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Ghosts, Mag Covers, French Chefs and Websites Oh My!!!!

The TOE family is all settled into our new 4 bedroom home in Northwestern Las Vegas ( we even live on a road with a cool name - Spinning Wheel Ave ) Danya and i love it, the kids love it and life is good, no more vagrant gypsy lifestyles for us, the days of 80,000 miles a year are over.  A very sad fact about this house which would come as no suprise to those of you who know us and know how bad our luck is, a family that used to live here had their power turned off because of non payment, the mother paid it that day with 1 minute left in the business day but because it was so close to deadline they told her it wouldnt be turned back on till the next morning, so she went home and the Father put a generator in the garage and ran a cord into the living room so they could watch TV, he forgot to crack the garage door to vent it and sadly they all died later that night from poisonous CO gas, the Mother and Father and their 13 yr old daughter all perished in this house along with several dogs, cats, parrot and chinchilla. In Las Vegas history this has never happened any other time and out of a city of 2 million we get the one house with a potential of being haunted - DOH

So far i am happy to report that i havent visited the insides of any TV sets yet, ill let you know as things develop.

For kind of moving away from the Moto industry i have done a good amount in Moto the last month or so, Lake Whitney i was shooting for Mini Rider magazine for a feature and scored the cover as well, Congratulations go to Ashley Fiolek for her first ever Mini rider cover! Laid out in obligatory pink text and graphics, she may be a girl, but watch out boys, she is making some of you look bad in supermini.

The same weekend i did a photo shoot with Blake Wharton after he won 4 of 5 classes, the subtle but imo, very cool ad will be showing up in Playground mag very soon. Congrats to Blake Wharton and Answer racing. ( Blake repeated that feat the very next week at Oak Hill winning 4 of 5 again. )

Danya and i will be at the Orleans shooting/vending photos both Thursday and Friday for the MiniSX coming up in early May, strobed Minibike photos...get yours right here! Then on Saturday we will be over at Sam Boyd shooting the SX, if you see us dont hesitate to say hello, were missing our moto friends already.

 Speaking of Vegas, the commercial aspect of our photo business has really taken off in a hurry, we lined up a photo shoot with world famous Chef - Hubert Keller at the Mandalay Bay hotel and Casino's well known Fleur De Lys Restaurant, and the wedding bookings are starting to flow in, we love it here in Vegas and we look forward to calling this home for years to come.

For those of you who didnt see our latest press release / mission statement, we are not going to be attending the outdoor nationals or SX in a fulltime capacity anymore, we will attend a few select races but we wont be doing very many ( 1-3 tops ) all the vegas MX events we will still cover, but thats about it.

The good news is that we have moved our focus to location shooting, for those of you who live in the California area ( or anywhere within a days drive of Vegas ) you can hire us to come out to your riding spot for a full days photo shoot, have you ever wanted magazine quality photos of yourself railing a berm, styling off your favorite jump with your gear pristine and the perfect background and lighting just like you see in the magazines? We can make that happen for you, we bring the studio to you. you find that perfect location and we show up and give you the personal attention usually only reserved for the pro's.

 The last bit of news is that we have a totally new and revamped website designed and maintained as always by the lovely Danya, same address all new look, check it out and give us some feedback?  www.TonyScavo.com 

 See you all in Vegas

DAD

After a really long and scary drive over the rockies not long ago ( Vail pas had a "chains only" alert for commercial vehicles ) and since my trailer is perpetually overweight with no brakes it can get a little hectic. we make it home to my mom and dads house for the holidays where we will stay until just after xmas and we head south to Ft worth texas for round 4 of bookoo arenacross.

On the 2nd night of staying here my dad gets up at about 4:40 in the morning and i hear him walk into the bathroom and he is breathing very hard, i yell to him to see if he is allright and he doesnt answer ( he is hard of hearing and his hearing aids werent in ) a minute later he walks out and goes back to his bedroom and i yell again, this time louder...he pauses in his bedroom and walks back out, by this time im standing up in his path to see whats wrong and he is shivering like a leaf and can barely talk, he tells me to call 911.

If any of you have never experienced something like this, let me tell you it is not a good feeling, i thought for sure he was having a heart attack but as it turns out his gall bladder was about to burst and the bile that was leaking into his bloodstream caused an infection and put him into shock and a bad fever, at this point his temperature was about 104 degrees when EMT's arrived at 5 am and because he was shaking so bad telling me that he felt like he was freezing i had piled blankets on top of him and i later felt bad thinking i made his temperature worse by doing so.

Once they get him tot he hospital they pumped antibiotics into him and gave him something for pain, the fever broke for the most part and they admitted him, he has been there for several days now. yesterday they installed a drain in his side to reduce the fluids in his gall bladder and to help the antibiotics do their job of getting rid of the infection in his bloodstream, the surgeon is an asshole, he tried telling dad he could go back to work for two weeks while the fluid drained and then come back to the hospital for elective surgery to remove the gall bladder...its amazing to me that he never bothered to ask my dad what he does for a living.

Dad drives truck for Chrysler corporation, he is in the fleet and drives back and forth from southern indiana and northern michigan on various shipping assignments, he climbs in and out of the cab all day and what if he catches that drain on something ( my dad is 64 years old, has a bum leg and is overweight and a bit clumsy ) and this jackhole wants to send him back to work with a drain flowing bile directly out of his gall bladder into a bag. What if he catches it on something and rips a hole even bigger in his gall bladder and all that bile goes right into his body cavity while on the road? not to mention the drugs they have him on prohibit him from driving anything anyway...Dr's are dumbasses sometimes, no wonder i havent been to one in 6 years.

Dont get me wrong, im thankful they are there, but poor bedside manners contributed to this rant, so here it is!

At any rate, i just wanted to get it off my chest.

 Say a prayer for my dad would ya?, Holidays this year have had a rough start.

Thanks,

TOE

WTF?????

So we drove north after leaving Fresno and round 1 of the bookoo arenacross, we had a little trouble witht he car not starting ( seems like an alternator problem ) and we stop in Stockton for the night at a comfort inn, some work gets done and finally we snuggle in for a nice nap after a long weekend.

 We wake up and notice a denny's restaurant right across the street so we get the kids up and walk over to grab a bite to eat, an hour and a half later we come back and we notice the maids cart is right against our door and immediately im thinking to myself hmmm, something doesnt look right about that, i mean this cart was right against the door and the door was closed.

I walk up and open the door and to my utter disbelief, there sits the maid on our bed, on our laptop and she is looking at a MYSPACE page...WTF????

 She is lucky i didnt grab her by her scrawny neck and throw her out on the highway, how can someone have the nerve to do something like that? she was young...late teens or early twenties, spanish...and when she got up she was stuttering and stammering and apologizing...i told her to get the F^&* out and i called the manager.

 He was about as happy to hear that as i was and the girl probably got fired ( at least i hope she did ) just a warning to the wise, leave your do not disturb sign on your door and make the bed yourself, when towells run out just call for more to the front desk.

 Usually we leave the sign on our door and for some reason this was the one time we forgot, sure enough its the one time something happened...or maybe its just the one time we caught someone!

 Anyway, had to vent...im still pissed about it.

Off Season

Well its that time of year again, Arenacross is less than one week away and thats about all the offseason Danya and i have had, Autograph stock poster shoots, catalogue work, design work and fixing a huge database error that cost us alot of time and money has taken up all the free time we were hoping to have to finish our business plan for the studio.

We are on board to shoot the entire Bookoo Arenacross series again this year and its back to all the travel in the Durango family truckster...also affectionately known as the TOE-Truck. We had alot of fun working with Mike & Gary, Shane, Erin, Becky, Lance and Trevor and April...along with the entire Read family. it will be nice to see them all again.

Having carte blanche to shoot however and wherever i want really makes it fun for me as a photographer, it offers me the opportunity to really push myself with experimentation on things that i just cant do all the time, especially with indoor motocross. Strobes, Gels, time lapse photography, stroboscopic effects, as well as image overlaying are some of the things i plan on doing this year so keep a watch out for some pretty cool stuff ( i hope )

We will still be doing amateur shooting on sunday, although this year we are doing it a bit differently... we will be offering a sign up for those who are interested in images of the race rather than shooting everyone in every moto, being a one day race we found that alot of people just didnt have time to come and look in our books to see what we had, so to reduce our workload and give a more personalized approach to the people who are interested, we will have a sign up on saturday and sunday and possibly one at the host hotel as well.

 After the Yakima round of bookoo Danya and i are heading back to Las Vegas to dig deep into the studio planning, there is alot more to opening a store front business than i anticipated, things i took for granted while working on the road are starting to look easy compared to all the planning it takes to get a really good head start with a studio.

we plan on still catering to the motocross community with product and location shooting, but we will be delving into portrait, wedding and team sports photography as well, hopefully i can stay busy with moto as it is my niche and we can hire a few shooters to do the wedding and team sports stuff, time will tell. The studio will be located in or around the Summerlin area, it is really nice up here with lots of parks and higher end housing, we have met some really nice people up here and i think we will be happy to call this home in the future.

 The kids have been playing with the neighborhood kids and all seem to be getting along well, thats more than we can say for the fighting that went on with the neighbor kids back home in ohio...maybe all the worldly traveling has taught them a little bit of wisdom and they are using it...ok thats my story and im sticking to it, lol  nevermind...cruce just got busted throwing rocks at the other kids, that lasted all of 25 seconds, sheesh 

 Thats it for now, see you at bookoo...dont be shy to say hi to Danya or myself 

October 11

So today is my 2nd day here in vitalmx land, so far it seems pretty cool, when guyb gets the little bugs worked out i think this place could rule the web in popularity...WTG guys, job well done so far. I love waking up in a house here in Las Vegas...for the last year my family and i have done nothing but live in hotels and at the track while shooting, we log around 80,000 miles a year and 50+ races. We are pretty much over the actual traveling, but at the same time we love to move around.  its gonna be hard to leave las vegas right now because this time of the year the weather is so perfect, oh well at least we wont see ohio and snow flying again until just before christmas and then it wont be so bad because we get to go back home to see family we havent seen in 3 months.

 I have been going out nightly on the strip to shoot stock images around that area, it always amazes me that even on a day to day basis the downtown strip seems to change, construction here is perpetual and offers me the greatest variety of juxtaposing angles of any city i have been to. I could shoot here for years and never get bored, but then i still feel that way about shooting motocross, new challenges always arise and its a thrill to overcome them and make the image!

 Danya got a part time job up here as a restaurant manager assistant/waitress and she really likes it, she gets time away to herself and its a change of pace from the grind of seeing nothing but dirt, its upscale so she gets to dress nicely and feel human again, im happy for her.

Kids homeschooling has been fun, Dava was having trouble getting place values and Danya and i were so frustrated with not being able to find a way to teach her, so i tried a visualization technique...i told her to remember every little bit of detail she could remember from her old porch back home in ohio, she told me about the boards that had paint peeling off and how many windows there were, it was very cute watching her squint her eyes to remember...i asked her questions to help her "see" the porch in her mind, then after she gave all the detail she could muster we talked about how could she have possibly remembered all that detail? i told her that her brain was like a big filing cabinet and that even though she didnt realize it, she remembers things that happen to her every day, math is no different, i told her to visualize the place values in her mind and remember the order they came in...in about an hour she finally grasped the concept and still has it a few weeks later.

 See ya in the next blog

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  AZ450Rider Posted:

  12/14/2006 11:05 AM

  TOE,
  
  Sorry to hear about your dad. He is in our prayers.
  
  May your family have a peaceful and joyful Christmas as well as a Happy New Year!
  
  Dan
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  Girlyz Posted:

  11/22/2006 11:45 AM

  Hey TOE!
  Let me kow what your schedule looks like for December. I think Girlyz will be taking you up on that re-shoot if you can find some time.
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  Girlyz Posted:

  11/13/2006 8:31 AM

  Hey!
  I am so happy I have friends now
  Hope BooKoo goes well for you this year. Did you say you are going to be at Cycle Ranch this year?
  Take care
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  Tiki Posted:

  11/8/2006 9:48 AM

  Can I use your computer? I need to check my "Myspace" page?
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  GuyB Posted:

  10/16/2006 5:03 PM

  Hey, glad you dig it. Have fun playing on here...and tell a friend.