So, as you may have noticed from the pictures in several other bloggers' posts, it snowed yesterday. Yesterday was October 12th. According to Aaron Kaufman's now-defunct blog, the first time it snowed last year was November 9th. This, in my opinion, is not okay. We need a few more weeks of that perfect 60-or-70-degree fall weather before we get into the real cold!

Not only was that snow not okay on principle, it was also not okay in terms of the movie. We were planning on finishing off our outdoor fall scenes today. When I woke up yesterday morning, everything was white, and the snow showed no sign of stopping. Alex and I panicked a bit. Either, we decided, Marital Aid would be basically an all-indoor movie, or we would have to put in a line explaining why it was snowing in September, and why the snow had melted by the next scene. By some miracle, though, the snow stopped in the mid-afternoon and had almost completely melted by today, so we were able to film our scenes as planned. We still all lost circulation in our fingers (it was about 35 degrees out), but at least the set looked nice.

And apparently, as it turned out, we would have been all right even if the snow hadn't melted – Mateo, the aforementioned primal spirit of Carleton film, approached Alex at lunch yesterday and asked him if the snow was going to be a problem. Alex, thinking he was offering to intervene on our behalf with the weather gods, was a bit perplexed, until Mateo explained that he had access to a snow-melting machine that a friend of his has in case it snows on the weekend he's making his own movie. That movie, by the way, is really interesting – it's a short film called Nova Roma, directed by Alexander Cooney '11, that's based on the premise that the Roman Empire never fell and is now finding itself in crisis. It's considerably more legit than ours – for example, they have a budget. Alex and I have spent $1.32 of our own money on masking tape to put up posters for auditions, and $7.50 on digital tapes, before we managed to get CSA funding of $45 to cover the tapes for the whole movie. For props, costumes, and everything else, we beg, borrow and steal. (Well, we haven't really stolen anything yet, but we're not taking it off the table.) We take a kind of perverse pride in calling it a zero-budget movie. But anyway, Nova Roma looks pretty awesome – a better summary is here. There's been a huge amount of student film activity this fall for some reason – I think I heard that eight people are making their own movies. I hope this trend continues; I love student film in general, making it and watching it. [EDIT: Apparently the snow-melter portion of this post never happened. Alex is a dirty liar. Sorry, Mateo.]

Besides movie stuff, basically what I have to do this week is study, study, study, because I have three midterm-y things on Friday (in-class essays in French and Social Welfare and an actual midterm exam in medieval history). The medieval history exam is particularly worrying – I have to be able to label things on a map of Europe with their early-medieval names. Geography and I have never gotten along; I can barely label things on a map of Europe with their current names. So that should be... interesting. On the bright side, though, my French class has recently introduced me to Baudelaire and Cyrano de Bergerac, both of which I absolutely love. I'll leave you with this monologue from Cyrano:

Je vous aime, j'étouffe,
Je t'aime, je suis fou, je n'en peux plus, c'est trop ;
Ton nom est dans mon coeur comme dans un grelot,

Et comme tout le temps, Roxane, je frissonne,
Tout le temps, le grelot s'agite, et le nom sonne !
De toi, je me souviens de tout, j'ai tout aimé
Je sais que l'an dernier, un jour, le douze mai,
Pour sortir le matin tu changeas de coiffure !
J'ai tellement pris pour clarté ta chevelure
Que, comme lorsqu'on a trop fixé le soleil,
On voit sur toute chose ensuite un rond vermeil,
Sur tout, quand j'ai quitté les feux dont tu m'inondes,
Mon regard ébloui pose des taches blondes !

Aww, Cyrano... (I posted it in French because it loses a lot in translation. I guess those of you who don't speak French can have some fun putting it through Google translate and looking at the weird stuff that comes out...)