Prairie Home, Harry Putter, and Swimming!

It's been a few days (or more than a few), and that's because I'd forgotten just how busy summer can be. Anyway, the quick updates:

I've spent a lot of time in the past couple weeks revising my auto-biography on my website (under "About JRG") - so far I've only finished writing a bit about education, but I have my list of other things to cover started on my computer already, so hopefully I'll have time to write more of those as the month progresses.

Prairie Home Companion came out yesterday! I took my mother to go see it with me last night, and she enjoyed it (I did too - it's even funnier the second time around). And as a nice bonus, I've heard it's getting great reviews from the critics around the country, not just in the Minneapolis / St Paul area. After seeing the film now again, I'm even more glad that I chose to write my theodicy paper (from my God and Human Suffering class - the assignment was to talk about the theodicy being advanced within a contemporary piece of media or artwork - I chose Prairie Home). Even though it's a lighthearted comedy, there is so much in there about death and suffering that I hadn't remembered to include in my paper that, while I feel I could have done a better job after seeing it twice, I also feel my original decision to write about PHC was right on the money.

This morning I was blessed with two very productive meetings about Harry Putter - the first with my costume designer, who has volunteered her time to sew together capes for the production, and the second was with my location managers and director of photography to try to hash out a shooting schedule. Costumes are looking like they'll come together nicely - I'll know more later this week, but things are looking up (especially considering I thought we wouldn't have anyone available to work costuming!). And the scheduling is coming together, too. We were able to plan out a not-too-overly-aggressive shooting list for our week of principal photography in June without leaving too many scenes to pick up in July. I'm quite happy with how everything is coming together, and every day I am more confident that we'll actually get this puppy done!

My last little note, going back to yesterday, is a piece of advice for anyone who would consider swimming in a lake on a less than summer-warm day. It's cold. The water was kind of warm, but the wind was dreadfully frigid. I think there was a reason that the seven of us were the only ones in the lake, and only for a relatively short time. Fun, yes, but brrr!