Never stop thinking...

Last night, I met an old friend and his wife at their hotel in Niagara Falls. Plan was to go look at the falls and maybe cross to Goat Island, but it started pouring rain, sheeting down like it was Houston, so that was out of the question. We scurried around to an Indian food restaurant near the hotel and spent hours there, just talking and eating.

I had a tasty lamb curry while they did chicken tikka masala. Got sick as a dog, en route home, because they used a chicken stock base for their curry. My body does not like chicken. Made it home, but only barely.

I know Andreas from when I was at UT in Austin. We both took a film editing class under Edward Dmytryk and reworked a fight scene from Gunsmoke. It's one where Matt Dillon stops an abusive man from roughing up his daughter or girl friend or wife or something. My way of working it was to focus on the fear of the girl as Dillon interfered in the man's abuse. I got good response.

There was one point in the footage where the abuser was on the ground after the fight and pulled a pistol. We had a choice of 4 or 5 different angles of Dillon kicking it out of his hand. I used the simplest one and shifted to the girl almost smiling. Andres used all of them, over and over, making it look like Dillon was trying to kick the man to death. It got quite a reaction, and he got a wary side-eye from Dmytryk.

But that's him. That was 42 years ago and we've kept in casual touch. I stayed with him when I visited Hamburg, and he showed me the whole damn city AND Lubeck in 4 days, not counting the night of the World Cup qualifiers Germany was playing in. By the time we were done, I needed a vacation from my vacation. Damn. Fortunately, my next stop was Paris, by myself. Very relaxing.

I helped him locate some of his German relatives in Texas. I visited him and his wife, Nino, in Bremen. We've chatted online and shared stories we're writing. One of my oldest friends.

Just a long way of saying I got nothing done on CK, yesterday, and tonight I'm only 10% into the last polish...and already found a couple of typos. One was a word missing; one was an extra space between two words. It'll take some time to get this done right. Dammit.