Happy Sunday to you all. I hope everybody is enjoying the football games, time with family, yardwork, or whatever. Me? I'm just chilling out with my morning cups of coffee. And Bach's "Coffee Cantata." I kind of slept in this morning, as I was in San Francisco last night and didn't get home until fairly late. I went to a screening of the Vietnam film that I worked on last year--as part of the Veterans Film Festival in SF. It was good to get together with Norman--the director of the film. I hadn't seen him for a while. We had a nice Vietnamese dinner and got a chance to catch up.

Then on Thursday, I was also at an event in SF. This was the launching of a graphic novel that the husband of a co-worker was launching. (She was a video editor at Indigo Film while I was there.) I got to meet her husband and also the main artist responsible for the artwork of the book. I found the experience interesting, inspiring, and yet a shade depressing. I still have this idea for a graphic novel, and I don't know if I will ever get it out of my head and onto paper. It is a lot of work, and I have my hands full just trying to keep the ship afloat.

While I might be tempted to drive a stake through the heart of this particular dream and never look back, unfortunately it has a built-in reminder that serves to slap me in the face every second week of October. You see, I got the idea for it on Columbus Day of 2007, so every Columbus Day I get a reminder, and I can easily calculate how long it has been since I got the idea, and compare that with how little progress I have made on it. I wish I could just purge Columbus Day from my calendar, but of course that is impossible.

And of course, my thoughts these last few days have been wrapped around the events in Paris. When I first heard the news, I got Facebook updates from an old friend of mine. Max was also an editor at Indigo Films, and I worked with him on several projects back in the 2004 timeframe. He has been living in Paris for a couple of years, and it turns out he was right in the middle of this mess. He and his partner had gone to the movies, and when it all went down the management of the theater came in and told everybody to stay in place--that they were safest in the theater. After several hours, they were allowed to return home. Their apartment is on the same block as the restaurant that was bombed. (In fact, he described that restaurant as their "it's 10pm and no food in the fridge" establishment.) The intersection where the mass shooting occurred is at the other end of the block. They had just walked through it on the way to the movie theater--about 30 minutes before the attack. And he says the Bataclan Theater is about a five minute walk from their front door. Very scary times.

I had been hoping to take my old camera with me to SF last night, and do some night photography. However, I could not find my shutter release, and I fear I may have lost it on my last trail outing. So no photography this week. And I still haven't made it out to Folsom Lake. It looks like I might try for that tomorrow. Of course, now I will need to avoid the crime scene--a kid came across human skeletal remains last week--right at the water's edge. The lake is only two feet away from its all-time lowest level, so there's no telling what is going to show up next. That's why I want to get out there and do some hiking and exploring myself. This is all area that has been well under water for almost sixty years.

Well, it is time to get back to the work at hand. Have a great week, y'all!