My StarWars-uber-fan-boy-hubby and I saw the special advanced screening of Return of the Sith last night and *sigh* I couldn’t help tearing when the credits started scrolling. Not only does the movie mark Anakin’s coming-of-rage, it also put an end to the saga my generation grew up with. Our good pal Carlo captures the emotion best:
Today is the day I shall finally see the end of a 33 year old saga. There will be no more Star Wars movies to look forward to after this. What do I do the day after Star Wars ends? Grow up?

I guess for those of us who don’t want to, there’s still this and this to look forward to.

Last night —

we had a despedida dinner (*sob*) for one of my bestest friends, Sheila, who along with hubby Mike will be based in Singapore starting next week.

(I’ll miss you Shei. So I guess Tips and I will just have to use up some miles in order to meet you for lunch from now on (; )

I also dropped by the mini-CFA reunion/welcome dinner for Lizza‘s friend Angela before heading to Sheila’s despedida. Carlo has some pictures here

Oh, if you happen to notice that Arn oddly wasn’t with me in any of the pics, that’s because he was at a dinner meeting with Gerry, Ilyn (hi Ilyn!), and Zach for another project to look forward to *wink*

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Speaking of Arn and Gerry, their last team effort Lastikman was reviewed in the Philippine Star last week.

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{Recycled post #3}

A few of our new year acquisitions:

Carnet de Voyage

Craig Thompson promises his fans that this is not his “next book”. It’s really a travel journal he kept while touring through Africa and Europe early this year. Exquisite sketches accompany his painstakingly-detailed notes and if you’re a huge Thompson fan like Arn and me, it’s worth forking the few dollars* over. You may browse through some excerpts here.

*Locally, you can ask our friendly neighborhood comic guy to get it for you.

Cosmos Boxed Set

Do you remember the old TV show Cosmos which aired on Channel 9 in the 80’s? (If not then oops, the age gap is showing). Loaned to us by Arn’s brother kuya Lenn, a professor in the US, this extraordinary show that was written and hosted by the late, great Carl Sagan is chock-full of information about everything over and around the sun. I’m only watching the ones that interest me but Arn is bent on viewing all 13 episodes one after the other.

Thanks to the rah-rah from good pals Carlo and Terry, I’m now an InDesign convert — a mere 12 hours after they convinced me to give it a try. This is actually a big deal because I’ve been a loyal Freehand user since the Aldus days. I only started enjoying MX a few months ago so I didn’t care about InDesign until our print producers requested that I use it for the magazine’s next issue. I’m taking some time to learn it and I can’t believe how much I’ve been missing, gee. InDesign makes it so much easier to control how characters kern, how paragraphs flow, and how text runs across columns. I know Quark Express can do that, too, but the thing I didn’t like about Quark* and the old Pagemaker was that I couldn’t draw vector shapes with them. Freehand, meanwhile, was a blend of Illustrator and Quark, but it had limitations. For one, I often have to manually space type to control how it looks. It’s really for graphic work than for publishing, and even then, colors do not translate exactly as I’d like them to in different applications. InDesign might be the key to solving those limitations. I could be gushing too early but I have a feeling that this program will take a beating from me in the next few months.

*not this Quark — this one I like, hehe! (: