VacaDude here. It has been a bit of an off-week for me here, as I am currently in the setting-up and review stages of a couple of work projects, so I am updating some marketing materials and catching up on some other little home projects. And being rocked by outside events from time to time.

For one thing, Mary and I celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary on Friday. The money continues to be pretty tight, so our celebration was pretty low key. Dinner and a movie. And dinner was at IHOP. But the thing is, we REALLY like IHOP. The move we went to see was "The Money Monster," which was pretty frightening. At the end of it I asked my her if she would be okay with the idea of moving to a country whose economy was based on the old barter system. It is really freaky to think about what is happening on Wall Street these days.

Another really great movie we have seen recently was "All The Way" on HBO. We watched that last night, and WOW--my head is still spinning over that performance. It stars Bryan Cranston as President Lyndon Johnson. This was based on the play he performed on Broadway. It is like Cranston was born to play that role...he gets completely lost in it. (That role won him the Tony Award for best performance last year.)

Then around the middle of last week I got a shock. Back when I was contemplating changing careers from software engineering to illustration/animation, I was taking several design classes through the UC Berkeley extension program. One of the classes I took was one in Computer Animation taught by a man named Stuart Cudlitz. He was then with Colossal Pictures, which was a post-production and visual effects house based in San Francisco. I took the class back around 1993, and a few years later I reached out to Stuart and we traded some e-mails back and forth for a while. Then we both wound up on Facebook, and again traded messages. I would often see postings of his--typically of a very artistic nature. But I hadn't seen any for a while, and I just kind of chalked it up to the usual Facebook glitching. But something caused me to go look at his page this week, and I learned that he had passed away. And that he had done so just over a year ago.

So I felt doubly sad. For one, that such a talented man had been taken from this world, and secondly the fact that I had so lost touch with him that I had not learned of it for over a year. Apparently there was a beautiful memorial service that was held in San Francisco for him last fall, and I would have given anything to have been able to attend that. I find that to be one of the problems with telecommuting--I sometimes feel very isolated from my peers and from humanity in general. I'm not sure what to do about it--perhaps I need to seek employment with more studios where I am required to work on the premises. I think it would do me good to have to do that from time to time.

But also what learning about that this week has done as been to serve as a reminder as to the finite nature of life. I think back over the past few years and I feel I have not done anything very creative since the outburst of art from the time of the Owl Box. So I am trying to take this experience and use it as a kick in the butt to get me going again on the graphic novel idea I have had languishing for the past eight years. Therefore, I am setting for myself a deadline of June 1st to create the first several panels of the story. Hopefully I will be able to show you guys some cool artwork at the next chat.

And speaking of that next chat, that will be on Sunday, June 5th at 6pm PDT. So I hope to see you all there! In the meantime, I need to get busy here because we are getting ready to go to San Francisco tonight for another movie night with friends. Tonight we shall be watching the 1960 production of "Exodus." It should be interesting, because we will probably be the only gentiles in a group consisting mostly of people in the Jewish faith. So it should be a learning experience!

Until next time, have a great week, y'all!