I probably wouldn’t have remembered that today was my birthday if, last week, one of the techs hadn’t pointed out that the staff meeting fell on this day. I always remember when staff meetings are. I have to buy donuts and cut veggies. The last few years I’ve tended to not notice that the 23rd has any significance until well into the day.

The illustration work continues. Slower than I’d like but it goes. I’m almost finished with the pre-photoshopping for the first page of the Strange Eggs story. I’ve got some of the Worlds of Cthulhu illustrations down to final pencils. Much to do yet.

Revenge of the Sith – mostly I breathe a sigh of relief that the Star Wars saga is done. Marvel Comics and giant monster movies provided most of my personal mythology as a kid. Star Wars came too late (I was twelve or thirteen) to worm its way in too deeply. This movie was mercifully lacking comic relief. R2D2 gave us most of it. R2 rocks. C3PO wasn’t actually annoying. I hated him every time I saw him but that’s because, after five movies worth of his whining and fussing, I’m predisposed to hating him.

Anyway. Done. The saga of a talented but self-centered and selfish young man who becomes a mass murderer and the prime tool of genocidal fascist (and yet is redeemed by one rebellious (and self-centered) act) has come to end.

In chapter three of Zorro’s Black Whip, the Whip gets into a fight with a couple of the bad guys. She doesn’t punch either of them but she does slam them around a bit. I’m impressed. The Black Whip rocks.

I’ve begun reading Wicked by Gregory Maguire. It’s neither a sequel (prequel, whatever) to the Movie or Baum’s Oz novels. It’s “inspired” by both. The green Wicked Witch comes from the Movie. Maguire has obviously read at least some of Baum’s books but he doesn’t try to rationalize Baum’s Oz. He’s created his own Oz inspired by Baum’s map. This book is more Barnstormer than it is Emerald Burrito. I am enjoying it as itself. I probably would have hated it as a kid. I’m not too far into it but, as a little green baby with big vicious teeth, Elphaba rocks.

One of our recent discard purchases from Rain City Video is Zorro’s Black Whip. It’s a 12 part serial from 1944. We’re going to watch a chapter or two every few nights until we get to the thrilling conclusion! So far Zorro has survived a sex change, many gunfights and at the end of the second chapter she was trapped in a bank vault explosion! The serial is set in Idaho in 1888 (I think), just prior to statehood. The bad guys are robbing and pillaging the poor settlers and getting away with it because there’s no law to arrest them. Justice takes the form of Zorro! More specifically, The Black Whip. No body calls him/her Zorro. Everyone refers to him/her as the Black Whip. Zorro in Idaho sounds silly anyway. The first Whip gets himself shot and killed so his sister takes over the role. The movie was made in 1944 so Lady Whip can’t go around getting in fist fights (and a serial without fist fights is like Seattle without rain) so there’s an undercover fed in town trying to discover the leader of the bad guys. The two fights he’s been in thus far completely destroyed the rooms they happened in. As per serial rules of clothing physics, neither he nor his adversaries ever lose their hats no matter how much furniture got broken on their heads.

This serial gets us prepped for the upcoming Legend of Zorro, sequel to Mask of Zorro. Mask is one of Nizzibet’s favorite movies. Nizzibet is sort of a Zorro fan. As much as she’s a fan of anything. Zorro was one of the inspirations behind Billi 99. Coincidentally I discovered yesterday, in an interview at Salon, that Isabel Allende has written a Zorro novel. Sounded like fun so I ordered a copy for the Nizz. Shh! Don’t tell her.

The dream I woke from this morning involved getting these huge manila envelopes filled with something hard and mysterious. I was excited until I realized that the envelopes were filled with 3 1/2 computer disks. Lovesettlement was sending me the disks I’d been storing at my mom’s house.

I’m sure there are no disks at my mom’s house. Lots of other things. No disks. I’ve got one ancient Mac that might run them otherwise I’ve long since transferred everything important onto other media.

This is what I get from sleeping on Nizzibet’s side of the bed. She was feeling sick last night and needed to be able to get up quickly so she wanted to sleep on my side, the outside side. Whenever this happens I end up sleeping lightly and remembering my dreams. The last time I dreamed that a giant grizzly was trying to eat me.

The webmaster at Kaijuphile.com forwarded me a nice complimentary letter this morning. Ted A. Bohus, writer/producer/owner of the The Deadly Spawn saw my fan art. And liked it. Would I tell you that the writer of a movie I liked hated the fan art I did for said movie. Probably.

The monster in Deadly Spawn was designed by Tim Hildebrandt, one of the Brothers Hildebrandt, twin artists who gained their fame doing Lord of the Rings calendars back in the 70s. I’ve always been impressed by the critter. It looks like nothing else in the movies.

Got the specifics that the Editor wants for Worlds of Cthulhu. Looks like my biggest RPG illustration assignment yet. And the deadline is the end of the month. There’s a slightly earlier deadline for the Strange Eggs story. That one’s got a Lovecraftian riff. So I’ve got lots of tentacles and indescribable horrors to draw. Warms my heart.

Friday we’re seeing the new Star Wars. A friend has tickets already otherwise it would probably be a month before we got around to it.

Godzilla is coming to Seattle for the Seattle International Film Festival. Yay! Nizzibet was asking me what I wanted to do for my birthday. Why, watch Godzilla: Final Wars on the big screen of course. If she didn’t actually groan it was because she was practicing self control.

Now I’ve got illustrations to do for Worlds of Cthulhu #3. Still getting details on what and how many. Between that and the Strange Eggs work I’m having to push all my other projects back a bit. Those two have more specific deadlines than anything else I’m doing. As we move in to summer and closer to the time Nizzibet and I move I see myself getting busier and busier.

Saturday I spent sometime helping the Bombshell move some furniture. She found a buyer for her condo and now she’s moving her stuff to storage spaces until she moves in with her sister in Portland. Then Nizzibet and I went to the Soon-To-Be-Canadians for a while, drank wine and listened to the conversations swirling around us.

We finished the night at home watching Merchant of Venice and the first episode of Space 1999. I’ve no love of Shakespeare and this sumptuous production of Merchant didn’t change that. Too serious for some of the silliness that occurs.

Space 1999? Hmm. Between the first episode and the two (A Matter of Life and Death and Black Sun) we saw on Sunday night I’m afraid that the show benefitted from It’s-the-only-science-fiction-on status when I was a kid. I last saw these episodes when I was eleven in 1975. Star Wars was still two years away. The original Star Trek was in reruns. Space 1999 had much better special effects. But … The characters spend a lot of time looking serious and discussing the ramifications of pseudoscientific nonsense. I’m pretty sure I thought their science was crap when I was eleven. On an episode by episode basis anyway. For some reason I was never bothered by the moon’s ability to find a new solar system every week. I thought that traveling among the stars on a rogue moon was a great idea.

I’ll be checking in on Nizzibet shortly to see if she’s ready to go have coffee. I’m nursing one of her Diet Dr. Pepper’s right now to get my caffeine level up to a tolerable level. I don’t really like diet anything but, unless I feel like making coffee right now myself, it’s the most convenient source of caffeine.

Paliki has been in and out. We don’t see her much these days. She meows to come in first thing in the morning when she hears us moving about. She eats and then meows to go back out. That performance gets repeated in the evenings. Sometimes then she’ll spend an hour on the front porch meowing about something. The front door is often open while she does this. Why doesn’t she come in? I’ve asked her this many times and I’ve yet to get an answer that makes sense. During the day she seems to sleep in the tall grass outside our bedroom window.

I would be announcing that I’ve posted an entry for the Glass Cat but Keenspace seems to be down and I can’t update the pages. I’m not even sure that the pages properly uploaded.

In other news, I just agreed to illustrate a short story for the next Strange Eggs anthology. Steve Ahlquist is writing.

The Hammerheads entry should have the image working today. I’ve also added an entry for Cap’n Bill. That one has link for Trot but it doesn’t go anywhere yet. The illustration for the Trot entry needs to be inked, shaded and photoshopped.

No drive to do anything last night. Got home. Made Nizzibet the avocado and turkey sandwich that I’d promised and heated up leftovers for myself. We traded news about our days and then, because I wasn’t in to doing anything productive and she didn’t have the energy, we watched The Magnificent Seven. Yul Brunner’s character is a Cajun. Apparently that’s a handy excuse when actor’s have odd accents and their character is still supposed to be “American”. A little silly given how many immigrants were running around the Wild West at the time. Silly also considering how many of those Mexican peasants in the movie didn’t have Mexican accents. Fun movie.