When the alarm woke us to step outside, we expected a cloud cover considering that we’d had a rainy afternoon into the early evening. Instead, we found the sky crystal-clear and the Blood Moon just ten minutes away from the maximum extent the eclipse was going to impact the lunar mass hovering high overhead. While our inclination had been to skip the event, we, somewhat reluctantly, gave into the nerdy desire to catch this celestial occurrence and are the happier for it. My only wish would be that I would have prepped earlier by setting my camera up on a tripod instead of needing to take nearly 30 photos before I finally got this decent shot that was handheld using a 200mm lens, 3200 ISO, f/2.8, at about 1/8th of a second.

It’s not often that Caroline and I spend nearly 9 hours drifting between theaters, but when we do, you can be assured it’s for the Academy Award Shorts. Not participating with local media, it can be tricky to catch when local events are happening, but here we were, having caught sight of that time of year when the animated, documentary, and live-action shorts up for Academy Award consideration are bundled together and screened over an entire day.

You might ask, what does this photo of a mall have to do with movies? Well, let me tell you. Harkins at Fashion Square Mall in Scottsdale is where we took in these movies, and between the groupings of five films, we’d walk around the mall. I’m not going to attempt to review 15 films, especially after a great start with the animated films, each a winner, only to crash into the documentaries where we watched a man die on the street and deal with another going to his execution in a Texas prison and finally a film from a survivor of the Parkland, Florida, mass school shooting. The best part of it all, during the animated films, we were warned about sexually mature content that arrived in the form of a minuscule puppet penis, but when the documentaries rolled, there was no warning that we’d watch a man bleed out. In America, penis is too provocative, while a man dying in the street is just part of the violence to which we should be numb.

My last post mentioned my writing progress and my excuse for why sharing on my blog has been sporadic. Well, it turns out that when I’m in town, most mornings witness me wearing my wannabe author hat at the WeBe Coffee Roasters. Today, they celebrated their 2nd anniversary, which, while not conducive to writing, was a great opportunity to meet all the regulars on one day and introduce Caroline to many of those people I distract myself with from writing as my social life occasionally takes center stage.

The illustration of WeBe Coffee in the background is from Aileen Martinez, who sketched the place and added it to her 2025 calendar, while the inset sketch is from the collaborative Faux-To Booth that she and Jef Caine operate to produce these lovely drawings.

The astute will see this Christmas-drenched trickery as a transparent act of trying to make up for lost ground after not posting for more than a month by backdating this missive. Maybe I’ll be called out for dating this post December 9th, when it wasn’t published until January 8th, as though I hoped that no one would notice that my posting frequency had fallen off a cliff. Well, as my then-teenage daughter once told me once, “You can suck it!”

It’s not that I’ve had nothing to say; it’s just that I’ve been busy. Let me rephrase that: I’ve been beyond busy. I’ve been absolutely consumed since November 4th working (toiling is more apt), writing this thing I want to believe is an evolving novel. Writing is all I do while I’m living in a zone, neglecting everything else and focusing exclusively on finding my way into the story, which is unfolding into an ever-expanding document that now contains so many words that it likely exceeds most humans’ ability to express such a number. Santa promised that if I wrote like the wind, he’d not fill my notebook with coal, and so, like one of his slavish elves, I work every day for others’ future enjoyment…