… so I am watching Lord of the Rings: Return of the King the other day.

The movie comes to the scene where Sam & Frodo are half way up Mount Doom.  Frodo collapses & Sam bravely tells him “I can’t carry the ring, but I can carry you.”  At that moment, my new vision of the film’s end came to life.

In this new ending, Sam carries Frodo to the edge of the lavapit.  Bringing all of his strength to bear, Sam lifts Frodo above his head & hurls Frodo & his necklace-bound ring into the lava destroying the ring & killing Frodo.  I’m not quite sure what happens to Gollum in this version, but I am sure it would involve lots of fast cuts of him talking to himself.  Perhaps the render farm dies & Gollum just disappears into a pixel mist confounding & frightening the computerless denizens of Middle Earth.
Having destroyed the ring & killed his friend, Sam wipes his hands of the whole ordeal & mutters “That will teach you not to believe me you stinking son of a b—h”.

Roll credits.

I would like to point out the advantage to my ending is that it is one ending & requires no second guessing by the audience to the true movie’s endpoint.

With a couple of project schedule shifts, the last week & a half provided some free time.  I worked hard for the last month prior so the short lull before the next rush is refreshing.

Friday, Theresa, JJ & I packed up & went to Disneyland for the afternoon.  Initially, Theresa wasn’t feeling well, but she seemed to get over it my the mid-afternoon.  Halfway there, we remembered that Mitch & Kim also had the day free & invited them to join us.  Overall, it was a fun afternoon / evening - especially in light of my “Parent Pass” exploit which cut a 45 minute wait on Space Mountain to less than 3.
Since all of my free time cannot be spent burning money & gallivanting about town, I am using the greater free hours to finally learn some new technologies & to relearn some old ones I have not touched in a while.

First among them is After Effects.  My time spent with After Effects was somewhat minimal during college & I rarely touched it again after that.  I remember a lot of the basics, but the program has changed significantly since I last used it with any regularity.  What I knew is coming back quickly enough & I am absorbing the new changes easily.  Adobe did a great job of establishing interface uniformity within their software suite, so many of the new features in the program are intuitive based on the fact that I know Photoshop & Illustrator so well.

Next on my list is Flex.  With more & more corporate style sites choosing to do full screen Flash websites (some of them doing it well, some not so well), Flex is definitely high on my list of programs to need to know.  Though I experimented briefly with it at Trailer Park, I never got the real needed time to concentrate on this program with the attention it needed.  As most of my learning time is concentrated on After Effects right now, Flex will probably have to wait another month before I can dive into it completely.

Having not received my COBRA paperwork from Trailer Park, I emailed HR today to ask what was going on.  Lo & behold, there was a clerical error and my paperwork was not processed.  In light of these facts, they apologized and said that Trailer Park will cover my health insurance for one more month until the paperwork could be properly filed with my COBRA activating in March.

All I could think was — what an inconvenience to not have to pay for my health insurance on my own this month.