It's late, and I'm tired. So, very briefly:

• Lunch with my Mom today at a Chinese restaurant very near my work. Much fun.
• A productive day at work, if boring.
• Wrote a bit more of the VR story. Posted some.
• At a friend's excellent suggestion, organized an impromptu Guy's Night Out for tomorrow night. Can't wait.

Tomorrow should be interesting, as I have a phone call with Saalon, an Otherspace meeting, plus GNO. Plus a few regular chores, such as backups. I'm looking forward to this; it's just going to make for a busy day.

Speaking of backups, tomorrow is the last Saturday of the month, so I'll be backing up the server, and burning backups to DVD. So, tomorrow will be even busier than usual.

Again, I really am looking forward to tomorrow; there are far, far worse fates than spending a day talking with friends, directing an animation team, and watching cheesy movies with other friends.

Another quiet day at work, helping out a few people and generally organizing things. I plan to spend tomorrow tucking in to at least one major project, which at this point will be a relief. Finally, something to do!

I had intended to spend the evening running errands, but once I got home, nuked a frozen dinner, and got into a comfortable chat with Saalon, I decided against it. Didn't have an immediate need for any of it. I can do it tomorrow.

Or this weekend, unexpectedly, as Saalon's not coming down as planned. His trip has been postponed until next weekend, as he's plum tuckered out and needs a weekend to regroup. So, I have an unexpectedly empty weekend. Whatever shall I do? Lounge around doing nothing, I'm sure.

Yeah, right.

Spent the rest of the evening on various Otherspace business. Got the proof for the Summer Storm poster, and checked over the sites I'll use to order business cards and t-shirts next week (I'm low on funds, so will have to wait until I get my August rent payment). I also uploaded our financial information for the second quarter of this year, posted it, and printed it out to distribute to everyone on Saturday.

Briefly: I paid the employees $2,100 last quarter. Phew. That's not a surprise, though; it varies from about $1,500 to a little over $2,000 every quarter. It'll be really interesting to watch this quarter, because of all the expenses for Otakon plus whatever money we get for selling all this merchandise.

Sure is fun, though. I'm going to be selling merchandise of characters I thought up a few months ago. Cool!

(Note: I 've uploaded an entry for yesterday.)

This morning was brutally hot, as it has been for the previous couple of days. Walk outside and summer sits on your shoulders, weighing you down, slapping you with heat. As I drank my orange juice this morning, I looked at my backyard and realized I hadn't watered in a few days. Everything looked pretty good—I have a few pots, and the plants in them weren't collapsed like dead soldiers—but I knew they'd need water.

Well. Work's been very quiet lately, so I slipped home at lunch and spent half an hour watering. This might strike some as a horrid, boring chore, but I enjoyed it. Fun to imagine the grateful plants slurping up this life-giving liquid: Thank you, benevolent god, for this sustenance! they might have said.

OK, maybe I stood out in the sun too long.

Anyvay. Went back to work, helped out with some computer problems (and that's fun, too, since I know what I'm talking about and can just calmly offer suggestions), and by the end of the day was very much ready to go home. Stopped off at a nearby grocery store, Wegman's, and grabbed half a cart of prosaic grocery store items: beef, broccoli (guess what Chinese dish I'm making this weekend?), more orange juice, paper towels, a catfish filet, band-aids, bird seed, cotton balls. The latter were named something ridiculously generic like "soft swabs"...and I looked closely and discovered that it's because they're not 100% cotton any more; part synthetic. 80% recycled steel wool, for all I know.

I mention this list because when I'm checking out, I sometimes look at my purchases and wonder what they say about me. If I have friends coming over, seventy percent of my purchases are potato chips and soda, and if I'm unlucky enough to also be buying a carton of ice cream for myself and a box of stack of frozen dinners, I feel like yet another unhealthy bachelor.

But I can't very well pull out pictures of my refrigerator and show the clerk the normal set of vegetables, fresh eggs, and meats in there, and that my cupboards are mostly oils, various sugars, flour, rice, etc. Because I get the oddest looks when I do that.

(Kidding!)

So I took my half-full cart outside...into the pouring rain. It was as though God had said to himself, "Shoot! I forgot to water Virginia!" and dumped a bucket on us. If it had been raining any harder, I would have been looking for a twister.

I looked at my basket: two full loads there. I looked back at the rain, and said to myself, "Oh well." Grabbed two handfuls of bags, ran to the truck, tossed the bags in, and by the time I was back, I was completely soaked through. The return was more leisurely; the rain couldn't get me any more wet. I was tempted to strip off my shirt when I got into the car, but (A) the sight of my white, naked chest would frighten passing motorists, and (B) I just don't think it's the right thing to do in public. We have shirts for a reason. I got into the truck, turned up the heat, and I was fine.

Got home, looked at the waterlogged garden, and thought: I'm so glad I came home from work at lunch to water my garden. Oh well; I really did enjoy myself, and who can live their lives at full efficiency?

Then, a good evening: changed into dry clothes, re-uploaded the Summer Storm artwork for a poster (and there's a story), made a few phone calls, and watched two episodes of a Flash Gordon serial (and there's another story).

And then, bed.

Brennen's been posting a multi-part essay (see part 1 and part 2) about the state of American primary education. He's working very hard to make a case with which I generally agree. However, I want to argue two points.

One:

Our culture has codes of conduct. Note that I don't mean arbitrary cultural beliefs; I'm talking about the standards embodied by the idea of dressing nicely when meeting with a customer. It's a matter of good culture. We encourage kids to avoid swearing just like we encourage them to comb their hair.

Why? Because these things are important. Culture is important. When you belong to a group, it's important to respect the cultural norms of that group.

I like the Rule of St. Benedict, because Benedict addresses these sorts of issues in a beautifully practical way: Societies need simple rules, and humans in those societies needs to humble themselves to obey those rules (unless harmful). The best societies mute power, and this is one of the ways in which they do that.

(Similarly, allowing any and all language unleashes those who use language to abuse others, both directly and indirectly. We all know people who, if given the chance, won't shut up, abusing this power. Children have a particularly strong tendency towards this behavior.)

Anyvay. Two:

The problem here, I think, is a matter of scale.

Brennen describes the democratic and free-form Tamariki School as a school that, overall, works in the way he'd like. I agree. However, as he points out, Tamariki has around sixty pupils and nine paid adults.

What happens when you have to serve, not sixty kids, but six thousand? Will you be able to afford the same adult-student ratio, and will all the adults be as good teachers as the ones at Tamariki? No.

So, how do you ensure that the poor teachers at least get across the basics? Hand them a textbook and say, "Make sure the kids learn at least this much."

Seriously, I think that education of the sort Brennen is advocating does not scale.

Note that this can be okay, depending on the type of education you want. If you want a holistic education that prepares a child ethically and philosophically, you can't find it in public education. That sort of thing simply doesn't scale up, from what I can see.

This is why I'd like to see public education become much more focused on skills. In my opinion, public education works best when it's teaching something relatively straightforward, rather than coaching a child in concepts of freedom, personal responsibility, etc.

(Put another way, asking why public education can't be like Tamariki is akin to asking why McDonald's can't serve six-course French meals. French cuisine works on a restaurant-by-restaurant basis, but not when you're trying to serve fifty million customers a day.)

At least, that's my take on it. Thoughts?

Hot day. As soon as I stepped outside, summer wrapped me in a thick blanket of heat and humidity. I practically staggered under its oppressiveness. More is expected tomorrow.

Which means...what, exactly? Par for the course in D.C. Our summers can be vicious brutes. A lot of people around here talk wistfully of moving to the Carolinas, where you still get the seasons but summers aren't as nasty. Of course, they never move. D.C. has a double-whammy, two gravitic pulls: Politics and the Pentagon. Some member of your family is either stationed here, or serving a political party here. Of course, once your tour of duty is up or your party falls out of favor, you'll move...but you'll move to be with your family in Oklahoma. The Carolinas are the greener grass on the other side of the fence from D.C.

Boy, you can tell I wrote 547 words of fiction tonight, and in forty minutes.

Anyvay. Can't sum up the day with any single word. Work was a grey blur; I accomplished quite a few jobs of various importance, but there's nothing immediate or urgent drawing my attention. In fact, I spent a lot of the day working on things to prepare for the future. This is good, obviously, but it doesn't focus the mind like a good emergency.

I came home determined to make some progress on home renovations, which has lapsed for a couple of months now, really. I got sick of the old Venetian blinds in my room yesterday, tore them down, and put up the curtains that had sat on the floor for months. That emboldened me to work on the house tonight. I don't like to paint, but I had a few bits of trim and such that needed a coat or two of Ultra Pure White. So I taped them up, laid down old newspapers, popped a can of paint, and began painting.

...And enjoyed myself immensely. I had fun, and I've never had fun painting before. Perhaps it had to do with the empty house, me alone and the only person around to actually do anything, and actually doing it. Perhaps it was the simple success of accomplishing a task, right now. To quote a Terry Pratchett character: "She liked digging pits. You know where you are when you're digging a pit."

Then iTunes began playing Mozart's "Ave verum Corpus," which is my signal to start writing. So I did: 547 words of my modern fantasy novel. I'm now a hundred words shy of three thousand words, which is about 5%.

I guess it has been a good day.

Hey, I managed to update every weekday last week! Hurray for me.

Saturday was a quiet, lazy day, though "lazy" for me means that I completed ten tasks instead of twenty.

My primary goal this weekend is to catch up on Gundam Seed Destiny, so I watched a handful of episodes yesterday. I'm now up to episode 32 (out of 50, probably), so I 'm now well into the main plot. The show is finally establishing some solid characterization for one of the main characters who, up to now, has mostly just been a jerk.

But I'm impressed with Destiny thus far. I think it's one of the better Gundam shows, which says a lot. It helps that it's a dark show, and Gundam is often best when it's flat-out serious.

I also made some Beef with Broccoli, thanks to a recently-purchased 1960's book on Chinese cuisine. I haven't been able to screw up any of the dishes yet, and the Beef with Broccoli turned out well (but a bit too salty). All these dishes are tremendously easy to make, too; just slice up some meat, slice up some vegetables, toss 'em in an oiled pan for a few minutes at appropriate intervals, and you're done.

Sasha the Space Corps Boy just left my house, where we had a great time watching the new Appleseed movie (I'm now annoyed by the reviews that sniffed at its mediocre plot; it's little more than a high-powered action movie, but it does a great job at being one. The plot is somewhat complex, but this is not a deep movie, and it never pretends to be. That's why there are mind-blowing action scenes literally every ten minutes.)

Let me back up. I had planned to have a mini-Redemption party at my house tonight, but nobody could make it. That was a good thing; I was feeling exhausted from this week anyway, and in fact came home early and slept for most of the afternoon. But Sasha called, saying that he'd be able to drop by, and I was thrilled that I'd be able to see him again.

So he stopped by, and we caught up, watched Appleseed, and swapped music. A very good thing, if just to spend some time with a good friend.

He also asked if I could drive him to Otakon, which I agreed to. Amusingly, after I attended Otakon alone last year (and suffered for it; cons are much less fun when you're alone), this year I'll be attending with six friends. Again, this is a very good thing.

...But, no, that's not going to happen. I spent all evening on the phone doing business with Saalon, and vegging out in front of MST3K ("The Killer Shrews"), exhaustion seeping into my bones like dry rot. I'm beat. I'm so beat that I'm calling off a bunch of my commitments for this weekend, and plan to spend the next few days recharging.

I need it. Lots of good stuff this week, but too much of it. I feel like I'm burning a candle from four ends.

(I did manage to do a little weeding in the garden, and go through all the mail that had piled up since Monday. So, things got done, just not as much as I'd hoped. Which, of course, is typical, so why does this situation always disappoint me?)

The front page of today's Wall Street Journal carries the story of a six-year-old who competes in sheep-riding competitions. That's the entire story.

Slow news day, hmm?

(A real post later, I hope.)

This was the last day of the certification audit at work. As yesterday, I just had to wait for information requests, and today, I received none. I did attend the final briefing, at which I received a round of applause for my efforts.

So. A good day.

I arrived home, ate dinner, started a load of laundry, and received a phone message from a member of my role-playing group, who asked if we could switch role-playing to tonight. I glanced at the clock, swallowed the last gulp of my dinner, called him back, and accepted. I raced out to his place and they spent nearly three hours shooting cops (they're members of the Mafia). Quite fun, though they've worked their characters into a corner: everyone hates them and they've been thrown into jail. I'll have to come up with a way for them to get out and get on with saving the world.

And that's been pretty much the entire day. I'd hoped to spend some of tonight recharging, but I can do that tomorrow night. Well, after I call Saalon to go over the Otherspace stuff, and before my big party Friday night.

This is turning into quite a week.

What a peculiar day.

I returned home from the game last night at midnight, trudged upstairs...and felt heat like an oven was left on. Now, my oven doesn't work, and it's not upstairs. Uh-oh. I went back downstairs and realized: Yesterday, I switched the A/C off so I could talk to a friend outside while standing next to the A/C unit and he wouldn't think I was standing next to a running jet engine. I forgot to switch the A/C back on. That was late at night, so the house had stayed cool that night, but after the heat of the day, the upstairs felt like the Mojave at noon. I switched the A/C on, and it began to cool down a bit, but it takes awhile. Ah well; this is what shorts are for.

But I felt bad, because my roommate had come home that evening and had to suffer with a hot house all day. I'd also forgotten to switch off my bedtime alarm (my computer plays Mozart's "Ave verum Corpus" at 9:00 p.m. each night, to remind me to stop what I'm doing), so that was softly playing Beethoven. Not the worst thing to be trapped in a house with, but still, a situation I wish I'd avoided.

This morning, I forced myself awake at 6:00 a.m. so I could get in to work by 7:30 so I could make a presentation at 8:00. Managed to shove myself through the motions until I got to work, where professionalism took over, and I brightly took my paperwork over to the meeting room: Nobody was there. I tried the meeting room next door: Full of people I'd never seen before. Hmmm.

I eventually made my way to the receptionist, who told me they were meeting in another building entirely. Ah; it would have been nice if I'd been informed this. So I marched over there, walked in...and was politely told that they were in the middle of a particular set of work and I wouldn't be needed until 10:30. Oh.

A wonderful start to the day, which had the following general form: I would spend ten-minute bursts receiving information, entering it into their system, and printing out information. Then, I'd spend the next several hours waiting for more information. I couldn't start anything else of importance, as they needed me able to respond to requests quickly. So I spent the vast majority of the day in a holding pattern. Odd.

But by arriving at 8:00 and eating lunch at my desk, I could leave at 4:00, stop by the grocery store, and be home by 5:00, in time to catch up on chores (bring the garbage can around back, empty the dishwasher, refill the bird feeders, water the pots in the garden), make a quick dinner of pan-seared tilapia and corn, and bang this out, before heading off to writer's group at 7:00.

(Those chores are odd things; I was always afraid that I'd get intensely bored by them, want to fob them off on other people. But no, not yet, not with my own house. Maybe someday I'd let other people do these things, if I simply don't have the time, but it would be a sad response to a need.)

Writer's Group was sparsely attended—just me and two others—and we discussed the need for more content. After batting around a few ideas, someone suggested each person writing a story based on a photograph. I volunteered, and just sent everyone a link to this photograph:

What germ of story does that conjure up to you?

Tonight, I met my Dad at McDonald's, then hopped on a bus which took us to the fabulous D.C. subway system, which whisked us downtown to D.C., where we joined the crowds of teeming, streaming humanity entering RFK stadium for a Washingtion Nationals baseball game.

I have been to a baseball game in over ten years, so I obviously haven't been to a Nationals game yet. I had a great time. The seats were big, we had a good view of the action (past third base, but only a few rows from the field). My Dad was great company, as usual. He provided lots of information from his encyclopedic knowledge of baseball, while I joked a bit and offered a few obvious insights: "That was a bad play." "He keeps pitching 'em in the dirt!"

There were some detractions: The food was expensive (a beer cost $8, and no, I didn't buy any; I stuck to $4 cups of lemonade and $4.50 small hot dogs). A mother in front of us kept standing up to hand drinks to her kids or talk to the person behind her, blocking our view. Plus, a few nearby fans had had a few too many $8 beers. But these were all minor. I'd like to go again this year.

My garden is looking much improved. My parents came over today with a load of plants that they had yanked from their own garden. We all pitched in and planted veritable miles of pachysandra and Virginia creeper, plus several hostas and impatiens. Kind of them, plus it filled out my garden nicely. Can't wait to lay down some mulch now.

We also watched New Police Story, Jackie Chan's latest movie. As Saalon expected, it's a return to Jackie's roots of solid, amazing action movies. Instead of typical Hollywood fluff (twenty minutes of goofball comedy for every minute of action), this has tons of character development and tense scenes interspersed with some of the better fight sequences I've seen in Jackie's films. Very dark and serious, too, which is a break from typical Jackie Chan films, but a welcome one (heck, Miracles is one of my favorite Jackie movies, and it's quite a departure from his norm).

Meanwhile, we've finished the Summer Storm animatic, which I've broken down into shots. I feel much more in control of Summer Storm than Matrix Experiments Lain, partly because I know more of what I'm doing this time around. Can't wait to see where this goes.

I accomplished absolutely nothing yesterday, aside from the Otherspace meeting. I think I was exhausted from the stress (!) of finishing Matrix Experiments Lain (which isn't completely finished; I'm going to clean up a few things before burning it to DVD). So I mainly chatted online yesterday. Felt good.

Geh. Accidentally deleted my journal entry for today.

Briefly: Got DVD case in the mail, but it was the wrong size. Everyone involved was extremely helpful. Can't complain. Wrote overwrought metaphor concerning this.

Saalon's helping me edit Summer Storm, which means I'll have less creative control but more free time. I feel this is worth the trade.

I'm keeping pretty well on top of things, so I'm feeling pretty darn good.

Also, note more VR story to the left.

Teriyaki chicken and Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Stars—an excellent combination which I enjoyed last night at my parents' house. I try to make it over there about once a week; it's my duty as a son, and fortunately, I genuinely enjoy their company. So we ate and watched Twinkle, Twinkle, which is a Jackie Chan film in the same sense that Raiders of the Lost Ark is a John Rhys-Davies film. Jackie's in it, and he has a few scenes (including an amazing fight in a Pepsi warehouse), but he's in no sense the star. It's an ensemble movie, mostly starring the Seven Fortunes and Sammo Hung. But it was definitely fun, worth watching.

Today I feel much like I did yesterday: like a wrung-out dishrag. The stress (!) of the first half of the week has shifted my brain into second gear. I can work, and talk, and be normal, but my creativity fuel level is near empty.

Which means one thing: Lots and lots of anime.

It's funny how the most thrilling, exhilirating moments of your life are also the ones most full of stress.

(I don't like that word, stress. It's a suspiciously modern term, and it smells like a modern excuse for something. Why did nobody in human history note a feeling of psychological stress until 1942?)

Last night, myself and an animator worked furiously to finish Matrix Experiments Lain in time for the Otakon submission deadline. The animation still needed to be tweaked here and there to eliminate stray lines and blemishes that had crept into the cels and gone unnoticed. Then, I had to render it several times and burn it to disc. Then I checked the disc on my laptop and found that one of the movie files was corrupted. So I burned it again. Then I checked the submission guidelines and found that they wanted a README.TXT file on the disc. So I burned it again.

But THAT ONE STAYED UP! (Sorry; Monty Python reference.)

So, as of midnight last night, I tossed Matrix Experiments Lain into my bag so I could mail it today. Huzzah. It's not completely final; I'll show it to the rest of the studio on Saturday, and they can suggest any final changes before I bless the animation as complete. Then I'll burn DVDs for everyone.

Phew. It's good for it to be over, and I felt wonderful accomplishment in completing it, but...man, I didn't like the last-minute rush. As I noted to Saalon last night, rendering a video is somewhat like compiling software code; though it's an automatic process, inevitably the compiled product has bugs that have to be fixed. I now plan to set aside a large amount of time—say, a month—for rendering Summer Storm.

I just don't want all that stress.

As I mentioned a few entries ago, I hate deadlines. In fact, I've organized Otherspace to minimize deadlines. However, we've had a deadline thrust upon us: if we want to premiere our animation at Otakon, the submitted disc has to be in their sweaty otaku hands by this Monday (a switch from the previous submission date of tomorrow. Luxury!).

So I got the last of the backgrounds last night, inserted them into their various shots, and everything looked great...then I leaned forward and peered at the preview window. The final shot had some kind of dust on the artwork. It didn't show up until there was a fully-colored background behind it. It was unquestionably there, though, so I IMed one of the animators and she set to fixing it.

Meanwhile, I set to recording a footstep. Should be easy; I set up my iBook to record the sound of a shoe hitting the wall. This should have been close enough to the sound I wanted. The recording was utterly silent. I futzed around with the settings for awhile before I realized that the iBook's microphone is apparently broken. Ah well; I could do without the footstep.

The animator fixed the dusty drawings and sent them to me. I imported them, and they looked great, and then I noticed that the import process had changed their size and position on the screen. Arrrg. This is part of a long animated shot involving about twenty drawings, each meticulously placed. It was going to take quite awhile to re-position them.

So I saved the project, switched on BitTorrent to download another episode of Gundam Seed Destiny, and leapt into bed with a gardening book and a biography of John Adams. The phone rang; it was Saalon, and we spent a pleasant hour or two chatting about role-playing and Gundam series. Afterwards, I climbed back into bed and fell asleep.

A good day, really.

The demon Despair attacked again today, though not as fiercely as last week. This time, it appeared as I drove to the animation meeting. It brought up every petty annoyance I've had lately, and I fantasized about being so thoroughly screwed that I would tell everyone, "Okay, that's it. I hereby dissolve Otherspace. I'm going to enjoy my free weekends from now on."

Of course, the meeting went great, and now wouldn't shut it down if someone paid me to do it. Funny, isn't it, how a brief flash of emotion can threaten to unravel plans going back years.

The sky was full of battleship clouds, slung low, cruising towards the western horizon. But as the sun galloped across the sky, the fleet broke up into a few huge carriers drifting lazily along.

Good day, all told. Work went swimmingly, thanks to my help on a troublesome project. Always feels good to be a rescuer.

Then I heard about the bombing of London today, and I felt a lot more thankful for all I have. My heart goes out to the British today, and if I can offer any hope, I'll just say this: You will come out of this stronger.

I came home and powered through a bunch of little chores—e-mail, blogs, filling the bird feeders, sweeping the front walkway, setting the clocks to the atomic time (as I do every two months), etc. I also paid bills online, as I've been diligently setting up my online bank account to accommodate this. It's wonderful to pay bills immediately; no filling out of a check, waiting for it to arrive, then waiting for it to be processed. I click a few buttons, and the money is immediately removed from my checking account. Wonderful.

And, suddenly, rain. Big, solid rain. The kind of rain you rarely see in movies, so I'm always shocked when I see it: neither the drizzle of film noir, nor the sheets of water in disaster movies. This is the rain of, say, Jurassic Park. A dependable, nine-to-five kind of rain.

As I left for work this morning, I noticed my umbrella sitting in the foyer, and thought to myself, "There probably won't be any rain. And if there is, it'll only be a drizzle." Should have paid attention to that little nag in the back of my mind. Usually helps.

I'm fresh back from a role-playing session, which I greatly enjoyed, and seemed to go well. We're all still familiarizing ourselves with role-playing in general. It's an odd form of interactive storytelling, and it's tough on the players and the GM in different ways. The players have to react to whatever the GM throws at them, and the GM has to keep up with the players' choices. Fun, but hard. Which is usually an excellent sign.

2:44 p.m.

It's a brain fog day—I can think, and I can plan, but I'm working at about 80%. Much like the weather: warm but unremarkable. There's no sky; above the horizon is nothing but a pearly, milky void. There's an occasional halfhearted sprinkle of rain. The whole world shrugs its shoulders and says, "Meh."

Spent last night on final preparations for Matrix Experiments Lain's premiere at Otakon. The company is working hard to finish it up in time for the unexpected deadline next week. Looks like we'll make it without too much stress or strain, actually.

And that's good, because I hate stressing over deadlines. In fact, if I could, I'd ban deadlines from Otherspace. (It's an impressively negative term, too, suggesting both death and the thin line of a garrote.) I've been trying hard to, but sometimes there are external pressures. At least we have the freedom to choose: Sometimes we work towards the deadline, and sometimes we reject it.

Watched a few more episodes of Gundam Seed Destiny last night, and my goodness is this a fun series. It still feels a bit like fanfiction (The protagonist returns with his Gundam! The venerable ship from the last series takes off! The girl is rescued!), but it's enjoyable, well-made fanfiction, and they've laid out enough of an interesting plot that I feel sure this won't devolve into a retread of the last series (or, worse, an attempt to cram this series full of great moments from favorite characters).

Grrr. I wrote a nice post on Tuesday, but forgot to post it. So it's posted now.

Much to write about, really: anime watched, books read, stories being written. But it's 1:55 a.m., and I've been chronically late to work all week, so I'm going to post this, then climb into bed, and stare at the ceiling for the next half an hour or so.

Sometimes, being a night owl really sucks.

(Okay, most times.)

It was a long, dreary, Siberian day at the office today. This was perhaps caused by my mode of waking up: when my alarm sounded, I rolled over, thought Ah, it's still vacation, I can still sleep and slept until 9:30. Then I realized it was a work day, and one of the developers I support had said he might need my help on a build today.

So I raced in to work, to find that he won't need my help until tomorrow. I had forgotten to eat breakfast, so instead I had a cupcake. An hour later, predictably, the sugar had worn off and I had the energy of a rusty hinge.

Lunch was sweet freedom; I went to Suncoast to pick up my reserved copy of Tenchi Muyo! OVA 3 volume 1 (I'm amused at the diversity of that franchise, and how many terms it needs to differentiate each series), and my debit card was promptly declined. Oh, wonderful. The helpful clerk—they're all helpful at Suncoast, now that the previous manager is gone—offered to hold my bag behind the counter for an unspecified period until I came back to pick it up. That's service. But I left the store glum; no new anime for me. Of course, the huge pile of unwatched anime at home means nothing.

(I later realized that my current debit card was deactivated, and I was sent a new card. I tried to activate it as soon as I got it, but the automation hell had no obvious option for new card activation, and I had other things to do. My next action was the mistake: I didn't put the card into my inbox, where I'd process it later. Ah well, I'm only mildly inconvenienced.)

So today I've been poking my nose through a long document that requires simple tweaks here and there. Utterly mindless work. And that should be perfect for a dull day like today—it's even drizzling out—but my mind wants to be active. I blame the weekend: I'm rested, so now I want to be doing something. But I don't.

Fair warning: This entry is bland as water.

Just returned from my parents' house, where I spent most of Independence Day. Their pool was open, so I took advantage of that to swim a bit, then we watched an excellent Jackie Chan film, Police Story 2, and a bit of the fireworks celebration. It was a great thing, really.

Meanwhile, Otherspace goes well. We plan to submit Matrix Experiments Lain to Otakon, and got an unpleasant surprise last week: Otakon just opened up its submissions, and the deadline is a week from this Wednesday. So, we're suddenly rushing to finish M.E.L. I don't like to rush, but there's little we can do, and everyone seems pretty upbeat about it.

Today, summer felt autumn breathing down its neck, so it gave us a classic summer day to remind us that it's still August: hot and sunny, but breezy enough to keep the heat from turning oppressive. The cicadas called loud and desperately to each other. If you like summer, this would have been your day.

I spent much of the workday fighting small fires; apps that suddenly didn't work quite right, people to call, etc. Nothing exciting or noteworthy, but that's good too. Exciting emergencies are great sources of worry, stresss, and strain.

I went to the grocery store and bought no groceries. While standing in line on previous trips, I'd noticed a digital photo processing kiosk at one end of the store, and wanted to try it. I've been taking pictures of my garden every month, to put in my garden journal for reference, so last week I burned a CD of the pictures and dropped it in my laptop bag.

So there I was, standing in front of the Kodak Picture CD Kiosk. I cringed inwardly; I've used enough of these horribly designed public kiosks that I steeled myself to navigate through a brightly-colored maze of options. To my delighted surprise, it was well-designed and intuitive, though I did get confused about how to get multiple prints, and ended up with a single print, plus an order for the other 19.

So I made my order using the "Ready In Minutes!" option. However, I discovered that this means that each picture prints in about one minute, so I had to stand there for twenty minutes while each photo dropped in a little tray in the front. Booooring, but I got my photos for $.40 each. Not bad, but I think next time I'll choose one-hour processing for $.25 each and shop in the interim. Though I'm so efficient at grocery shopping that I'm usually done in half an hour. Hmmmmm.

Anyvay, I got my pictures, and this got me in the mood to garden. I came home and straightaway used the rest of my mulch in the front yard, mowed both the front and back yards, and trimmed back a bush that was overhanging a neighbor's yard. As I did so, a boy who just moved in next door peeked his head over the fence and said, "Nice backyard!' "Thanks," I called back, and he grinned and ran back inside. That just about made my evening.

Came back inside, nuked some frozen lasagna, and went upstairs to work on Otherspace. Saalon chose tonight to assemble shots for the first time, so I talked him through my process. Unfortunately, the shots just weren't ready yet, so he couldn't get very far. I agreed to take them back to the animators, while he did some experimenting and looked into local anime conventions that we can attend.

And that's a wonderful situation: Saalon's making our convention arrangements, which is a load off my mind. He can keep up with such things better than I.

Then I paid a few bills (which is another story, but a boring one that I'll not detail here), browsed a few online comics, and climbed into bed. And here I am, and now I'm going to try to get some sleep.

Summer's here, but autumn is near.

Ahhhh, I love Mondays.

I really do. I'm usually rested thanks to the weekend, and I charge headlong through the workday, getting all sorts of things done, to come home tired but fulfilled.

So I did. I spent a fair chunk of the morning reviewing my projects and tasks and laying out a Next Actions list. Then I spent the rest of the day powering through it. Incredibly satisfying. Odd that I don't do it more often.

Then I spent the evening on a variety of more or less fun projects: Uploading photos from the Otherspace beach trip, writing and tweaking a new interface for the Otherspace site, and installing Syllable 0.5.7.

And that was my day, in brief.

A good, quiet couple of days. Though it's interesting I should say that; I'm sure others would describe a "quiet couple of days" as hell.

Such things are on my mind because I've been looking for romance on eHarmony. Funny how this process of looking for someone else makes you think more about yourself. Well, I want to make a good impression on any girl I'd meet.

I have little love for the eHarmony process, mostly because it's all online. The bandwidth for human connection on the internet is very limited; there's only so much that one can get across in a few paragraphs about oneself. I wish I could just meet a couple dozen girls for a few minutes at a time, talk briefly with each one, and have a short list of potential girlfriends within an hour or two. Someone phone Hollywood! This would make a great reality show. Not that I've ever seen a good reality show, much less a great one.

Anyvay. My weekend was tolerably quiet; I spent Saturday afternoon at a productive Otherspace meeting, then Saturday evening at my parents' watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which they enjoyed. Always good spending time with them; we fit each other like gloves.

Then spent today on a variety of chores: spreading mulch out front, doing backups, uploading Otherspace content (there's a new episode of the manga), working on the Syllable website (a new version of the OS was released today), cleaning, making sweet-and-sour pork for dinner, watching the first episode of Super Radical Gag Family and the second episode of Quiet Country Cafe, and generally chatting with folks.

So, yeah, pretty quiet and uneventful....

Achingly beautiful day. Warm, breezy; the Earth herself is in a chipper mood, smiling brightly.

A day so beautiful I couldn't quite bear to stay at work all day. So, after truthfully completing all the work assigned to me, I cut out a little early and headed over to the local landfill to get a load of mulch. This is to stave off the lady who couldn't remember what mulch is called. I got there at 4:30, just as the gates were closing. Drove home in a funk, hopped online, and discovered the landfill closes at 4:00 p.m. every day. Well, that's sure convenient to nobody.

But on a day like today, I couldn't feel bad for long. After nuking a single-serving pizza, I dove into my pile of chores. By 8:50, I'd finished all of them, including a check of Tripwire logs, a review of Syllable.org (to look for dead links or otherwise buggy code), a quick clean of the bathrooms and kitchen, and processing all the cosplay photographs from Otakon so I can post them to the Otherspace website. Phew.

So, as a bit of a reward, I sat back and watched my new DVD of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. I'd forgotten how much I loved this film, and I still do. It holds up. A great adventure with an immense sense of fun.

It's sad, really, how little of our so-called entertainment is really fun. So many action/adventure films take themselves so seriously, when they could just be a rollicking good roller coaster ride. Make fun of yourself. Toss in a few self-referential gags. Lighten up!

Sorry for that aside; the movie has made me fill that giddy. I want to shout to the world, "Life can be such FUN!" But the goths are buried too deep in their angst, the Gen X'ers too deep in their mortgages, and the boomers too deep in their need to die with the most toys.

Lighten up.

Oh: New bit of the VR story. Not particularly exciting, I know, but that's all I've had in me for that story. I'm building up to the end, but I've taken a vacation that's killed my desire to write. Ah well; I'll get back to it. And I will; I took a vacation because I didn't have the time to finish all my projects. Now I'm clearing the decks, so I'll have time to write without that time eating into other chores and responsibilities.

Another late night and short entry.

Excellent day at work. Busy all day, but pleasanatly so—I had a bunch of things to do, each of which I accomplished in under an hour. So it was all stuff I could just do, and check off my list.

I left work, stopped by a local McDonald's for a chicken strips meal (which tasted like well-salted crispy leather strips), then drove straight to a friend's house for a night of role-playing. I really enjoyed that, too; we pushed forward with a campaign set in a world of Greek Mythology. Lots of stuff is hapenning, and the players are pushing a lot of that along.

But I didn't get home until 11:30 at night. So I skimmed through my e-mails and cleaned up a few forum spams on Syllable.org. Then I got annoyed with the forum spam so much that I logged in to the MySQL server and dug out all the remaining spam using some SQL scripting. That felt good.

Now, I'm tired, and I want to get a good night's sleep so I can get to work at a reasonable time tomorrow, so I can get home and finish up all the chores that I have still remaining left over from Otakon.

So, good night.

I've had one of those weird days where I came home ready to finish catching up from the weekend, but didn't get to any of it.

Instead, I took out the pork I'd bought to make sweet and sour pork, chopped up the green pepper and onion, put my knife through the pork...and discovered that this pork was still on the bone. Well, couldn't very well dice this, so instead I just pan-fried it and the vegetables, and microwaved some rice, and sat down with a VHS tape that had just arrived.

The VHS tape in question was The Halloween Tree, an animation of the book by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury wrote the script and narrated it, the main character was played by Leonard Nimoy, the rest of the cast is well-acted, and the direction is solid. Unfortunately, it's animated by Hanna-Barbera. Not poorly, but it shows. Eh, it'll be a good addition to my yearly October Ritual.

And now, it's late, and while I'd like to prattle on about my day, I'm getting tired. So a quick, odd link: COLOURlovers, a site about color. Or, colour. You can see the submitted colo(u)rs, rate them, and comment on them. Strangely hypnotic.

Wow. I'm beat, but I'm tickled pink by this weekend.

Where to begin? Thursday was a day of getting ready for the weekend; cleaning up the yard, doing laundry, etc. Got it pretty much all done before heading out to role-play with some friends that evening. We're playing an SF mafia campaign in which they just managed to defend Mafia HQ against a massive invasion force made up of hovercraft and walking tanks. I had fun, at least, and I think they did, too. Got home, went to bed, and slept well despite worrying about the weekend.

Woke up the next morning to an odd sound outside. A rushing, shushing sound. Pulled the curtains to one side and saw rain pouring down on the street outside. Wonderful. This was not merely an inconvenience; I was taking two passengers to the convention, so all our bags and merchandise to sell was going to have to go in the bed of the truck. Which was now thoroughly wet.

So I got everything together, hauled a tarp into the back of the truck, put the boxes of t-shirts and posters into that, then folded the tarp over and clamped it down with bungee cords. It would have to do, I said to myself as I climbed, rather thoroughly wet, into the truck.

I found my passengers easily, then we were off to Otakon. And we stopped: The beltway was full of stop-and-go traffic, at 10:30 in the morning on a Friday. Arg. That added to our trip, but we got to Baltimore soon enough to find our hotel. I tried to park myself in the parking garage, but a thorough search of all seven levels revealed no parking spaces whatsoever, so when I found that valet parking was an extra $4 a day, I figured that I could manage that.

So we checked in, checked our bags, and hauled our boxes of merchandise to the convention (note to self: next time, bring a hand cart). In the rain. But we got there, got our badges, huffed and puffed our way to Artist's Alley...and stood in another line, as Artist's Alley had a huge number of artists checking in. Oh well; my companions set up our table while I got ourselves registered, then we sat down and began selling.

It was odd. People would walk by, glance at our table, and keep on walking. Which was normal, of course, but how do you break through that? We quickly realized that we needed a hook, so we started announcing to people, "We're making our own anime." (Not quite accurate, since anime is Japanese by definition, but "We're making an anime-style American animation" doesn't catch people's attention.) Then people would do a double-take and murmur, "Cool." And then they'd really look at the laptop on which our storyboard was playing. Then we'd point to the beautiful full-color glossy posters and explain that this was our current project.

By the end of the weekend, we had a full-scale routine. "We're making our own anime." A head would turn. We'd gesture at the poster, say, "This is our current project, Summer Storm," we'd gesture at the laptop, "and this is the storyboard behind it." We'd pause a moment as they stared at the screen, then we'd say, "Would you like to support our efforts? Design sheets are only a dollar; two dollars gets you all three. Posters are only five dollars, and t-shirts are merely ten."

And then they'd take a business card and keep walking.

Actually, "we" didn't say much of that; Christina (one of our artists) did almost all the talking. She switched on as soon as we started doing this; once someone was within talking distance, she'd start her speech. It was amazing; the rest of us wouldn't even start talking that soon. She, quite simply, rocked.

And she's the main reason we sold over $130 worth of merchandise, for an animation nobody's even seen yet (including us). I didn't expect to sell anything, so I'm floored that we did so well. We actually managed to pay for both the table and the cost of power, plus a little extra to cover the cost of the merchandise. Eeeexcellent.

Friday evening, I had a thoroughly pleasant surprise: my parents called me and told me that they were there, at the convention. They'd driven all the way up and paid for registrations just to watch the premiere of Matrix Experiments Lain with me. So they did. It aired at midnight, and everyone in the room was exhausted, so nobody reacted, but they didn't react to the animation before it or the animation after. I'm content.

In any event, the weekend passed smoothly. I got a little better at engaging people and talking to them about the animation, and we each left our table at various points to see the rest of the con. I finally saw Kakurenbo, which was a fanastic thriller with a disappointing ending, the first episode of Bleach, which was very good, and a bunch of anime music videos. I also bought a couple of cels: a beautiful Kiki, a Porco Rosso, and a lovely Tenchi OVA cel. All in all, a good weekend.

So we checked out and I drove the artists home on Sunday, then immediately turned around and drove to a friend's house for a going-away party. The guest of honor is leaving for college, so we all got her various presents. She's a huge fan of R.O.D the TV, so I bought her the boxset, and everyone else chipped in for a Barnes & Noble gift card. And we basically had a great time chatting and eating cake.

So I got home from the convention at about 1:00 a.m. Monday morning. Fell into bed, slept late, and spent the workday doing comparatively little except catch up. Then, grocery store, home, mowed the lawn, watered the pots out back, made dinner, updated the Otherspace website, processed all my mail, and did laundry. I think. It's a bit of a haze at this point.

I'm still not caught up yet, of course; I won't be until at least tomorrow. But I'm well on my way.

So, now, to bed.

I love my boss.

Today, he took the CM team (a total of five) out to lunch, on the company's expense. We mainly griped and discussed work-related frustrations. It was a great team-building exercise (a term I usually use in contempt); I returned to work energized by it. At which point he announced he plans to hold them every quarter.

What a great guy.

Had a good, productive day at work, then came home and watched the second Harry Potter film. I don't like it quite as much as the first, and having watched the deleted scenes, I can see why: quite a few important plot points were removed. More importantly, they removed several scenes in which Harry asks himself, um, about himself. He begins to analyze himself in this episode, which becomes an important theme throughout the series: Who is Harry Potter? Why does he have these powers? What makes him special? Who decided Harry should be placed here, now, with all these responsibilities and problems? And almost none of that is in the final film. Note that I'm not complaining, per se; the film's long as it is. But I wish they had cut down on some of the action/adventure scenes (the Whomping Willow, the flight from Eragog's lair) so they could fit in those more introspective scenes.

I do think I'm going to pick up the third tomorrow and watch it tomorrow night.

And I spent the rest of the night cleaning out my inbox, shredding mail, and processing a few eHarmony matches. Funny thing, eHarmony: Depending on my mood, it scares me, or I feel like it'll be a lot of fun. Sometimes both at once.

Is it sad that I haven't really dated anyone until now? I keep telling myself: No. I've had my reasons to wait. I'm still wrestling with a few demons that I'd like to vanquish before moving forward, but if I did that, I don't think I'd ever do anything.

I think I'll begin soon. Very soon.

Just finished re-watching the first Harry Potter movie. I remember being impressed but a little disappointed with tiny things about the movie—I thought the big Quidditch match was a bit hard to follow, and it seemed they didn't cover near as much as the book did, and the performances were excellent but not quite everything I'd hoped they'd be. Now, with distance, my complaints have vanished like smoke up a chimney. Sure, it's not everything I wanted it to be...because I have my own version in my head, the book version, which is slightly different than the director's version, which is slightly different than the editor's version, which is slightly different than all the actors' versions, etc., ad naseum. I don't see how they could have done it better, given their constraints.

I'm thinking of watching the next one tomorrow night, and possibly nipping out the next day to grab The Prisoner of Azkaban, which I still haven't seen, and watching it that night. This is to celebrate my completion of The Half-Blood Prince; I'm in a mood for Hogwarts and Harry.

It's also fun to watch for certain lines and behaviors in characters, now that I know bits of their futures. There were a few lines that appeared to be almost throwaways, that are downright prophetic seen from the vantage point of book six.

Work was—like most Mondays—productive but not as much as I'd like to be. This was the second Monday in a row in which I spent the morning organizing my projects, prioritizing my work. It makes the day feel short and relatively unproductive, but last week I was so much more aware of my priorities and able to schedule my work properly that I think it's well worth it. It was certainly like that today, which was so chaotic I twice had to completely rewrite my scheduled work for the day. But I got the most important things done anyway, as well as the urgent.

I got home to find an e-mail from an Otherspace employee, with the latest Otherspace online comic, this one introducing Saalon. So I posted that, and took the opportunity to refactor the comics pages so that they'll display archived comics properly.

Then, just to highlight the issue of Importance versus Urgency, over the course of two hours I received and made half a dozen phone calls from and to various friends. We're trying to schedule a going-away party for a girl who's going off to college, and everyone had settled on this Friday night. Well, I couldn't because of Otakon, and someone else dropped out, so we were trying to reschedule for another night. So I dropped what I was doing and made the appropriate phone calls and did some research, and we got that resolved, and I went back to my work. Boom.

I do love being organized.

Now if only I'd done all the things on my to-do list that I ignored so that I could re-watch the first Harry Potter movie....

Welll, that was fun.

After a morning spent tearing through various chores in preparation for the day, I hopped in my truck and took a different route to GMU. I'd just received a SmartToll transponder, and was eager to try it out. I figured out a likely route, left very early, and got to GMU no sooner than I would have had I not taken the toll road. Well. Disappointing, but I'll try a few other alternatives and maybe I can shave ten or fifteen minutes off my hour-long commute.

I arrived at GMU, walked in to the Johnson Center, and hung out for a while until the Otherspace crew gathered. We started the meeting, which was extremely busy; I had half a dozen agenda items to discuss. I also had the pleasure of distributing posters and business cards, which everyone was a bit tickled about. Then, two people interviewed with us, to help draw backgrounds. I hired both of them on the spot. One is an excellent graphic artist, the other draws lovely furry artwork. Great stuff.

We finished up at 4:00, at which point I drove up to McLean Bible Church for Redemption. I hauled my stuff in to our room, then tromped up to the information desk to check our room reservation, which keeps changing around...and sure enough, we were in another room, across the hall. Okay. So I hauled all my stuff in there, and waited.

Nobody showed up for awhile, so I tried calling them on my celphone, to discover I couldn't even send calls. I fiddled with it for awhile before discovering that the phone hangs up every time I try to use the touch screen while on the phone. I managed to make a few phone calls, and confirmed that two RPG friends were coming, at least. They were the only ones who could make it, and then not until 7:30. I had a wait of almost two hours.

So I cracked open my laptop, wrote a bit more VR story, and re-read How To Be Creative. A productive wait, at least. Then the guys showed up, and we did some impromptu role-playing, first as soldiers during D-Day, the next as space marines on a ship taken over by aliens. Lots of fun.

Then, home, and the rest of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Yep, I finished it, and it's quite a book. The plot leaps forward near the end, and Rowling is certainly setting up an amazing finale. She has amazing skills at plotting and pacing. I envy her.

But then, she's written how many thousands of pages of Harry Potter?

Woke up this morning and realized with a little dread in the pit of my stomach: I'm sick. I rolled over and took a quick inventory, letting myself wake up and gauging exactly how bad I felt. Okay, only "sick" in a general sense of malaise, slightly sore throat, slightly upset stomach, etc. Stress sickness, in other words.

So I fired off an e-mail to various folks at work, telling them I was sick and would be in late. I took advantage of my time to stumble through my e-mail inbox, and blearily water the drooping plants out back.

By the time I got in to work around noon, I was tired and moving slowly, but I could function, and I took care of a number of tasks both small and large. I only spent three hours at work, but I accomplished more than I do during some full days. Eh, life's like that, I guess.

Swung by the grocery store for provisions, came home and cooked some beef with broccoli. I tried making it once before. The recipe said to pan-fry the beef, then pan-fry the broccoli, then put them both in the same pan for several mintues. Well, duh, it came out overcooked. The cookbook was clearly out to get me. So this time I followed my intuition, and it turned out perfect: The broccoli was still crisp, while the beef was soft and full of flavor. Ha! Take that, cookbook!

Then, watched an old anime episode, did some weeding, and now I'm here in my big bedroom chair, typing away on my laptop. Not a bad day, overall, even if it is as hot as the devil's oven outside.

Oh, by the way: No more VR story today. I'm stuck. I'll figure out what to write and will post more soon. Sorry about that, but I've written myself into a bit of a corner, and need some time to think my way out.

Tonight was another complete waste. Work was exhausting; it seemed that everyone in my group was fighting fires that flared as soon as I stepped into the building. Nothing serious; just people who had to get this build done or other such things. Frustrating, since yes, we're supposed to help programs with their builds, but when every build is an emergency, that's not fair to CM, either.

Plus, I took my phone in to get it serviced, as it kept dropping incoming calls. I waited over an hour in the store only to find that the (very nice) techs were stumped, too. They suggested I upgrade the OS to the latest version.

I appreciated that the techs were polite and helpful, though. They were clearly trying to help everyone as quickly as possible while giving each person their full attention. Full marks there; the store was just stuffed with people who appeared personally affronted that they had to wait for something.

So combine a long wait with very busy work and I came home utterly unable to do anything. I'd stopped off at the grocery store on the way home—hadn't gone for over a week, and was out of a few things—and ate a bit of a surprise: good grocery store pre-made Chinese food. Orange chicken on a bed of rice, still warm, microwaved a bit. Flavorful and filling; well worth the five dollars it cost. Yay!

So I chatted online for most of the evening. Eh. There are worse things to do.

No, I didn't update yesterday, and for no good reason. I was home most of the day, and didn't even accomplish much of note.

I was waiting, again, for my Otherspace merchandise. Fortunately, it arrived, and the UPS guy was the nicest guy on planet Earth. And that's not relief speaking (okay, not much): he was cheerful, and asked when I got home. I replied that I usually get in around 5:30, to which he replied, "Okay, 'cause if you're not home during the day, I'll just come around later. I don't mind."

Wow. My estimation of UPS just got turned right around. That's pretty darned good service.

Anyvay. It all showed up: the posters, the t-shirts, the business cards. The posters are beautiful, the t-shirts could house a circus, and the business cards are set a bit oddly. No major complaints, really, even though the t-shirts are supposedly pre-shrunk. Well, I plan to put one through the wash tonight; maybe it will shrink to baby-doll size. Or whatever.

I'm not complaining! Really. It was thrilling to receive physical products featuring characters that I thought up a few months ago.

Now, we just need to make the frickin' animation.

Oh wait! There is something I can complain about. Heard a knock at my door yesterday evening. That's always a pleasant surprise, since I know very few of my neighbors, and I've enjoy meeting them. I opened the door to a rather heavyset, older woman who peered at me from behind sunglasses.

"Excuse me," she said, "I'm from the neighborhood association? I'm here about your yard." She glanced back at the mulch I'd laid on either side of the walk, along with liriope at intervals. "I need you to weed out your overgrown plants, and put in a little wall so that your....ummm....." She waved vaguely at the mulch. "...your whatever it is won't go onto the sidewalk. Understand?"

I blinked, then smiled, and said, "Yes, I understand."

Then she nodded and left.

Y'know, it's sad that she's never met me before, and the first thing she does upon meeting me is complain about my yard. I should also point out that, when I moved in, my yard was completely empty except for grass and trees. I've done some work to make it attractive.

So when I unexpectedly woke up early this morning, I pushed the mulch well out of the way of the sidewalk, and sprayed Round-Up on the weeds. And I feel impelled to point out that these "weeds" were things like clover that had grown up around the liriope. They weren't ugly; they were just unexpected.

So. Whatever. I find it funny that the person whom I apparently offended with my uneven garden doedn't know what mulch is.

I'm sitting on my couch, waiting for the UPS guy to arrive.

As I've been doing for the past six hours.

I arrived home yesterday to find that UPS had tried to deliver the Summer Storm posters, but I wasn't home at 3:00 (amazingly enough). The delivery rep left a note that he'd be back sometime after 2:00 today. So I got off work early, came home, and have been waiting ever since.

Worse, UPS trucks have driven past my house three times today. I know, because I've been sitting on my couch, looking out at the street all afternoon and evening.

...Aaaaand I just checked UPS.com. According to it: "THE PACKAGE WAS MISSED, NO ATTEMPT WAS MADE TO DELIVER AS SCHEDULED."

Wonderful. So not only did I have to miss half a day of work, I get to do it again tomorrow. I wonder if they'll remember to toss my package on the truck then?

Briefly: Productive and tiring day at work, interesting RPG session, and rain.

First, work. Not sure how to write this so that it won't sound incredibly boring, but here goes: I've had trouble keeping track of things at work. Oh, I could reply to an e-mail, or make up a sticky to remind myself of an ongoing project, or write in an appointment on my calendar. But I have quite a few ongoing projects (most of them small, piddling things), and I wanted to have a better handle on all of them.

So I've started implementing the Getting Things Done system, which includes several neat little productivity gadgets: lists of Projects, lists of Actions, the 43-folder Tickler file, etc. But more importantly, it recommends a weekly review, in which you sit down and re-calibrate all of your projects and actions to ensure that you're keeping up with everything.

I've been scheduling my work weekly review for Fridays. Seemed logical: Once the week is complete, tidy up everything. Didn't work. It never felt like the right day, and I was frustrated that I was getting my work straight and ready to go with the weekend right around the corner. Plus, I really didn't feel like maximizing my weekly productivity on Friday afternoons.

So I moved my weekly review to Monday this week. Lo and behold, it worked wonderfully; I was motivated to have everything ready to go for the new week, and I was able to focus and organize it all properly. So, um, huzzah!

The rest of the workday was full of productive work, which was good but tired me out. I went straight from work to the weekly RPG session, which was a tiring as well, for different reasons.

I'm playing with a fun group of guys, and I certainly enjoy myself, but they get distracted a lot. Almost everything I say is greeted with a joke. They get involved when something particularly dangerous happens, but that only happens once or twice each session (and I can't lob life-threatening dangers at them every five minutes). I asked Saalon about this when I got home, and he promised to think about it and get back to me with some advice.

It's just...frustrating that I can't seem to engage my players. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong, or what I should be doing to make it right.

So I went home in the pouring rain. It's welcome, after at least a week in the tortuous 90's, but it fit my mood.

As I've mentioned earlier on this blog, Saalon came up Friday night. He was here until Saturday night, and my goodness did I have a good time with him. He's just so easy to talk to, and full of interesting things to say.

We both attended an Otherspace meeting, during which I interviewed a potential new animator. She wanted to know our process, pay, etc., and seemed a bit shocked that she could work at her own pace. And that we let people find work that interests them. It was gratifying, really; that's how I want work to be, and it's nice that this intrigues people.

Saalon and I then played some Gundam War (a fun collectible card game set in the Gundam universe) and watched the MST3K episode, "Pod People." To quote Dr. Forrester, "It has nothing to do with Pods, it has nothing to do with People, it has everything to do with hurting." Terrible, terrible movie, made worthwhile by Joel and the bots' riffs. Huzzah!

Since Saalon was here all day Saturday, I took Saturday as my day off, which meant that today (Sunday) was a day for chores and generally getting things done. I'm still a bit frustrated that I have to devote an entire day every week to these sorts of things, but otherwise they never get done. I did manage to accomplish a huge amount today, though, from gardening to cleaning to catching up a bit on Infinite Ryvius (which flatly amazes me). I even had time to stroll down to a local Italian/Greek restaurant and have a leisurely Gyro dinner as I read a few chapters of Romans.

Meanwhile, one of the new features of the Otherspace website is a new comic spoofing the discussions we all have during our meetings. I'm very proud of it (though I neither wrote nor drew it; it's all done by our character designer/storyboarder/key artist extraordinaire).

Mood: Content.

It's always a bit of a shock to walk out of your place of work and see multiple fire trucks at the next building. Especially when that building is actually the main building of your place of work.

Which is what happened today. Two fire trucks, plus several small support vehicles, like little dogs yipping at the heels of the Big Dogs. Lights blazing, of course. Turns out an A/C unit went on the fritz, or some such thing. Nobody was remotely hurt, unless somebody stumbled on the way out the door.

I was walking out of work not to go home...well, actually I was. But not to go home for the day; I slipped home at lunch. I made soup last week; it needs to be eaten, and had forgotten to bring any in this morning. So, I drove home, cursing the dump trucks cruising along at ten MPH under the limit in the passing lane, slurped my soup (which sounds dirty, but isn't [unless you spill your soup {my goodness, it is dirty}]), skimmed a bit of a self-help book (a "YOU...CAN...conquer the world!" book, to quote Danny O'Brien), and watered a few garden plants that looked like they'd had three too many bourbons.

Gardening consistently frustrates me. Not the gardening itself; my lack of time and money to make my gardens what I want them to be. I've been studying garden design for years—I have a bookshelf full of gardening books—but there's just no time to really dig in properly. I suspect I'll fiddle around with gardens for thirty years, then if I retire I'll actually be able to create an amazing garden, and everyone will wonder how I was able to do it in no time at all, and I'll grab them by the lapels and say, "Do you have any idea how long I've waited for this? I could've done this two decades ago if I hadn't been working full time!"

Or, not. Spent the evening on petty little chores, preparing for Saalon's arrival. I had to pay all my bills, a task I was not looking forward to, until I tucked into it and remembered that I pay all my bills online now. So now I can process six bills in a few minutes, instead of the half an hour it used to take when I had to fill out checks.

Then Saalon came, and we talked until 2 a.m., as expected. More on that later.

Oh, and note new VR story stuff, on the left.

Hot. Hot, hot, hot. I went out for a walk today at lunch, and it was like stepping into a pizza oven. Fine day otherwise, though; clear and sunny. And hot.

Spent most of the day preparing for Saalon's arrival on Friday. Then he called and told me he couldn't stay on Sunday, so I'll have at least that day to get chores done. Perhaps I didn't need to rush as much, then, though everything I've done needed to get done (house cleaning, for example...I don't want Saalon to walk into the house and immediately start sneezing, or tripping over large packages).

I did order some cool merchandise for Summer Storm: business cards from 48 Hour Print, and thirty t-shirts from CustomInk.com. They should all arrive in time for Otakon in two weeks (two weeks!).

And man, if you ever want t-shirts...okay. CustomInk has a beautifully designed website that includes a nifty little Java app that lets you pick a shirt design, upload your artwork, and position it on the shirt, so you know what it'll look like. I did so, and sent off my order. Half an hour later, I got an honest-to-goodness phone call from a guy at CustomInk, who asked if it was okay to tweak the artwork so that it would show up better on the shirt (the artwork is a bit sketchy), and if they could fix the bottom of the picture, which had been cut off. I said that that would be great. He replied that he'd do that, and that I should see an e-mailed proof in about an hour.

Sure enough, just over an hour later, the proof appeared in my inbox. I approved it thinking, I don't think I've ever gotten this level of service from a web merchant ever. Better, the price is excellent: about $6 per shirt for thirty, and of course the cost decreases as you order more.

If you want t-shirts, I can't recommend CustomInk highly enough.

Spent the day staring down a document at work. I just couldn't muster up the courage or interest to power through it, so I whittled away at it all day. Could have done it in a few hours if I'd just gotten down to it.

I have sleep like al Qaeda has a conscience, though. I've spent the past several nights staring at the ceiling for hours, tired but unable to drift off. Then I finally drift off, and at 5:30, a steady beep yanks me out of Slumberland: it's my roommate's alarm clock. He's been out the past few days, taking care of his son. I now know precisely how to turn off the alarm, and can do so while mostly asleep, but the clock's in the other room. By the time I collapse back in bed, oh, I do go back to sleep, but I don't get good REM vibes for the rest of the night.

So life's been a bit of a haze all day: drive to work, work, drive to dinner. I'm having dinner with a friend, and I'm typing this as I wait for her to arrive at the restaurant. Got here a bit early and strolled around a nearby Toys'R'Us, observing the changes since my childhood. I don't remember my childhood being filled with so many bright colors, or slick packaging. Then again, I picked up a classic re-issue Transformers box of Thundercracker, and things haven't changed that much. The copy on the box was amusingly pointless, describing the character's various skills. We didn't care how fast Thundercracker was relative to Starscream; we just wanted 'em to shoot lasers at each other.

There was a huge rack of collectible card games, including one especially for girls (featuring fairies and princesses, it seemed). Now there's a trend nobody predicted, and what a brilliantly simple game mechanic. The cards are relatively inexpensive to produce—glossy card stock doesn't cost that much—and players keep buying them to build up their decks. Makes me want to get in on the action.

Actually, in a sense, I did: I designed a prototype collectible card game a year or two ago, called "Chaos!" I've still got the prototype sitting around, collecting dust. It's a hard thing to do, really. You have to ensure the game is balanced, but not so balanced that it's boring. My game also depended on various tokens, which would make the game less spontaneous than, say, Magic: The Gathering. Harder to just whip out a deck and play.

Later: Had a wonderful time catching up with my friend. Got home and spent the rest of the night chatting with friends and watching Flash Gordon, which has a strange power: once I start watching it, I don't want to stop. It sucks me in very effectively. I can see why people wanted to go back every week and see what happens next.

Ironically, the cliffhangers don't work much for me. So Flash is caught in the middle of an explosion; we know he'll survive somehow, as he always does. And I don't think audiences of the day were fooled, either. I think it would have been much more effective to end with a major character dilemma. If an episode ended with Flash having to choose between saving his own skin and sacrificing the lives of others, for example, I'd have been much more curious to see how the next bit.

But did the writers ask me? Noooooo.

Long, busy day. But a good one, as I'm apt to append.

Work was pleasantly busy. I was prepared for grim battle with a document that required much less change than I'd originally thought, so by the end of the day I'd updated half of it. Since I'd thought the document would take me at least the rest of the week, that felt good.

I also bought the first disc of the anime series Kodocha, and listened to the dub. It's a notoriously difficult dub; the Sana-chan (the protagonist) has huge lines delivered at a pace rivalling that of the Matchbox Car Guy from years back. It takes all the actors a few episodes, but by the end of the disc, they're doing a good job with their voices. I was pleased.

Tonight was also a meeting of my writer's group, where I received final comments about one of my stories (which I can now clean up and send off to publishers, yay!). I thoroughly enjoyed myself as we discussed various stories and caught up. I also gave the group copies of my notes for a modern fantasy novel.

Which brings up something I should mention.

Last night, I was utterly unable to go to sleep. This was partly due to readingthe first two-fifths of Ricardo Semler's Maverick; more on that later. But as I stared at the ceiling, I came to a realization.

For the past month or so, I've set aside an hour every night to write. This has been excellent writing exercise, but as I lay in bed I realized that my writing has prevented me from accomplishing important, day-to-day tasks like, oh say, mowing the lawn. Moreover, I'm laying the foundations of two novels now, the Young Adult Novel and the Modern Fantasy Novel. So I have all this time to write novels that I haven't plotted out yet.

So I've decided to cut back on writing for the next month or two. I'll spend a bit of time each week outlining and brainstorming the two novels, plus writing more of the VR story to stay ahead. But I think this makes a lot more sense than just forging ahead because I've decided to set aside that an hour a day for writing. By early to mid September, I should have a solid foundation for each novel, so I can knock together walls and a ceiling in no time.

About Maverick: it's essentially Semler's memoir about the history of Semco, a company he inherited from his father. Ricardo didn't much like the top-down, command-and-control culture, so he began applying democratic principles to the organization: what if, instead of managers deciding on a pension plan, employees could vote for the plan they'd prefer? What if profits were distributed to business units, and they were given complete freedom to share those profits as they wished? What if, every time somebody needed authorization for something, they asked a committe of their peers instead of a boss?

Some things have worked, and some haven't. Most of them have worked swimmingly. Not only do people stay at Semco, it's an amazingly profitable business in an extremely difficult business environment (Brazil from the early 1980's).

Fascinating, and it's made me think a lot about companies in America. Why are American corporations run like a Soviet economy? It's a command-and-control organization with a large bureaucracy, in which the lowest level generates the real wealth but that wealth is distributed mainly among the people at the top, most of whom blunder around with Five Year Plans and vague assurances to the public. Heck, there's even a Secret Cabal in the Board of Directors.

Why not apply democratic principles to the business world? Who's to say it's doomed to failure?

There are days when I love computers, and days when my computers respond to that love by biting my hand.

I decided recently to shift my weekly duties around so that I'd have one day per week free from any chores. I could still fill that day with projects as I saw fit that day, but I'd have nothing scheduled for that day.

Yesterday (Sunday) was my first attempt, and I only had one holdover from the week's chores: Backups. Well, that would be no problem; my backups are pretty well automated. It was time for my monthly backups to DVD, as well, but that wouldn't complicate things much.

Sure.

Everything went smoothly until my final backup. I ejected the backup drive and removed the Firewire cable...but OS X had not completely ejected the disk. I plugged it back in: Drive unrecognizable. Arrrg. OK, boot into DiskWarrior, which apparently can recover anything. Well, anything except this: DiskWarrior couldn't make heads or tails of it, either.

So I raged for a bit. That drive had the last remnants of stuff I've been collecting for over ten years now: bits of fiction, articles written in a fit of pique, old audio clips created by friends, movie files culled from long-vanished back alleys of the 'net. Nothing that I needed, but they were all tethers to my past. I'd scan through them occasionally and chuckle at a clip of John Cleese or Rowan Atkinson. All gone.

After an hour or so I calmed down, realized my frustration wasn't making the drive any better, and decided to go ahead and re-initialize the drive. As that commenced, I realized: This is crazy. I've spent most of my free day mucking about with backups.

So I stood up, walked out of the house, and drove to my parents' house. I'd intended to do this, actually, and we had a good time eating dinner and generally chatting. There's something so relaxing about that: I don't have to be or do anything except myself, and same with them, so we can function together with almost zero friction.

Got home, IMed with a few friends, read a bit of Candide, and went to bed at a very reasonable hour.

...and woke up at 11:00 this morning. Ack! Alarms went off, but in my bleary state I shut them off and went back to bed. I think the stress of the backup situation—and what a ridiculous thing to be stressed over—exhausted me. Got in to work to find that my main project had wanted to perform a build with my assistance this morning, but, um, I was fast asleep at the time. And I'd forgotten to give the password to my backup person. Oops. We got it straightened out, and nobody got upset that I could tell.

The rest of the workday passed in a blur; I was supporting another project as well while a co-worker took care of other business. Which is a great way to pass a day.

(Incidentally, I enjoyed Candide for awhile, until it became apparent that Voltaire was going to hammer his point through the table, the floor, the foundation, and eventually well into bedrock. I put it on my "Done" pile.)

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.

Just finished watching Ong-Bak, and what an enjoyable movie that is. Harsh, painful, serious...but there's lots of amazing action and stunt scenes. A good, good film.

Sadly, my pounding headache insists that I write no further. Perhaps more tomorrow, as I'll have the day off. Briefly, I've had a pretty uneventful weekend. Did a bunch of chores Saturday morning, had a very long Otherspace meeting Saturday afternoong, mostly goofed off Saturday night, and went over to my parents pretty much all day today.

Can't complain.

Gah. Got back from running, which is good, except it's made me very tired, which is bad. I think I'm just not used to running, and I'm certainly not used to running for 45 minutes at a time.

But I've been listening to EarthCore and The Three Musketeers. EarthCore is decently written but wonderfully performed by the author, while The Three Musketeers is brilliantly performed by an Englishman. The 45 minutes flew by.

So now I'm tired. So no new VR story, I'm afraid. Hopefully, I'll be able to get to it tomorrow.

My bed calls, and I can't resist. Which is saying something; I usually can't make myself get to bed.

Well, that was most remarkable.

I bought myself an iPod Shuffle today, primarily because of an article in Runner's World in which the author enthused over his times spent running while listening to audiobooks on his iPod. I've been thinking about running again after getting no exercise for the past few months, so I figured that $100 was a reasonable investment.

I left the house at 10:00, recognizing that I can usually manage a twenty-minute run. Listened to a few podcasts. Got back into the house, sat down at the computer, and saw that it was 10:45.

And I enjoyed every minute of it, chuckling along to TWiT as I wheezed my way around town. And how I'm all exercised 'n' stuff. I feel good. Woohoo.

The rest of the day was similarly enjoyable. Though I've mostly rejected my earlier geeky ways, I still get a thrill whenever I buy a new tech gadget. The Shuffle is a beautiful little piece of technology; easy to use, nicely sized. Perfect design. So I was excited all day over that.

And what a day to feel good. Warm, breezy. Palatial clouds drifted across the sky like swans on a lake. (Hey, that was a good metaphor! I should stop my writing vacation.) The kind of day made to lay down on a grassy knoll, close your eyes, and feel the breeze ruffle your hair and the soft grass tickle your legs.

Spent the evening on boring technical stuff, updating security policies and passwords and such. Yawn. But important. Worth doing every so often, if just to prevent the crisis that would inevitably occur if you didn't keep up with it.

I like staying home. I have a good friend who, if he's stayed home for an hour or two, is overcome with a need to go out, see people, and do things. I can sympathize, but I almost never share the impulse. I've made my home a place I enjoy living in. That's kind of the point of having a home, isn't it? Why not enjoy it?

Which is why I spent all day yesterday at home (excluding a walk around town, which I'll describe a little later). I had good reason, actually; I wanted to make a few things for my parents' visit tonight. We're establishing a tradition that they spend Halloween evening with me, since they live in a neighborhood with few kids these days, and it's rather depressing to have a total of three kids stop by on Halloween. So, over to my place, where I get thirty.

Anyvay, they'll be coming for dinner, so I wanted to have a few things on hand: caramel popcorn, a nice autumn treat; some bread for the cold cuts left over from the Pumpking Carving Party; and a batch of chocolate chip cookies just because I do that most weekends and the cookie jar was empty. After I stop by the grocery store tonight, I should have the following menu:

• Sandwiches made from fresh homemade bread, cold cuts of ham and turkey, and cheese
• Apple slices
• Caramel popcorn
• Chocolate cupcakes
• Chocolate chip cookies
• Apple cider

So I made the popcorn, bread, and cookies yesterday morning, all of which went smoothly enough. In the afternoon, I helped Saalon set up his new blog, then went for the aforementioned walk around town. I live in an area that has a bunch of old houses, many rundown. Perfect for Halloween. I wanted to get some good pictures, but my camera doesn't do well in the dark, and I couldn't hold the camera still. But I ended up with 38 photos.

Then home, where I watched several Japanese live-action TV dramas, and I think I'm getting addicted. Interesting acting, neat camera angles, tight writing, fascinating premises...and really bad video. Ah well. More on them later, once I've had the chance to ruminate on them for a while.

For now, it's Halloween. Remember, you're entitled to one good scare.

Meanwhile, Saalon is back, with a neat description of our hacker travails.

Halloween Comes Once a Year, It's Almost Here, It's Almost Here

After a day spent on chores and a productive Otherspace meeting that's uninteresting to anyone outside it, I sat down tonight to re-watch John Carpenter's Halloween.

Every time I watch this movie—as I do every October—I am more impressed than I was the last time I watched it. It's not just scary.

See, I don't like horror movies much. They're usually too silly or stupid or over-the-top or pointlessly gruesome. Horror movies seem to suffer from one of two unfortunate extremes: they're either too over-the-top and fantastic (e.g., the killer can leap two stories or fall from five stories and be fine) or they're relentlessly true-to-life, which requires victims who can't run faster than a trot.

Halloween falls into neither trap. The villain is just on the cusp of supernaturally evil; he's surprisingly indestructible, yet real humans often survive the kinds of injuries that he sustains throughout the movie. A single-minded human could do all this.

And that's what makes Halloween so dang scary. That guy could be right out on your street, and if he really wanted to he could kill you. He could break right through my sliding-glass door downstairs, detour into the kitchen, grab the butcher knife from the knife block, come upstairs, and how could I stop him? Throw books at him? Most of us couldn't stop a determined, strong man from stabbing or throttling us.

But it's not just the premise that works; it's the execution. The movie presents relentlessly mundane scenes of girls chatting, trick-or-treaters wandering from house to house...and it all underscores that underlying horror that everyone is so vulnerable. A couple kids in costumes pass, and they're isolated and alone on those big, empty streets. There are no crowds in this movie, and that helps embellish the movie's feeling of isolation.

It's rather remarkable that the everything in this movie comes together to work so effectively. The script is quite tight, building dread and establishing characters. The music is simply perfect; minimalist but spooky. The cinematography is as effective as that in any great film. The acting is...okay, much of the acting is acceptable at best, but it's helped by Jamie Lee Curtis' vulnerable yet strong babysitter character.

And it all contributes to a film that manages to spook me out even hours after watching it. Sat, 29 Oct 05 00:00:00 -0500 Miscellaneous

Well, the Pumpkin Carving Party was a complete success. I'm already planning for next year's, which I want to make even better.

It came on the heels of a bit of a disastrous day at the office, from a productivity perspective. I could not make myself fall asleep Thursday night, so I ended up sleeping through my alarm this morning and got to work late. I'd scheduled a one-on-one lunch with my boss today, so that ate up an hour. Plus, I had to leave work early to get ready for the party. Fortunately, I'm mostly caught up at work, so this had no direct impact on my work. I was able to slide through work today, doing somewhat less than usual.

I got home and made last-minute preparations. All the food was baked or otherwise prepared, but I still had to wash out a tub so we could bob for apples, and I had to assemble everything for transportation. This was a significant engineering challenge, as I had only one small pickup truck in which to hold:

• Two large pumpkins
• A medium-sized tub
• A plate of deviled eggs
• A plate of green Brain Jell-O
• Sixteen chocolate cupcakes
• A bag of caramel popcorn
• Six apples
• Fourteen assorted knives

Plus, on the way there, I had to pick up meats, cheeses, and bread rolls for the main meal. I fit it all by putting the tub in the back of the truck and the two pumpkins in that, and the deviled eggs and Brain Jell-O on the seat next to me. Everything else fit on the floor or behind the seat.

I muscled my way through rush-hour traffic to arrive only a few minutes late at a friend's house. I was thrilled to discover he'd invited a few friends to join us (I'd made it clear this party was open to friends of friends), so we ended up with thirteen people. A good number for a party.

And all of these extra friends needed to shoot a short film for school, too. They remembered that I have actual film experience (thanks to Saalon's Dreaming by Strobelight), so I gladly helped out behind the camera. We assembled a fun, silly little interpretation of one of the Canterbury Tales, I think. I had tons of fun. I even showed them how to edit the film using their VCR, a skill I learned from my fellow AMV creators. Very cool. I didn't get home until 1:30 in the morning.

Can't wait to do it again next year. Even though we never did bob for apples.

My Mom just left after a wonderful evening. Don't have time to describe my day in detail, but briefly: I've read some fascinating, thought-provoking books, and applied them today, which has been enlightening. My Mom worked on lining my curtains while I baked cupcakes and made deviled eggs for the party tomorrow. We then watched The Twins Effect, a Hong Kong vampire romantic comedy action flick. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Meanwhile, note the new survey I've added to the middle of the page. I tossed it together today at work in some spare time, and it seems to work fine. Surveys may not stay around for more than a day or two, so if you want to vote, vote early.

Also note that you can add an option to the survey. When you do, you automatically vote once for that option. Why am I doing this? To offer you a voice. I'd like my website to be a bit more of a dialogue than it's been in the past, and this is a way to let you provide your own answers to the questions I plan to ask you.

So, please, if a survey's options don't satisfy you, add your own. HTML is automatically stripped, and you can't post links at all (I want to prevent forum spam from the get-go).

I've also shuffled the contents of the middle column a bit, moving the latest photograph further down the column, so the recent books stay near the top.

I hate nights like this, but I love nights like this.

Get home late, thought that's because I stayed at work late talking to my boss. Cool guy. I scheduled to take him out to lunch on Friday, so I can get to know him better.

Anyvay. Got home late. I needed to do some laundry, and sweep the downstairs. And with the Pumpkin Carving Party coming up in two days, I needed to make Brain Jell-O, and while I was at it, I might as well hard-cook some eggs for some protein in the mornings. And I need to draw character designs for my upcoming comic. And call back an Otherspace employee. And get some groceries, and fill up the truck with gas.

So. Put clothes in the washing machine. Mix up and pour Jell-O. Hard-cook eggs. Put laundry in dryer. Go out, get gas, and buy necessary groceries. Sweep downstairs. Call back Otherspace employee. Two hours have elapsed, and I've done most of the things on my list.

I hate nights where I'm going like a whirlwind, but it does give me a wonderful sense of accomplishment. And I do usually accomplish an astonishing number of things.

Tomorrow night should be busy, too; my Mom's coming over to fix up my curtains and cushions, after she made me some which don't fit at all in any way. Very nice of her to do this, though. While she's here, I'll be making devilled eggs and cupcakes. And, hopefully, squeezing in some writing and drawing so I can post another bit of the VR story on Friday, and finish up these character designs by Monday.

I hate nights like this, but I love nights like this.

Well. A tiring day, but a good one.

Spent much of the workday on little things, setting up various software environments and helping people with small problems. A good way to spend eight hours, really.

Then I came home and began preparing for the Pumpkin-Carving Party on Friday. I'm preparing food in advance each day, and today I made another batch of caramel popcorn. Thanks to Chris' recipe (thanks, Chris!) I made it in no time at all, mainly by omitting the baking step. It was just as good as the baked kind I made a few days ago. Thanks, Chris!

Then I worked a bit on character designs for my upcoming online comic. I've established hairstyles for all four characters, so now "all" I need to do is draw all of them from the front, the side, and three-quarters perspectives. I want to do that by the end of the month, so I don't have much time.

Then I helped Saalon troubleshoot his blog. It still doesn't work, but now I've downloaded all his data and will be converting it to plain text so we can create a fresh blog and re-upload the data. We should be able to finish that within the next few days.

All this activity helped pull me out of the funk I've been in for the past couple of days. It's been minor, but persistent, and probably a combination of the steady rain driven here by Hurricane Wilma and a sudden phone call from Bank of America about my Visa card, on which I owe quite a bit of money. I have a handle on it, but it still had me depressed.

Interesting, isn't it, how I was pulled out of my depression by concrete projects with firm deadlines? Work isn't such a bad word after all....

To Brennen, regarding #48: I'd love to be a participant in that discussion amongst your friends, but conclusions? Come now, I think you know better than that. Even if we all did reach any conclusions, I'd be immediately suspicious of them.

I think the fact that we all can take the same data and arrive at different conclusions is one of the unique benefits of being human.

Oh, and thanks for your recommendation of The Stainless Steel Rat some time ago; I read the first novel about a week ago and "Slippery Jim" DiGriz charmed me off my feet. A fabulous book, and a great example of the kind of SF I'd like to revive: wildly fun adventure.

Ask not about Friday! Friday was a black hole into which my time descended, and did not return. I did nothing, and didn't even really have fun doing it.

Ghost Stories

Oh! I did watch the first episode of Ghost Stories, a bland and predictable anime that the American licensor completely rewrote and redubbed into a grown-up spastic comedy. Hilarious. Not so much Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo, an anime adaptation that's just too weird and experimental to be engrossing. 'Twas an interesting visual experiment, but I had no desire to watch more.

Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo

Today was better, though it started off worse. I've had the hankering lately to try my hand at making caramel popcorn from scratch, so this morning after getting up, I printed off four internet recipes and started in. The caramel was pretty simple, really: melt a stick of butter with ¹/4 cup corn syrup and a cup of brown sugar until boiling, then let it boil for three minutes, then add ¹/4 teaspoon baking powder and a teaspoon of vanilla. Unfortunately, I had prepared all this in a medium-sized pan, and when the baking powder goes in, the mixture poofs up. Out of the pan. Onto the burner.

Okay, so long story short, I started a fire.

It was a small flame, though; I just moved the pan to one side and let the caramel burn over, and the fire went out as I was opening windows and the sliding glass door nearby. Well. Would I let that stop me? No sir. I let the caramel in the pan blacken and cool, then poured it into the trash and started again, this time on a lower heat (so it wouldn't be as liable to burn) and in a large pot. This time, no problems, and after adding the baking powder easily poured the bubbling caramel on the popcorn and peanuts. After mixing that all up, I spread it out on baking sheets and baked it for about fifty minutes at 250°. Every ten mininutes I opened the oven and stirred the mixture, to really get the caramel coated on everything.

Turned out quite tasty, though it could use a teaspoon of salt. Oh well; that'll be good for next time.

As that cooled, I fired up Navi and worked on my yount adult novel. I've always had a tough time sticking to longer projects, so with this novel, I'm trying a new approach: I'm writing increasingly detailed outlines. The first outline was a list of eleven plot points. Today, I finished the second outline, which is about 4,500 words describing the main action of the novel—who does what, the broad mood I want to set in each scene, etc. With that done, I can now go on to a much more detailed outline describing exact character movements, rough dialogue, etc. I hope to finish that by the end of November, so I can complete the first draft by the end of March. Here's hoping.

Well. A scheduling error caused me to sleep in this morning, which made me an hour late for work. Fortunately, this wasn't a problem in terms of the work itself; it just meant I had to stay late to make up for it. Also fortunately, I had two major projects to accomplish today, and together they took exactly eight hours to complete. I walked out of the office building with a spring in my step, knowing I had done at least my full share of work that day.

...and came home exhausted. It was partly the psychological effect of coming home later than usual; it just felt like the day was long, despite my working no longer than a normal day. So I watched The Halloween Tree and episode two of Densha Otoko. If you're not interested in odd animated Halloween specials or Japanese dramas, feel free to move on.

The Halloween Tree could have, should have been brilliant. It's got beautiful, detailed, atmospheric backgrounds. It's got snappy direction. The voice actors are solid and easy on the ears. The character designs are generic but at least not ugly (the girl, in particular, looks quite cute).

If only it wasn't animated by Hanna-Barbera. There are plenty of cels; it has a very good budget by Hanna-Barbera standards. But...for instance, when four kids are being blown by a fierce wind, their bodies undulate up and down like flags. Real bodies don't move like that. The characters feel like they have no weight to them; they're just floating on the backgrounds, being pulled along by the animators' whims. I'd prefer if they moved oddly like characters move in anime; in this, they move like...well, like Hanna-Barbera figures.

If you're going to make a cartoon scripted by Ray Bradbury, and even get him to narrate, can't you at least have it well-animated?

Anyvay. Densha Otoko continues to kick my awesome. The nerd...

...has just asked the girl...

...out to dinner. And gone shopping. And he really looks nice. I can't believe it, but I'm really rooting for the guy. This is great stuff. You can download the episodes via BitTorrent at TV-Nihon.

Wow. I am exhausted.

Just got back from a Chinese dance presentation at the Kennedy Center. It was fabulous—a combination of modern dance and martial arts, kind of. The second half was rather slow, as it was just people contorting their bodies to the sounds of bells (bells without melody, too), but the first half was a dynamic set of dances, some energetic, some mysterious, some tragic. Great stuff.

But I woke up a little after midnight this morning and was awake for three hours. At least I got quite a bit of Otherspace work done as a result, updating the website and checking on a few miscellaneous things.

But so yeah, as if the late night weren't enough, I'm operating on too little sleep. My bed lays next to me, beckoning me, and I think I'm going to throw myself into its welcoming arms now.

The Chinese are cool.

It's been a good weekend, if not productive in my core projects. Even so, my parents were so gracious to take me out to breakfast Saturday morning, then helped me repair my backyard fence. It's a standard white picket fence that's seen better days; the wood's rotting and several pickets have been missing since I moved in. In fact, I've been using an old wooden pallet to block a large gap in the fence.

But Dad had some spare boards that he was able to cut and paint and use as pickets, so we all spent about an hour fixing the fence up. Looks quite good now.

I then drove to GMU to meet with another potential Otherspace artist. She wants to draw backgrounds, which we very much need, and I ended up spending an hour and a half explaining our processes to her. She was very interested in everything we're doing.

She was a good example of the difference between someone still in college and someone who's graduated. She graduated awhile back and has been working for a while, and she naturally asked a lot of questions about the company and was generally very engaged with me. When I interview folks who are still in college, they often ask only a few questions before saying that, yes, they'd like to work. Completely different.

Anyvay. I spent today (Sunday) catching up on chores, and watching episode one of Densha Otoko, a.k.a. Train Man, a live-action Japanese drama about an anime fan who helps a girl on a train, and develops an incredible online support network of fellow netizens to advise him as to what he should do next. Once I got used to the over-the-top action, I became hooked. The show's packed with anime jokes (most of them Gundam-related), which helps, and they use a number of songs to set the mood. Heck, the first episode opens with various shots of real-life otaku hangouts set to Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto.

So, needless to say, I'm downloading episode two now. I'd wait to buy a legitimate release, except that I doubt this will ever be released in America. Heck, it looks like even the Japanese release won't have English subtitles. So, there's one sale they won't get. Ah well.

(Oops. Forgot to post Friday's entry, and to upload more VR story. Done.)

It's been a very weird October. Temperatures have hovered in the high seventies and low eighties every day until this week, when a deluge of rain has dropped temperatures to more seasonal levels. It's still very comfortable for mid-October; I went on a brisk walk today and had to remove my jacket after a few minutes.

But a stubborn net of clouds still clings to the sky, with only rare gaps allowing glimpses of blue. Frustrating. It's October, two weeks from Halloween, and I want blustery winds with clouds sailing like merchant ships through that odd slate blue that so often tints autumn skies.

I'm also impatient with my young adult novel, as I'm nearly done with the second outline (of three). Another hour's worth of writing should bring me to its conclusion. This is the five thousand word version; the first one was an eleven-bullet summary, and the third will be a stripped-down version of the book itself. You could call the third version "draft zero," since I won't even try to write pretty descriptions or get the characters' voices exactly right. It will be the humanoid lump of rock which I will then chisel into a fine statue.

So, I “only” need an hour to finish outline two, but an hour can be difficult to come by. I've got that, plus Otherspace, plus drawing, plus Syllable build attempts. And anime. I have far fewer projects now than I had even two months ago, but now that I can devote serious amounts of time to each project, I'm just as busy. I'm much more productive, though.

I just sat three rows from a stage where I witnessed a complete production by the Peking Opera (the Chinese entertainment form that essentially spawned kung fu movies). It was indescribable. The costumes were prisms painted on silk. The acting was intense, powerful, moving, and at times overtly funny. The acrobatics were fantastic—rarely has anyone in the movies done better, and these somersaults were performed twenty feet from my head.

The music...well, I could get used to the music, but I was annoyed by its simplicity and lack of melody. Not my kind of music. But it's amazing to think that that's my only complaint.

Fantastic.

Well, this Hungarian Whooping Grippe or whatever it is really knocked me for a loop. I've been out of commission for the last seven days. And for a guy like me, that's frustrating.

I did manage to catch up on my reading, though. I powered through all 534 pages of Disney War, an account of Michael Eisner's time as head of Disney. Boy, that was an eye-opener. Eisner's not quite the guy I imagined him to be; he's cluelessly drunk with power. He made a lot of excellent decisions, but he apparently couldn't stand the idea of someone threatening his position. He consistently bad-mouthed each executive who might be a possible replacement (or even right-hand man). He made a lot of enemies. Sad.

I also re-read From the Dust Returned, a recent book by Ray Bradbury that collects and re-spins several of his spooky short stories into the tale of a Twilight Family, an Addams Family. This is quite intentional; he and Charles Addams had plans to collaborate on this book decades ago, with Bradbury providing the stories and Addams the illustrations. Bradbury wrote a few stories in preparation, but it never came together, and now that Addams is gone Bradbury put together the book, at least, and had that published with Addams' wonderful original concept illustration as the book cover.

Addams wanted it to be “a sort of Christmas Carol idea, Halloween after Halloween people will buy the book, just as the buy the Carol, to read at the fireplace, with lights low. Halloween is the time of year for story-telling.” And it is certainly that. It's part of my October ritual, where I read and watch a number of moody Halloween works, including:

• October Dreams, a thick collection of spooky stories centered around Halloween itself. Some are horror, some are more thrillers, while some are true accounts of authors' childhoods. Wonderful stuff.
• Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree, about a group of boys who descend through Halloweens past in search of their dying friend
• An animated adaptation of The Halloween Tree, made several years ago by Hanna Barbera. It's quite good, despite being made by Hanna Barbera.
• The original Halloween movie
• It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
• Garfield's Halloween Adventure, an odd little thing. X-Entertainment has a fabulous article.

And I'm back out of business. That cold nabbed me again, and I spent the last three days in bed. I'm just well enough to come to work today, but I suspect I'll crash again tonight.

I have been watching some anime. Specifically:

• The new Ah My Goddess TV show, which is moving along slowly but entertainingly. Overall, I'd grade it a "B". I'm a bit frustrated that by episode five only Belldandy has shown up. No major complaints otherwise.
• Planetes, an awesome hard SF show. Seriously high-quality, adult storylines (and not in the pornographic sense). This is clearly made by people who love the idea of realistic space work.
• Fafner, a show with all the trappings of a giant robot show that nevertheless handles them all perfectly. This is what I want in a giant robot show.
• Smatterings of various Gundam shows of various quality. I'm having fun, learning about bits of the Gundam universe that aren't known to the casual fan. ZZ Gundam is almost straight comedy.

More once I've recovered. Which hopefully won't be too long.

I'm back in business (mostly). Worked a half-day at work, and that partly because things are quiet there. I've powered through pretty much all of my work, so I cleaned out my inbox and took care of a few things, and generally went easy on myself to prevent a relapse of this cold.

Got home to a couple of phone calls, both of which were good. One of them makes me feel very good about Otherspace, and the other was a chat with a friend. I felt so good that I made sweet-and-sour pork, wrote eight hundred words of outline for my young adult novel, and drew half a dozen heads of hair in preparation for my comic. I think I've figured out something important about how to draw hair; I've been trying to draw individual strands, when actually I should be drawing more of the overall shape of the hair, and adding the strands as details. But the hair as a whole is made up of strands, so I'm drawing a flowing, watery shape more than a solid shape. I can't describe it, but I think my brain's wrapped around something important.

Lessee. In other news, I've re-watched the first two episodes of Planetes, which was as good as I remembered. It's a hard SF show set seventy years in the future, about a group of astronauts who deal with space debris. Though, being good anime, that's only a small fraction of the story; it's also about perseverance, and honor, and heroism, and friendship, and justice, and a bunch of other things that I can't even put into words. So, good good stuff.

So anyway, yeah, I'm feeling better, and things appear to be on an upswing.

And just when I get a little more interested in blogging, a cold grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and threw me into bed for a few days. It's been pretty bad yesterday and today; so bad that I'm staying home from work today. Don't want to infect anyone else, though I got it from work. This same nasty cold has been leaping from cube to cube. It's the current office joke; someone will be out for a day or two, and the rest say, "Ah, must be that cold."

So I've spent a fair amount of the weekend watching anime, particularly After War: Gundam X and ZZ Gundam. I'm enjoying both for very different reasons; X has accelerated its character development and is (as of episode 15) moving along at a nice pace. And it's refreshing to watch a Gundam series that's more focused on the action/adventure aspects of the Gundam experience than the "War Is Hell!" drumbeat of many other Gundam series.

I'm only three episodes into ZZ (well, two really, since episode 1 is just a clip show summarizing the first two Gundam series), and it's fun, too. It's certainly more light-hearted and comedic than any other Gundam series I've seen (though Turn-A comes close), but I mean that in a good way. ZZ isn't a screwball comedy; it's a Gundam series with more comedic bits than other Gundam shows. Again, refreshing.

And with that, I'm going to go drink some orange juice and think for a while about some things Brennen just posted to his blog.

My apologies for the scattershot nature of this entry, and the lack of an update yesterday, and a late update today. I've been working ten- and twelve-hour days to support a computer that can only be used after business hours. This is my last day of it, though, except for one more day next week.

And it's affected my sleep patterns in very odd ways. I got home last night and went straight to bed. Tonight, though, I'm wired and can't make myself to go sleep. I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing; I suspect it's neither. Or both. It just is.

Meanwhile, my mind's been percolating with suggestions from Tom Peters' Brand You 50, in particular his suggestion to catalogue 25 observable aspects of ourselves. That is, if someone were to judge you (not negatively), what are some things they'd use to do that? Things like hairstyle, posture, even handwriting. I've only managed to catalogue twenty, but even that has revealed a few things that I'd like to work on.

It made me realize how much I'd like to improve my handwriting. It's a bit better than the "chicken scratches" that everyone I know describes their handwriting as, but it could be a lot clearer. So I did a bit of Googling and found Dyas A. Lawson's Tips for improving your handwriting. Briefly: When writing, hold your fingers still, and move your whole arm plus a bit of your wrist. I tried it, and it made my handwriting a lot easier to read. Takes a lot of practice before it becomes natural, but then, doesn't everything?

Ha! I never described how Thanksgiving went. In a word: Perfect. All the food was delicious, nobody stressed out, we all chatted pleasantly, we went on a brisk walk around the neighborhood, and we watched two Jackie Chan films (Dragon Lord and The Medallion). We ate succulent turkey, flavorful stuffing, plump sweet potatoes, corny corn muffinsh, and thick slices of apple pie with vanilla ice cream. Couldn't be better.

As mentioned before, I then spent the weekend on various purchases. Friday night, as I lay in bed thinking about the morning, I had an idea shocking in its odd yet perfect logic: I needed a coffeemaker in my bedroom, despite not drinking coffee.

No, all that anime hasn't rotted my brain. My morning pages (three pages of journalling in the morning) have become a tradition, but I've had difficulty waking up in time to write all three pages. I usually wake up to the alarm, then lay in bed luxuriating for half an hour or so. I realized that, if I had a hot cup of tea waiting for me, I'd be much more inclined to get up immediately.

So I bought a cheap, programmable coffeemaker and set it up for the next morning. I woke up and listened to the tea cough and burble into the carafe, and up I sat. Went right over, poured myself a steaming mug of hot tea, sat down at the desk, opened my journal, took a sip of the tea...and nearly spat it out. Tasted horrible. But I was up and journalling.

I still don't know why it tastes so bad. I've washed everything, but maybe it needs a more thorough cleaning. Very odd. But I still get up.

And I do enjoy the mornings, especially calm, grey mornings like this one. It rained last night, and the sky was that lovely, velvet grey that looks soft and inviting like a worn blanket. The street outside was still empty, but with a promise of further activity. Kids were no doubt lined up on the corner farther down, craning their necks to look for the school bus, another week of lessons and friendships begun.

And I'm preparing for another week of work, to which I'm increasingly looking forward with good anticipation. Tom Peters writes about "reclaiming work from Dilbert," that we are not simply slaves to corporate culture; we're accepting slaves. We not only work in insane bureaucracies, we sit back and take it. No. No. We can reclaim the idea of work as a fun, amazing, exciting thing to do. We can leap into our workweeks with the ferocity of a pit bull and the excitement of Peter Pan. We can become masters of our own work.

And I suspect most of my readers are rolling their mental eyes, saying, "Yeah, right, whatever." I was the same way. But I've been thinking about this, and observing my work, and wow do I have opportunities to reclaim my work, to stake my claim, to turn this mundane project into an experience that makes people gasp in awe.

Why on Earth would I want to settle for mediocrity when something like that is possible?

Spent the afternoon Christmas shopping, it being Black Friday and all. I surprised myself: I have presents (or know exactly what I'll be ordering online) for everyone on my list. I usually suck at Christmas presents, but this year, for some reason, I'm on the ball, and early. Now if I can just get all these presents shipped in time, which is one disadvantage of having so many online friends.

While I was out, I bought a few things for myself, including a Hartley & Marks journal, the Generatio. Its cover is the beautiful image from the Book of Kells above. I've resisted buying an expensive journal, but I've also heard that you'll write more if you own things that make you want to write. And I've been wanting to write in this thing ever since I laid it out on my desk. So, I suppose, it's true.

Because I increasingly believe that knowledge workers can't afford to let their skills atrophy, I've been learning the Python language lately. To learn it, I started a simple project: writing a text adventure (like Zork, only much less ambitious). I just finished it and uploaded it, so now you can explore Castle Doune yousrelf.

(Castle Doune is the name of the first castle seen in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The layout of the game's castle is similar to the layout of the real castle.)

I finished it this morning, actually, as I waited for my parents to arrive for Thanksgiving. I baked an apple pie last night, and will be making muffins once they arrive. Mom's bringing potatoes and the pumpkin pie. I'm looking forward to it greatly; this has become a family tradition.

I've been in a sysadmin mood lately. I want our server to be a model of efficiency and automation. I want us to be able to recover instantly in case of disaster. I want to describe our setup to other people and hear them reply, "Wow."

Partly, this is because I've been re-reading Tom Peters' Brand You 50 at work, a few chapters at a time. Here's one of his suggestions (paraphrased):

1. List all your projects at work (a project is just work with a specific goal).
2. Ask yourself—and others—what it would take to make people gasp in amazement and delight when they hear about each project.
3. For each project, list ten ways you could make it more of a "Wow!" project.
4. Pick a couple.
5. Do them.

I agree, which is why I just set up a cron job that backs up all web files changed in the last 24 hours.

Hey. You're working on stuff. What would it take to turn that stuff into "WOW!" work? Why not do some of it?

Sorry for the long down-time. Our server died almost exactly a week ago, and we've had some trouble with our provider in getting it back up and running. Suffice to say that we appear to be back to normal.

It's been a nice day, really, dependig on your definition of "nice." It's been cold and drizzly all day, but that's felt cozy to me. Perhaps it's because this feels like the first real day of winter we've had. It's been cold lately, but only recently has the wind swept through and tugged most of the leaves off the trees. Now, the naked trees standing against a stark grey sky symbolize winter. It feels like the perfect day to wrap yourself in a blanket, wrap one hand around a mug of hot chocolate (complete with wraiths of steam dancing above the rim) and with the other hand open a good novel. The Three Musketeers or Treasure Island would be good; something adventuruous and out of the ordinary. Something to take you away from the blasted cold and rain.

I spent the weekend at Anime USA, mostly sitting behind a table at Artist's Alley. I didn't sell anything, but I talked to a fair number of folks, and gave away a lot of business cards. It was a success in the sense that I got the word out, though it was certainly a failure financially. Oh well. I'm just not a salesperson.

Don't have time to write much. Just got back from a performance of Chinese acrobatics, incorporating a lot of the maneuvers of the Peking Opera with the concepts of Circus acts (juggling, unicycles, etc.). No clowns, thankfully.

It was a good day, if short. Unfortunate that I had to spend so much of today catching up; Sundays should be days of rest. Next Sunday will undoubtedly by the same, what with Anime USA that weekend. Ah well.

Just returned from a wedding, in which the groom is a friend that grew up next door to me. We played practically every day, then drifted apart. A story as common as grass. And now he's married.

That was a bit of an emotional roller coaster ride. I'm a bit jealous, honestly; his bride looks terrific, in all the best ways: fun, vivacious, smart, pretty, thoughtful. I have nothing. I've never even had a girlfriend.

But I looked at the two of them and realized that the groom could have taught me a few things about getting a girl. He searched for a long, long time. If I had nurtured that friendship, kept up with that connection, I would at least known more than I know now.

Tom Peters writes, "YOU = YOUR CONTACTS." More accurately, the better your contacts (and your connections with those contacts), the better you are. Very true, in the working world as well as the personal world (and, of course, business is personal). I need to invite a few more people over for lunch or dinner.

Starting with this friend, perhaps.

Well. In my previous entry, I wrote that I'm thinking of pitching some animation ideas to Cartoon Network. That was Wednesday. I've spent the past two days under an almost unceasing assault from my Inner Critic, insisting that I not do that. That I'd be better off abandoning all my creative projects, in fact. That I'd enjoy myself far more if I spent every evening watching MST3K re-runs and anime. That I'm crazy for thinking that they'd actually accept my pitch, and even if they do sign me on, what then? Like I'm going to really be able to deliver a TV animation on time.

To which I have listened, and ignored.

It's good to hear these things. It's made me realize how much I fear success. The idea of really starting a full-scale animation studio scares me witless. It excites me, too, but it's really scary. I'd be providing livelihoods for dozens of people. I'd promise to deliver a heck of a lot of beautiful, life-affirming animation. <gulp>

But at the same time, I'd be creating beautiful, life-affirming animation. I'll be making something of beauty, that people will watch and think about. I'll change people's lives, hopefully for the better.

That's worth listening to a whiny Inner Critic for a while.

I just got off the phone with Saalon, with whom I talked for, um, three and a half hours. We talked about anime and the nature of work for about half an hour, then I dropped a bit of a bombshell:

I think I'm going to go to Atlanta and pitch some animation ideas to Cartoon Network.

I have a startup animation company. They take pitches from people with a lot less than that. I gather that producing a short animation would be good, but I don't need it to get in the door.

So why not just walk through the door?

So I asked Saalon to write me a treatment for an idea he's been champing at the bit to do: a fifty-episode Gundam-like series. Giant robots. War in space. Some teenage angst. We won't duplicate Gundam, not will we make an homage. We (or rather, he) will be taking everything that we think Gundam does well, subtract everything we think it does poorly, and adding in our own tastes and interests and feelings.

Meanwhile, I'm going to work up some treatments for some other shows I can pitch to the network. I want to pitch a "World War II in space" show, complete with Big Band music and hot shot pilots. I want to pitch an animation variety show. I want to pitch some amazing animation aimed at girls, for a change (why does the largest gender demographic get so few good cartoons?).

Because I'm not going to wait. Well, except that I'll wait for concept art. But after that, I won't wait.

Tonight, I needed to rest.

Work passed as a dim grey blur. Accomplished little of any consequence.

As I drove home, I stopped by the library and picked up about eight different books, most of them about finding a sense of fulfillment at work. As you can imagine, this has been on my mind quite a bit lately.

I blame the season, actually; it's been getting dark about when I get home, now, and we had some cold temperatures lately. After the Indian Summer of the past two months, I feel like I've passed straight from summer to winter, with no chance to get used to it. Perhaps I've been touched by Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Either way, I knew I wouldn't be able to make progress on my projects, so I dedicated the night to flipping through the library books. I'm taking care of my parent's golden retriever this week, so she lay at my feet as I skimmed business books. I will admit, it made for a satisfying and recharging evening.

And now, partway through Tom Peters' Re-Imagine, I'm beginning to grok his larger point about the fundamental changes to work in the 21^st century. I have to completely re-think my job now. I can't rely on...well, anything. Anything. I am going to have to be C.E.O. of Brent, Inc. Because my current job just won't be there soon. And, if you're working in a white collar job, you're probably in the same situation.

Agh, it's half-past ten, and I need to get some sleep, so I can't justify this. I am increasingly convinced that it's true, though. And it means a radical reinvention of self.

Which, on reflection, is a good thing.

Amazing how one little thing can upset your entire day.

I'm taking care of my parents' Golden Retriever, Molly. She's a sweetheart, but she's an added responsibility, and I have to keep reminding myself to feed her, fill her water bowl, let her outside, etc. But that's not what upset my day.

I felt a profound lack of energy today at work. I performed a build this morning, which was good and important and is my core duty at work right now, then for the afternoon I felt worthless. No amount of breaks or recharing helped. But that's not what upset my day; in fact, I think the upset caused my lack of energy.

I woke up sleepy this morning. I got to bed a little late, and I awoke groggy. And it suppressed my energy for the entire day; I've felt a little spacy ever since.

Amazing, that my entire day can be made much less effective than normal by one seemingly minor physical disturbance.

Anyvay. A quick round-up of what I've been watching lately:

• Densha Otoko episode three, in which the geek takes his proto-girlfriend on their first date. He does suprisingly well, asks for further advice from his net friends, and then the spanner is thrown in the works: he's flamed by a troll who points out that he's done nothing but take people's advice in this. He's been spineless. And the geek realizes this is true, so he switches off his computer for three days to think about it. So this series takes an unexpected twist in showing the limitations of the geek's online support group. In episode three. If they're doing this much now, what on Earth will episode eight be like?!?
• Crying Out "Love!" From The Center of the World, another J-drama that's much more serious than Densha Otoko. Crying Out "Love!" tells the story of a seventeen-year-old boy who falls in love with a quirky classmate who (he doesn't know) has a terminal disease. The series begins by telling you that she dies within a year, so you get to watch the show with that flavoring their entire relationship. Fascinating, and beautifully presented. A good example of the power of short TV series; because the show is only eleven episodes, each episode has great power and pushes the story forward.
• The first few episodes of Digimon Tamers. Some of my readers probably think I'm crazy for seeking out and watching this show, but now that I've watched a few episodes I've re-affirmed why I liked this show. It's amazingly well-crafted. Each episode has heft and weight. The characters are introduced very deliberately, so that you get to know them very well (compare this to the first season of Digimon, which tosses all seven kids and all their Digimon at you in episode one). The overall story was written by Chiaki J. Konaka (serial experiments lain, among others), and you can see it.
• The Myth, Jackie Chan's latest film. Certainly the most dramatic thing he's done in decades, perhaps next to New Police Story. Half of it is set in the modern day, where Jackie's character is researching a lost treasure as he remembers fragments of a past life. The other half is set in that past life, where Jackie's character is a ridiculously skilled warrior protecting a concubine. It's lush, it's adventurous, it has an amazing number of action scenes, and it's well-acted. There are a few groan-worthy elements—the concubine is constantly being rescued and turns into an unmoving sack every time she's in danger—but otherwise it's a superb film. One of my favorites of his, now.

Just went to the theater and watched Chicken Little, which I thoroughly enjoyed. A shame about the negative reviews; I don't know why people expect The Incredibles from Disney Feature Animation. Those are some amazing animators—the character animation in Chicken Little is jaw-dropping for their first CGI film—but what was the last great Disney film? They're hamstrung by their writers.

(Not that the writing was bad, either; it just isn't as strong as the other great animated films made in the past few years, such as Spirited Away and The Incredibles.)

Anyvay. Got back, talked on the phone with Saalon about it for a while, as I drank tea and ate cookies in my back yard, basking in the perfect weather. Mostly sunny, mid-seventies. The clouds are moving in now and they threaten rain, but that's okay. This has been a very, very good day so far.

And it should be even better tonight, as I plan to spend a good chunk of the evening on my major projects: writing Giant Armors and drawing.

So what made the day so good? It wasn't just because I was relaxing. I'm not, really; a movie is not a relaxing experience. Talking with a friend is not really a relaxing experience; it's energizing.

I'm feeding my values. Animation is important to me, which is why I decided to see Chicken Little (otherwise why would a 29-year-old single guy pay seven dollars to see a CGI cartoon?). Keeping up with my friends is important to me, which is why I called Saalon. Writing and drawing are important to me.

And I've spent time actually sitting down and thinking about what's particularly important to me. Lots of things are important, but we each have certain values and virtues and desires that have strong meaning. One person has strong feelings about the environment. Another has a strong belief in building community. Neither is wrong to pursue that particular feeling with unique passion.

But how many of us have sat down with pen and paper, and asked ourselves, "What is particularly important to me? If I took away everything anyone's ever told me about my likes and passions, what would be left?"

I've done it. Have you?

Why not?

There's some new VR story over there.

Meanwhile, I've more than doubled my productivity at work this week. How? Ritual.

I just finished a neat book, The Power of Full Engagement, which suggests that the proper management of energy, not time, is the most direct route to personal improvement. They point out that you can expend and recharge energy—physical, mental, emotional, and spritual—a lot like you exercise a muscle: stretch it for a while, then rest for a bit. So, during a work day, instead of trying to expend your mental energy for eight straight hours, you take a break every hour and a half or two hours.

But how do you remind yourself to take those breaks, especially if you're not used to taking them? Rituals. Here are the rituals I made up for myself earlier this week:

I'm sure I'll change these over time, but they're a start.

Because I'm now forcing myself to take breaks from my work every hour or two, I don't get nearly as tired throughout the day. At 4:00, I have about 80% of the energy I had at 9:00 in the morning, whereas until now I've had almost no energy in the afternoon.

So, want to increase your productivity? Break up your day into smaller chunks, and force yourself to take those breaks. It feels completely unnatural and bizarre. It's hard, but it's worth it.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

That sounds a little patronizing, I know. But it's easy to have big dreams about things you've always wanted to accomplish, then leave them as big dreams.

What is the one thing you'd really like to do someday? Or two things? Or three things?

Writing a novel? Visiting Mt. Fuji? Finding the greatest cheesecake in the world? Create a cool game?

Well, you can. It's possible. But it's hard.

And that in itself is an interesting problem. People talk about how hard it is to do certain things, then turn right around and explain that they got in through a lucky break. Or simple persistence. How is that hard?

It's hard because it's hard to change ourselves. The roadblocks to greatness are the ones inside ourselves. So how do we go about changing that?

There are a bunch of ways, and I've been reading about them a lot over the past few years. I think I'm now ready to write about them, and provide my thoughts on them, and hopefully provide some sort of synthesis of many different approaches to self-improvement.

Once I started changing myself, my world began to change. Previous impossiblities—like starting an anime studio—started to become more than possible; they started to happen. I was living my dreams.

I want you, the people reading this blog, to live your dreams. Eric. Brennen. Stephen. Alice. Chris (both of them). Some of you are on that path; some aren't. Doesn't matter. Even if you're on your way, I think I can provide you with a walking stick and smooth out some rough terrain.

Because it's hard. But it's so worth it.

After all my preparation for my parents' visit last night, I got a phone call yesterday morning. It was my Mom, telling me that one of the dogs woke up very sick and was...let's just say, making messes all over the house. There was no way they could come. ARG!

That threatened to spiral me into a depression that would have put me in a funk all night. I had food, and plans, and everything.

But, no. After half an hour or so, I decided that I would not let myself spiral into a funk. Instead of focusing on what might have been, I focused on what I had: a movie to watch, a book to read, trick-or-treaters to greet, and plenty of good food. Can't ask for more than that, really.

A fresh loaf of bread for dinner


My Halloween dinner, a ham and cheese sandwich with caramel popcorn

So, it was a good night. I got thirty trick-or-treaters, though two were giggling high schooler girls, and one was the woman who used to live here. Which was odd in itself. I opened the door, and there was a woman, who announced, “I'm here to tell you to leave!”

“...What?” I replied.

“Now that I'm here, you have to move out!”

“...Huh?”

Then she explained that she used to live here, and I said (quote), “Ohhhhhhhhhhh,” and she looked at my bowl and exclaimed, “OOOH! Full-sized candy bars! Can I have one?” I said sure, so she took one, and her son took one, and she left.

Oh-kay.

The movie was Nosferatu. Compared to Halloween, which just gets better each time I watch it, Nosferatu gets more boring. It's a good film, and certainly a classic, and it does some amazing things—the shot of Dracula rising out of his coffin is still genuinely horrifying—but the shots last a bit too long, the acting (Max Shreck excepted) is embarrassingly over-the-top, and...well, frankly, we've seen all this before. Yeah, that's because everybody's copied the plot of Nosferatu. But that doesn't keep it from being boring, and I think it's revealing that other horror movies (like, um, Halloween) don't suffer the same problem despite sharing that limitation.

Anyvay. The book was October Dreams, a beautiful anthology of horror and thriller stories and remembrances, all focused on Halloween. (I use the term "thriller" as opposed to "horror" because a lot of these bits aren't meant to horrify as much as to spook and thrill). Great reading, and I've made it a habit to read it every October. Some of the stories don't hold up to frequent re-readings, but many of them continue to pack the same punch they had when I first read them several years ago.

In other news, I've been reading a lot about energy and productivity and time and focus, and I plan to write quite a bit about them in the near future. As such, this blog might become a bit more screedy than usual; I'm going to try my hand at provocation. I'm very much not a pushy person, but I'm feeling and thinking some things that I want to challenge the world about.

I'll start you thinking with a quote from Tom Peters:

The bloom is off the rose. As of today, I'm officially tired of my vacation from all media.

But that's good, actually. That's an opportunity for me to examine my reaction and figure out what that means. Why am I tired? Why do I want more input?

Here's what I figure so far: I like to learn and I like to teach. Those are pretty intrinsic to my nature; I've been doing both, happily, for many years now. When I'm separated from all media inputs, I can't learn. That goes against my nature, so it's not fun.

On the other hand, the first half of this week has shown me that a lack of input can give me a huge amount of focus. I've been much less scatter-brained this past week than I usually am. So, clearly, cutting back on media has been helpful. The question is, how much should I cut back?

At this point, I know that I want to cut back on the amount of media I take in each week. I'm planning to establish a budget on media each week: no more than five hours of DVD watching, for example. If I break these limits, nothing will happen; the point is to have a visible limit, so I know when I'm consuming more input than I had planned to.

I'll see how that goes once I'm back to normal this Saturday. Though I won't really be "back to normal" until next Monday, since I'll have a pretty busy Saturday (Otherspace meeting, plus hosting my parents for New Year's Eve) and Sunday (parents staying through New Year's Day, and possibly role-playing that evening).

(A few side observations: I haven't missed the web at all. I have missed e-mail, and I think I didn't need to eliminate that. I would have benefitted from more contact with people, not less.)

Gee. Everyone's staying away from their blogs this week, it seems, except me. And I'm the one avoiding media, so I should have the least to talk about. Instead, I feel like blogging. Hmmm. That's causing a few neurons to fire.

The media avoidance has made me realize just how media-saturated I am. Well, and it's not just media; it's raw input. I have a lot of stuff pouring into my brain at any given moment. Imagine this scenario: I'm in line at a coffee house. I'm thinking about what to order. In front of me hangs a huge menu of choices, and each choice is competing for my attention. Pop songs are playing loudly enough for me to understand the lyrics above the din of conversation. I'm smelling several different brews of coffee. That's a lot of input.

I come home and I have DVDs to watch, magazines to read, mail to sort, e-mail to answer, and possums on my back fence. No, really:

This little guy sat on top of my back porch all Monday morning. After a cold snap last week, we've had warm weather recently, which has thawed out several inches of snow. I suspect my little friend's burrow flooded, so he was spending the morning drying himself out and waiting for his burrow to dry out. Poor thing. Totally unafraid of me, though; let me get right up next to him and didn't even bat an eye.

I guess that's what comes of less media input; I notice things like this.

Had a good Christmas. It was "just" me and my parents, but that was plenty. Which sounds like a snarky put-down; it's not. A weekend with my parents is joy. I love every opportunity I have to spend time with them. I wish I had more time to spend with them...though on the other hand, I have to balance that desire with an understand that I have to live my own life.

In any event, nothing of major import has occured lately; the major news of the moment is this: My one-week vacation from all media has begun.

What does that mean? No TV. No movies. No DVDs. No newspapers. No magazines. No radio. No books. No web. None of it, at all, until the weekend.

Have I been completely, totally faithful? Well, no. I watched quite a few episodes of Good Eats today. But it's the principle of the thing, and it's made me really think about the amount of media that I let into my life. Without it, I have all sorts of time. And I have to ask myself: Is it all worth the time I put into it? What do I get out of the local paper? What do I get out of the latest blockbuster movie?

Which is not a rhetorical question. I do learn and benefit from those things. But at what cost?

So. This webserver died a few days ago, which is why I haven't been updating recently. I'd explain, but I don't want to risk the ire of my current hosting company. Suffice to say I'm less than thrilled with their service.

Though it was kind of nice to be away from e-mail for a while. I sure had a good bit more time for other things. Such as "liming."

"Liming" is a term used by some Caribbean population to refer to their night-time parties. See, each morning, they'd show up for work bright, energetic, and happy. They'll work hard throughout the day, then at the end of the day they stop and party all evening and well into the night. Then they repeat this every day. Foreigners were amazed that they could keep up the pace.

The natives explained that, when the ships from the Old World came, the sailors were always sick from scurvy...until one ship came with lively sailors who had brought limes to punch up their cuisine. And of course, the citrus in the limes prevented scurvy. The Caribbeans adopted the word to describe their own practice of allowing "the spice of life" to completely consume you while you're off work. Of completely recharging every single day.

So I've been "liming." Yesterday, that meant going to my parents' house for dinner and staying until well into the night, eating and talking and laughing at terrible old TV shows. Tonight, that will mean watching a lot of Good Eats, or otherwise just letting go.

Wish me luck.

Long, long, long week.

Mainly due to work. I have essentially two duties there. One required a lot of work this week, and the other required a ton of work this week, most of which culminated in a Friday spent almost despairing at my work load.

I got it done, pretty much. I still have some work left to do, but I turned the tide and acquitted myself with honor. But it wiped me out in the evenings, which explains why I haven't been writing in this journal much this week.

The other reason for my silence is that I've been rather more silent lately. I've been thinking about myself, and observing my routines and habits. I've been asking myself a question: Who am I?

That may sound trite. To be more clear, I've been examining my actions. How do I sit when I talk to people? How long do I take to get out the door in the morning? How do I spend my money in a given week? And what does that say about me?

The old cliché says that actions speak louder than words. One of the problems with old clichés is that they're usually true but misleading. More accurately, people see your actions and give them a lot of weight. Your actions are usually given much more weight than what you say.

Moreover, if you say one thing and do another, it's the action that you truly believe in.

So I've been paying close attention to my actions, and noticing when my actions don't match up to my beliefs. For example, when I talk to people, I like to "zero in" on them, paying close attention. As I've paid attention to my actions, though, I've noticed that I tend to relax my body and sit/stand in a pose that signals uninterest. I lean back, put my hands behind my head, and so forth. This is because I'm trying to pay so close attention that I want my body as relaxed and uncomplaining as possible. But I'm sure it signals to other people that I'm not interested. So I've been changing my posture as I talk to people, and sure enough, they act more engaged when I talk to them.

So that's a good thing.

Above is my Christmas tree for this year. Turned out quite nice, in my opinion. I gathered a small collection of eight or ten ornaments from my parents this year, and put up my first real tree. The ornaments look okay, actually; my fears that they would look scarce were unfounded. Instead, it looks...understated. Well, and the billions of candy cances help.

I'm getting back into development for Syllable Why? I like the community. I like the idea: an easy-to-use OS for home and small office users. I'm impressed at the scale of the goals; this is definitely a WOW! project. I like the possibilities. And I like to write code, so why not?

...except I'm the guy who always has too many irons in the fire. I already have half a dozen major projects in the works: the VR story, my young adult novel, Syllable.org itself, DAMmachines.com. Where will I find the time to write Syllable code?

Actually, I have an answer for that. I'm setting aside about an hour every day to work on a major project. Divided amongst these many projects, that's not much time; some will only get an hour per week. But it's some time, at least, and I can do a fair amount of work in that time. Worth a try.

It's Monday, so I'm feeling fine. Wrote three pages in my paper journal this morning, slammed through my morning routine, took out the trash, and arrived at work fifteen minutes early. Had an easy day, taking care of a few things and talking to my boss. I felt like a professional. Just got home and slammed through half a dozen little chores.

I'm on top of the world.

Much like Jackie Chan in The Tuxedo, which I watched last night, as a very lame segue. I liked it more than I expected. It has some wirework, but less than I thought it would, and it had a tighter script than most Chan films. And it's very nicely lit and filmed, which helps.

They needed a dapper British guy to play the gentleman that Jackie drives everywhere (and eventually takes the place of). So they got Lucius Malfoy. Almost impossible to watch without wanting to rip his eyeballs out for trying to kill Harry Potter. Ah well. He did a great job nevertheless.

I didn't bake as many cookies as I'd hoped; I only have six batches complete now, which is four short of my goal. But then, my parents were here for most of the day; my Mom sewing curtains and my Dad cleaning up the grout in my little foyer for me, so I was spending a good amount of the day with them. Plus we went out to lunch.

Not that I'm complaining at all; we had a great time, and I'm always glad to have them over. I should be able to finish the cookies this week. In fact, I may be able to make two batches tomorrow, since I have two doughs sitting in the fridge.

Saturday was a bit more exciting; I had an Otherspace meeting. We're making good progress on the DC Anime Club TV ad, but more importantly, I had a great time at the meeting. We were comfortable. We chatted and laughed and worked. It was exactly how I want this studio to be.

Woke up to a veritable winter wonderland, but one with a deadly secret (dum dum DUMMMM): the snowstorm ended with a finale of sleet, so the roads were like frozen ponds. As I journalled and sipped a cup of tea, I saw people carefully maneuvering their cars onto the roads, and decided to wait a little bit before heading to work. I'm glad I did; the day was comparatively warm, so that by the time I left, the roads were covered mostly with slush.

And there's new VR story up. I'm not maintaining a large buffer of content, but I'm not sure if I need to; I've nearly finished the story. There's probably less than two thousand words left to the VR story, which kinda amazes me because I've been writing it for two years now. Two years. And it should be over in a couple of months.

At which point, I want to completely rewrite it. But such is the nature of writing.

By the way, I didn't bake any cookies today, despite having such an easy day. Spent quite a bit of time at home, but spent it working on online projects or goofing off watching MST3K. Oh well.

Woke up and felt like chewed bubblegum. Shot out an e-mail to folks at work, explaining how I felt and that I'd be in to work late. Not a problem; my calendar was clear today, and the program for which I'm responsible is hosting its customer today, so my "bosses" would be plenty busy without me.

So I got an extra couple of hours of sleep, and woke up feeling refreshed for once. Zipped in to work and took care of a few things, then came home a little early to get started on my baking.

Thus begins Christmas Cookie season. As I've mentioned to practically all of my friends and acquaintances recently, I'll be baking about ten different types of Christmas cookies this weekend. To start off, I'm baking some of the more difficult cookies each night leading up to Sunday, when I'll roll up my sleeves and bake the rest.

Tonight's challenge: Candy Cane Cookies. They're two strands of dough, one white and one red, twisted into the shape of a candy cane. They look great, but they're a pain to make. You have to make the dough—which is near the consistency of bread dough, quite tough—and twist it into the appropriate shapes, despite it falling apart, then bake it for quite a bit longer than the recipe calls for, then transfer the cookies to the baking sheets without moving them too much or they'll fall apart.

I still have nine of them whole. :sigh: Ah well.

I've been reading a book on the early history of jazz. The book's titled, appropriately enough, Early Jazz by Gunther Schuller. It's a fascinating study of jazz from the turn of the century through the thirties, mostly because Schuller dissects jazz musically during this time. He'll write paragraphs of intense explanation about a particular song's swing. Great stuff.

And it's fun because it satsifies my curiosity. I've always wanted to know more about jazz, and to be able to appreciate it. This book is my first step.

I picked up the book from the library because one of my self-help books (The Artist's Way at Work, actually) recommends satisfying your intellectual curiosity at least once per week. And this is. And it feels so, so good.

Meanwhile, I came across this as I finished my (third?) re-reading of Tom Peters' Brand You 50, and very much wanted to share it with you wonderful people: