I emailed my Church Council meeting minutes to Jenny last night.

I typed my Readers Write: Weddings last night. It's less than one page long, 10 point double-spaced. It's a mere 209 words long. I'll write a cover letter this weekend and drop it in the mail to Sun Magazine.

I've decided to submit Alejandro Comes and Goes to Glimmer Train Magazine. They're accepting submissions again in April.

I had a wonderful, rich dream this morning. I can't remember anything else about it.

Connie's been researching how to help her niece apply for a passport. It's reminded me that it's time for me to renew my passport. I applied for my first passport right before my trip to Holland in 1995. I hate to get rid of that passport - it has sentimental value - but a passport is a valuable thing to have around.

I'm becoming obsessive about this Matisse story. It smells like an urban legend. It's quoted all over the internet as a "fact," but never referenced to anything. I think it's odd that I can't find even one image of this often-mentioned Matisse artwork. I went to the Urban Legends Reference Pages, and did searches for "Matisse" and "Le Bateau," but turned up nothing. I work at a university, so I should be able to find catalogs of Henri Matisse's works.

I typed the Church Council meeting minutes last night. It took a little over an hour. That was twice as long as I thought it would take. My minutes turned out to be half the length of the last meeting's minutes. I don't know if I did it exactly right.

Today's Daily Inbox Trivia told the story of Henri Matisse's "Le Bateau" (The Boat), which hung in New York's Museum of Modern Art for 41 days until someone noticed that it was hung upside down. I'd heard that story before, but I have never seen what the painting (print?) looks like. I spent about 20 minutes this morning searching the internet. I found the story reprinted many, many times. I found several online Matisse galleries. But I couldn't find a reproduction of Le Bateau. Sometimes it's surprising the things I can't find on the internet.

There is a pattern to my illnesses that perhaps I should pay closer attention to. Last Sunday, after Writers' Group, I suddenly became very sleepy. I took a nap and fell sound asleep as soon as I made contact with the futon. Then I had to drag myself out of bed to feed the sugar gliders, but I never felt like I'd completely woken up. I went to work on Monday, exhausted. I just couldn't wake up. Last night, I did wake up with a sore throat. Then I began a constant cycle of waking up and then falling right asleep and then waking up again. It was an interesting experience, actually. At times, I couldn't tell if I was awake or dreaming. I phoned in sick this morning and slept/ woke up/ slept until one in the afternoon. Then I went back to bed until Phillip got me up at 5:30.

Tonight was my first Church Council meeting. I wasn't feeling up to it, physically, but I didn't want to miss the first, introductory, meeting. So I went, and was elected Council Secretary.

I should be typing up the meeting minutes right now, instead of this blog entry, but I don't feel like it.

Every once in a while, I get the urge to rent a movie just to see if it's as bad as everyone says it is. That's why I rented the 2003 remake of Willard last weekend. I was disappointed. The movie was neither especially bad nor very good. I couldn't figure out if it was intended to be campy or scary - it didn't seem to achieve either, but it seemed, at times, to try for one or the other. It was so mediocre that I wouldn't have even bothered to make a blog entry about it, if I hadn't watched the DVD extras.

A couple of the DVD extras were so good that I'm still thinking about them today. I almost wish I could own the extras without the movie. The deleted scenes, with the commentary turned on, presented a vivid portrait of a director sacrificing artistic vision in order to get his project accepted by a studio that wanted a more "family friendly" horror movie. (The best of those deleted scenes was a wonderful character development between the male and female leads that would have explained a lot of their motivations, cut because the studio wanted the movie to "move along.") Then there was an hour and a half long "making of" documentary that I think should be required viewing for film students. It told the story, from beginning to end, of a medium-budget movie production in which nothing disastrous happens, and yet nothing goes exactly to plan. (For instance, the production got pushed back by four months because of the difficulty of finding an actor willing to star in the movie.) The documentary went into informative details not usually covered in "making of" features - including an interview with the production assistant assigned to menial tasks like guarding the parking lot, but happy to be working on a real movie.

This blog is packed with errors. An email from Pet today asked me why I had written "El tiempo es frio" instead of "El tiempo está frio." (I can't find the original entry right now.) Which form of "to be" is correct? Does the weather exist as coldness, or is it being cold? (Man, this is confusing.) After digging through my class notes, I discovered that we were both wrong. It turns out that I should have written: El tiempo hace frio (or, more informally, I could have gotten by with "Hace frio"). The weather makes coldness!

Alejandro Comes and Goes was a huge hit at Writers' Group. I was strongly encouraged to try to get it published. My friends in Writers' Group often have more faith in my writing than I do.