wealthy Gilded Age millionaires. I once visited a home called Lyndhurst in Westchester that was full of just rooms ripped out of the homes of European aristocrats for dimes and put into the house, created by another insanely rich man named Jay Gould, a railroad scoundrel robber baron from the Gilded Age.

Hammond Castle kind of reminded me of Lyndhurt, but it was much, much, much weirder. I was expecting this stately home with all of these giant rooms, in the same style as Breakers or Marble House in Newport, but Hammond Castle wasn’t like that at all. You walked into something that looked like a chapel, that was then attached to a Venetian palazzo like courtyard where it was that it was said Mr. Hammond had once made it rain. That courtyard on one side had a Gothic entry and on the other side (no joke) a life sized nude statue of Mr. Hammond portrayed as a Roman (or Greek) god.

No, no, no, we are so not done yet. There were several staircases that were narrow enough to fit one human that lead you around to all sorts of tiny rooms. One room was circular library full of false doors and another was a red bedroom with an authentic, gothic mattress filled with horse hair (or something) that when you touched was as a hard as a rock. Oh and that room (according to our EXTREMELY COLORFUL) tour guide was a place where 12 ghosts had been found by a ghost hunting show.

God love you John Hammond. God love you and your weird house:

Inigo Montoya edition.

Well, occasionally Wrong Side of the Camera travels. As we’ve seen in the past year, Wrong Side of the Camera has gone to the Cayman Islands and Chile. Well, this time this wanderer stayed a bit closer to home. It is summer in New England and that means lobster rolls, homemade ice cream and road trips.

In 2011, I realized that summer in Boston is absolutely a magical thing. I had a taste of this when I went to the Cape during the summer as a kid, but working in a school fun of teenagers, I started to really experience summer again and do things I absolutely loved. Added to that, the aforementioned road trips. Every weekend in the summer I’m traveling from one place to another, enjoying another adventure.

This weekend Wrong Side of the Camera visited this insane place called Hammond Castle. I guess this should really be Gloucester Fashion File, but hey, Boston is our editorial home, so Boston it is. Anyway, I rolled up to Hammond Castle with my friends. For a bit of introduction, John Hammond was an insanely rich inventor of many things including the remote control, so he made a house that looked like a cross between a Venetian palazzo and the interior of a medieval times restaurant. More on that whole thing in an upcoming entry. Anyway, so we roll up and discover people dressed in all kinds of corsets and leather things that look interesting but really uncomfortable. We all look at each other and think “yes, yes, this is for us.”

We spent a couple of hours wandering around Hammond Castle, exterior and interior, mingling with the characters. We learned about sword fighting, hence the sub-title Inigo Montoya edition. There was singing, there was dancing, comedy, guitar playing, over priced lemonade and a man asked if I wanted him to take his pants off for his photo. A more perfect Sunday could not have been created.

Grab your sword Inigo and let’s go to Hammond Castle and find that six fingered man!!!!

Have fun storming the castle!!!

OK secret divulging time. I… I…. OK. Here goes. I watch 1970s and 1980s Soviet and European gymnastics videos on YouTube. I acknowledge that it is weird. I know. Why do I do this and how did I start?

Well, I’ve been obsessed with gymnastics from an early age. I think it is a beautiful and amazing sport and in the 1970s and 1980s, nobody did it better than the Romanians and the Soviets. Sure year, Mary Lou Retton, but the Soviets had this balletic grace and style that was unbeatable. I love how they always performed to classical music and their performances looked like ballet with some tumbling thrown in. Today, at its best, floor exercise is high energy and fun. At its worst, it is this awkward meld of dance and tumbling.

The old gymnastics videos allow me to study the movements of the performers and get pointers on who to photograph movement. Maybe because the moves were simpler to execute than the ones they do now, it is easier to study their movements. I’m not sure. But it is still fun to study them and then see how it translates when I am taking photos. How I do it is that I set up an imaginary “frame” where I think the photo will happen, a moment when I know that the best movement will happen and then snap at that moment. The action happens within the frame usually. I figure out where the frame is by trial and error, but I am usually right. Eh, well sometimes wrong but I adjust.

Anyway, all of my training (late night YouTube watching) comes in very handy in situations like this: