Today felt like the first day of my vacation. I've wrapped up all my work projects, so I have nothing at all to do. So I spent the morning walking slowly around the streets near my office, picking up little things I need for my trip. Maps of Massachussetts and New York State, for two driving excursions I'm planning, batteries for my walkman and so on. I noticed the usual tourists, but this time, without envy, since I knew I'd soon be joining their ranks.

I walked past the Academy of Art's gallery on 2nd street, noticing in the window that they still had the students' Spring show up. I almost retraced my steps to take a look-in, but walked on. Somehow, diversions like that don't seem to fit in to my San Francisco daily life. Then I stopped, and wondered why not. Visiting galleries and museums is something I do all the time when I'm on vacation; what earthly reason is there not to do it when I'm home? So I walked back and took a tour. It was a good decision, because there were lots of good work on show. Several pieces made me stop a while and look at the prices. Of course, there were also a few pieces you'd be embarrassed to see on your parents' living-room walls - pretty little nature scenes with a deer standing on a ridge. But overall, it was refreshing to see so many great pieces in a student's show.

I made a little piece of art of my own recently. Well, it was really mostly Steven Spielberg. I saw him on Bravo's "The Actors Studio" a couple of weeks ago, in a two hour special that was riveting and inspiring. James Lipton, the host of the TV show, who's laughably and lovably obsequious, that is when he's not being laughably and lovably pretentious, asked Spielberg what one image he'd choose to represent his films. And Spielberg chose the moment in Close Encounters when the young boy, who lives with his Mom in the Indiana countryside, opens the door to let the yellow light from the UFOs flood in. It's a moment of childlike wonderment and exploration.

Smaller Version of the Image I've framed from Close Encounters

It brought back my own childhood memories, when you'd hope beyond hope that something exciting would happen to you. Nothing ever did, of course, but I'd like to try and capture that same wonderment in a movie script of my own. So I tracked down a color still of that scene from Close Encounters, scanned it into my computer, and worked on it in Photoshop so that I could print out a high-quality image suitable for framing. I've put it on the wall I face when I'm sitting at my desk as a constant reminder to try to recapture that moment.

Mind, I've a long, long way to go. We showed our new short movie, "Rico is Back", to the cast and crew last night. Overall, I think, the movie works well. But there are some glaring lapses in continuity, lighting, and direction. It's kind of hard for me to look at it as a stranger would, but, for the moment, I'm not as thrilled with the results as I'd hoped. It's basically a decent, mostly competent movie, telling a nice little story. It's probably right about at the level of accomplishment you'd expect, given our experience. So I'm far from dissappointed. The process of putting it together was very worthwhile, and we've learned a lot which we can put into practice on our next production. Now we just have to come up with a new story to shoot.

The horrible flu-like sensations that I'd had over the July 4th period seem to have gone away, thankfully, just in time. But I'm still horribly tired all the time, too tired to go running. The hormone-replacement therapy doesn't seem to have helped so far, although I really have no clue how soon to expect results from that. I've been running only once a week for the last few weeks, and I'm really beginning to worry about getting out of shape. Let's see what a month's vacation does to me!