Day off.... finally

William and I took the day off and mostly stayed home watching tv. The only trip out was to renew my license, stop at the comic store for the new "Fables" and to check out the Dr. Who toys and to pick up some lobster meat for supper.

Manga-palooza

Yet again I had meetings all day and the evening filled with film screenings. Margaret and William went to the Manga-palooza thing and met comic artists and did some drawings of their own.

Student films

This evening the first half of the fourth year films were screened at the Rainbow Cinema. They got a great crowd. I arrived late so a few seats had opened up but initially it was beyond the 150 capacity. The last film of the night was Erik Sirke's film which I acted in back in January. It turned out quite good anyway. Lots of fun.

Artesian

Margaret went to the open house concert at the Artesian today. I had meetings all day so couldn't go.

What's up doc?

I cleavered the bunny into bits and we had a chocolate feeding frenzy today. Probably at least ten pounds still remaining.

rerun rerun

I can't recall if I wrote about this, but my SSHRC proposal for my "Rerun" research program was turned down (actually, it received what they call a 4A which means it was approved but didn't have a high enough rating to get money). It was suggested that I could apply for some university money to help develop the project further. The deadline is next week so I was thinking that I would write this application between other duties this week. Late last night I realized that the application will require signatures from the department head and the dean and they both want it a week in advance. Therefore, I spent most of today drafting it.

Easter

We had two Easter gathers today, one at my parent's house, which included my second cousin Julie and her brother and sister in law who are doctors in Sudbury. They have a new baby and my cousin has a 1.5 year old so talk was mostly about babies.The second event was and Richard and Gerda's and included many people such as Fred Clipsham (Regina city council, running for NDP in current election). The talk was mostly politics.

The Easter Bunny came early

Margaret won an 11 lb Belgian chocolate bunny!!!

Flood

We took a walk in the park to look at the highest water levels we've ever seen.

mini figs

It was the semi-annual reconnecting of all the mini-figs with their heads and hands. I'm down about 20 hands but suspect they might be squirreled away in a bag somewhere.

Will Nye the Science Guy

The oddest thing I've done this week, so far, was to alter the voice and on-screen text of the Disney show "Bill Nye the Science Guy" into "Will Nye the Science Guy" for William's presentation in the morning.

not funny any more

Snowed all night. Didn't melt much. Worked at home, trying to get taxes and choral dvd and grading all figured out. Only went out for short while in pjs and rubber boots to build snowman.

new mini figs

Worked on my taxes in front of my backlog of "Republic of Doyle" all evening. William got the punk rocker with his first series four mini-fig.

Brrrrr

Dan and Les drove back to Winnipeg today. They had to drive on sections of the #1 highway covered with a few inches of water. Back in Regina, floods give way to blizzards. I think winter has finally come... back.

Guests

Artist Dan Donaldson and old friend Les Newman are guests in our house this week. Dan has an opening of his paintings at the Art Gallery of Regina tomorrow. Les is installing with him.

 

Our backyard is still full of water. I bailed a lot of it away again (50-60 gallons) and then Dave from next door lent us his pump because his water is mostly gone.

willim sick

I had an early meeting today and then thought I could take a rest at home. I don't think I've had a rest in a month. When I arrived I discovered that William was sick and home for the day. He and I watched Woody Allen's Zelig. It's one of my favorites. I didn't get much rest though. Margaret needed some help getting ready for Les who was coming in from Winnipeg today and staying with us for a night or two.

water

My back yard is underwater. The house is higher but there is seepage anyway. I spent an hour shoveling water off the lawn into buckets and hauling them to the alley. This helped.

Mad Men season four

I finished watching season four of Mad Men. Paul gave me the first seasons for Christmas and I got the fourth recently from Amazon. It was a much better season than the third, getting back to the humour and the advertisements and less on Don's marriage and issues. The packaging on the first three seasons was ellegant, bring appropriate detail to match the content. The fourth is just the folded cardboard package with the plastic portions already falling off. The whole thing was just shrink rapped, shoddy and unattractive.

Party

This is the last day of a week in which I had multiple deadlines and time commitments. The morning began with a set of meetings with William's teachers. This was very informative but the timing could have been better. On the way back to the office I stopped and shipped the poetry videos I made to Bulgaria. The mpeg video render of the Sock-Vile project worked out so we were able to watch the 2 hour cut I created in class today. My students came over to our house for bbq. William was a great host, keeping a check list, announcing their arrivals, and giving out Lego door prizes.

My Birthday

Breakfast was sweet. Day was exhausting. Finished a rough assembly of all 15 episodes of Sock-vile and documented Courtney Milne event.

tired

William woke up this morning with a bad dream around 5. I thought he'd gone back to sleep (which is what I did) but he actually eventually went downstairs and listed to the new Eddie Izzard cd I bought him (when you start to tell me what a bad idea that was, I have to tell you that I was voraciously listening to Cheech and Chong when I was his age). Anyway, he is very tired now, as am I. Worked a very long day. More on that later.

poetry videos

I got my entries completed for the Bulgarian poetry video project. I had hoped to have six entries but only had time to finish three and those are a bit below par. My Sockvile deadline is screamingly close so I cannot afford another hour on them, even if my brain was capable.I don't know if they are worth shipping but that's probably just the despair talking.

last photography class

End of term for photography. A couple people will have late work to hand in.

Golem of Socks

This afternoon I recorded William doing the voice for the Golem of Socks, the last remaining character for my separate version of Sockvile. I wrote it a couple of years ago (notes are likely here in my blog for anyone who cares) with the intention of practicing some 3D After Effects. It is in 13 one minute serialized melodramas. I went to copy it to my portable drive off the older Mac based ProTools suite and surprise of surprise, the two wouldn't work together. Can't I go one day without facing a mac/pc conflict?
Yesterday I chose the update to the blog editor and it  allows much more manipulation of the posting, moving photos around and changing their size and so on. 

Trading Card party

Today was the 8th anniversary party for the Artist Trading Card (ATC) group that Margaret is an organizer of. I finally started on some new cards although only one is ready, the first card for series two of my Rerun: Canister the Robot collages. Here is the central image:

I also spent a lot of time stressing about the video files for the choral work on Courtney Milne scheduled for later this week. The videos I've been sending to David Gerhard have gone into the dropbox as 720x480 but he downloads them and they then seem to be only 1/4 that size. I changed compressors a couple of times and as inexplicably as it started not working, it started working.Is it another mac/pc thing? I don't know.

too much IS too much

April Fools Day: This morning I helped William make coffee for Margaret: boiled water with dark food colouring. Yum. He wanted a crayon in it but we didn't go that direction.
When I got to work I discovered that I can't transfer files larger than 4Gb from the Mac where I've captured the Sockvile footage into a hard drive formatted to pc. This just further drives home the idea that a Mac computer can easily do anything you ask it to do so long as you never ask it to do something that it can't do. The list of things it can't do is kept secret and left for you to discover one item at a time.
In class, instead of being able to watch footage, we took a break to watch Darrell Prohor do a talk on his research into historical photography in western Canada. Then we did some improvised music in the studio.