2011

For the third year in a row, something bad happened in January. My college friend John Dye passed away in San Francisco. The last time I had seen him was at the MSU reunion in 2001. This hurt. It still hurts. There's a lot I don't understand, and never can. We were thick as thieves in college, as I've written about before in this 50-year, navel-gazing travelogue. He had no computer, nor any interest in having one, but I sure do wish I had kept in touch with him better, through other means.

His brother Jerre asked me to sing at the memorial service in Tupelo. I picked "Corner of the Sky" from Pippin, which was John's audition song back in college. Kermit Medsker played the song for me, just as he had for John all those many years ago.

In April, my favorite cat Jack died, hit by a car. We got a new kitten, Sparta.

Lots of work. We finished Scaredy Squirrel and All the World. By the end of the year, we were working on Scaredy Squirrel Makes a Friend and just gearing up on I'm Fast!. I also did ten spots for Kroger, which were shown on the Jumbotron at Titans football games. There were some smaller animation projects too; I did some animation for a shadow puppet piece for Brian Hull, and a motion comic music video for Trace Adkins.

I went to two reunions: My 30th high school reunion and a 20-year reunion for the Beauty and the Beast show at Disney World.

There were also some puppetry gigs: A little more for the Quaver project, some promo appearances with the Brown Chicken Brown Cow puppets for Trace Adkins, and a fish character for Operation Overboard.

We took a trip to Chicago in the summer, so Burton could go to Brickworld, a Lego convention there.

We got our Honda Element.

I turned 48.

Towards the end of the year, I start to work out an idea for an interactive app.

And that was 2011.

On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world. — Henry David Thoreau