I’ve just finished attempt #3 to re-pack and prune what I’m bringing out west on Saturday. My bike is packed up in a box, I’ve booked an airport limo for 4:30 am and there are two 70lb bags of dog food in the basement to keep the hound in chow while I’m gone.
It’s amazing to imagine 4 months living out of one suitcase. Kind of makes me want to donate all the rest of my clothes and shoes right now. I’ll probably do a huge spring clean when I return and get rid of a ton of stuff.
It’s been great to have Armen already out in Mountain View so that I can ping him and ask questions like “Is there an alarm clock in the apartment?”. I need to know these things. Right now I’m praying there will be space in my carry on bag for a coffee grinder. Not because I drink coffee but because I used it to grind up flax, spices and oats for baking and smoothies.
There’s not much going on in terms of open source work. The past couple of weeks have been filled with preparing to leave town, seeing friends and doing a bit of AMO editing. I’m happy with this past term I have to say – in the end I made the President’s Honour list again. Now I just have to keep finding ways to turn that into potential funding for my last year. When I’m filling out applications it seems that the biggest factor is what kind of community and volunteer work you do.
Next year I’m going to volunteer with SOY where I would do 1 on 1 mentoring with a queer youth. It’s hard to translate all the hours and effort that went into my time on the Trinity Square Video Board of Directors into funding applications and I’ve maxed out my 2 X 2 year terms. Mentoring a youth will probably look better and maybe I’ll be matched up with a young’un who’s into computers and/or film. The other options that interest me are to get involved with Sketch or Parkdale READ. I’ve been able to give at least 4 hours a month to TSV so hopefully I can make a similar comitment to the new organizations.
In other news, one of my films got into Frameline which is in San Francisco in June. Lucky for me, I’ll be in the neighbourhood this summer and will be able to attend my screening. I was working on getting accredited as a distributor by representing my old workplace but as a filmmaker I will get treated much better and probably score some interesting shwag.
After the Images festival opening where G.B. Jone’s feature premiered (I did a voice over for one of the main characters) I was inspired to make a feature on Super 8 film and I made a pact with two other filmmaker friends that we would each have a feature before ten years were up. It may be ambitious but my hope is that by the end of this summer I will have a working screenplay to start preparing a schooting schedule from. I’d prefer to have a feature finished in 3 years, not 10.
That’s all the news fit to print right now. Time to take the dog out which I’m dreading because she ate 10 pull ‘n peel licorices earlier. Ugh.
