the quiet is all consuming.

There are many reasons for my silence over the last few weeks. The largest of them has been the passing of my mother in law Cheryl Anne Jeffery. She succumbed to her cancer on april 10th. Although I will miss her (all mom in law jokes aside), I am glad her suffering has come to an end. She now gets to explore the next stage of life, and I hope it is more peaceful for her.

I have taken a week off of work to help with the grief with jen and melanie and emma. All of life seems on hold right now, even if it isn't. Fortunatly we have signed our lease for another year (increased of course), and now it is the schooling situation to wade through.

We planned a small vacation back to bintan to help us relax, but it blew up in m y face a bit. Emma's passport is 5 months and 17 days away from expiring. To get into Indonisia, your pass port must be 6 months or more from expiring. So... we could not go. To postpone our trip will cost us about $200. Sigh. Such is life I guess. In the mean time I've been running around trying to get her passport renewed on time and could not.

Jen is home.

Yes we really found the two of them sleeping like this. I have no idea what was going on to have caused this pose.

What a relief to have jen back. But it is not going to be easy. She has gone through a lot, and needs my suport more than ever. I'm there for her. Once she is normal I'll collapse and then she can take care of me for a while. ;)

Picking her up from the airport was my usual drama. I miss read the flight numbers and paniced when it said her flight landed two hours early. I grabed the kids and lily and we ran out the door to the airport. We went to the wrong terminal first and that precious delay meant that when we went to the right terminal most of the passengers had already left. I figured we must have missed her so we rushed home to an empty house.

What do you think does she look excited?

I double checked the internet, realized my mistake, notice her plane was still landing early, so we had to rush out to the airport again. I at least got the right terminal number this time. It took some of the excitement out of the kids but I think it was still good that we went to get her.

This is mel and emma waiting for the first taxi to the airport.

It has been hard for jen to get over her jet lag and all the emotional stress she went through, but, like always, we will manage. We are strong like that.

Here are some more pictures as I really do think they speak more words than I could type.

My dad above.
Emma below.

And Scrapper.

AHHHH I miss jen. Ok I just had to toss that out there. I've got a few more pictures to share. haha I have just noticede that emma is naked in the background!! Unfortunatly that is a common state for her. :D

It would seem that my last two posts had been saved as drafts and not posted. I've put them both up now. (see bellow)

Work is work. I'm getting a bit frustrated at times. We seem to have a high turn over. GWL liked what I had done, but he did have some requested revisions. Nothing too out of the ordinary. We are in the last two weeks of revisions. I've learned a fair amount working on this one. It is very difficult balancing life, interviewing and training new people, doing my own shots, and approveing the teams, as well as managing the day to day business stuff.

Today Emma and I were going to go to the zoo. However it is raining much too hard to justify the $50.00 in cabs we would have to take. So we will find something else to do. We might go downtown to the far east plaza, or walk around orchard a little bit. Even the mrt ride takes up some time that emma enjoys. ;) While planning for our zoo adventure, I found a website that lists the weather for the island. I thought it was funny that it has 12 variations of rain adn cloud, and only two for sun. A bit revealing I think. Here is the link: http://app.nea.gov.sg/data/mss/docs/ncastmap.htm

I bought a new camera as both of our old ones have been broken. I bought a samsung L100. It's a little family model that has some nifty face recognition features and stabilization. Emma should be a pro with it in about two days. I might take a week. Here are some of the first photos we have taken with it. i will get some with melanie and lily soon too, and then wehn jen gets back I'll post some more of her and me. :D

My website redesign has been going well. I have a layout and colour scheme picked, and a map of what each button will do. I'm looking forward to watching jen build it.

Hey mom! If you click on the photos they should open up bigger. I can send you high res ones too if you want to print them off. Just let me know. I am so happy to have a camera again.

Wow it's febuary.

ok ok . sorry for taking so long to update this. Life as usual has been crazy, and any spare time I've had I've spent taking a deep breath. Jen is in Canada for her mom, and isn't due to return until march 16th. Hopefully she will return on that date. Life as a single dad has been an eye opener for me.

Future plans

So... my efforts to update my web site are proceeding. I do not yet have a design that i love, and frankly speaking I doubt I ever will. I have a few things going against me for that, one is the technical how to build it, and the other is I like so many different designs I have trouble limiting myself to just one, and when I do I feel the limitation. Ah well it is good to create stuff on my own again. When jen gets back she will help me with the technical. This means you won't see an update for at least 35-40 days. My google count down clock has set jens return at 28 days (that means she will arrive home on march 16th). I figure I'll give her a few days to get it built. ;)

The image beside this will be on my about page. I was going to cut out my girls, but then I was missing arms and frankly didn't want to have to rebuild them. The picture was already a composite.

Once my site is up, and I'm slightly happier with it, I am going to try some outside development. As tough as this sounds with my family situation going, and being a "single" dad for a bit, I have decided to help my crew develop their portfolios. Many of them have expressed a desire to improve their vfx type portfolios. I, by no means have a rock solid vfx portfolio. But I want to help these folks, and figure I will learn from it too. I will need to run it past my work to make sure it does not conflict with any legal obligation or ownership. We are not going to sell anything, just learn from it and enhance our experience.

It will be interesting to see who wants in. More so to see who actually contributes what. Time for some to step up I think.

STAR WARS CLONEWARS ANNOUNCED

http://www.starwars.com/video/view/623.html

http://www.starwars.com/theclonewars/news/announcement.html

Pretty cool eh? Nothing shown here (except for one or two scenes) was done at the studio I'm at. But is can show you roughly where it's going. Personally, I like our episodes better, but I might be biased.

I'm re-working my professional web site. I've always hated the one I had, but never really had the time to make it better. Jen made it very functional, but I want a bit more flare.

If you have any good reference sites please pass them on.

cheers

ryan