Aaargh, I hate this fatigue thing! I mean, I'm in a chipper mood, and all, but I'm feeling pretty rotten by the end of each afternoon. It's hard enough to prop my eyes open and watch bad movies on television, let alone imagine that I can do anything constructive in the evenings.

I hardly ever watch live television, but I do have this terrible habit of noting things I want to watch and compulsively programming my VCR. My two VCRs. I admit it, I have two VCRS, and, at any one time I may have something like twenty different things programmed to record. Of course, I never get to watch them all. I have a pile of tapes lying in a drawer with movies or documentaries that I probably won't watch until the next time I'm sick with the flu.

Last night I watched an old TV movie called "Murder in Mind". It was hilariously bad, but watchable on account of Nigel Hawthorne, who makes the most eerily attractive psychotic killer.

But what I should have been doing was working on my various film projects. I've five different projects going right now, and the single most frustrating part of this fatigue problem is that it holds me back, despite my desire and drive to work on the film projects. So I schedule things I can't get out of, trusting that I'll just make it through them. Tomorrow night, I'll spend three hours in a film editing room, and this Saturday I'm the assistant director (the guy who yells "Quiet on the set!") of somebody else's class-project.

My film-class came to an end on Monday night. We ended with a little party - chocolate chip cookies and beer - while watching the few last rolls of film that people had shot for their individual projects. None of us had produced masterpieces, but we're not done yet. Over the next few weeks, we'll continue to work on our group project (that's what I'm doing tomorrow night), as well as completing our individual projects. Both of these take the same kind of work; cutting and splicing film and sound tape and synchronizing them to the point where you can ship out sound and film to be finished into a final print. The crucial final piece of learning came only in the last class - how do you sync and splice your film? It's so low-tech, really; the splicing, for example, is accomplished using a guillotine and scotch-tape. Well, it's not really scotch-tape, but something rather like it.

So now I'm a film-maker, I guess. I know how to do the entire process from start-to-finish. Uh, what's next?

After a few days of deathly boredom at work, it looks like I'll be busy again, finally. We're all waiting, with bated breath, for a large customer in Silicon Valley to sign on the dotted line. I should hear tomorrow, and, once I hear, I'll have to spring into action. It will be a mad five weeks. It's either feast or famine. No doubt I'll start to complain, "Oh, I'm sooooo busy at work!" At least that will be a break from the monotony of complaining about being bored at work.

Beautiful cloudscapes this morning ...

... after the last storm cleared out.

And then this evening, the weird behavior of the fog. It often forms a coridoor across the Bay, as it gets channeled through the Golden Gate Bridge. But today it hit Alcatraz head on, and kind of leaped over it, leaving a hump of fog covering the island.