Wednesday, and Monday...

I missed a couple days of Nablomogojoetheplumber or whatever it is (apparently I do not want to waste the four brain cells it would take to memorize the 10 letters that mean national blog every damn day even if you have a net negative things to say so you post a meme and then repost your first ever blog entry and then a photo of your tongue and then another meme and then a long discussion of your dog's last poo...this is a reflection of my blogging abilities, not yours, please take no offense!)

I missed it because of random malaise and stuff. The CPAP is good, except that I have this damnable cough, which means I wake up in the night and give up on the machine, because hacking cough + positive air flow up the nose and out the mouth + air leaks + discomfort because of sinusitis = NO SLEEP FOR JULIE.

On nights when I do not attempt to cough up a lung, two feet of intestine and a kidney, the CPAP is working good. Unfortunately I have approximately eight to ten years of too little sleep to catch up on, so once the cough is gone and I actually get to use the CPAP to sleep all night!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I will get caught up on all my sleep deprivation in like say...2020! Woo! Okay, that's a bit of a stretch...it will be 2017 at the latest.

The weather is cold cold cold. Which is fabulous, because I like cold so much better than hot hot hot. It was foggy again last night, so we have a thicker rime on everything. I took some more photos yesterday...

And I am hoping the clouds will burn off so I can take some more today, since the frost got even thicker overnight. Looks like it will, there is the slightest hint of a possibility of blue skies starting.

MONDAY...


Today Tess and I went to see High School Musical Three. I had a stabbing headache off and on most of the day, so going to see this movie was not at the top of my reallyreallyreallyreallly fun things to do.

The movie was a little...scant, meaning they could have fleshed out some of the storyline a little, but the singing was good and the dancing was really fun. Not something I would watch again and again, but in the category of "movies I cannot believe I had to sit through for the sake of some random child", HSM3 pales in comparison to the Care Bears movie I took my niece to, and the Pokemon movies my kids HAD HAD HAD to see. I would watch HSM3 again. I would drive an unsharpened pencil two inches into my own thigh to avoid the Care Bears and Pokemon (I almost said four inches, but decided that was a bit much. BTW, Mica, you still owe me for taking you to that Care Bears movie. You ungrateful wretch.)


(Okay, I have posted every day but Sunday now, because Sunday was busy avoiding taking Tess to see High School Musical Three day and making Mark a fake lasagna hotdish for his birthday, which was actuallly on Friday, fake lasagna because I didn't have any lasagna noodles. It was really pretty good. Maybe tomorrow I will post the recipe on Sunday, so then I will still be caught up with the Nablahblahpomo. I am fully cognizant of the fact that much of this particular paragraph is not only grammatically challenged, but confusing and possibly nonsensical. You're welcome.)

Movies I Don't Hate

Yesterday I ticked off Tasina, apparently, by dissing The Spiderman movies. At the very least, she threatened to disblogroll me. Unblogroll me? Remove me from her blogroll, alright? Or perhaps it was the hate for Spiderman cartoons, or JeanClaude VanDamm.m. (I absolutely cannot be bothered to learn the correct spelling of his name. I just don't care.)

But, hey. She. Likes. Cats. So we are even, and I am confident she will not unenblogroll me...(like unenroll, but unenBLOGroll! Yes, I do impress even myself sometimes.)

Really, Tasina and I are scarily alike, except that she lives in South Dakota and has a job, and I live in Arizona and don't. We even had the same baby names picked out for our kids -- she got the Noah, I got the Tess. At least once a week one of us posts something that the other one could have written.

So instead of risking two days in a row where I tick off the Tasina, because I would hate to push her to actually carrying out the threat of unenblogrolling me, I will rave about a couple movies I love.

The first is Juno. I love this movie. I love the actor who plays Juno (Ellen Page). I love the characters of her parents. The writing is funny.

I was impressed with Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman. When I got home I had to google Jason, because I remembered he was in some sitcom in the '80's, but I couldn't remember which one. ( Valerie, then Valerie's Family when they fired Valerie Harper and she was replaced by Sandy Duncan. There. Now you don't have to google Jason because it would bug you until you remembered which sitcom he was in...)

I love the scene where she tells her parents she's pregnant. It's a great scene. The parents' reaction is so terrific. (Actually, since it is past Tess's bedtime -- I am writing this Tuesday night -- I may go yoink the DVD from her just to watch that scene. But then I will stay up way to late because I want to watch the whole thing. Maybe I better wait. Sigh.) I think Juno is just fun and funny and a great smart movie.

The Host

The Host is a Korean monster movie. It is awesome. I love this movie. It's funny and sad and exciting and really really well made.

The main character, Gang Du,
(the guy in the green shirt) loses his daughter to the monster. But then he gets a cell phone call that makes him and his very dysfunctional family -- father, brother and sister -- think she is still alive. But no one will believe them, so they set off to find and save her themselves. The monster shows up right away. Not of that teaser stuff where they show bits of the monster, a claw here, a tooth there, a hint of skin or eye, nope. It's full on monster almost immediately.

And it is an awesome monster. The special effects are excellent and seamless. The monster is creepy and sinister. The locations are great -- much of the movie is set under the bridges and in the sewers and tunnels around the river. The atmosphere is rather gray, which adds to the discomfort and creepiness.

The characters are great. I love the characters. Since it's a Korean movie, it has details that are unfamiliar -- Gang-Du's father owns a small trailer store by the river, and sells things like dried squid. Apparently the longest leg is the tastiest of dried squid legs. The way characters react -- the way the family of the monster's victims grieve, the attitudes of doctors and bureaucrats to Gang-Du and his family -- are different from the way generally portrayed by American movies. On the DVD, the director apologizes to various actors and crew for things like cutting scenes, putting them in uncomfortable situations during filming (like hip deep in the river), for not showing their faces. I can't really imagine most American directors bothering with something like that.

Americans are poked at -- an American mortician (I think) is the one who starts all the trouble by pouring chemicals down the drain, and several other American characters are morons or weird. The American Army is treates as rather bungling, as is the Korean military and government.

Oh, yeah, it's in Korean with subtitles. Actually it is dubbed into English, too, but I hate dubbing. They always end up sacrificing dialogue and pacing of the lines to match the words to the mouth movement.

Oh, yeah, it's kinda bloody sometimes. Tess is not watching The Host until she is quite a bit older, especially since the girl who's about the same age as Tess is one of the first victims of the monster. Which is fine with Tess, since she's not a big fan of the scary or creepy.

The Host is another fun and funny and smart, and creepy and scary, movie.