I fully intended to update before now. My last blog was a month ago. And a day. But who's counting?

I really did intend to update. But it has been a busy month, and really - most of it was just "stuff," the every day busyness of life and work, so not that interesting to blog about.

I will say this about the last few weeks: my employer just moved into a new building, so we all spent the last part of May and the first part of June cleaning out file cabinets and purging old files in preparation for the move. I don't mind rolling up my sleeves and doing some manual labor, but my back doesn't necessarily care for the process, and I usually feel it for a few days afterwards. In some cases, my past back problems flare up and "a few days afterwards" can turn into a few weeks. As a result, my back has been pretty sore since mid-June. Then Caryl, Chelan and I decided that we would take advantage of the three day holiday weekend to finally clean out our garage. When we moved from Portland to Pleasanton a year and a half ago we put a bunch of stuff into storage. When we bought this house, most of that storage transferred straight into our garage, and we waited until the rest of the house was set up and settled before tackling that little job. So - we have spent the last three days cleaning out our garage and (as a result of that cleaning out) putting things away in various rooms around the house. My back is now singing "Ave Maria" in an off-key sort of way. To put it another way, it feels like someone poured ground up glass in between my lumbar vertebrae. Hopefully I will be feeling better in a few days - not a few weeks. Anyway, the garage is now mostly cleaned up (a few more boxes to sort through, but no urgency), and we can enjoy the month ahead.

July promises to be more interesting than June. Or at least much more fun.

Tomorrow our friends Scott and Jodi arrive for a brief visit. They came to see us at new year's, just before we moved into our house, so this visit is an opportunity to let them see our home now that we are getting settled in. We will also do a little sightseeing.

Then, a week and a half after Scott and Jodi leave our niece Kirstin and her daughter Addison will be here for a few days. Kirstin has to come to the area for a three day work related seminar, so she is arriving a couple of days early to spend time with us and sightsee, and she is bringing Addison, all of a year and a half old, to let us spoil her rotten. Chelan will watch Addison while Kirstin is in her seminars during the day, and we can all play in the evenings.

Two days after Kirstin and Addison leave we will fly to Portland for our annual film festival and a week long vacation with family and friends. In addition to seeing Scott and Jodi again, and Kirstin and Addison again, we will get to spend time with most of our family and, hopefully, a few friends we haven't seen in a while.

About the film festival - I'm not going into a long explanation here, because I have talked about the GarlickDance Film Festival in previous blog posts, but I will say that I am excited to see this year's films and to gauge the audience reaction to my film. There are a total of eight entries this year, most by members of the Garlick family (Garlick is the last name of my brother in law who started this family film festival, thus the festival's name). Two of the films are from people not related by blood or marriage, and one of those is presenting his first film entry. I am hearing good things about the films this year, and looking forward to the screening.

Sydney Pollack died today.

He was an Oscar winning director, which only tells part of the story.

"Story." That is the operative word. I appreciate and admire a lot of directors. Film directors are a special breed. They have to be visionaries, and they have to be coaches, and they have to be motivators. And they have to understand what will speak to an audience. They have to be able to translate their unique vision into a story, and they have to get the actors and the cameras and the score and everything else to blend so perfectly that the audience experiences the story as one complete representation, not a bunch of segmented elements.

Sydney Pollack had a gift for the story. It was so complete and yet so subtle that audiences often didn't realize that they were being told a story. It often felt more as if they were characters in the story. And Pollack didn't do that through special effects and surround sound. He did it by understanding what spoke to people, and blending the elements together so completely that the people in the audience felt as if they were a part of what was happening to the people on the screen. That was true even when it was a story as unlikely as "Tootsie," and it was even more so when it was a story as touching and emotional as "Out of Africa" or "Kramer vs Kramer." Go back and watch "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" and tell me you do not feel the pain and fatigue and desire of the characters in that story. Watch the subtleties of Robert Redford's transition from hunted to hunter in "Three Days of the Condor." Compare the same elements with Tom Cruise in "The Firm." Yes, Pollack knew how to create real responses, even in unlikely scenarios, and he would just suck you in to the vortex of his vision.

I will never be a director. Not like that. I dabble in films, I don't really have the ability to create the vision. But Sydney Pollack . . .I watched and I admired and I yearned for that ability. See, Pollack wasn't just a director's director; he was also an actor's director. He studied acting under the great method acting guru Meisner, and while he probably drove some of his actors 'round the bend at times with his insistence on reality, he also made them better actors. And they knew it.

We'll never see another Sydney Pollack film produced, more's the pitty. But we're better for the ones we have. He knew how to tell the story. The man certainly understood his craft.

"Wind's in the east, mist comin' in.
Like something is brewin' about to begin
Can't put me finger on what lies in store
But I feel what's to happen, all happened before."

(Bert, Mary Poppins)

It feels like the wind is shifting on some things in my life.

Sure, why not . . .

. . . it's been a year, I'm due for change.

Again.

There's nothing negative brewing, mind you. I'm just not ready to go into any details yet. Too soon. May turn out to be nothing.

But watch for a magical nanny floating from the sky holding a bumbershoot. Yes, that might be the sign we are looking for.

(And no, we are not moving again!)