I finished The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons, and now I’m very curious to read the works of John Keats. Both Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion have central and obvious elements related to the English poet, most obviously the fact that the books share the names of poems by Keats. Dan Simmons has two other books set in the same universe that also share names with the poet’s works: Endymion and The Rise of Endymion.

The life of John Keats is a sad one. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was age seven. His brother fell victim to the same illness 14 years later. Three years after that, at the age of 24, he succumbed to the same disease. During his career as a poet, he was savagely criticised by his contemporaries. His last request, out of suffering and personal frustration, was to inscribe only this message on his headstone:

“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

This post is coming out of a hotel room in Tucson, AZ, where I’ll be staying for the rest of the week. I flew into Phoenix on Saturday to join Kori during her last week of a 4-week rotation in Tucson.

After flying in on Saturday, we went to a friend’s house in Scottsdale. He was gracious enough to show us around town and offer us place to stay for the night. Actually, it was way more than that; he had dinner cooking for us when we arrived, we had a nice air-mattress to sleep on, he made us breakfast in the morning, and we lounged around his pool for most of the day on Sunday.

After we were finally able to pull ourselves away from our friend’s resort-like home, we made the hour-and-a-half drive to Tucson. I spent the rest of the night relaxing, watching a little TV, and doing some reading (The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons – an excellent book so far, and the first book, Hyperion, was also great). Today was spent working, topped off by a nice sushi dinner with Kori.

I’ll have some photos once I get back to my home computer, which has my camera’s software and cable. While I’m out here I hope to get a few more posts up, maybe work on some details of this site, get some more reading done, do a little drawing, and spend the rest of my free time relaxing.

I think I’ll get started on that last one.

Volkswagen has had some amazing commercials in the past few years. Somehow I missed this one with Gene Kelly. It’s very possible that everyone else has seen it, but I saw it for the first time today – genius!

And in case you somehow missed the new commercials, “Unpimp Your Auto“, click on over and enjoy a laugh.

“V-Dub – holding it down on the engineering tip, y’all. Ya.”

I’ve had a pretty bad cold for a week now which has left me with little motivation to do anything except sleep. I managed to get a fair amount of work done last week, but between work and rest I haven’t had much time to use Lightwave, edit the college videos, or finish any of the other tasks queuing up on me. I have been drawing quite a bit, however, so I decided to post up one or two of the sketches I liked.

I’m finally starting to feel pretty good again, so hopefully I can start putting up more 3D posts in the gallery and add to the college section.