I’ve moved back to VT. For the holidays, but also for the foreseeable future. It’s vacation, then working, saving up, and if all goes as planned, film school starting in the Fall. I’ve taken a two-year detour from what was really my dream, and I’m back on track. So that’s good.

Before I left, I got to check out a MAKE IT! fair and was pretty impressed. I’d wanted to go last year in Vancouver but looked up the vendors that had websites and was pretty turned off. This year I just took the plunge and am sure glad I did. From Cocoa Nymph (awesome chocolates) to Thyrza Segal’s Plantscapes to Daughters of Bastards Warrior Wear (awesome chain mail jewelry, no website, sorry) there was plenty of awesome stuff to check out and to gawk at. Catalyst Reaction had some cool leather stuff and I picked up some great Christmas cards from Hug + Kiss Designs.

Other than that, not much else to report. T-day in Seattle with the bro, a week in NYC with an old friend, then getting settled in here, ready for Christmas, watching the last of my funds slip away.

Moved onto Season 2 of Fringe and giving Leverage a second chance. Finished Dexter Season 4 last night. I’m still traumatized. Fantastic show…they don’t pull any punches. Hoping to start in on Supernatural Season 2 soon. Being Human was a no-go for me; the emo vampire dude was waaay over the top annoying, I couldn’t even look at him. Watched Slither and Gremlins recently. Both were awesome. Definitely to-purchase. Great fun. Excited about Chuck’s Season 3 and Burn Notice’s continuation in January too. Workin’ away at my to-watch lists…

I’ve been on a pretty major Star Wars kick lately. Partly nostalgia (I found my first screenplay – a Star Wars fanfilm, almost 70 pages!), partly reading Death Troopers (fun!) and partly finally getting around to watching Star Wars Clone Wars from Cartoon Network. Pretty awesome series, I’m having a blast. You know it’s good when it gets you excited about watching the prequels. Yea. That’s serious.

Listening to lots of industrial and gothic, generally dark stuff lately…Rammstein mostly but Imperative Reaction, Assemblage 23, Zombie Girl a bit, I:Scintilla, Heimataerde, Icon of Coil and Birthday Massacre. Got Nightwish’s Dark Passion Play on in the background right now. Never a baddie :P. Awesome album.

Hope all’s well with everybody reading. And everybody not reading. And no I didn’t get you presents. Have great holidays! :)

via YouTube

Right now I’m watching a mockumentary by Zak Penn called Incident at Loch Ness, a fairly funny little flick with a great back-cover description.  It’s a bit slower than I’d thought it’d be, but it is indeed, like the back cover says, a pretty well done indie style flick.  Good fun for a group of witty friends and some nighttime snacks.  Heh.  Yea.

Here’s wishing you a great holiday season, and hopefully I’ll get some updates up within the next few days with some videomaking progress and fun time with Elliot, who’s coming down tomorrow for some finishing up of The Waiting Room, and of course we’re hoping to do some other things as well.  But I’ll update with whatever happens on that front.  Have a great last few days of 2007!

I really love making things, be they crafts or websites, stories or movies, and I want to find some way to pursue that love on a small scale, but dependably, so I don’t come to the end of another year wondering what I did with all that time, having nothing to show for another year gone.  So that’s my goal; I’m going to make something each month, and it’ll be posted online in some form, depending on what it is (movies on YouTube, pictures on Flickr, crafts on…Flickr, etc.).  I’m excited to get to try making something each month and trying new things.

That’s really another reason for this goal, is the trying of new things.  I’ll try making some new food, try some new craft, try writing an idea that I just realized made sense to me, or something old that’s been percolating for years.  It’s basically a chance for me to create an outlet for my ideas and creativity, and the by-product is to show the world (or my friends and family, anyway) through the internet.  It’ll give me an outlet, a chance to branch out, and something to be proud of at the end of another year.  I’ll have something to show that I made use of my time, that my year was worthwhile, and that I’m proud of it – to at least some degree.  And heck, everything’s a learning experience, right?  So I’m bound to learn something from this at some point or another.  What are you going to do in the new year?  Share in the comments section.

OK…so…?
Yesterday, however, went fine.  I got things done, I worked very hard for about 7 hours on my PC cleanup project and got it almost completed, though I hit a snag when I couldn’t just reformat the hard drive like I had thought I would be able to.  I’m going to see if I can boot it up from a boot disk and if that doesn’t work, then I guess I’m stuck reinstalling Windows on the machine for a second time.  That would really suck, but if it’s the only option, then I guess that settles the argument.

Alright… today?
Today I woke up on time, but kept lounging around in bed for a while, and had to jump up and get ready for work, rushing in for the morning shift on a Wednesday morning.  Oh yea, we were busy.  No, we really weren’t.  Oh well, it was with a friend and a slow, quiet morning, so we had a decently good time.  I got a tad bit of Christmas shopping done (as in one gift) and did some errands for my mom, so in that mode I was productive.

Come on!  Productivity…?
In my own pursuit, though, I got home and didn’t work on my own projects.  I even was prodded politely by the man I’m working for (not officially, but I’m helping him out on a project he’s working on for a friend of his) asking how my progress was going on the project.  Not so good.  I guess I haven’t been home for a long time, and I can still schedule some work time around food and my nightly entertainment/wind-down session in the basement with some good movie-watchin’.  Tomorrow though I’m going to have to study for my final exam in Sociology – and then it’s finally over!

The whole she-bang!
The productivity project was fun.  It was a great chance to figure out how I work, how I might want to work, and really how I should work and approach my daily life in terms of task-, time- and goal-management.  I still have a lot to learn and a lot of work to do in the area, and I think I’ll keep up the posting on here about each day with a regular, if shorter, installment of the day’s progress.  I’m going to eat dinner, followed by a roto session, followed by my nightly wind-down and fun time.  If anybody’s interested in productivity, definitely keep checking back here, or subscribe to the RSS feed, and check out David Seah’s blog I mentioned a few times throughout this series.  Right now though, I’m off to eat some tasty food.  Yummy!

So…get to it!
I’ve got work this morning, coincidentally, though I didn’t realize that I did, and I also have to drive my dad to an appointment I didn’t know he had, and the two obviously conflict, or I’d be at work right now.  So I’m going in for a late half-shift and then coming home to get started on the productive afternoon/evening of the day.  It’s a fine deal, the only thing I wish is I could find a way to mix projects so I could do one time-consuming one and some smaller, less time-consuming ones all at once.  And now that I think about it, I believe I can do just that.

Next update
I will update tonight with a review of the day’s progress, but I think not posting a review last night threw my routine off a little bit.  It feels that way, anyway.  On the better side, at least the foot and a half of snow we got is mostly cleared off the roads, so they’re driveable, which is nice.  Today I’m back to the routine though, with the morning intro post and the nighttime review post of the day’s antics.  Hope fully they’re not real antics.  Hopefully they’re a bit more organized than that.  That’s the whole point of this experiment.

Next Update
I won’t be posting a follow-up post tonight about the day, since there won’t be any productivity stuff going on today, but I might post at some point today about other things, if I get the chance the the mood. Other than that, tomorrow it starts again, and I’ll continue to work to figure out ways to be more productive and efficient in my projects. Until then, have a great (snowy, if you’re in New England) day.