Monday 26 July 2010
First: I must like having several projects going on at once, because it seems like I have had about four or five personal projects going on at any one time in my life during the past, oh, twenty years. By personal projects, I obviously don’t mean anything related to employment or schooling, but I also don’t mean home projects, either – like sheet-rocking a basement or tending to a garden.I mean honest-to-goodness personal projects that have no discernible value. Like this blog.
The annoying thing is setting aside time to work on a project, but then being unable to. Like today, I planned to finish up a video during my lunch break. An hour should’ve been enough time. I needed to find some royalty-free music, and then just use it as appropriate in this (supposedly) simple, short filmlet. But I couldn’t locate this great site, that offers easy downloads of royalty-free music. I’ve used that site before, but I couldn’t find it today. I found another site, but they charged for their music. Add to that the fact that about 75% of the sites I tried visiting were blocked thanks to my job’s Great Wall of Blocked Sites. So, not only did I not finish the filmlet during my lunch break, I made almost no progress at all. Bummer. Once this filmlet is finally wrapped up, I’m gonna dedicate that day’s blog post to telling the story of what should’ve been a quick video to create.
You’ve been warned.
Second: my wife requested that I put the day of the week at the start of each blog post. Her exact request was: “You should out the day at the top of each post.” So I said: “I do.” She said: “No you don’t.” Then I said: “Oh, you mean the day of the week?” And she said: “Yeah.” So that’s that. Behold: it is Monday.
Third: cool story.
Tuesday 27 July2010
And here’s part of the problem with trying to write something about each day: often times, the events of the day aren’t “ready” to talk about or show on that day. Here then, are some photos I took back on Sunday:
Last December, Owen and I went to a holiday pot luck organized by Happy Trails Nature Club. One of the activities there was to take a pine cone, tie some twine to it, smother it in peanut butter, then roll it in bird seed. It’s quite messy! We took our pine cone home and hung it out on our deck. I didn’t think any birds would eat from it but not only did they eat – they picked it totally clean. A couple of times now (when I’m in the mood), we’ve given the ol’ cone a refill.
Tonight we shared the movie The Princess Bride with Owen. He said he really liked it, being especially enraptured with the swordplay and the ‘holocaust cloak’ (that garment Fezzik wears when storming the castle). At one point, we paused the movie for some reason, and Owen summed up his critical analysis thusly: “This movie is a lot like Number Five, only there’s no robot. And they don’t have laser guns.” By ‘Number Five,’ Owen means Short Circuit.
A couple of weeks ago, we all sat and watched The Wizard of Oz. Owen enjoyed that one, too, as was especially evident by his non-stop questioning of everything in the movie.
I’m not sure this kid appreciates the kind of quality film we try to bring into his life. Maybe he will when he’s older. And I’ll be happy to watch those flicks with him again.