back in town, just. a week that saw a movie modeled on a amusement park ride (with the same depth of plot), and a movie about a computer game (with about the same degree of meaningfulness).

and marketing is ALL. content seems to be only a minor detail in the fight to be SEEN, to be HEARD, by a mass. the economy of attention.

one last retreat to the highlands with Chris, Scharmin and the kids. getting high in the Rockies. while it is getting more and more crowded in the Front Range area, massively more than in 1976, it is still a phenomena, the full experience of getting above 10000 feet, the air, the Light, the sky, everything.

preparing food for the passage to Colorado. choosing the way. this time, moving through the reservation on less traveled routes. maybe by Chaco again. though the road is crappy, dirt. keeps the tourists away. at least most SUV's never get off pavement. ten percent, I heard some where.

what should I write about here? no blogging spew to be had, not that I really care about putting something down each day, hardly have done that in the history of this whole work.

spending time on the archive. looking through old 16mm family films. there are more than 4,000 feet of silent Kodachrome from the 1950's. mostly Alaska. researching the telecine process going from film to digital video. want to get them all transferred so that folks in the family can actually see them. there used to be a 16mm editing console (manual splicing and viewing unit), but that has long since made its way to the Goodwill or so. so I manually spliced the remaining 100 foot reels together onto 400 foot reels, there are ten or twelve of those along with "The Alaska Movie," as we call it. a 1600-foot behemoth 45-minute-or-so series of fragments of hunting polar bear by air, Inuit dancers, glacier break-ups, family parties, sledding, trailing moose in the car, panning gold, and on and on.

part of this increasing tendency to archive these days. bought archival storage cases for all Dad's and Aunt Mary's slides, amounting to about 7,000 or so. numbered boxes for much of my own small archive of negatives, prints, and other art stuff. seems spurious, out of all the things to do in the world.

so cycling 20 miles in the 100+F heat seems the Other thing to do. winds make the difference. with the wind downhill, against uphill.

much time spent taking Dad in for his almost daily hospital visits to get his leg wound looked after. really shocking. shows how much more difficult it is for the body to heal as it ages. eventually there is not enough energy turn-around to bring order back to the system.

an early birthday party for Loki, since he will not be around in the US to celebrate next month. Zebra joins in for the festivities.

reading IEEE Spectrum, NSPE, Science, and all that stuff. The old Encyclopedia Britannica, playing chess with Loki using the old Japanese ivory chess set. Finally he beats me. twice. I made him work for it, but he came through with not too much complaining. and ends up beating me all the time thereafter. monsoon season maybe did start up today. actually got wet, but it evaporated within an hour. the respite from sun was welcome, clouds are okay, too, nights warmer for the insulating effect, but highs are lowering. mountain biking today, and swimming, that's good. necessary. gotta do a longer ride tomorrow.

the "P" on the side of the mountain south of town has been changed from all white(wash) to stripes of red, white, and blue. this area of Arizona has many veterans who started migrating to the area following World War 1, seeking a dry climate for health reasons. the Veterans Administration established a hospital in Prescott on the site of Fort Whipple, an early outpost for US military control of the native American 'situation' in the region. the Yavapai Indian Reservation abuts the Fort, and extends in a rhombohedral shape that sticks into the middle of the east side of town. between that and the "World's Oldest Rodeo," it's cowboys and indians here.