Well. This was not the best of days.

I don’t want to get into specific details for a variety of reasons. I think I can get away with this much: I got an emotional voicemail last night about Otherspace, and when I tried to return the call today, the person who called didn’t answer the phone. So I spent the day in a state of anxious anticipation, and now I know I won’t get back in touch with this person until at least Monday. Arg.

And indeed, I woke up feeling poorly this morning, so I called in sick to work. Rather, e-mailed in sick. (Technology is amazing.) And because I was trying to return this phone call, I spent the day mostly in nervous anticipation, getting little done.

I did manager to draw a couple of heads (as practice for my upcoming comic) and write about five hundred words of outline for my young adult novel. I haven’t been able to figure out exactly what to write or where to start, so I figured I’d write a detailed outline and see where that takes me. A successful local writer writes outlines that are about forty percent as long as the finished novel, she says. Personally, when I have written to an outline, I’ve been able to write more easily and more directly. It’s just not as much fun as picking up a plot thread and following it to see where it’ll take me. But if this gets the book written, I’ll do it.

I also watched the first disc of Koi Kaze, a recent anime romantic drama about a thirty-year-old man who sort of falls in love with his fifteen-year-old younger sister. Which sounds either like a wacky comedy or a dreadful quasi-porn title; it’s decidedly neither. He’s very emotionally closed off, and she’s just moved in after their parents divorced ten years ago. She idolizes her older brother, and she causes him to actually feel his emotions. So when he starts having feelings for her, he’s even more conflicted than he would be otherwise. He feels terrible about what he’s feeling, but then, he’s feeling. Good but bad. And all presented with the utmost delicacy and respect for the subject matter. Highly recommended, if you like a series with no sweatdrops or giant robots.

Oh, and there’s more VR story. I’m getting fairly close to the end. We’re within a few thousand words, I think.

Well. This has been a rather bad day, with a good ending.

The day started with insults. All digital: e-mails and forum posts making wild assumptions or withholding information. Made me stalk around a bit, alone, to let off some steam before replying graciously. I was apologetic for causing any frustrations or making mistakes. Cleared up what misunderstandings I could, and turned away from a discussion that got nasty. It was that or get really angry.

On top of that, after looking over my finances recently, I came to an inescapable conclusion: I can’t afford to keep Otherspace going at the moment. So I e-mailed the Otherspace team this morning to inform them of this, and that I hope to start things up again in a month or so.

Man, that was unpleasant. I know my animators expect a regular paycheck, so if I’m not following through on that…I feel bad. I feel like I’m not doing my job. And I’m not, really; I should have handled my finances better. But, well, I didn’t. So here we are. I’m not hugely depressed, just mildly disappointed in myself.

Work went pretty well, and afterwards I swung by the grocery store for essentials, then home, where one of my Alibris books had arrived. It was Tom Peters’ The Brand You 50, which I spent much of the evening reading.

I’m taking its advice to heart. Which is: if you’re a white-collar worker, your job is not guaranteed. Heck, it’s almost guaranteed to not be around in ten years. So, go back to the way it was two hundred years ago: you’re a colonial, a pioneer, and you have to chart your own destiny. View yourself as a company; you have to think about how to market yourself, position yourself, do research, etc.

My initial response: I wrote down all of my major projects on index cards, and ended up with eight of them. I tore up half of them. I now have four projects on my plate: Writing my young adult novel, drawing a comic, becoming the Paranoid Masochistic Build Engineer for Syllable, and keeping up with Otherspace duties.

Of course, that latter won’t be much of a chore for the next month or so….

Okay, so, what have I been up to lately, you all may well ask? Or not; some of my best friends don’t read this blog. Fie! Fie, I say! Whatever that means.

Anyvay, I’m in an odd mood. I feel a need to describe my weekend, but it all seems so uninteresting, even to me. So, how to make it interesting? Let’s see what I can do.

Last week, I made plans with my parents to have them over on Saturday. This was to celebrate my new oven, which they graciously bought for me and was to be delivered Saturday morning. Why a new oven? Well, as I was warming it up about a month ago, the top heating element glowed white hot and began to spark. This struck me as probably outside of the normal operational range, so I switched it off; after that, the top element refused to even get tepid, no matter how hot the bottom element was.

So. Me and my parents met at Best Buy, where we picked out a nice, new oven: fast-heating range, time delay so you can put, er, something in your oven in the morning and have it switch on at 4:00. I can’t think of what I would want to place in a cold oven for eight hours before getting cooked, but who knows? Could come in handy.

Two guys showed up at 9:30 Saturday morning to install it; neither spoke English well, but they were quick and efficient. My old oven was out and my new oven was in, clock blinking, within fifteen minutes. Amazing. I signed, and off they went.

By the time my parents arrived, I had baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies. The oven works great, though it seems to be a bit hot. My parents and I had a great time, as usual, just chatting. For a good four hours. I baked a pizza and we just enjoyed each others’ company.

I spent Sunday wrestling with backups. Oh, the backups themselves are fine; I was testing them out. Which translated to performing a backup on Yasuo (my G5), then wiping the hard drive completely clean, re-installing the OS, and restoring from backups. I have a little script that restores the backups, but I hadn’t tested it yet.

So the morning was devoted to checking the backups, performing a local restoration of a few files, then a complete user account. Everything went smoothly. Then I held my breath and wiped the hard drive. Installed Tiger. Ran the restore script. Didn’t quite work right for my main account, so I tweaked the backup script and ran it again. Huzzah! Success.

Well, not quite. I had to re-install Microsoft Office and various Adobe applications from the CDs, and I can’t open Matrix Experiments Lain in Adobe Premiere. But everything else seems to work pretty smoothly.

But it’s a good feeling, knowing that even if I suffer a catastrophic loss of my hard drive, I can restore everything on my computer within a couple of hours.

Once that was done, I relaxed with Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team. It’s blowing me away. It’s a full-scale Gundam series, despite having only thirteen episodes. The protagonist’s views on war evolve, he faces moral crises, there’s a lot of great giant robot action, and there’s even a romance that’s much stronger than any I’ve seen in other Gundam series. Fantastic anime.

Spent most of today at home. My parents bought me an oven for my birthday (may sound like an odd gift, but I requested it after my old oven died), so I baked some scones and worked on a few technical things.

…yeah, this is a pretty anaemic entry. But it’s the end of the weekend, and I just don’t feel like blogging. Haven’t felt like it for a while. Don’t have much to say, really.

Been watching a lot of anime lately. Some might chuckle at this and ask, “Aren’t you always?” Actually, I haven’t been watch much at all. Just not been in the mood.

But I’ve come across a bunch of oddball anime that really intrigues me. And perhaps that’s why: One of the reasons I’ve been intrigued by anime is because it’s been on the edges of society. When I first got into anime, the only place I knew of that actually sold anime locally was a Sam Goody, and that was a single shelf of VHS tapes (mostly Dragonball Z). I remember the day when Amazon.com started an anime branch of their DVD store…and it held about twenty discs total, as I recall. Now that anime has become increasingly mainstream, it’s lost that magic, that unique quality.

Which would explain why I leave my BitTorrent client running almost 24/7, downloading odd anime that hasn’t appeared over here yet. Cases in point:

• Oseam, a Korean animated film with unfortunately simple character designs, but a tremendous story. It reminds me of Grave of the Fireflies, though in many ways I prefer Oseam. In Grave, the fate of the children is pretty darn clear all the way through. In Oseam, until about five minutes from the end I didn’t know how it would end. It was pretty clear the finale would be bittersweet at best, but I could not have predicted that ending. And boy did it hurt, which says a lot.
• Practically the opposite of that is the first episode of Daddy Long Legs, part of the ”World Masterpiece Theater” program that’s been playing fifty-episode anime adaptations of children’s books for decades in Japan (Miyazaki worked on several of these series). Daddy Long Legs tells the story of a teenaged orphan girl living in New York around the turn of the century, who is given a scholarship to a prestigious high school. She is spirited and bright but rather clumsy, so we follow her life in the style of Anne of Green Gables. Great animation, in that simplified style similar to good anime of the time. There’s a good amount of re-used animation, and poses are often held for a long time. But it looks so good–all the characters are on-model and lovingly designed. Very solid anime.
• Kochikame is the longest-running manga in ”Weekly Shonen Jump,” which says a lot. I watched a random episode from a recent anime adaptation, and unfortunately it’s a clunker. Minimal animation, unnecessarily bright digital colors, and jokes that are supposed to be funny because they’re supposed to be funny. I turned it off after ten minutes.
• But compare that to Kamichu!, by the director and writer of the brilliant R.O.D OVA and TV series. Kamichu! is a junior high drama/comedy about a shy junior high girl who is suddenly granted the powers of a traditional Japanese goddess. She gathers a small circle of friends as she learns how to control her powers. As far as I can see from the first episode, it’s partly a coming-of-age story as she learns self-confidence, as well as a romance as she haltingly pursues a guy who’s hopeless with girls. Sounds like a mediocre modern anime, but this is all presented with such deft direction, such subtle animation, and such smart writing, that I thoroughly enjoyed every scene.
• After War: Gundam X, on the other hand, suffers the ignominy of being the only Gundam series (except the first) to be cancelled. I’ve watched the first three episodes, and I can’t really see why: it’s slick, it’s intriguing, it’s funny, it’s got plenty of good mecha battles and strong characters, and it has some interesting things to say about the destructiveness of war. Seems like solid Gundam material to me.
• Ditto 08^th MS Team, which at least has a good reputation. Toshihiro Kawamoto’s character designs are as pleasant to look at as were his designs for Cowboy Bebop and Mighty Space Miners, and while the story is taking a while to develop, it appears to be moving along at a steady pace. I’m enjoying it thus far, two episodes in.

And that’s it so far. If I get some time, I’ll write a description of my trip to D.C. on Sunday. Thrill! As nothing exciting occurs.

Well. It’s been quite a week.

I had intended to spend last Sunday wandering through the museums in D.C. I suffer from a common affliction: the native who never actually visits the local famous landmarks.

But when my eyes opened Sunday morning, I realized that it was September 11^th, and I did not want to go into D.C. on the anniversary of 9/11 if I didn’t have to.

So I stayed home and worked my way through various chores and responsibilities. I even went on an hour-long run around town. As I huffed and puffed down the street, I came upon a park trail, which I took down a beautiful tree-covered path, under an overpass, along a rocky stream that chuckled at me as I ran. Heaven.

On Tuesday, I left work early for an appointment with a local company that rents out office space. The company’s offices were quite nice, but she didn’t have the sort of space I need (collaborative space for eight to ten people). But when she took my card and remarked at how cool it looks, she asked more about Otherspace, and she ended up grilling me for fifteen minutes about how I started it up, what we plan to do, how we’re getting by, etc. She was tickled pink at our whole venture, and she confided that she knows nothing about animation. When I left, I encouraged her to stop by our website to see our artwork, and she replied, “Are you kidding? I’m going right back to my desk to do just that!”

So. That made me feel pretty good. I’ve read that a good litmus test of your idea is how excited it makes other people. Well then, I guess we’re a guaranteed success.

(No, I don’t really think that.)

Anyvay. Thursday night, I took my parents out to dinner for their birthdays, and showed them My Neigbhors The Yamadas. They loved it. I loved it. I love them. ‘Twas all good.

Then Friday night I and my parents went to the Kennedy Center to see the Lily Cai Dance Company. They presented three dances: a traditional Chinese dance, a modern dance set to the music of Mahler, and a Chinese ribbon dance. All three were breathtaking: beautiful, sensuous, captivating. Each girl had complete control over her body, curving it into beautiful shapes.

And now it’s Saturday. Shortly after waking, I emptied my inbox, watered the pots in my back garden, posted more VR story, then drove to a nearby farmer’s market where I bought two peppers and three apples. Mundane, you may well think. But I brought them home and washed them, and bit in to one of the apples. It was like a dessert. Sweet as a candy bar, full of complex flavor, and perfectly crisp. Every bite snapped. This is the benefit of locally grown, organic produce: amazing food. (And cheap! $3.80 total.)

In half an hour, I’ll head out to this week’s Otherspace meeting, which promises to be a short one. Then back here, where I plan to do laundry, clean house, run, check my financial account balances, pay bills, buy a couple books online, clean up my to-do lists, do my backups, and mow the front lawn. For a start.

Looks like it’ll be quite a day to cap off quite a week.

Okay. Okay, okay, okay. I’m not dead. I didn’t come down with the Mexican Whooping Grippe. I was not abducted by cute, big-eyed alien girls and whisked away on a wild interstellar adventure. I did not travel to a distant land to avenge the death of my master. I did not stumble into a giant robot fight and get caught up in a war. I did not lose myself, and I did not find myself.

I’ve just been busy. More soon.

Wow. Summer continues to impress with warm beauty every day. Fabulous.

Meanwhile, quite a bit’s been hapenning. I’ve been hunting around for a renter on Craig’s List, and got a phone call on Thursday from a woman, asking if she could look at the place. She seemed reasonable enough, so she arranged to come over that evening. Turned out to be a very nice woman who liked the place, and wanted to move in. So I accepted. She’s moving in around October 1^st.

So, renter problem solved. That was easy.

Then today, we had several fairly major crises at work, and I had to smooth some rumpled feathers of people who seem to think that CM should be all-knowing and prepared for every possible situation. That was frustrating, but at least it was over quickly; I don’t have any major problems hanging over my head.

Except I do; the customer’s coming in a week and a half from now for a big meeting, and I’ll be chairing the meeting. For the first time. Gulp. I know roughly what I need to do—describe our agenda, write down Action Items as they come in, then re-iterate the Action Items at the end—but it’s still a strange and amorphous duty that honestly freaks me out.

But it’s not all bad, by any stretch. Just stressful. Which may be what’s driving me to come home and run for 45 minutes practically every night. Honestly, it shocks me that I enjoy it so much. Exercise should be hard.

Anyvay, apologies for the rambling of this entry; it’s late and I’m tired and I want to get to bed. So I will.

Brainstormed a novel. Chatted with friends. Proceessed everything in my inbox. Made hard-cooked eggs for breakfast tomorrow, so I can start the day with some protein as well as my usual orange juice and Clif Bar. Did a load of laundry. Ran for forty minutes, and as I jogged down my neighborhood’s sidewalk, I gulped in the fresh air and gazed at the star-studded curtain of the night sky.

Perfect.

From June through August, summer’s been a crotchety old man. Not villainous, just a general obstruction to good times. It’s been too hot, or too muggy, or constantly raining, or some combination of the three (occasionally all of them). Never to such an extreme that anyone can seriously complain; no heat waves or typhoons. Just generally unpleasant.

Then this past week it made up for its past sins. Perhaps it realized everyone would grumble, so it decided to clean up its act. Every day has had a high of about 82, with a light breeze and a few decorative clouds dotting the sky. Perfect.

This is usually the point at which the blogger makes an amusing counter-point that the week’s been terrible, but I’ve actually had a great time. Went to my parents on Sunday and watched Ong-Bak, as decribed in my last entry. Last night, after a long day at work, I stopped by Suncoast and bought a variety of DVDs, including My Neighbors the Yamadas, and watched that last night.

Wow. What a beautiful, touching, funny movies that is. Gorgeous. You’d never know it was by the guy who directed Grave of the Fireflies, “film most likely to make you slit your wrists.” Though, now that I’ve seen all four of his movies, I suspect that Grave was more of a serious project that he did because he felt it was important. It was a story that needed to be told. It wasn’t his story, after all; it was an adaptation of Akiyuki Nosaka’s short story. Pom Poko has its serious side, but it’s at least as much a comedy, and Only Yesterday is more like a romantic drama. Neither have near the weight of Grave, and both generally maintain a light-hearted tone throughout.

Whereas The Yamadas is a straight-out comedy. Oh, there’s one dramatic sequence that lasts a few minutes, but the rest of it is a series of unconnected sketches from the lives of these characters. It’s not even remotely realistic. And it’s thoroughly entertaining.

In any event. I had another long day at work today, followed by writer’s group. I was dreading that a bit because folks would be reviewing my preliminary notes for The Modern Fantastic, and while they’re all great, I wanted to gird myself for their criticism. Not surprisingly, I received lots of great feedback that will undoubtedly make the book much better than it would otherwise have been. I came home energized and ready to write.

So I re-watched My Neighbors the Yamadas. Great film.