To be appreciated!

Apparently, the Boss just decided to give the Co-worker and me a raise today.

It's a good feeling to be appreciated.

Woot!

Over the ground lays a mantle of white...

Snow!

Well, it's finally really snowing! It's pretty, but ugh all the same.

Movie Review - Paris, Je T'Aime (2007) - 5 Stars

I adore this film! There is not one thing over another that makes me adore it; as a package all together, the film is simply charming. Paris Je T'Aime is comprised of several 5-7 minute sequences, each directed by a different director, and each starring various actors of French and American cinema. The direction of each sequence is superb, as is the acting. Each vignette is well-crafted, and each actor captures the life of their character perfectly. Given the length of each sequence, it would appear that there wouldn't be enough time to flesh out each character, but that is not the case in any one of the vignettes. You really feel for them, and want each one to find the love that they are searching for.

The only continuous thread throughout the film is love. The stories themselves are each separate and unique unto themselves, but each one deals with love; either love of the city itself, or the love of another that is found in the streets of Paris. I have never been to Paris, and the movie captures the allure that I have always attributed to the city. It is a unique experience to see each directors view of Paris, and how each captures a different aspect of the city, its magic and its various inhabitants. My only wish would be that it had a wider theatrical release, so that I could have enjoyed it in the theater.

Movie Review - Renaissance (2006) - 3 Stars

I'm all about experimentation and pushing the limits of what can be done with animation, and Renaissance accomplishes this, almost to a fault. The film is presented entirely in shades of black and white, literally. Black and white; no gray whatsoever. The technique makes for a fascinating film visually, but it does make it hard to interpret what is happening on screen during some sequences of the film and occasionally it's hard to distinguish some of the characters from one another. While these are drawbacks to the film, the black and white aspect also makes for some stunning visual sequences, and the look and feel of Paris in the future is wholly realized and thought through.

The story itself is nothing special; the secret to immortality is discovered (but never explained as far as I could understand) and the big, world-dominating corporation that is out for the "betterment of mankind" wants the secret for their own possibly questionable means. There is murder, espionage, intrigue, greed; all the makings for a stereotypical cautionary tale about companies becoming too big for their own good and the lengths that will be taken to achieve their ultimate goal, usually presented as something to improve life for everyone, but in reality is only sought after for the betterment of the company (or in this case, the head of the company).

The voice-acting is rather flat in some cases, almost as if it were the actors first read-through of the script. It just doesn't always seem to fit the tone of the film. I'd like to give the movie more than 3 stars, but realistically, if it weren't for the unique quality to the animation, there wasn't much substance to the film itself.

This is funny

OK, I haven't seen Beowulf yet, so can't say whether or not I agree with this guy's review of the movie, but it was so funny, I thought I'd pass it on.

Unseasonably warm

The weather remains unseasonably warm. We were up into the 50s last night, and we're supposedd to be in the mid-50s today.

Yay!

C is coming into town this weekend, and I'm going to go pick him up in Battle Creek. Hopefully I'll be able to visit with him some more this weekend before he goes back to Chicago.

Quote of the day

"Put a fat girl in a candy store, and watch her smile!" ~Paula Deen

Not getting enough reading done...

There's a big surprise... I'm not getting as much reading done as I thought I was going to do while at Mom's house. The big problem this weekend was I couldn't keep my eyes open. Everytime I went to read, I'd dose off. I guess I needed it, but damn, it was frustrating.

The snow is coming... Just kidding!

So, no snow yet. There's been a snowflake or two in the air, and that's about it. We're supposed to be up into the mid-50's by the middle of the week again.

Freakish weather.

The snow is coming! The snow is coming!

Well, it would appear that our good luck with the weather is about to end. We're supposed to finally get some snow tonight. I can't complain; we've had an unseasonably warm autumn, but I still don't think I'm ready for snow yet!

Endymion Spring

I read Endymion Spring by Matthew Skelton last night, which proved to be a great read. Now, if I can just keep up that level of reading, I should be able to finish all the books that I brought with me to Mom's house to read.

Me and Mame

I'm going home early today.

Yep, that about says it all.

Wow...

Some people have too much time on their hands.

Unlike me, who is busy at work, and whose job would appear to be scouring the internet for odd little bits of info, as opposed to doing some kind of production work on the books that I am supposed to be laying out.

But I'm still too busy waiting on the Co-worker to finally get caught up for me to be able to do any kind of work today.

I have to share this, it's BRILLIANT!

A visit to the Creation Museum.

What books do I take?

Well, I'm off to Mom's tomorrow for housesitting, and the big question of what I should take with me to read has come up again. I always take far too many books with me when I go over there, as I always expect to get in more reading than I do.

The one set of books that I have pretty much been sure that I would take with me are The Lord of the Rings books, including The Hobbit and The Children of Húrin. I have wanted to re-read these for awhile now, and decided that this would be the perfect opportunity. With the amount of reading that I have been able to accomplish lately, I'm sure that I can have these read by the end of the first weekend I am there, so I need to decide what else to take. I think I'm going to take over the couple of books that I picked up at B&N last time I was there (Spirit Gate by Kate Elliott, The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie and Daughter of the Blood by Anne Bishop) and I think that should get me through the entire 2 weeks. If not, I'm sure that I can find something over at Mom's house that I would want to read.

Yet another lazy day...

Good lord, I need to get my act together and start making my weekends far more productive. Of course, it didn't help that I was woken up so many times in the night due to drunken B or a screaming, hysterical child, but still, I just barely got my things ready to go to Mom's for the next 2 weeks. I still have tomorrow night to finish that, but I wanted to at least have some sense of accomplishment this weekend.


Where has my ability to organize and schedule out my weekends gone too?



I better find it before I decide to move on with my business.

Well, that was wildly unpleasant...

It's about 4:45am, and I just got woken up by a child in one of the apartment's below me who was screaming and crying and in something of a hysteria. I have no idea what the problem was, but the child would not stop. I can't believe not only how hysterical the child was, but how loud it was as well. I think they took it out of the building, as I could hear adults yelling over the child's screaming, and then it sounded like the screaming moved, a door closed, and I believe I could still hear the screaming going down the hall.

This was on top of B storming back into the apartment sometime not too much earlier after going to the bar.

Apparently, I'm destined to just not get an entire night's sleep.


Maybe I'll go grocery shopping now.



**yawn**

LibraryThing

Have I mentioned lately how much I love www.LibraryThing.com?

S introduced me to it, and it has slowly become my newest guilty pleasure. I can spend hours just wandering around the website with no true goal in mind; just looking at my (or other people's) books. It has given me a chance to connect with other people who have similar taste in books, and has really opened my own eyes to the books that I own and have read, and the number of books that I still own that have yet to read.

It has made me acutely aware to certain trends in my library (not that I wasn't aware of these trends, but when you actually sit down and go through your entire library in a weekend to catalog it, you can see how some book purchases affected the future purchasing of other books) and where I feel I need to focus my attention in future reading and purchasing. I haven't had a true goal in mind when I read any one particular book over another (and really, there shouldn't be any kind of goal unless you are reading for another reason other than pleasure), but I have found that I have focused much of my reading over the last couple of years on what I view as mostly escapist reading (fantasy, sci-fi, YA).

I think that I've needed that for awhile now; to get away from anything that remotely resembles the real world. However, I have found myself thumbing through what I call my "Uncle T Challenge" books. Every year, he sends me a book for Christmas that he things I should read, and for the most part, I cannot get into them. I don't know what it is; it's as if my brain puts up a shield and says, "I'm sorry, this smacks too much of something that could really happen, so you won't be able to process this at all. Go read something about a fairy!" Not all of the books that he sends are even remotely involved in the real world, but I find it so difficult to get through them. The most notorious of these novels is Giles Goatboy by John Barth. Apparently Uncle T thinks this is one of the greatest pieces of literature, and I can't believe what a jumbled, incoherent mess it is. Some of the other books that he has sent that I have never been able to get through: The Horses Mouth by Joyce Cary, As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Ulysses by James Joyce, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West and Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe. Each of these I have tried unsuccessfully to read. For a change, I think that next year as part of my 52 Book Challenge, I need to try to focus on getting these books read, as they must have some literary value, otherwise Uncle T wouldn't be sending them to me.

The 52 Book Challenge is another aspect of LT that I have come to really enjoy. I had started this on my own at the beginning of the year as a challenge to myself to read at least a book a week for the entire year. I know in years past, there has been occasion where I have gone months without reading a single novel, and decided that I needed to make sure that that didn't happen again this year. I started keeping track of what I was reading, and then after joining LT, discovered there was a discussion group that was devoted to just this idea, so keeping track of what books I've read this year has been fun. I've been able to keep ahead of the year as well. I am currently reading my 51st book (The Circus Fire by Stewart O'Nan) and we are only in the 45th week of the year.

Basically, LT has helped me to fall in love with books all over again. It has allowed me a better idea of what my library contains and could yet contain, and what I should read and given me a chance to connect with others who share my same interests. If you enjoy books, and aren't yet a member, I'd highly recommend joining.

Go distract yourself for awhile

The latest obsession at the office.

My best score to date is 23.

and the laziness continued...

The rest of the weekend continued as Saturday, except that 4 chapters into Foundling I decided that I didn't want to read it. It was the beginning of another series that I just didn't want to get into, so I took it back. I grabbed Here, There Be Dragons off my shelf instead, and read that yesterday, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a great read! Very imaginative. I'm looking forward to the sequel, was will be released sometime early next year. I also read half of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz last night and got through the first chapter of The Circus Fire this morning before work.

It's been a reading whirlwind for me this weekend!

What an incredibly lazy day

I have accomplished next to nothing today, and it has been beautiful! I finished one book (The Name of This Book is Secret; it's awful, don't bother) and read another entire book (Seeing Redd, the second book in The Looking Glass Wars trilogy, which I highly recommend) and have started another (Foundling by D.M. Cornish). It has been a loverly day. Tomorrow will be filled with laundry, and cleaning, and organizing, and getting ready to housesit for Mom, but today was all about doing nothing. It's a guilty pleasure for me.

Wow

9:05am, and the Co-worker has been on the phone for the husband or talking with the Boss about the husband almost continuously. I wish the Co-worker would just take the day off to deal with this sh!t.

What happened to Fall?

On my drive into work this morning, I was reflecting on the lack of a true autumn this year. We started out like any other normal fall, a little crispness in the air, a leaf changing here and there, when suddenly the entire season seemed to take a break. Temperatures steadily rose on a regular basis instead of dropping, some days reaching record highs. The leaves never really changed. True, some trees have given us tremendous displays of scarlet and orange, but others have held their green, as if they are confused by the warmer weather, only to finally simply drop the leaves in an act of desperation, knowing that winter should be right around the corner, regardless of the warm, sunny days.

It seemed that once October arrived, time slipped by at an alarming rate. I can hardly believe it is November 1 today. We never made it to an orchard. There have been no leaf piles to fling ourselves into. The only ordinary part of this autumn has been S's Pumpkin Party. If it weren't for that, I don't know that I could honestly say that autumn has arrived!

Where are all the kids?

S and I had fun passing out candy last night for Halloween. We ordered pizza and watched The Nightmare Before Christmas and then Pushing Daisies. It was a little on the cool side (somewhere in the 50s I would imagine) but we did end up having a little rain, so there weren't as many kids out as last year.

As a matter of fact, there seem to be fewer and fewer kids out every year. It's a shame, really. I know that there have to be more kids around her neighborhood. It just seems that kids today either have too overly protective parents, or they just don't care as much about the fun of getting out of their house for some good old-fashioned trick-or-treating. We had a couple of groups of little kids whose parents were obviously in the spirit of the holiday. We had a couple groups of teenagers who at least made the effort to put on a costume, and I gladly hand out candy to them. At least they are trying to have fun with the holiday. I think a lot of kids are taken to the mall, or organized functions with churches and schools, which isn't a bad thing, but Halloween is one of those holidays that has to be truly experienced. Rushing home from school to get your costume on, running through the neighborhood with your friends, getting the wits scared out of you at nothing but your own imagination running away with you, getting to see all the decorated homes, counting candy when you get home. S had a good point, that as our society becomes more and more unsocial due to either email, video games, TVs, whatever, kids are loosing out on the experiences that we all grew up on. It does seem a shame, really. The parents that are so scared of something happening to their children seem to forget the fact that they themselves survived their own childhood, and their children need to live the same experiences as well.