9-20

 9-20

It's my nephew Kaysen's twelfth birthday today.  I've been calling him twelve for almost a year.  Usually, I go to my cousin's house on Tuesday nights, but since three episodes of "Cassian Andor" are dropping at one am tonight, we had figured we'd watch one of them, and call it a night.  I have to go out of town on Thursday, so that means I can't go to the cabin tomorrow.  But I got an idea: what if I went to the cabin today, got some editing done, and went to my cousin's tomorrow night, and we could watch all three "Andors," and I could also do the cabin thing?

So I did.

It seems somehow responsible, even though going to the cabin is pretty indulgent (once again, no one has been here since I visited last, making me wonder why I bother packing up all my food and bedding and suitcase and such).  

There was a deer out front, eating leaves where my oldest nephew makes his campfires, and when I stepped out and took a picture of it, it took off like a bat out of that town in Texas near Big Anklevich that has thousands of bats.  And it hurt my feelings.  "Why do you recoil?  I am no thief."

I got one chapter finished (there was a bit where Arcove was supposed to say "Roup," slowly, and I must've recorded myself saying it a dozen times, not able to figure out how to make that single syllable slow AND in Arcove's voice . . . and only then did I realize that Abbie had actually written "Roup, Arcove said softly"), started on a second one, and am going to put in relines in a third (one of the episodes had about five moments when the short in the microphone cord ruined the audio for a line or two).  That feels pretty productive--and there's an hour or so before I usually go on my run.*  

Now, it is pouring rain, though.  The sky is that sickly yellow color that happens up here when it rains, but never does at home.  It's pretty darn cold out, and I've put on long pants instead of shorts, and am thinking of building a fire again tonight (a skill of which I've never really gotten the hang**).  Now the rain has stopped, and I know I should head out before it gets dark, but we've gotten to a pretty good part of the book, and I'm eager to at least finish the chapter (even if it means I'll be driving to the dam in the dark***).  Abbie just used one of my favorite words, "transitory."  I've never used it myself, but I still remember the night, back in September of 1989, when I heard that word for the first time.

I replaced the lines in a chapter, only to discover another bit that'll have to be replaced, and started on yet another chapter.  I had felt like I was being irresponsible and indulgent by coming here today, but I've gotten more audio editing done this afternoon/night than I have the past five days put together.

As a reward (or maybe I should say, a "reward") I put on another movie I got from the library, JUPITER ASCENDING, starring Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum.  

It was an amazingly inventive Sci-Fi adventure flick, and the two leads were quite good (especially in comparison to the two leads in last week's movie), but I gotta say, every single time there was an action sequence, I mentally checked out, and couldn't follow any of what was going on onscreen.  The first time it happened, I thought it must just be me, but it kept happening, over and over, and I noticed that, even though the special effects were splendid and ultra-realistic, they were shot in a way that was virtually incomprehensible, with just noise and flashes of light going on.  Now, don't get me wrong, it wasn't as badly directed as a Michael Bay action scene, but directing action must be a hard, hard thing.  Last week's movie (VALERIAN), as flawed as it was, was better than this, and I feel like TRON 2, which I watched three or four weeks ago, was better than both of them (though I wouldn't characterize any of them as Good).  Also, characters were introduced, then discarded for the rest of the film, leading me to think that either a) this was originally a much longer film, and hacked way down for a shorter running time, or b) much like Rish Outfield writing a novel, it was made by someone who had no idea what they were doing.  Since the Wachowskis have to have made at least one great movie in their careers (I've heard good things about SPEED RACER, so who knows?), I'll chalk it up to studio interference.  Mila Kunis was neat-looking, though.  I wonder what became of her.**** 

I remembered my self-suggestion to start doing sit-ups again (jeez, was that only yesterday?), and forced myself to lie down on the hard wooden floor and do fifty sit-ups just now.  I cannot believe that I did that sort of thing every day for a year.  Can you?

Exercise: Yes (17)

*Honestly, running along the dam until my breath won't catch is preferable than cutting out hundreds of little mouth sounds, some of which don't even show up on the waveform.

**Here's a bit of a digression: a couple of years back, there was a sudden deepfreeze at the end of October, and my brother-and-law and I came up here to thaw everything out and drain all the pipes, in case any of them were about to burst.  And while my job was to find as many containers to fill with water we could boil, he started a fire in the stove, and got it blazing so hot that we had to open the doors and windows in below-freezing weather, and it melted the buckets and garbage cans I had filled with water to heat up around the stove.  That dude knows how to make a fire.

***That reminds me, I saw what I thought was a dead cow alongside the road on my way here this afternoon.  But as I passed it, I saw that it was an elk someone had struck and killed with their car . . . and then cut off the antlers (what would you use for something like that?  Bolt-cutters?  A chainsaw?), and left the rest of the gigantic animal to rot.  I feel like you could destroy a Hummer if you crashed into one of those.

****Maybe someone else saw her embarrassing performance in the Oz prequel, and stuck her in director jail along with Sam Raimi, who only recently got paroled.