Erik at home

Got a tour of Erik's new house. I expect it to turn into a strange and creative avenue so long as the electricity stays under control.
Paul, William and I went  out and bought three Lego sets from a guy who advertised them on Used Regina. We got an old Mindstorm R2D2, an old Bionicle that William doesn't have, and a remote control "Shadowstrike" vehicle (see video).

Delivery Day

This morning the chip repair guy came and fixed the two chips we got in our new tub during renovations  around it at $75 per chip. The light fixtures for the bathroom also finally arrived. Luminesque gave us a discount for the inconveniences of the three delays. They aren't installed yet, I'll post pictures when they are. My video card also arrived. I just opened it up and was very intimidated; I think it needs its own licence plate. This thing is massive; it takes two slots and must have five times the mass of my old card. It requires its own power. I was a bit freaked out putting it in but finally got it and now it working really well. I imported photos from my camera and it just immediately sees all the photos and displays the thumbnails; no delays at all.

 

This evening I presented the Fragile Harvest film screening at the Filmpool. The crowd was nice. Everyone stuck around afterwards and talked. (there were about twenty people. quite a few more than are in this photo).

vacation?

I'm still on vacation today so I stayed home and answered a few dozen work emails and didn't go anywhere. Very tired. Read a bit. Had  hoped to read Douglas Coupland's new book "Player One", which he read out loud in five, one-hour lectures, during this trip. I didn't find five hours of quiet so am still working on it. Paul and I watched Tim Burton's "Batman" (on my new tv). Looks good but it hasn't held up as well as I thought it did.

Game day

William played with his cousins all day, running around with George visiting and so on, while Margaret worked and I brought my niece Nicole to Paul's to connect up with Mike and Thomas and play some games. I can't actually remember the names of the two games. One was set in a haunted house and the other was about disease control around the globe ("Outbreak" and "Pandemic" I think it was called). The haunted house game was very cool. You play it cooperatively at first, exploring the insides of a haunted house to see where everything is (the floor tiles are randomly chosen as you open doors) but when certain random events occur, one player becomes the villain and the rules all change. In on session I played an 8 year old girl who opened a gate to another dimension and summon in a Lovecraft-type elder god.

Belated birthday

Paul's birthday was on the weekend. I had lots of family in town and so did he so it took until today to make a cake. I used my new icing bag and nozzle to write with whipped cream on top, this is my first successful attempt at cake writing. With whipped cream it was quite easy. The cake was chocolate cheesecake, one of the better ones recently, probably due to the simplicity. We played some Lego Minotaur and some Munchkin after supper then watched the pilot episode of Caprica that came out a few months before the new series. Neither Paul nor I had seen it. It was okay but not as interesting as the show seemed to be.

pre-party party

To shoot William's birthday film we have been connecting him up with his friends every day for play dates and clip capturing. Today Teagan and Daniel both arrived at the same time so it became an impromptu party and bar-be-que. After everyone else left, William opened the power miners exo-suit that Paul bought him. He built it while Paul and I restored the Crystal King. Who would win in a fight? No one knows for sure.

My Birthday

I started off the day light: a quick cappuccino and a biscotti then out the door to meet to discuss avant garde film with Brett at the new Mercury Diner on 13th Ave. It was the perfect place to discuss nostalgia, which was central to out discussion today. The Mercury opened last week and is owned by the same guys that run the Novia. They've fixed it up really nice with red vinyl benches and lots of retro stuff.Since I'd worked late last night getting a draft of the curriculum report done (a week ahead of schedule), and had no meetings this afternoon, I blew off the rest of the day. Margaret had to work (owing to her forgetting a shift yesterday) so William and I went to "Clash of the Titans" in 3D. He was amazed at the new glasses style, having not seen a 3D movie since "Shark Boy and Lava Girl" with the two colour glasses. It was fun and not as intense as the previews had led me to believe.This evening we dropped in to Paul's place and watched the new episode of Dr. Who on our way to going swimming. In the end we decided not to swim (just as well, I have had a leg cramp for the past three hours) and came home where William and Paul played Lego (William got a Prince of Persia Lego set the other day - see above) and I made vanilla gelato.
Margaret is home now; we can now eat some of the amaretto cheesecake I made yesterday.

restored

Today I finally finished restoring "Daytona: A Happening", a film by Jean Oser that was accidentally cannibalized for found footage sometime last year. Luckily most of the parts were intact. I accidentally destroyed a six inch part in the process and have another six inch part that part that I could not locate a home for. There are a couple other gaps but overall it is there.
Jean Oser was a film editor and a great filmmaker in his own right. He made quite a few short commissioned films in the fifties and sixties (industrials when such things were still pretty cool). He then came to teach at the UofR where he became one of the most influential people in the creation of a film community and film industry in Saskatchewan. The films he made are housed at the Saskatchewan Filmpool and are unlikely to be housed collectively anywhere else in the world. While many of them likely exist in other collections or in the archives of their commissioning companies, no one else has them collected as "Jean Oser" films. This one in particular is a fast paced short about motorcycle racing. Made in the 60s, it is filled with odd bits of slang. At one point the narrator points out that when the race is over, the action hasn't stopped and we see the rider necking with a sexy girl. It was commissioned by the Triumph Motorcycle company.
It was Paul's birthday today: HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAUL. We had pizza and cake. His brother Mike came to town and surprised him half way through supper. Then we went to the opening at the Dunlop. William was doing a number of drawings and had them laid out on the floor. Two people, including one person who is a programmer at another local art gallery, walked by just as he'd finished them and stepped directly on them. What kind of people go to art galleries these days?

Life is Like...

William went to Gavin DeLint's son Jack's fourth birthday party today but was in a bad mood the whole way there. I assumed it was because he'd been up late last night (nearly midnight) but as he attempted to sleep on my lap (quite out of character) I began to suspect he was also sick. We exited after the cake and went home where he suggested that he get some rest. I installed him with another Animorphs book (the 39th he's read) and a hot water bottle and went down stairs to roast a pheasant. When Margaret got home she noticed it was cold in the house. We quickly determined that the furnace wasn't working (it had been first thing in the morning) so we called the guy. He came fairly quickly, while Margaret was out getting cat food because our not-so-picky cat refuses to touch the new brand we bought a few days ago, and he finished before she got back. There was a chunk of dryer lint covered insulation lodged in the air intake and that made a switch trigger. That was a $133 piece of lint. William finished the whole book by mid afternoon and started to feel better. He stayed up late again, starting his 40th Animorphs book. We have three more out from the library, then we are out of avenues to get more unless we start ordering them on=line. There were about 60 of them in total.
Paul called to direct me to this snowman, his face is plain snow, perhaps it melted off, perhaps it was never there. It was directly behind Allan's house.

William has readers

Late this evening, still in the midst of massive house cleaning and crisis management, I put together a very minimal video for William's blog, this time featuring the rocket that Paul built for him. He had a friend at school ask him how to join his blog last week. i took him over at Rowan's house today and we showed him and his sister William's blog as well. He is starting to establish a viewership so I'd better start to produce work for him.

Apples and pie but not apple pie.

Day began with the George's girls waking up and me jumping out of bed to feed them, but not myself. I zoomed off to get some blood work done to test my tri-glycerides again (remember my liver tests six months ago). I've kept with my near-pop-free diet for 4.5 months so we'll see how that worked. My new hard drive finished formatting at about 8 am, about 10 hours. At work I met with Janine (who couldn't make it Tuesday). Gave her a copy of Marian McMahon's article "Nursing History" which may be important to Janine's thesis project which involves studying her family history using photographs as her guide. Email was down all day at the university, making it a calmer environment. Met with Eric for a while and primarily talked about a superhero idea we initiated yesterday. It's based on an idea he pitched years ago to Incredible Story Studio and was accepted but then never made for reasons unknown. Of course our version will be a bit more twisted, but he's been doing the most work on it. Went home early, stopping at Safeway. Why do people try to back up into diagonal parking spots? They constrict the lane as they do it, then when they leave (supposedly easier) they are facing the wrong way down the row so are idiots twice with that one action. Is it that hard to back out of a spot? At home I moved all the dvds into my new shelf. Finally back in order (alphabetized by director except box sets and animation/superhero). I picked all the apples from our tree in time for my parents, Margaret's parents, George and the girls back from the farm, and Paul and Mike to arrive for desert. Margaret made pies. After everyone left, I processed all the apples and made apple sauce.

217

Had breakfast with Mike and Paul at their parent's house. As always, the conversation turned to Lego. It seems that they built Lego as kids as well, so I suggested looking for the sets. Unlike my mom who wanted me to take all the stuff that was mine out of the house shortly after I moved out, Mike and Paul's mom seems happy to store their stuff, cleverly hidden so not even they can find it. So with her help, they uncovered three Lego sets from 1977. Paul is probably building them right now.I watched Cody Banks 2 with William, it was uninspired, then worked on my Carle Steel video (another Warhol styled "Modern"film). I put 4 frames of Warhol's "Empire" in as the background. I don't know how to get stuff off of Youtube, so I simply used the print screen command to grab whole screens of the image as it was in pause on Youtube, the copied them into photoshop, cropped them, then imported them into After Effects and created a loop of them. As I promised her, I have made her thinner (by about 1/3).

215

I spent the day trying to complete my annual information forms for work (a summary of my activities, screenings, committees, classes, and other stuff I did last year) but instead I fussed around with my two computers. I finally got them to both access the internet via the wireless router, and the laptop will also have access. With Paul's help, we also got them both to be able to access the printer. I imagine we'll be able to send things from the laptop as well, although that isn't set up yet. Anyways, finally at the end of the day i got back to my forms and got them mostly done, but for the information I forgot at the office. I can easily finish it up tomorrow since I'm not being reviewed this year and a day more or less won't kill anyone (the paperwork is looked at only by the department head and put on file until peer review next year).
I talked with Deric for a while, he called out of the blue just to chat. He's teaching down in Montana now, things are going well. We mostly talked about the kids. He's won an award at a festival in Calgary so he'll be going up to receive that next week.
I saw the thinnest icicle I've ever seen today. It looked like a strand of glass hanging off the edge of the deck railing. When the deck was touched, it shimmered and vibrated like a tuning fork. It was sublime.

194

This evening I cooked chicken three ways, Bar-B-Que with my 7 herb recipe, Thai peanut sauce, and mango. Then I put Paul to work, first trying to get the router working (it might me malfunctioning), and then to sort Lego. I thought it might be fun to reassemble the kits so all the pieces are available for William to put them together again from the instructions, as he is just learning to do that and having lots of fun. By the end of 5 hours and having not quite put two (relatively small) kits together, I wonder if it would be easier just to buy more.

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.

get your kicks

William had a tooth pulled today, it was one that he'd had a big filling done when he was much younger but now it has an infection under it so he's got it pulled even though the adult tooth won't come in for a few more years. They put in funky place holder, a wire that has been custom made to fit around the tooth beside it and just have a loop of wire in the gap so that the teeth don't shift. For his recovery time, I bought him "Birdman", the 1967 series.

It's Paul's birthday today so I baked a cheesecake and we put up a banner and blew up some balloons. After a rousting game of Kerplunk, we settled into some heavy crossword puzzling. Hmmmm, when I write it down, it doesn't sound nearly as exciting.

I'm finally able to stop recording "Toopy and Binoo", a surreal kits cartoon about a big mouse and his best friend, a smaller silent cat. William loves the show and I don't mind it even though it generally puts me to sleep. Toopy and Binoo runs in a number of different time slots on Treehouse, pretty much every day, sometimes just 2 of the 5 minute episodes, sometimes 5 put together into a half hour. According to the Spectra Animation website, there are 104 of these episodes, but there are not episode guides ... UNTIL NOW!!! The following is a list of the entire 104 episodes, in alphabetical order,

Abracadabra

Amazing Maze, the

Ant Mimi

Baby Toopy

Backpack

Ballooning with Binoo

Big Blue

Big Parade

Big Race

Binoo Blows Raspberries

Binoo’s Island

Binoo’s Letter

Binoo’s Wand

Binoo's Birthday

Bistro Binoo

Bubbles

Bug Smooch

Camp Out

Castle, the

Christmas Eve

Cinder Binoo

Cloud Gazing

Colour Me Toopy

Cuckoo Clock

Diaper Dream

Dreamland

Duckling

Dusteroos

Eggheads

Flying Hat, the

Four Seasons

Funny Bunny

Gargantua

Genie

Giant Footprints

Godmother Toopy

Gone Fishin’

Gopherville

Great GooGoo

Grunt Monster

Happy Toopy Day

Invisible Dog

Invisible World

Jack in the box

Jungle Toopy

Keyhole

Land of Colours

Land of the Lost

Little Bo Toopy

Little Red Binoo

Lost Bear, the

Magic Bowl

Magic Marker

Magic Mirror

Magic Woosher

Meatball Western

Moon Bounce

Mud Cake

Night Light

On and Off

Peanus-Butterbot

Pet Palace

Playclay

Power Pyjamas

Pumpkin Party

Puppet Show

Recess

Robot Doctors

Rockin Toopy

Santa Toopy

Seven Binoos

Sky Friends

Sneezing Toopy

Snowflakes

Snowglobe

Soapy Toopy

Sock Puppet

Sock Safari

Song and Dance

Space House

Sparkle Binoo

Storm in a Bottle

Strange New World

Super Toopy

Superball

Three Bears

Tickle-Me-Tail

Tiger Binoo

Toopy Goes Bananas

Toopy Knows Everything

Toopy’s Bed

Toopy’s Nose

Toopy’s Present

Toopy's Story

Toopy's Surprise

Topsy Turvey

Train Ride

Treasure Hunt

Treehouse

Under the Bed

Warm Circus

Water Wings

Where's Binoo

Where's Patchy Patch?