Day tripper

William had a doctor's appointment this afternoon. He finally got a proper check up and they'll be investigating his cough further. He opted to stay out of school after that and run a couple of errands which included trips to Rona and Home Depot. I bought the tiles for the tub. Nothing fancy, although we might get some detail tiles for highlights. When we got home, the birds in the tree above our house were really really loud but were quiet along the rest of the block. I recorded them and am trying something new. I've uploaded the audio to my website: here is the link. I left it as a wave file so it is a bit big. I suppose I should have made it an mp3. Perhaps I'll replace it later. I've done this because it is difficult to find a place to put audio without video on the web. You can't do it in this blog, nor on Facebook or Youtube. You CAN do it on Myspace (and I have a profile) but thought I'd try something I could organize myself.
This evening we went to William's school for their welcome back BBQ. We saw his classroom and talked with his teacher and also saw the "time machine" which is part of the upcoming centennial of the school. William has a drawing inside it. Janine Windolph and Gerri-Ann Siwek are involved heavily with this.

portrait of my brain

This isn't really my brain, it just feels that way. I had a headache all night that kept me from sleeping. This morning William asked if we could watch "Alice in Wonderland" which I bought a couple of weeks ago but haven't opened yet. I was quite certain that he didn't want to watch it, being potentially creepy, so I gladly agreed. I quite enjoyed it and so did William. He wanted to re-watch the Mad Hatter scenes. My headache persisted but discovered that it was less when I was sitting upright so I slept in a chair all afternoon. This image is a photo Margaret took yesterday while working at Gerda's on paper making. It is by Gerry Ann Siwek: image of bunny from handmade paper with inclusions.

snow day

William and I stayed home all day, partially due to lack of health but equally due to excess of snow. Wow, there is a lot of it out there. I am almost finished my annual report to the university; just a couple last details and my cv to update and I can submit it. I also got a couple of student scripts read, so am finally almost on top of things. Margaret went to a collage collective session all weekend and created a nice new piece that combines paper onto wood with paint. Luckily she drove there with Gerri Ann from across the street who has a 4 wheel drive, else she'd have probably not made it there first thing this morning.

comic day

Tomorrow is comic book day, go to a comic store and see the wonders and get free stuff!
There is also a comic book conference at the university. My friend of over 25 years June Madeley is in town from St. John to speak at it about Manga. She is staying with us this week, will have lots of time to catch up on stuff. At the conference, there will also be presentations by local comic artists including my friend and neighbour Gerri Ann Siwek and an ex-student of mine Brent Braaten, pictured below.

Saturday laziness

Margaret had to work all day at the Dunlop at Sherwood where they had an opening of work by Vic Cicanski, Donna Kreikle, and i-Ann Siwek, as well as some garden events and dancing by New Dance Horizons. William and I watched Johnny English this morning then went to the opening. I'm really tired from staying up way to late watching Veronica Mars season 3, which I've been waiting four months for through the library (I was about 25th on the list, but luckily there were 3 copies). I also read The Invention of Hugo Cabret, an amazing book which was mostly drawings, all set in1931 about clocks and cinema. Check out the sample first pages on the website. I had a nap and am ready to watch Veronica Mars again until morning.

281 my birthday

It's my birthday so I premeditatedly dove off of my reduced sugar diet I've managed to maintain for an entire week. Today began with Belgium chocolate in bed. I picked up William at lunchtime and took him to A&W where we each had a teen burger (I ate about 1/3 of his) and root beers. At supper, William wrapped me a can of Coke, so it only seemed right that I drink it. I baked a cheesecake, chocolate, and we had some of that later - although in my twisted reality, cheesecake IS a health food.
My horoscope in the Leader Post for the year reads: "You're so powerful this year that it's like you can control time itself. You learn and do more in the next year than many people would do in 10. Believe in your powers to exceed the norm. ..." Well that sure rocks.
So part of my time travel today was to run errands, pick up a hard drive and camera from work, wash the car, put gas in the car ($1.26 or so per litre), pick up issue 13 of Buffy Season 8 from the comic store (funniest issue ever, Xander hanging with Dracula), drank some of my expensive tequila and talked super-heroes with Gavin de Lint who stopped by with his three year old son Jack to drop off a book for Margaret, restocked my herbs, met with Christina at the university regarding Caroline Leaf and chatted about Warhol, did a phone reference for a student seeking a job, and got home in time to do some great work on my videos before William was out of school. Margaret came home with Terry, with whom I was chatting for a few minutes while Margaret went upstairs to print off a file from the computer from her. However, Margaret comes down and tells me she can't find any of her files. I come up here and find that Margaret's entire folder under the My Files is gone! I look in recycle bin and do searches in the computer and cannot find it. I figure I should re-boot and hope that it's just some glitch that will sort itself out, so I tell the computer to reboot. It tells me that I have After Effects running and, realizing that I'd not saved the really nice looking Warhol style piece I did on Gerri Ann Siwek, I hit cancel. I suppose I should have read the question of the screen more carefully, as the computer takes this to mean that it should continue to reboot and my file was lost. I grouched for a while then got back in the saddle (Gerri Ann is shot on William's spring horse), and I eventually find Margaret's folder, which had been moved inside a different folder. I do not understand why it did not appear with a search. I rebuilt my Gerri Ann video: see still below. I used a more feathered edge and lowered the contrast on the initial image, rather than increasing it as I've done on some others. Overall I like the effect of this altered approach. Some of the blue is going to be replaced with real images, something about death such as car crashes or dead buffalo if I can find something appropriate. I read with William for an hour then watched "Shoot em Up", a movie I'd never heard of before Kevin lent it to me a couple of weeks ago. It was fabulously funny. I watched half of it over again with Margaret right away afterwards. It owes a lot to John Woo and Quinton Terantino, but is definitely its own film, funny at every turn with death and mayhem that straddles both the absurd and the emotionally real. HIGHLY recommended for a fun evening (extreme violence warning).
I got 11 birthday greeting through Facebook! More than in real life!

108 : Margaret's birthday in 2007 with pictures

The reference below to how we "ate the results" of my super-8 film was meant to be mysterious. Now that I am writing this caption, six years later, it took me a few minutes to remember that this referred to my film "Cake" which I felt was quite successful. 

 Today is Margaret's birthday. She's decided everything should be based around the number 3, which has me somewhat baffled. It's not that I don't work well with arbitrary themes, it's only a problem when that theme is so general that I don't know where to start. It's like saying that the birthday should have a birthday theme. I picked up an amazing New Yorker cartoon collection. If the hefty 600 page book isn't enough, it also has a dvd rom which contains all 70, 363 cartoons on it! That would be reading one a day for about 200 years, or 200 a day for a whole year. Fits well into her cartoon collection which has been sealed in the attic for a year until last night after we watched the Adam's Family with William and I had to go find the Chas Adams collection from storage.

William and I had our doctors appointment today, so I took him downtown to the SGI tower for lunch. They were serving macaroni and cheese as well as ribs. William was excited about the macaroni until about 5 seconds after I'd been served, so he mostly ate my lunch and I ate his. Fortunately he said something before we'd put some horrid ketchup onto it, he follows his mother in being able to tolerate this mixture, I can't. We are in good shape, William surprised the doctor by reading words off the poster he pointed at, rather than just the letters while testing his eyes. His reading is coming along quite well. I found out from my appointment that I'm actually an inch taller than I thought I was. I double checked with my own marking on the wall that I drew a few years ago and it's true. I marked it but never measured it, who knew?

I finished shooting my One Take Super-8 film today and ate the results with Gerri Anne, Steve, and Paul. Steve made his first video last weekend, "Going for Milk", although it perhaps should have been called "Milk Run" about getting distracted by the hot car while using it for an errand. Pretty well done, especially for a first work. Only about a couple of minutes long.