Another week coming to a close and I still haven't gotten to finish my strip! Very frustrating but I am so busy and the many vagaries of life keep pulling me in several directions at once (and none of them toward the drawing table)!

Wednesday night, as I do every week, I went to my parents house to do some work fixing up their home. They are starting to get along in their years and need some help in doing these small projects. I really enjoy helping out and doing the manual labor. There is something queerly satisfying about building something with your own hands and looking back at it when you are done. Over the last few months I have repainted their downstairs bathroom and added baseboard trim all the way around, and I am just finishing up working on re-doing the downstairs bedroom/computer room. These have been pretty big jobs and limited by my only being able to work on them 2-3 hours a week on them.

Last night, Thursday, Emily and I finished watching KILL BILL Vol. 2. We had started watching it on Tuesday night but only got about 45 minutes in before we had to switch it off and do other things, but last night we committed to finishing it. It was fantastic! I liked it much better than Vol. 1, and I liked Vol. 1! It is truly a shame that Quentin does not make movies more often. But I guess the trade off is the quality of his work. He has a real knack for dialogue and in Vol. 2 he delivers in a way that was missing from Vol. 1, which seemed to focus more on blood-soaked battle action. This volume was much more character driven and as a result is superior. Structurally, Tarantino is at it again, jumping back and forth in time to add emphasis to some of the action. For the un-initiated I can see where it could be confusing, but I find his de-construction of the typical Hollywood script format to be a refreshing change of pace and a challenge to the viewer to pay attention to the details. His time-hopping is not done sloppily or haphazardly, but with a sense of purpose that is usually revealed sometime later in the film. The great thing about this one is that you don't necessarily need to have seen Vol. 1 to enjoy Vol. 2. So check it out!

Tonight we leave for Rochester. It is the annual family party for Emily's niece and nephews. They all have birthdays within a few weeks of each other so rather than have multiple parties, they just have one big party for the three of them. It is always fun to get together with the family and should be especially nice this time since Emily's brother David is flying in from San Diego. Emily's family has not been all together in one place for awhile so it should be nice.

So no drawing board for me until next week sometime. But life is funny like that. And not always in a bad way.

Duty now,

---Doug