The Olympian - Police evicted four residents of a small tent city along Deschutes Parkway on Friday morning. In the spirit of the holidays, they didn’t arrest them.

–Jesus is never going to return if we keep treating one another this way–

I'd left a wet umbrella outside my front door after a walk. When I went to retrieve the umbrella, a small green frog hopped into the house. Looked like the frog came from the umbrella.

I know the frog was probably just in the neighborhood and did not come from the sky. But I find myself wondering if maybe it was really raining frogs last night and one hitched a ride  home with me on the dark blue umbrella.

There was a huge, old-fashioned animation stand buried deep in the maze of the Library building. I was able to sign up on the roster and use it nearly any time I wanted. In 1975 I had taken an internship with the regional educational television station in Tacoma. My aim was to produce a three minute piece. But there were two big problems.

The first little complication was the fact that I could find no one to really spend time and teach me how the animation stand worked. Believe me, I tried. My faculty sponsor really knew nothing about animation or cartooning, he was an anthropologist! The keeper of the stand basically threw open the door for me and said, "Have at it, kid." So I taught myself how to use the contraption. My short film was an animation of the song "Surrey With The Fringe On Top," set for an elementary school audience. To this day, I can't hear that song without thinking about this episode.

The second problem was that even though the television station wanted a three minute segment, they had, as I discovered only after I completed shooting, supplied me with less than two minutes of film. That meant that almost half of my labor was spent on what could be charitably called "conceptual art." But I still had time to be resourceful and complete not one but two finished short films by the end of the quarter. And I did it without using the animation stand.

Inspired by the innovative Canadian animator Norman McLaren, I ran some leader film through a projector. This discolored the white film enough for me to identify where the frames were located. Then I painstakingly drew, with a fine point India ink pen, on each frame. At 32 frames per second, it took awhile, but the result was sort of a shimmering effect that I really liked.