Sept. 24:

Spending the night in the same basement bedroom where you spent the final 2 years of your marriage is a surreal experience. Confronted not only by the house projects that need doing [simple things that would drive me crazy because they're such quick fixes - loose kitchen faucet, bulbs need replacing, etc.], but also by an overwhelming sense of how new and opulent the house feels compared to the cramped 90 year old house in West Seattle. Still... Kayla (my dog) is really enjoying herself.

I discovered the '1001 Movies You Should Watch Before You Die' list, and was surprised by the sheer number of noteworthy films I've not yet seen. During the past 3 years, I've spent a lot of time critiquing cinema with an eye toward trying to improve my own story telling, and find something new to say cinematically with my own filmmaking projects. Last night, I watched a few of the silent classics from the list “A Trip To The Moon”, and re-watched “The Great Train Robbery”. I started watching “Les Vampyres”, a serialized silent film in 10 parts. I think I'll stick with the modern films since the slow pacing of these early silent classics make them almost impossible to sit through without sitting on the fast-forward button. One big caveat there...

I am NOT collecting films, nor attempting to see every film under the sun. Life is too short to fritter it away chasing lists of what someone else thinks is a great film. The intent is to use the list to pick from among great films when there's not an obvious choice of something to watch. I'm not a 'compulsive collector' in that way. But SPEAKING of NetFlix...

Another annoying thing happened at the office this week. Because the company I work for is owned by a bank, the bank's internet security squad tends to be somewhat authoritarian about which websites can and can not be browsed from a workstation desktop via the bluecoat web filter system. But to make up for this the company provides public 'kiosk' PC's on each floor from which to view personal email (like gmail, hotmail, etc) – of course, these kiosks filter out some web addresses that they shouldn't (like the online dating site OkCupid.com for example… big brother, please fix that!). This week, however, the 'blue coat bandits' went TOO FAR, and stole our ability to adjust our NetFlix Queues from a workstation desktop!!! Oh, I could understand if they wanted to block the on-line movie viewer… but the DVD queue?!?! Give me a break.