Yes, this blog has been very quiet lately. That is simply a reflection of how quiet my life has been. I'm continuing to go through my medical treatments and things are improving dramatically. I am back working and I see my children every day after school. Days feel pretty normal right now.

If you are missing regular Depot Dad updates, all I can do is direct you to the archives at the bottom of the right hand column. Maybe there are some posts you haven't discovered yet. Its all I have to offer right now. Whan my life stops being so dull, I'll be right back here with an update. But to tell you the truth, after the year I've just been through, dull is just where I want to be right now.

I’ve been wanting to get back to my “Depot Bell” series for a long time. To newcomers, the Depot Bell articles were to be a list of one hundred things that have brought me happiness in my life with a little blog post for each item in the list. So far, I’ve written six.

And now I’m not sure if I’ll be able to finish the ambitious project. So, in the interest of expediency and completion, I’m posting an abbreviated version of the list here with only a sentence or two for each entry. If time and good fortune permit me, I may still return to give these topics the love and attention they deserve.

In no particular order, here are the first ten of one hundred things that have made me happy...

1. The Waiting by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
Pure rock and roll without compromise or pretension. Perfect.

2. Star Talks at Oliver and Amélie’s school
Teaching twenty 6 year olds about the night sky using marker board doodles and telescopes. Possibly my finest hour.

3. The Golden Girl
My first crush under windy Nebraska skies.

4. Pure Imagination from the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
Gene Wilder is a national treasure.

5. The artwork of Edward Gorey
Intelligent, sarcastic, literary, and morbid, a joy to behold.

6. The television show Taxi
“What does a yellow light mean?”

7. Drawing Comics with Phill in High School
My first creative collaboration and still the best. We wrote stories together and drew together, sometimes combining his characters against my backgrounds in the same frame. There was no clash of egos. We simply wanted to make great comics that we would enjoy reading. We produced hundreds of pages, all of which, I'm happy to say, still exist at Phill's house.

8. The computer game Grim Fandango
The greatest adventure game that no one played. This game satisfies on so many levels it is hard to believe it is real. I became so attached to the characters that I actually teared up when I reached the dramatic ending. For art direction, dialogue and musical soundtrack in a computer game, it is still unsurpassed.

9. Fresh blackberries on real (remember BREYer's, not DREYers!) vanilla ice cream
It tastes better when the berries are stolen from other people’s bushes.

10. Cows on a hillside
There was a day about five years ago I took a bike ride in the wine country. I came upon a steep rocky hillside, on which there were thirty or forty cows scattered all the way up to the very top. The golden sunlight of sunrise gave the scene an otherworldly quality and made everything feel like a John Singer Sargent painting. I was transfixed.

More Bells coming soon.