My sweetie-wife returned home on Friday after spending a week helping take care fo issues surrounding the passing of her mother.
Yesterday we went whale watching. I’ve lived here in San Diego nearly thirty years and I’ve never gone whale watching. It was fun. I had forgotten just how peaceful I find sea travel. Not the same for my honey. She is prone to motion-sickeness so it was not the best of times for her.
So after diner tonight and a long day at work I decided to unwind with a bit of a zombie flick. I put in my blu-ray of the 1979 Dawn Of The Dead. (In my opinion Romero’s best Zombie film.) Anyway since this film was shot in 1979 the soundtrack on the original is a mono-sooundtrack. On the blu-ray they have upgraded it with a re-mastered 5.1 surround soundtrack in lossless PCM output. Well I had my shiny new sound system and subwoofer so I played around watching the film switching back and forth between the various sound sources.
There’s a scene where on of the characters — Stephen — is along and in the bowels of the Mall. He fires at shadows and the rounds go bouncing off into the darkness. Listening to the scene with the 5.1 surround was great. I heard the bullets ricochet completely around my seat. I was really surprised that a re-mastered soundtrack performed so well.
So my sweetie-wife has headed out to her where her mother lived to wrap up affairs there and I am on my own for about the next week. The condo seems much larger and more empty with her here.
At work they have offered more overtime as we are behind on our paperwork. (The bad economy has hammered people hard and that makes them turn to us in greater numbers.) Without anyone to rush home to I am doing the overtime at work. I did two hours tonight and I am likely to do two more tomorrow night.
At home tonight I just watched TV and made my own dinner.
The only bright spot today was that I scored ticket for the next taping of the TV show “The Big Bang Theory.” I’m not much for sit-coms, but I like this one. Of course being a geek really helps and that the fact that the shows isn’t mocking of geeks, but rather it really seems to get geeks and geek culture. I scored a few tickets for friends and one for my sweetie-wife, though she is unlikely to attend, but if she changes her mind I am ready. I am looking forward to next month when we go to LA and watch the show live.
In the we early morning hours this morning, my sweetie-wife’s mother passed away in her sleep. We knew we were dealing with end-of-life issues and now it has come to pass.
First, I am making a slight modification to my work resolution.
When I am working on outlines and plotting notes, that I only need to do five hundred words per night. I found that 1000 was too many. I could do it, and I have been doing it. However it was causing me to not fully develop my ideas. While I am constructing the plot it is important to take the time for feel out the flavor and nuance of each idea so that I can properly understand where it is taking me.
When I am working in narrative, that will require a 1000 words per work night before I can play.
Another change is that I am walking away from short stories for awhile. The last rejection actually hurt, and normally I have an iron armored hide when it comes to rejections. (Writing ones, emotional ones were always far far worse.) This one burned and it’s put me off short stories for the time being. I will focus entirely on Cawdor and other novels. (Anyway my black mood is perfect for writing Cawdor.)
Over Christmas we had another attempted terror attack against America. By now I assume that everyone reading this blog knows that a young man smuggled explosives aboard an International flight — the bomb making materials were apparently in his underwear — and after determining that the aircraft was in American airspace, attempted to detonate it.
Only by a combination of luck and in competence did the device not explode, but merely burned. Even that could have been very bad had passengers not acted quickly and subduing the terrorist and putting out the fire.
It stupid that this man was able to smuggle the bomb-making material aboard. We have the technology to catch this crap. It’s back scatter x-rays.
These devices can image right through clothing down to the skin. The likelihood of getting contraband through such a system is much lower than with our current wand and pat down system. (Nothing is assured – a dopey scanner operator can still miss things, but this is so much better than what we have now.) We have not instituted these scanners because it is able to image people in the nude, right through their clothing.
Horrors, someone might see my wang.
Bloddy hell people, I’d rather have TSA people seeing an endless parade of naughty bits than not be able to see bombs. Hmmmm, nude or dead, I know which I’ll want to be.
The only reason to hold back this technology is that we are so scared of skin we’d literally rather die than have someone see some.
To quote Plan 9 from Outer Space…
“Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”
Today is the anniversary for my sweetie-wife and myself, and it is also her birthday. (She made it easy for me to remember the important dates by loading them all onto the same day.)
We were going to go out to dinner and have a nice night. Sadly, that was not to be.
I woke up with a headache, which grew throughout the day. There were times when I wanted a 9 mm analgesic.
We stayed home of course – I hurt so badly I had only toast for dinner — and plan to go out tomorrow.
My sweetie-wife has traveled back home to help her mother and I have to fend for myself for the weekend.
It will be videos, video games, friends, and tomorrow morning an early showing of Avatar. I don’t expect much from the story but I want to see the new technology.
So this blog post was going to be about why I was angry with Turner Classic Movies and their proposed 1st annual Classic Film Festival.
Saturday Morning I awoke with plans of grabbing a couple of checks that needed depositing and walking to my bank to perform said deposit. That plan fell through when I saw that there was a downpour of rain going on and walking anywhere would result in a through soaking that could only be matched by Washington D.C.
So with my sweetie-wife off doing overtime at her job, I sat down and flipped through the channels on the television. I stopped at TCM — Turner Classic Movies — there was one of those short subjects playing about Claude Raines so I watched that and then the commercials for up coming movies. ( I really like that TCM uses the original trailers to promote the movies they show.) Then the devil stepped up and had an offering.
TCM is hosting the first annual Classic Hollywood Movie Festival. They started running down the lists of movies to be shown and I got more and more interested. My interest needle pegged when they said that they would be premiering the lost print of Metropolis. Oh my, I really wanted to see that! (I admit an interest in seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen again.)
Then the host – I am certain — revealed that the festival was going to take place in Hollywood, Florida. Damn it man! That’s not Hollywood, not movie Hollywood by any means at all. I was bummed. (I said as much to my ex later that day when I called to wish her a happy Birthday.)
So tonight i sat down to blog about and of course that meant digging up the link to the festival. Surprise, it’s in Hollywood California like it is supposed to be. It’s four days of panels, events, and classic movies projected onto big screens. Man, for a film nut like me this is just great.
Except a cheap 4 day pass current runs $399.00, and that’s going up by a $100 soon. Le Sigh
I have the money. It would be like a really expensive SF con, nut I can’t justify it. There are individual screenings and I may attend one of those.
Sorry about the life posting and blogging here of late. There has been a lot going on in my life and it has been sucking up time and energy and emotional fortitude.
Overtime at work is a factor but the largest issues is that my sweetie-wife’s mum is sick and in the hospital again. My sweetie has driven out to be with her mum. We’re hoping for the best but it is stressful and sleep has been lost.
It’s impacted not only my blogging but my writing as well.