Oscars Over, I Need a Vacation

I've got journal envy.

My pal Mike Lathrop wrote a nifty journal recently. I'll give you a few of the best paragraphs:

"I have learned to snowboard. Snowboarding = good. The first two days were brutal, but it just gets better after that. I feel like the silver surfer while I'm doing it. While I'm sure I don't look as cool as I think I do, it's still awesome to think I look that cool!"

and

"I'd just gotten what seemed like a really genuine compliment from the former President of the United States of America! At that point Jimmy joked that he'd always wished he were tall and had hair like us. The President said quietly, so that not everyone nearby by could hear him, 'You know, I was 6' 8" before I was president!' and then he started laughing a little. That's when the shutter clicked and I had to move on."

Well, not much I have to say is going to compare to my pal Mike and his Brush with Bill(tm): http://www.bigmikestudios.com/me-and-bill.jpg . Still, I do have a little going on in my life.

For one, the Oscars were tonight. The awards were nicely divvied up between "Gladiator," "Traffic" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," which is how it should be. I bet it's a little depressing to be up against "Titanic" or "Shakespeare in Love" and know that, even though your movie was pretty good, pretty funny, pretty well edited, you made one little mistake such as include Jim Carrey in the cast, or perhaps John Cusack, who was in the sensational "High Fidelity" this year, and if you haven't seen that movie you should rush out right now and rent it because it's THAT good.

Well, Variety.com does a lot of work for the Oscars, and things went really smoothly this year, except for the fact that no one could view any of the updates we were making. I mean, we were adding photos of arrivals all night, posting winners as they were announced, linking to reviews and video clips, and all of it for naught because the web company that hosts our new site has a system that doesn't actual let you update data unless you call over there twice and get a guy named "Herman" or "Alex" to call one of his "people" to "look into" the database. It's all quite frustrating.

I've been Mr. House Project guy recently. Nothing as exciting as when I crawled under the house to run speaker wire to the back of the living room, but little impressive things still... I hung photos in the hallway (and even put little felt feet on the backs of the photos so they wouldn't mark the wall, how's that for "This Old House" handiness?), replaced the armrest in the car and spray painted black paint over the bright, annoying warning on the underside of the sun visors in the Miata. Yes, Mr. Government Label Enforcer, I KNOW that if I don't sit way back from the air bag I could injure myself, but when I'm plowing into the back of a school bus at 35 MPH on a 5 lane freeway, airbag bruises are probably the least of my worries, eh?

I need a vacation.

Last bit of news: Susie got the slide scanner working, so I'll post some cool photos I took a while ago online soon.

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