The parents are worse than ever. Mom's genuinely, honestly psychotic. I don't mean in that "she's a mom" way, I mean, like, the minute-to-minute things that she talks about have little or nothing to do with the reality the rest of us experience around her. I'm 25. She's 48 (47?). Neither she nor I is old enough for this to be "normal". I have an almost-college-age younger brother and a very cute six-year-old niece at home, neither of whom deserve being around her. And that's about twice as much detail as I'd meant to mention.
Tim, the almost-college-age brother, is doing astoundingly well all thing considered. He's been doing neat stop-motion animations forever, and professional video editing, just weddings and local stuff, for a few years. But he's put together his first full-on movie recently and it's good. It's, like, really good. Comparable to Clerks in humor and feel, but only about a half-hour long. Not bad considering he completed directing, co-writing and starring in it just before his sixteenth birthday. Not sure where he gets it from, but he's a creative genius.
Got some excellent digital photos while I was in Texas. Some long-exposure photos of buildings at night, some decent fireworks photos, some nice aerial shots through the plane windows. And the Dickens Faire stuff I did earlier came out nicer than I'd expected. Pretty cool. The best was the sparklerpainting, where I set up the camera on a very long exposure and a very small aperture and we could paint things with sparklers and it'd come out all as one picture. I need to figure out how and where to post this stuff, but it *must* get onto the web.
Okay. Back from Texas, driving to Santa Barbara today, heading for Chicago on Friday. Gotta finish re-packing...
