it’s been four weeks now, and next week i have the art workshop for elementary teachers every day during schoolish hours, so it’s about time to think about resuming my regularly scheduled life.  i’m hoping (hoping) it won’t completely immerse my own life as it did last year.  it’s actually been quite a four weeks.  completely alone, often not out of the house for several days at a time, i learned again to study, at least what i want to study, and concentrated for a good bit of time on art influences.  i learned again, pretty much, to eat meals of food.  i didn’t get done what i had planned to do but, hey, there’s still time, right?  i did get the study cleared out (at least at surface level) and it looks good again and i’m quite invited to be in there--the screening area is especially nice--and i spent some days reading in the morning, knitting at mid-day and then watching in my dvd space from late afternoon until bedtime, when i checked the net.  how much complaining can i do about that?  so it’s been lonely, or it was until i got used to it, but it’s been good.  i’m going to have to get used to NOT doing that, now.

as i said, i moved to middle earth, working my way through the incredible dvd sets that show how the movies were made.  (i had said, when they began to come out years ago, that i was going to wait until they were all out before beginning, so i could do it all at once and not have to pause; and then when they were all out i was otherwise engaged) really made me nostalgic for my theater days.  they seem unaware that the unique feeling of kinship to which they kept alluding has a precedent in repertory theatre--which MacKellan, at least, can’t have forgotten so i’m sure he’s just being disingenuous--which made me homesick or the first time in many years for those days at OSFA.  that and the fact that i went to art school with the special effect supervisor really cued me in in a way that began actually to make me jealous until i remembered that making movies is the seventh ring of hell.  they forgot to mention that part; or they mentioned it (he actually began to seem quite unpleasant with the complaining--i notice he hasn’t continued to work with weta but has moved on to other movies, which is only to be expected as he ws a flown-in american expert, after all, but still, it seems the kind of thing one would throw ones life over to continue to do if at all possible, i would, or i would if i were a 20-something boy, which it seems is the majority of people on the film) but in such a way as to glamorize it.  but anyway, i persevered with the whole thing, and am reading the books again, and getting lots of influences.  I even got the online MMORPG in order to keep the thing rolling.  I don’t know if it will work.  I’ve only tried one of those and it didn’t work for me at all and i soon uninstalled it, but then LOTR itself didn’t work for me for many years, either, and now it’s providing great influence, so who knows?  I can’t tell because it’s taking hours and hours to install.  First 2 hours to install from 2 dvdroms, and then, once i logged in, it started downloading game updates which it’s still doing hours later.  thing’s only been out since april.  so we shall see (somehow, to the obsessive me, that sounds promising.)

sigh… still only 35% downloaded…