September Sweeps - Day 607

So, back to the cabin again.  I believe I complained about fall having arrived so fast the last time I was here.  Even more so now, not only have the leaves changed their colors up here (there are still some green leaves, maybe 15% of the trees have not yet changed), but more than half of the trees are now completely bare, the leaves having fallen in the week since I was here.  Things look dead, the grass is brown, the water at the lake looks shrunken and sad, and there is a chill in the air that made it difficult to do my run on the dam, much less stand in the spot with a phone signal and check my messages (I had zero text messages, always an unhappy discovery).

It's probably something that I have said before, but summers are very short way up here in the mountains.  There is probably a three week stretch every summer where it gets hot enough up here to open the windows and leave them open at night (and that's still only on days when it's a hundred degrees or so back home), and of course, winter lasts a lot longer up here.  It was cold enough that I put a long sleeved shirt on over my long sleeved shirt once I got here, and didn't take my shoes off for a couple of hours.

I went outside and gathered ten logs for the fire (there are downed trees that my brother cut down earlier this summer, and though he chainsawed them into stove-sized lengths, they hadn't been collected or stacked), and then grabbed a bucket and filled it with kindling--branches and pieces of bark that would easily burn and, hopefully, start a fire that wouldn't just go out in two minutes like mine usually do.

To my surprise, once it started up, it never went out, burning as long as I continued to feed the flames, and I even went out and filled the bucket with more kindling right before it got dark.  It took a long while to get the temperature in here up, though (I think it had gone from 49 to 55 an hour after I got the fire going), but once the logs started to burn, it warmed right up so well that, when the fire burned out sometime in the dark of night, it only dropped a few degrees by the morning.

Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In September: 3185

I've been reading a really thick biography on Walt Disney the last few weeks, and it has been kind of thrilling, but also very, very frustrating.  The author clearly puts you on the side of Disney (and his studio)*, and you root for him, want him to succeed, want the cash to come pouring in.  But the man was apparently so terrible with money, so unconcerned with the bottom line and budgets, and such an irresponsible perfectionist, that after the first three or four times that something ends up costing way more than it was supposed to (sometimes more than double) or doesn't come out when it was planned to (sometimes by more than a year, and in the case of BAMBI, more than three years), you start to shake your head and see the same crazy pattern repeating.

The worst, in my mind, was Walt's obsession with an animated concert feature film about classical music, which he put all his focus on, despite having other projects much further along and closer to completion.  The weeks he works and reworks and imagines and reimagines what will be called FANTASIA are so frustrating, that it starts to feel like one of those mad scientist pictures where the creation no longer can be considered noble or an understandable scientific endeavor, but is the textbook definition of a monster.  

When FANTASIA was finally completed, it clocked in at two hours and five minutes long, and that's completed hand-drawn animation with effects (they ended up cutting out a half hour or so of that footage when it hit wide release).  It's a movie celebrating classical music with no real story, an active effort to get away from narrative and be more artsy, and Roy Disney (the financial half of the company) keeps having to borrow more and more money to get it finished.  Walt's studio keeps teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, only staying alive due to bank loans and Mickey Mouse merchandise . . . and he then puts all his eggs in the FANTASIA basket.  Because of stuff like that, the book reads like a horror novel.**

Sorry to keep going on about the book, but I don't have Big Anklevich to call and bother, telling him crazy bits of trivia and sharing Walt's triumph with SNOW WHITE with him.  But it's particularly fascinating to see projects that the Disney company spends weeks or months developing (like a Rold Dahl collaboration about gremlins, or a film with Salvador Dali exploring surrealism) that never came out, despite the thousands of manhours dedicated to them.

Push-ups Today: 111
Push-ups In September: 3633

As far as writing goes, sigh.  I've been working on this super quick Will Choner follow-up story (I was considering calling it "The Case of the Grandma's Bracelet" or maybe something more alliterative, like "The Case of the Beauty's Bracelet"), that I could have finished at any time, but instead have only contributed a couple of paragraphs to here and there, at the end of long days.  In the heyday of my daily writing, I'd have completed it in less than a week, but here we are, dipping our foot in October, and it's not quite done.

Even so, I had hoped that hanging out with Will and Beth again might give me the energy to go back to the story I was writing last year (the last time I touched it was November 28th), in which they create a sort of detective agency to find missing items.  While it would be good to finish something I started and abandoned (right, Mister Disney?), I'd love nothing more than to bang out a couple of really short stories based on website prompts or Marshal Latham suggestions, getting them finished in two or three days each.

To make matters worse, I went out and shoveled gravel for a little while, and while doing so, I got this idea for a Dead & Breakfast Christmas story (I tend to write a holiday tale every year, and this should be no exception), where the staff (which ought to include housekeepers, janitors, and the handyman that we've never really met before) get together and tell of the experiences they've had there.  I sat down after my run and jotted down everything that had popped into my head while I was shoveling, but I don't know if I'll end up writing it.***  It's one of those projects where I need one more good idea--like a cool ending or a twist or something big to work toward--and I could jump into it and start writing.

Words Today: 331
Words In September: 19,935

*There is the lengthy section with Walt versus his striking animators who want a union and better pay and working hours, and only in that chapter does the author paint Walt as less than noble, less than sympathetic.

**Of course, I hate FANTASIA.  I have always been baffled and bored by it, so I knew from the outset that it was going to crash and burn.  If you're a big fan, maybe you'd view its development as far less damning, though it's impossible to justify its budget or think it was bound to succeed (where even the excellent PINOCCHIO failed to recoup its budget by almost a million dollars--and this was back when a Disney animated feature was budgeted at $900,000 or so).

***I establish in "Meet the New Clerk, Same As the Old Clerk," that Meeshelle has never worked there at night since being rehired until the last Saturday in December), and I don't want to contradict that.  Can she have attended a holiday party, say, from 5:30pm to 7:30pm, a week before, and not have mentioned it in "Last Friday In December?"