We had planned to shoot this scene in the beautiful and ornate tunnels at Guandu Temple. We tried to sneak in and film last weekend, but there were simply too many people milling about. Then we tried the direct approach and asked for permission. They strung us along for about a week before saying no, that they were completely paranoid that we might use guns in the temple or something like that. If you can imagine.

So Dean and I went other way, back to the place where we’d originally first met the commandos from an earlier scene, the old abandoned Naval Foreign Language Institute just past the Martyr’s Shrine on the road to Neihu. It called for still more changes in the script and a third storyboarding (I got a bit tired of re-storyboarding this scene, believe me), but it would work, and there was nobody to tell us we couldn’t film, just a bunch of guys in camos and goggles shooting the hell out of each other. All we had to do was stay out of the crossfire.

We all met up at Yuanshan Station, Dean, Paul, Darrell, Josh, April and myself, got some sandwiches for lunch, and then piled into a couple of cabs. It was cloudy but the rain that had been falling earlier in Xindian had stopped at least. I’d printed out vague instructions for the drivers. Shirzi had found us a couple of guards, Peter and Banjoe, though Peter and Shirzi were both late, due to suffering the effects of the previous night’s drinking (last weekend was full of weddings. I went to two myself).

A full-on battle was going on when we arrived, and they had to call a cease-fire so we could walk through to the shell of a building where we wanted to film. We walked by the waiting soldiers quickly, saying “sorry, excuse us…sorry,” feeling like part of a Monty Python skit. Luckily the battle didn’t extend to the upper floors of the building, though the stairs were iffy territory.

We got several shots done with Josh and April. April had a gun for the first time. She’d wanted one for a while, but she needed some instruction on holding it and pretending to fire it. Dean brought some popping firecrackers for gunshots and ricochets that worked well while they lasted.

Clouds came and went, playing havoc with lighting, and we went all over the building looking for better lighting conditions. BBs covered the floor, making walking a dangerous proposition, to say nothing of the running around we were doing. At one point Josh took a mean fall and landed on his knee. I wasn’t looking in his direction when it happened, but I could see through the camera the winces of the other actors and knew it must have looked pretty painful. The end result looked good, though.

Dean made himself up to look beat up for this shoot. It looked ok. When it came time to film the guards, we found that it is very difficult to get Peter to stop smiling. In the end it was alright, but we had a lot of fun laughing at Peter’s beret, which kept falling off in mid-shot.

All during the shooting we could hear the BB battles going on downstairs. During the bits where we were out in the jungle, Darrell even got hit by a stray shot, though to be honest the mosquitoes were a far greater nuisance. We even got the commandos in a few shots.

We were getting a lot of shooting done, and I got through most of a tape as well as three batteries. We shot the last shots as my last battery was dying, at around 3:30pm. I need to get some more batteries, because that was just cutting it too close. I’d planned more shots but had to abbreviate a few of them to conserve battery power, but they still seemed to work. We’ll see how they work in the cutting room.

Next week, weather-permitting (and the weather hasn’t exactly been cooperative lately), we should get the last of Josh’s shots done. He’s leaving in December, and I have to edit a rough cut of his scenes, i.e. most of the scenes in the movie, so that we can do looping before he leaves. That’s going to be a bitch, but there’s nothing for it. Dean’s master’s thesis isn’t going to write itself, either.

Last weekend was apparently a good time for weddings, according to Chinese astrologers. Chinese couples like to get married in the latter half of the year, due to local customs, so there’s always a bit of a rush in the fall and winter. I went to two weddings, one on Friday and one on Saturday.

The one on Friday was that of a former co-worker at TVBS (which is currently under “investigation” by the government after it made some rather uncomfortably revealing reports on government scandals), Lee Jian-wei. He and I were both camera assistants back in the day, though he left the station and I got promoted to cameraman before quitting, but that’s a story for another time.

The banquet was held at the Santos Hotel on Chengde Road. I got off the MRT a bit early and spent some time taking pictures of the pedestrian overpass before heading over. It had been a long time since I’d seen any of my old co-workers, and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.

It turned out that none of my former co-workers were able to make it, and I ended up sitting at a table full of people I didn’t know for the whole thing. It was a rather economic affair, with the MC announcing specials and advertisements for the hotel’s services the whole time. Little “gift coupons” were located under the tablecloths. The food was ok, though. The whole time they had a mushy video playing over and over again of how Jian-wei and his new wife met, and by the time I left I was getting really sick of the repeating music.

The wedding on Saturday night was that of Azuma, a friend who has helped us out a lot with filming over the last few years. It was a much ritzier affair, held at the Grand Formosa Regent Ballroom and involving hundreds of tables and mirrored ceilings. Really professional photos of the happy couple were being projected on two large screens on either side of the huge room. Oldies were being played, good oldies, that is.

The actual marriage ceremony had taken place in Guam, and nicely edited video of it was shown as well. Although I was wearing a dress shirt, neither Dean nor I wore a tie, and I felt a bit underdressed among all the glittery celebreties. Not the first time, though.

It being Azuma’s wedding, there were large unwiedly lightsabers and congratulations from Darth Vader on video. They also played the video Dean and I made, though many people still commented that Dean looks like Jonathan Frakes, and thankfully nobody mentioned my appearance in the film.

The food was pretty good, and there was plenty of wine as well. Azuma nearly broke down in tears during his speech, which was touching. Although theirs is an arranged marriage, they obviously really love each other.

Weddings often inspire conflicting feelings in me. On the one hand, I find all the ceremony somewhat annoying, yet on the other, I’m also reminded that I most likely won’t ever be able to have one myself. I’ve resigned myself to this, but now and then it still sticks in my craw.

The weather’s been gray and gloomy the past few days, though it was nice all last week. Hard to believe it’s almost November already. Last night the Muddy Basin Ramblers, all except Thumper, who is in the South mountain climbing or something, got together at the Sandcastle for some jamming and delicious homemade soup courtesy of Sandman’s wife Jojo. We’re going to be playing at around 4pm at the Blues Bash 2 on the fifth at the Breeze Center. Hopefully it won’t be as cold as the first one, held in Taichung earlier this year.

All in all, things are good, if a bit hectic at times. As the man said, I can’t complain, but sometimes I still do. Wouldn’t be much of a journal otherwise, now would it?

前一陣子聽到

I just got word that one of my photographs is now an album cover. Cool. The music’s not bad, either.

The other day I decided to explore the mountainside just beyond the suspension bridge and the teahouse, behind the row of houses where Chris and the kitten now live. I walked up the path accompanied by a yellow dog I see around the area a lot. At the top of the stairs was a pile of rubble from a demolished pavilion, as well as a building that apparently used to be a temple building. Inside a group of rather poor-looking people were gathered around a makeshift kitchen, i.e. a wok over burning wooden fittings recovered from the rubble. “Rest”, a euphemism for “Sex area”, was scrawled on one wall with a grafitti arrow pointing to the second floor. The wok was filled with a bubbling brown concoction.

“Don’t go up that path, it’s dangerous,” one of the people warned me, saying the area was full of snakes that would be out sunning themselves. “Walk loudly to scare them away,” he advised. I did, using a walking stick to thrash about. There were more ruined buildings and a greenhouse just down the path. The marble path was broken up by tree roots. Apparently the area was quite developed at some point in the past. The stairs leading up to the site of the old amusement park were blocked by a felled tree, so I kept going straight, but that path soon deteriorated and got really spooky, so I turned back and took the lower path that ran along the water’s edge.

This path was a little more tidy, and soon I found myself in front of the old house, the only house visible from the suspension bridge. I’d heard that the place was haunted. It had been built by a family for the elderly parents to retire in, and then it was a hotel, and then it had been abandoned for a number of years. Guys took their girlfriends there to scare them into making out in the dark, or so I’d been told.

From the looks of it, it had recently been renovated, but nobody was living there. The renovation was still incomplete, I found as I peeked in the windows. A huge spider skittered along the wall as I walked by the front door. The interior seemed rather swank and contained temple-like fittings, buddhas and even possibly a picture of Christ in the upper windows, I think. I walked around back to find a locked gate. There were no bars on the windows. It would have been easy enough to get inside, but I didn’t try.

The place seemed nice enough in the daylight, nicely located on a little inlet, though the boats were rotting and the grass had grown over the dock. Some other nearby structures had been demolished recently. It would make a nice little estate for a family, but I don’t think I’d like to live there alone. Not with that network of derelict paths and rusting, empty lighpoles all over the mountain.

I wonder what it used to be like. The entire side of the mountain must have been lit up with pathways and little buildings. Now it’s all jungle. Something must have happened to make the vicinity one big taboo, something bigger than just the death of a couple of construction workers tearing down the amusement park, which is all I know about from Sandman’s tales. Was there a mass murder? Did some well-known Taoist priest come out and say the area was evil because he slipped on someone’s spilled fruit drink? Did people just get tired of climbing hills in general? The dogs and cats seem completely fine with the area, as well as the poor people I saw. It’s a mystery I’m going to have to investigate further one of these days.

Update: Paul’s done another photo essay/commentary page about this shoot.

Due to last-minute script and story discussions, as well as a bout of stomach-related ickiness, I didn’t get the storyboards for the jungle jeep scenes done until Saturday, the day before we shot. I had a couple of performances the night before, so when I got up at 6 a.m. on Sunday morning after only a few hours’ sleep and a slightly queasy stomach, I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit.

Still, the shoot must go on, so I loaded up my gear and set out to meet the gang in front of Taipei Station, where we sat in stolen chairs at a coffee shop waiting for the others to show up, me trying not to fall asleep. We got seven train tickets to Yangmei, where we would meet Doug, the guy with the jeep, and a friend of his with a car to take us out to the four-wheel-drive-only hills of Guanxi.

The train ride was pleasant but too short for a proper nap as I had to keep an eye out for our station. A couple of people who inexplicably didn’t have seated tickets (we’d bought ours only minutes before the train left) stood over us as we looked through the storyboards, but didn’t have much criticism to offer, instead preferring to bonk us on our heads with the books they were reading. The tuna snacks I’d gotten from 7-Eleven weren’t causing any trouble, which improved my spirits, as well as travelling to a place I’d never been before, which tends to put me in a good mood as well.

The sun was shining when we pulled into Yangmei Station, a good sign. Doug showed up in his black Wrangler and introduced his friend Bob, who was to act in a scene, though I seriously doubted we’d get around to it that day. As usual, we had massively underestimated the time it would take to get everything done.

We piled into the jeep and Bob’s car and set off though the little city, which seemed rather pleasant in the cool, breezy weather. At the edge of town we passed a huge factory that could have been making Saturn V rockets on an assembly line. Pretty soon we were out in the countryside, and Bob had to park his car, while we piled all the equipment in the jeep. We then walked up the hill to where we’d be filming.

The area was grassy and supposedly full of snakes, but it was pretty enough and wild enough to be a good stand in for our location in North Korea. I did the sniper’s-view shots from up on a little hillock first before going down and getting ambush shots around the jeep. Josh did a nice little jump out of the jeep that’s going to look good on film, and Maurice did the getting-shot-shooting-shot several times. The squib, as usual, didn’t quite work, and we ended up getting more than a little fake blood on the jeep seats by the time we got the shots.

Josh was learning how to drive the jeep on relatively smooth surfaces, which helped a lot. Maurice was apparently quite attached to his pith helmet, on loan from Rowan, as it did an excellent job of keeping the sun out. Dean had made sandwiches for lunch, and he, Bob and Doug sat on Doug’s collapsibly chairs and chatted while we shot. We’re going to be looping everything anyway, so the sound wasn’t really a priority. I got some handheld shots, and then we headed up the mountain for another location.

We hadn’t seen a soul all day, but in the afternoon a bunch of four-wheel-drives began to grind past in both directions, making shooting difficult, especially when one of them began to teeter, stuck on a precupice while the cast and crew stared. Most of the vehicles were guys with families inside, most likely trying to justify their purchases of the cars.

The sun was approaching the horizon when we filmed the last scene we could film, which takes place earlier, but the timing and lighting are going to be tricky in editing, and dusk could stand in for dawn in some cases. I bolted the camera to the jeep’s window and stood on the running board as Josh drove back and forth for interior dialogue between Josh and April and sometimes Maurice.

At last the light failed. I’d used up all my batteries in any case, so we couldn’t have done too much more filming even if we’d wanted to. We packed up and went back down the mountain, Doug showing us a few interesting cliffs and rocks on the way down in the jeep. Doug is not the kind of guy you dare to do things, because he’ll do anything, I think. At one point Paul had his camera out as we were approaching a cliff, and Doug said, “Here, take a picture of this!” Darrell and I, both in the jeep, glared at Paul as we plunged down the cliff, the jeep going alarmingly sideways at times. We also ran over a snake that may or may not have died earlier.

On the way back to the train station we stopped by Doug’s quiet suburban house to put the roof back on the jeep and wash it off a little. It was a little disconcerting, because although the houses were more or less laid out in an American fashion, they were all tiled concrete monstrosities done with purely Taiwanese aesthetics in mind.

It was rather late by the time we got back to Taipei, and having skipped dinner Dean, Paul, Darrell, Maurice and I went to Alleycat’s for dinner. It was good, but I kept dozing off, so we didn’t stay too long. Bed sure felt good that night.

Next weekend we have castle catacomb shooting scheduled. Looking forward to discovering all the things that can go wrong with that.

Last weekend was a long one for me. It started on Friday evening, as I was headed home to do storyboarding for the shoot in Yangmei on Sunday. It was raining. I crossed the suspension bridge after getting off the MRT I heard a mewing sound, and I spotted a little kitten running around the middle of the bridge. It was white with black spots and, unlike most stray kittens, approached every passerby, but nobody paid any attention to it. I stopped to look at it, and it ran over to take shelter from the pelting rain under my umbrella, rubbing around my legs and effectively trapping me. Clever kitten, I thought. It knew exactly how to use its feline wiles to enslave me to its purpose.

Obviously I couldn’t just leave it there, but I didn’t know from which end of the bridge it had come from. There are stray cat societies on both sides. I was going home, though, and I knew a friend of mine, Chris, who had expressed interest in getting a kitten. I picked it up and carried it across, and it didn’t protest at all. The door downstairs was open, so I could get to Chris’ balcony, but she wasn’t home. I called her, and she said she wouldn’t be home until much later. Hours and hours later, in fact. And I was getting bitten by mosquitoes. The kitten was dry and relatively safe under the balcony’s cover, but it was obviously starving. I cleaned out a nearby ashtray and filled it with water, but there was no food. I had to get to an appointment, but I didn’t want the kitten to wander out again. Chris said I probably shouldn’t slip it in the window, but I could use the clothes washer. Seeing no other alternative, I put it inside the washer and closed the lid so it wouldn’t get out, and wrote a sign saying “Kitten Inside” to put on top.

A while later, when I was done and after I had contacted Sandman and Jojo about the situation, I went back to check on it. When I opened the lid the kitten was asleep at the bottom of the washer, but it awoke and started mewing again, sounding a lot like a rusty hinge. I had just taken it out and sat down with it when a couple of men, both Asians, came up the stairs, one older guy and one young guy with no shirt on. The older fellow seemed bemused, while the young guy was hopping mad. He was complaining in poor Chinese to the older guy, who was apparently the landlord, about the washing machine situation. When he saw me holding the kitten, he nearly blew his top.

“Did you put that kitten in there?” he blurted. “Did you?” His tone was very accusatory. He seemed mad that I would treat a kitten in such a fashion.

“Yeah, I did,” I said. I thought he was going to hit me, the way he glared. “I didn’t have any other place to put it while I was away,” I explained. He paced about for a little bit as I sat with the kitten, petting it and hushing it. It was licking itself a lot.

“Ok, just be honest with me, dude,” the shirtless young man said. “Did you put the kitten in there to keep me from using the washer?”

“Huh? What are you talking about? I don’t even know who you are.” Ah-ha, so he was upset that he couldn’t wash his clothes. The kitten’s welfare wasn’t in his mind at all. He and the landlord left, and I heard the young guy saying to him, “I want to move out! I can’t take this any more!” But because of his accent and poor tones, the landlord didn’t understand him or at least pretended not to understand him.

I turned my attention back to the kitten, who by now was making itself comfortable on my lap. I noticed then that it had a nasty puncture wound in its belly that it kept licking, and it limped when it walked. I also noticed that it was a female. Jojo and Sandman arrived soon after with kitty food and the greater portion of Jojo’s birthday cake. Jojo saw the spot of black on the kitten’s head, and promptly named it “Xiao Maozi” or “Little Hat”. It was around midnight when Chris got home, and she took to the kitten right away.

Needless to say, I didn’t get any storyboarding done that night. I had some leftover cake for a snack and went to bed. The next morning I had a little more, and immediately regretted it, as my stomach rebelled to the extent that I couldn’t leave my apartment all morning. I spent my time outside the bathroom doing storyboarding. It was Daniel Pearl Memorial Day, and The Muddy Basin Ramblers were playing two gigs that afternoon and evening. I had wanted to see the other acts, but I felt horrible and had to finish the storyboards, so I waited until right before I had to leave before I got dressed, loaded myself up with the euphonium, trumpet and washtub bass and headed out to Treasure Hill, where the event was being held.

There were a lot of people there, many of whom I knew, or who at least knew me. I wasn’t in the best of moods, however, and avoided talking with most everyone. We set up after Sky Burial, a rock band wearing white face makeup, and started playing. The sound guys seemed on top of everything, and people heard the washtub, if not the euphonium. At one point Slim started singing about the Xindian River. It sounded pretty nice, what he was doing, so I added a bassline, and soon everyone joined in. We made up the song right then and there, on stage. It was extremely cool.

After the Ramblers finished, I also played the bass for Tarry Bush, which was a pleasure as always, but tiring. My pen, which I use to pluck the bass, was showing signs of distress and the rubbing of the rope ate through it. Cracks were appearing around the washer that runs through the hole in the washtub as well. I had visions of it failing spectularly, the washers bursting through the plastic and hitting me in the face as I hit a high note, so I kept it down in the lower notes most of the time.

After we were done, I walked around a bit and drank some water. Slim and Thumper had gone ahead over to Witches, so David, Sandman, myself and Mark, who was playing accordion with us that night, caught a cab over to our second show that night. It was hard to fit all our stuff in the cab, and the cabbie kept saing “So much stuff you’ve got there! So much stuff!” We dumped our stuff at Witches, which was still full of diners at that point, and headed to the track on the NTU campus across the street for a warm-up jam.

Tarry Bush was on first, but we did one song as a sound test before anything else. The dining tables had been moved away. My stomach was feeling better, and I even helped Slim eat his pork chop and rice with no ill effects. I think I may be becoming lactose intolerant, or at least Taiwan-style birthday-cake-intolerant.

The sound at Witches was sweet, at least for the first few songs. I could hear the bass very well, and was thus able to get all the notes right, even if I was confused about the tempo at a couple of points. My pen, however, burst, covering my hand with ink, so I had to get another pen to play the bass with. I’d use my finger, but the effect isn’t as nice, and besides, it rubs my finger raw after a while.

The Ramblers came up next, and we have enough new music that we didn’t have to repeat any songs from the Daniel Pearl gig. We even got the euphonium properly miced, although the stage was so crowded we kept bumping into each other.

By the end of the show I was pretty tired, and I had to get up early the next morning for our shoot in Yangmei. I had a couple pieces of bread and planned to hop in a cab, but the fellas were off at the track playing again, so I went and played a little with them. It was just too much, though, and I had to leave early because if I didn’t, I’d have been there until dawn. At least that’s what usually happens.

As for the Yangmei shoot, I will post about that in the production journal as soon as I have captured the footage. Needless to say, I was completely exhausted by late Sunday night. What a weekend.

We’d planned to get all the van action this weekend. The weather had been great all week while we were all stuck in various cubicles, working our day jobs. Come Saturday, however, I woke up to the sound of heavy rain pelting on my window. We had to call off all the outdoor shoots.

There were still shots we could get, however, inside the van. Dean, Josh and I met up at Dean’s place, and when the rented van showed up, complete with driver, we piled all the equipment and various knickknacks we could find inside, and headed off in search of a relatively dry, yet outdoor location where we could film the van interiors with Josh. We ended up at the empty end of a parking lot underneath the Jianguo Expressway, just south of the Flower/Jade Market. The driver took out all the seats from the Volkswagon, and we proceeded to try and make it look like the back of a spy van.

It turned out, however, that we’d forgotten one key component: shelving. So Dean had the driver take him back to his place for some shelves, while Josh and I sat amongst the seats and
all the junk strewn over a couple of parking places, looking for all the world like a couple of guys whose car had been mostly stolen.

We waited for over an hour, as Dean was stuck in traffic. An old guy who most likely went jogging in the park ran up and down the metal surface of the parking lot. Eventually Dean returned, and we promptly found that the cigarette lighter power adaptor we borrowed from Paul had melted to a degree that it no longer worked. So we turned on the overhead lights in the van, which weren’t quite bright enough, and I opened the camera all the way up, planning to do the rest of the brightening in post, and we shot all the scenes we needed, including some with Josh talking with his hand over his mouth, just in case we need to insert other dialogue down the road.

It was still raining on Sunday, so we got together again at Dean’s place to film Josh hacking a computer that is supposedly located in the baron’s evil complex. This time we used lamplight and the flickering monitor, and got some nice shadow effects as well. Afterwards we went out to Carnegies where we met with Doug, he guy who is helping us round up jeeps for our jungle shoot next weekend in Yangmei. He showed us his black Jeep Wrangler, and gave us some pictures of the area, which will help in the planning, as we’re going to shoot this one cold, without having seen the place ourselves. Not the first time we’ve done this, and it probably won’t be the last, either. Still, it should be interesting at least. As long as the weather holds out.

Last month our friend and cast member Azuma announced his upcoming wedding to fellow geek Jane, and he asked Dean and I to film a little video of each of us saying congratulations so they could play it at the wedding with all the other guests saying congratulations. Of course, we’re all Star Wars/Star Trek/Indiana Jones geeks, so Dean and I decided to write a little skit that involved as much geekery as possible without actually using golden idols and huge boulders, since we knew Azuma would get a kick out of it. I sat on it a while because Azuma hadn’t seen it yet, but now he has, so…

Here’s what we came up with. It took us an afternoon to do in a patch of jungle near Dean’s house. Shirzi helped out by acting as Sword-wielding Bad Guy with Evil Laugh. He is wearing headgear he brought back with him from his recent trip to Jordan. We originally had him in a kimono (he hates it when we call it that), but it didn’t work out. I dressed up as Indiana Jones, using Dean’s jacket and shirt and holster along with my fedora, and Dean brought his Star Trek II uniform to play…Captain…..Kirk. Dean and I both shaved our beards, and he even has Star Trek regulation sideburns. If you’re wondering how he came to have such a uniform, he wore it to the Canadian Ball where he did a rendition of William Shatner’s Rocket Man while wearing it. If you listen closely you can tell that, though I don’t do a great Harrison Ford impression, I at least got a Belloq reference in there.

We were nearly devoured by the mosquitoes, Shirzi’s skin was burning from all the mosquito spray, and it was really hot, but we had fun doing it, if not carrying the stuff up the mountain. I was convinced it was a plot to make me appear sweaty for the film. I complained all the way up and made Dean carry extra stuff on the way down. We decided not to bother Paul and Darrell for it because it was just one quick shoot, so I set up the camera and let it film us doing our thing without any operator.

Dean put in all the music and special effects. I know he is particularly partial to the “fight music” Tuh-ta-DA-DA-DA tuh-ta-DA-DA-DA! as he quotes it often. The result looks like the videos I did with my friends in high school, but we had a good time making it, and it gets the message across in a pretty entertaining way, I think.

Last month our friend and cast member Azuma announced his wedding and asked Dean and I to film a little video of each of us saying congratulations so they could play it at the wedding. Of course, we’re all Star Wars/Star Trek/Indiana Jones geeks, so Dean and I decided to write a little skit that involved as much geekery as possible without actually using golden idols and huge boulders, since we knew Azuma would get a kick out of it.

Here’s what we came up with. It took us an afternoon to do in a patch of jungle near Dean’s house. Shirzi helped out by acting as Sword-wielding Bad Guy with Evil Laugh. We were nearly devoured by the mosquitoes, and it was really hot, but we had fun doing it, if not carrying the stuff up the mountain.

Last weekend was the Migration Music Festival, which was fun, if not as fun as last year, mostly due to bad weather and a preponderence of accordians. Afterwards we all jammed into Peshawar and did some jamming with Tarry Bush, which was fun. We stayed into the wee hours the next morning, just as the typhoon really started to roar. Sunday was spent listening to the wind and recovering from the night before. The Muddy Basin Ramblers apparently stand a good chance of being invited back next year, which would be cool, if the weather holds anyway. Our next show will be in the late afternoon of the 15th at Treasure Hill for the Daniel Perl Day activities being held there, and then later that night at Witches near NTU. That will be a busy day. I’m looking forward to hearing Slim play his new trombone, though.

Hard to believe it’s October already. The wonderful weather has returned, though the weather bureau is pessimistic about it lasting. A week after my computer’s motherboard went, my TV died, perhaps in sympathy. It had been going fuzzy and taking longer and longer to warm up into a watchable state, so I knew the end was coming. While it kind of sucks having to shell out for a new set, at least I can get a warranty this time.