7 posts tagged “movie”

My poor blog, it's become so neglected. I promise one of these days I'll actually have something worthwhile to say. In the meantime, I'll try to scrape together a TonT.

Loathe:

• Being tired all the time.
• Watching my poor boy and his friends get crushed in three baseball games over the weekend. This was his second (and last) tournament of the season. We got to the point where we were just hoping for them to make some plays because there was no hope for them winning.
• Having to hear my little boy say, "I stink at baseball!" and try hard to fight back tears even though he was around his friends. :(  (For the record, he doesn't stink. He has some things he needs to work on, but I maintain that he's got potential to be a solid player, even if he never becomes a star.)
• Knowing that Joey's team that's been practicing for 5 weeks on a team we paid $60 for him to be on got crushed by a team of kids mostly a year older than them, that's been together since March, whose parents paid $500 for them to be on. Seriously! In third grade!
• Not losing weight like I've wanted to since we restarted South Beach a couple of weeks ago. I've lost 2 lbs. I started closer to my ideal weight this time so knew the weight loss would be less dramatic, but still I was hoping to see some better results. Oh well. Plug away, I guess.

Love:

• Watching my kids when they don't know I'm watching.
• Watching a project at work that I've been leading for almost a year finally come to fruition. We're working on getting everyone trained and will implement on July 21. The new process isn't perfect, but what process ever is? It's WAAY better than what we currently have. I feel such a sense of accomplishment, and I daresay I'm looking pretty good to the higher-ups! I had a great team, though...which goes a LONG way. I'm proud of them.
• Cuddle Time: a ritual in our house where all 4 of us pile onto Brian's & my bed and just watch something on TV. And cuddle. :) The kids are always asking, "Can we have Cuddle Time?" I love that they want to do it, even when we have to say no.
• The unpredictability and variety of midwestern weather. Last week it was pushing 100; today it's not even 70. As they say, if you don't like the weather in Minnesota, just wait a few minutes. Gorgeous weather is always nice, but I need it to change now & then. I could do without snow, though.
• Even though the games were not so great, at Joey's tournament last weekend I got to meet all of the parents. It was so much fun. In particular I spent a lot of time talking to the mom of a boy that Joey has gotten to be good friends with over the last half of the school year. Now they're on the same team for both tournament and house league baseball. I like her a lot. And the really cool thing is that they're thinking of switching their son to Schaeffer Academy after he finishes elementary school, just like we plan to do with Joey! Crazy. She said she's been praying for a good friend for her son, and to think that my guy might be the answer to her prayers just about makes me want to cry. In a good way.
• Holidays! Because they equal days off work!
• That Brian checked out the X-Files movie from the Bookmobile today. I'm finally going to see it, Kelly!

Are you bored yet? LOL

As aforementioned, I fully plan to give this blog some attention once I actually start having coherent thoughts again. :)

....is such a cool movie.

We rented this movie tonight.  I'd never seen the musical before and only barely knew anything about the storyline.  It was bizarre, and quite graphic, actually.  I have to say that I'm glad the kid got away.  And, I didn't know that Johnny Depp could sing a note.

Tomorrow night is 21.

I was hoping to get the John Adams series since I'd heard so many good things about it, but I got vetoed.  (Haha, veto....president....get it?)

Am I the only female alive who has absolutely no use for Sex and the City, either the TV show or the movie?  I mean really, I have to admit I've never seen it, but what is the appeal of watching women with perfect bodies be promiscuous and then bragging about it?  I guess if I'm a prude then I'm ok with that.

We decided to have family movie night tonight.  Brian and Joey had gone down to Hollywood Video to grab a DVD to watch, and they'd picked The Game Plan.  Joey was all excited because it had football in it.  So we settled down in front of the new big-screen to watch our movie.....only to find out that our player wouldn't read the DVD!  Brian wasn't about to go back out to exchange it so we decided to pick one from our own library.  We chose Hoosiers, a classic sports movie.

Can I just say....I LOVE this movie!  It's one of those feel-good movies that, even though you know how it's going to end, you still find yourself being baited for the high of the Hickory Huskers taking on the South Bend Central Bears and winning the 1952 Indiana State High School Basketball Championship.  And a disgraced coach finds redemption, and love.  A drunk gets a second chance, gets dry, and reconciles with his son.  You just cannot go wrong with this movie.

I think it also strikes a chord within me because at some level, it takes me back to my own high school days.  (And no, I didn't graduate in 1952!!)  Small town, small school, sports rule.  I had issues with that mentality but I love sports so when it suited me, I was all in.  Some of the gyms we played in weren't all that much different from the gyms in that movie.  It just brought me back.  My high school teams were ok, never great, but it's just that feeling of watching your friends take on the giant, of a barn-burner coming down to the last few seconds.....you just can't beat it.  It's exhilarating.

Around the time that movie came out - 1989, maybe? - there was a tiny school in my area that had an incredibly good basketball team for its size.  The town was named Palmer and they had a couple of players who were probaby destined for DII ball, if not DI.  A big deal when the talent pool is limited by sheer numbers.  (One of them did go on to the U of Iowa, and if I remember right, another went to Iowa State.)  Another town in our conference, Albert City, had a team that they were absolutely sure would go to state.  (Albert City always had an inflated idea of their teams...but that's school spirit).  They were also a good team, but anyone who wasn't from Albert City knew that Palmer was a better team.  When it came time early on in the bracket, Albert City took on Palmer on the road to the state tourney.  My sister, her then-boyfriend (now husband), and I went over to Albert City to see the game - partially because we were hoping to see AC get beat, partially to see this Palmer team we'd heard so much about, but mostly because we knew we'd be in for a really good game.  Because of Hoosiers, Palmer was receiving national attention and because we sat on the Palmer side for that game, we actually were part of a crowd shot on the NBC Nightly News.  Big time, I know!  :)  I remember I was wearing a yellow sweater so I was able to pick myself out.

I miss high school basketball.  Here in Rochester I can go to a bb game if I want to, and I've thought about it, but I think in a bigger school it would lose something.  For one thing, only the stars play in bigger schools.  The thing I loved about being in a small school is that you didn't have to be near-pro in order to play and to have some degree of success.  It's something I wish more kids could be a part of.  You learn good life lessons by being on a team.  You learn that you're a part of a whole and not always an entity in and of yourself.  You learn that the world does not revolve around you.  You learn how to build others up, and to be built up by them.  You learn to handle criticism.  You learn to win and lose gracefully.  And you learn that the world goes on either way.

I posted a few months back about our decision to put the kids into private school after they finish public elementary.  There are many reasons for this, but one benefit I think it will give them is the opportunity to be involved in sports and other activities.  I want that for them.

Five o'clock AM would be considered sleeping in if today were Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday.  So I'm not tired, and they say it's good to get up at a regular time every day.  It just seems wrong to be up this early on a weekend if you don't have to be.

My cat does this thing where she makes noise in the morning to wake us up.  First she hops up on the garbage can/shredder and paws on the miniblinds and makes a horrible noise (the shredder is next to the window because the window is next to the outlet).  Then when I get after her for that, she stops for a minute then hops up on the trunk against the wall opposite the foot of the bed and rustles around in the silk plant on a stand next to it.  Or if she finds papers on the floor she'll rustle those around.  After we chase her away from those, she sometimes will leave the room, cross the landing, and paw at Bailey's door.  The last thing we want is one of the kids woken up at 4:00 (6 is early enough), so at that point one of us will get up, usually Brian if it's Saturday, usually me if it's any other day.

My alarm during the week goes off at 4:00, so usually as all this transpires I've already hit the snooze button at least once, so it's just an impetus to get me out of bed.  But she's been starting this earlier and earlier lately, so we're being awakened as early as 3.  There are few things I hate as much as waking up - or being woken up - an hour or less before my alarm is supposed to go off.  So this naughty cat has really been on my nerves lately.  She was kind enough to wait until 4 to start this morning but was absolutely relentless.  We tried shutting her out of the room but couldn't ignore the sound of her pawing at the door.  I'm so conditioned to the sounds of miniblinds or plants or doors that once I'm awake I hear them all, and eventually her relentlessness just made me too mad to go back to sleep.  Normally she eats her breakfast at 5, but I'm holding off feeding her so that she doesn't perceive it as a reward for being so annoying as to get me downstairs.  This is a dealing-with-toddlers tactic; it ought to work on a cat too, don't you think?

Jen apparently also had trouble sleeping too, and she did something that reminded me of something I need to do too - remake my grocery list.  I had a great one but it's gone with the demise of my old computer.  So in the famous words of Uncle Rico, I might as well do something while I'm doing nothing.

OK, it's now 6 am, I have a job to do, I should probably feed the cat (it's been long enough and she's been amazingly patient), and my morning news show is starting.  I'm also going to start some coffee, so maybe between that and the intellectual stimulation my next post will be a little more interesting.

Oh yeah, totally off-topic: We watched "Pride & Prejudice" last night.  FANTASTIC movie.  I loved it!  I haven't read the book (I know, I know!) so the story was new to me and I just loved it.  And I must admit that Mr. Darcy being so nice to look at didn't hurt matters any. :)

I downloaded Quick Time Pro at work so I can make/edit movies for educational stuff.  So this afternoon I decided to try to familiarize myself with it, because of course there are no directions.  And the help files were only semi-helpful.  Kind of like your average help desk call.  I was limited with what pictures & music I had at work that would go together, but I came up with this.  I couldn't get any of the effects to work, maybe next time.