On a recent date night, Kathy and I caught Moulin Rouge at the $2.00 theater in town. Though bawdy enough that it can by no means be considered a family-friendly film, I was hugely impressed with it, especially the wonderfully creative music. (Who knew young Obi-Wan could sing like that?) The film borrows freely from the pop music of the last three decades, interspersing The Police’s “Roxanne” with The Sound of Music theme with Elton John’s “Your Song” and many others. Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman carry off their leads so well that the music just seems a natural extension of what’s going on in the story, lending emotional heights and depths to the straightforward story that would otherwise be unachievable. An artful combination of humor, drama, and pathos makes this a film well worth watching — you’ll come away singing compulsively.

Emily returned from her annual summer trip to New York about two weeks ago. We’ve really been glad to have her around again, and are enjoying her sweet disposition and pleasant company once more. She came back with gifts for the whole family. In a particularly touching show of her knowledge of my tastes, she presented me with a tin of jalepeno cheese dip, which I gobbled immediately.

After completing his Radio/Television/Film degree at the University of Texas, my buddy Ross Richie moved out to California so that he could get involved in the film industry. It’s been a long time coming, but his tenacity in Hollywood is finally paying off, as things are moving forward on one of his banner projects, a film version of Matt Wagner’s Mage comic book. Touchstone just announced that F. Gary Gray, who did Friday and The Negotiator, will be directing the film. Ross is very pleased with the choice, and I’m more and more excited to see what will become of this project. The script is great, and Gray has a good shot at bringing it to life in the way it should be.

After a month and a half of debugging, my software company, Saguaro Studios finally released version 1.0 of Oratorio, the presentation package for church music. It’s been getting mentions on Macintouch and MacNN, and I’ve been getting a lot of good feedback from people trying it out, so I’m happy with the release. Now I can finally get back to programming features, instead of the far less exciting debugging I’ve been doing.

This afternoon, Origin took all of us who work here out to the Alamo Drafthouse, a fun movie theater in Austin that has comfy seats and waiters that will bring you the food and drinks of your choice while you’re watching a movie. Today’s feature was Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which I have, of course, seen innumerable times, but never on the big screen. It came as a surprise to me how many little things I noticed that never came across on the television – cats being beaten, gorilla paws suddenly pulling away the feminine hand turning the pages of a book, just how cute the little bunny was. In spite of the fact that I’d voted to see A.I. instead, I was pleased to find myself enjoying the film all over again. (The enjoyment was probably enhanced by the fact that for 15 minutes preceeding the movie, they played drive-in movie theater intermission reels from 1959 with psychedelic music behind it. It felt like a scene from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Snack Bar.)

Last weekend, the family and I went up to Denton for a few days. I had a consulting contract, and Kathy was looking forward to visiting with some of our old friends from up that way. We stayed at a Best Western which had just opened, and which still had some bugs to work out. Notably, the cleaning crew left our door wide open all day, the staff only answered the front desk phone about 50% of the time, they had trouble authenticating credit cards, and the power went out for about 90 minutes on Sunday morning. (Admittedly, the last item was probably not their fault, but it had already become enough of a comedy of errors by that point to just add to the effect.)

In any case, we were able to squeeze some good visits with a number of dear friends in, though I’m afraid we missed several others I wish we had been able to see. (Sorry Pierces, Morrises, Leaheys, Hugheys, and others!) It was interesting to be back in Denton again after a year’s absence. The experience was closely akin to that you get when you go back to visit the parents after having been away at college for a year, and find lots of tiny, but cumulatively unsettling, changes about the old homestead. But the trip as a whole was quite enjoyable, though enough of a working holiday that we were immediately ready for a weekend after the weekend.

Ever since Liam was born, I’ve had a low-level irrational fear that he was going to drown himself; I even had a nightmare or two on the theme. This concern was given a bit of fuel when we moved into a house with a swimming pool that had no fence around it.

In order to assuage my fears, we’ve made getting a fence up one of our priorities since the move. We hired a good friend who did a beautiful job to build the fence for us. We were really excited with how nicely it spruced up the pool deck, and how pleasant it would be to be able to let the kids run amok in the backyard without that concern. And then as we stood admiring it, Liam came up, took one look, and slipped right between the bars of the fence without batting an eye. Argh!

So, Kathy painstakingly removed each of the vertical pieces of wood and nailed them 1/2″ closer to each other — close enough to keep Liam out, but still far enough away to permit us to see the water. She was just finishing up resetting the last of the slats over this weekend, and what does the ungrateful boy do?

Learns to swim.

He made it about 15 feet without help of any sort on Saturday, and was back and forth enough that I have no doubt he’ll be able to recover if he finds himself in the water unexpectedly. It was nice to see the hard work we’ve been doing with him on learning pay off so handsomely at last.

Now, if we can only get him potty-trained…

While working in the garden recently, Kathy was surprised to turn over a pile of dirt and find a gold ring with a tremendous diamond in it! She took it to the jeweler to have it checked out, and it turned out that the diamond was fake, though very pretty, so Abigail, who had become enamored with the item, got to keep it.

A few days later, Kathy was doing some more work in the garden, and found another ring, this one with 21 tiny diamonds in it. It too went for a visit to the jeweler, who determined that this one was real! So, since none of us are big jewelry wearers, we’ve put it up for auction. Now go bid up the price!

On Saturday morning, Kathy asked me if there was anything in particular I wanted to do that day. “Let me think about it,” I replied. By 10:30am, I’d thought about it, and decided I wanted to go to the beach — about a 3.5 hour drive from San Marcos. Kathy wasn’t up for 7 hours in the car, but helped me get the 3 elder kids packed up, and off we went. On the way down, we alternated between reading books, singing, watching for seagulls, and listening to stories on tape, finally arriving at about 2:30pm, when we pulled off to the first beach we could find.

Much to my surprise, the recent tropical storms blowing through the Gulf of Mexico had dislodged so much seaweed that it had formed 3 foot high mounds all along the shoreline. I had to actually lift the kids over to get them into the water. Once over, Liam was pretty skeptical of the waves at first, but gradually warmed to them over the course of the afternoon. He was jumping around in the shallows without me by the time we left. Emily, of course, dove right in and had a great time hunting for shrimp and crabs in the seaweed drifts with some other kids. Abby never did develop a fondness for the waves, but after some time out in the water was having enough fun to forget to ask if we could go someplace without them.

On Sunday, I took Emily to see The King and I, which was being staged by our local community theater. It was a typical community theater production, with a wildly mixed pool of talent, a cast of thousands, an orchestra that seemed to consist mainly of trombones, and “Siamese” men who were dressed in outfits that late-70’s giggolos would have rejected as too garish, but no less fun for that. Emily hasn’t had much experience with theater yet, so we talked about the different pieces of music, theater customs, the roles of the various people involved, etc.

When we got home, we discovered that Liam had taken the opportunity to give the new cat a haircut while Kathy’s back was turned — one of those situations where parents teeter precariously between grounding for life and uproarious laughter. Kids these days.

There are some authors who, whenever I happen to notice a new book of theirs in the store, I will purchase without a second’s thought, knowing that their work is inevitably excellent, solid storytelling and that I won’t be disappointed.

But then there a few authors whose work I wait for with bated breath. When the latest book finally hits the shelves, I go buy it immediately, get a 256 oz. glass of iced tea, catheterize myself, and install myself in the recliner for the duration, devouring the tome in as close to one great literary swallow as I can.

One such author is Neil Gaiman, to whom Ross introduced me several years ago, when Neil was still sticking to graphic novels and short stories as his forms of choice. His third novel, American Gods, has just hit the street, and I’m agonizing that I’m in the office instead of reading now. In the interests of economy, I’ve ordered it from buy.com, but have been sliding down to Barnes & Noble during my lunchtime on the days I’m in Austin to sit in their big comfy chairs and read their big comfy hardback. So far, it does not disappoint, though the returning to the office suffers a bit in comparison. My protestant work ethic has thus far won out, and I remain employed, with only about 60 pages under my belt to date.

Darn it.