About 2015 and a writing exercise.

2015 was an interesting year. I set some goals and feel like I was able to follow through with them.

My year started with me working as a contractor for Volt at Microsoft. I won't say I was working for Microsoft because I was not a Full-Time employee of Microsoft. No. I was a contractor working for Volt at Microsoft. My immediate superior was a Microsoft FTE and I worked on systems in the Office 365 Foundations Labs keeping stuff running that the Exchange team needed for their Dev testing.

I would have four alarms set 5:00 am, 5:15, 5:30, and 5:45. The five am alarm I would snooze. 5:15 would be my call to kick my ass out of bed and get ready. The 5:30 alarm was a reminder that I had only 15 minutes until I had to leave. And the 5:45 alarm was the call to leave the house so I could make it to the bus on time. I would take a 6:03 am bus from Northgate in Seattle to the Microsoft campus in Redmond and get to work about 6:50 am. I would then work from 7 am to 3 pm and take a bus back to north Seattle. I was often very bad about getting to bed on time so I would nap on the bus. I would always wake up on time to get off at my stop.

When I wasn't working I would be trying to get more into film production in Seattle. I wanted my focus to be directing and I did direct four short films during the year. Two of them were for the 48 hour film project and two were in conjunction with a Facebook group “Weekend Warriors Film Group.” I think three of the films are pretty good but I hope to do better work in 2016. I also used my sound equipment to record field audio on a variety of short films. And my camera skills were utilized on one of my short films and on another project for a different director.

I did what I could to help my boys whenever I could. There were some difficulties that we handled. Duncan and Calvin are both moving forward with their lives. Duncan is about to visit friends and Calvin is studying Japanese in school.

My second marriage ended in 2014 but it was this year that the paperwork was finally submitted to the proper authorities to have the marriage dissolved (Washington State's term for divorce). So that's final.

Near the end of the year I started dating again. I won't go into any details. I'm not sure what I want but I'm pretty sure that alone isn't it.

So the year has ended. And my Volt contract at Microsoft has ended. And I'm now 51 (I was joking that I'm now 33 in hexadecimal or 110011 in binary). What the new year brings will be new.

I'd like to continue with film. I think I'd like to focus on a feature but I have such a block sitting on my head that I can't think of anything to write. The ideas I have are sitting there caught in the mud; not sinking away but not jumping up demanding to be written.

Write about Sunday Afternoon
(a daily writing exercise for January 1 from the book “A Writer's Book of Days.”)

What is a Sunday Afternoon. Most weekends you sleep late after staying up late on a Saturday so Sunday Afternoon is the morning. A late breakfast or a jump ahead to lunch and the slow crawling dread that tomorrow is a work day. And even if you love your job the start of a work week kind of sucks. So you rush out to do something to grab the day to squeeze the last bit of juice from the fruit of the weekend. And you run into everyone doing the same thing. The mall, the traffic, the park full of people and kids and dogs, the movie theater with lines to get in and lines for popcorn and lines for the bathroom and after spending the last of the day out you go home and figure out what to eat for dinner. As you pick through leftovers and boxes of mac and cheese you remember the times when your mother would make a roast with all of the trimmings for Sunday dinner. You'd remember getting up early for church and wearing your good clothes and being shuttled off to Sunday school while the adults went off to arcane places. And the day would be spent running around after church with all of the neighborhood kids getting into all sorts of mischief and dirt and scraped knees and trees to climb and the day would last forever and then the whistle from your Mom calling you home because no one had cell phones or computers or anything with technology. And you'd go home to dinner and a large TV in the family room that was controlled by the adults with all of four channels to choose from. And then off to baths and jammies and bed way too early and promises that you'd stay up as late as you want when you're an adult. And as an adult you go to bed early because you have to get up and get to work in the morning.