Musing on the muse...

I watched The Incredibles this afternoon, then watched most of the extras on the second DVD about the making of it. I can't tell you how bad I want to make a movie right now. :) The creative muses are calling very persuasively. I wonder what these "urges" are and where they come from and why. They do come, and sometimes they're really, really, really strong. Part of the extras was a series of lighting/color sketches of the various sets in the movie. They were only splotches and shapes of color, but the effect was amazing. With art, certain parts of it (the interplay between light and shadow, the emotional effect of color, perspective, and so on) are spellbinding for me. I really don't know how to explain it, but it's real. I've decided that I'm tired of letting life slip by with creative expressions muted and bound, off to the side. No more. From now on, art and music and writing will get the attention they deserve (within proper bounds, of course).

So, in other parts of the world -- er, my life, I mean -- I ate lunch with a mechanical engineering major the other day and had a fascinating conversation about materials. I was so excited that I went straight to the library and got a refresher book on calculus. Then my ELANG class yesterday we finished our discussion on transformational grammar (Chomsky) and moved on to natural language processing. It's so interesting! I had to restrain myself from bouncing around the classroom for joy. Okay, I'm weird. :) If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm interested in practically everything. The number of topics that bore me diminishes daily. It's a great way to live, since there's so much to life. Why be bored when you can be having fun?

This past week we've been working really hard on the Immigrant Ancestors Project website, and the new search is finally up. We're in the process of importing all the data right now (we have over 8,000 names thus far). Last night at about 9:00 we were working away at it when one of the names caught my eye, and I found to my surprise that it was Manuela San Emeterio, who emigrated from Spain in 1848 and went to Cuba. "San Emeterio" was the surname given to all the abandoned childrens raised in the orphanage there, and so my great-great grandfather's name was Zoilo San Emeterio. We can't trace his line any further than that because his parents are unknown (and it's extremely unlikely that they'll ever be found). In searching through the Santander records earlier this year, I found a handful of San Emeterios who showed up a few decades before Zoilo but they disappeared abruptly with no trace left behind. Now it looks like they too emigrated to Cuba (Zoilo's son Antonio moved there, where he married and had my grandfather).