How others apparently live

Can't remember if I've mentioned it here before, but Faith has been going to a weekly class for homeschoolers on Friday mornings at the zoo this fall.  Eric's been staying with my mom, and instead of driving back and forth and spending more than an hour in the car, I go to the McDonald's I frequented during zoo camp this summer and sit with a Diet Coke and free refills to read the newspaper and magazines for a little less than three hours.  Or at least, that's what I normally do.  Today, a mom and her two young-adult daughters sat at the table next to me and talked about planning a resort wedding.  Learned more than I ever wanted to know about prices of resorts in Barcelona vs. those in Mexico and if you have to wear a wristband (why?) and whether they all thought they could each save $2500 in six months to pay for travel and board. Tried to tune them out but couldn't.  Didn't get much reading done this morning.

It's beginning to look a lot like...

So I'm really falling down on the blogging thing this week.  The closer to the end of the year I get, the worse job I'm doing.  I think it's a combination of blogging fatigue and the fast-approaching holidays.  Our church has a daily schedule for Bible reading, and I kept up with it all last year until the week of Thanksgiving, at which point it just all ended until I got back to it with the good intentions of the new year.  So far this year, I'm about 4 days behind on it, all of which has happened since Halloween.

Halloween is the archway with "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here" inscribed on it in the calendar.  From there, the final two months of the year just turn into a avalanche which gathers speed until it deposits me, stunned and breathless, in January.  Have to buy a turkey; have to make pies; have to shop; have to clean; have to decorate; have to wrap presents sometime before Christmas morning; have to find the Christmas music (the last three years, I have never found my crate of Christmas CDs until after Christmas); have to buy Christmas cards, then have to get them mailed.  And this year, I never even finished thank-you notes from my birthday eight months ago!  And I haven't answered e-mail since Valentine's Day.  And I haven't mailed anyone a birthday card since April when I could never get my hands on photos of the kids, cards, a calendar, and my address book all at the same time, and when I could, there was so much piled on the dining room table, I couldn't even sit down to write them until I cleared it off....

2011.  Tough year for getting things done.  I'm taking the next two weeks off homeschool (except for minimal reading and math to keep them from regressing) and will try to get some of the above conquered.  I will pay with tears when I have to get them back into the daily lesson rut afterwards, but I need some time off.  More importantly, I need not to waste the time off I take.

Upgrade

I type from a new laptop tonight.  My old one got a bad infection several months ago, and while I was able to recover from it, the audio never sounded right afterwards so we had to use Tommy's computer for watching movies or listening to music.  So when my backspace key popped off and the retaining clip broke while I was trying to put it back on, I just decided to upgrade.  So, yeah, I bought a new laptop because a key came off.  Doing my part for the global economy!

Sneak Reviews

Faith had her friend Alyssa over on Saturday, and we took them and Eric to see "Puss in Boots."  It was pretty lame, and that's coming from someone who still has some latent affection for Antonio Banderas' Zorro and thus is willing to cut the movie some slack.  It's astonishing to what extent Pixar has lapped the field in children's movies, even second-tier Pixar like "Cars 2" and "Monsters, Inc."  (I know critics loved it, but I include "Ratatouille" in the second-tier list, while putting "Cars" and "A Bug's Life" in the first-tier slot.  Go figure.)

The game of the century!

So they're billing tomorrow's LSU-Alabama football game matching the #1 ranked team in the country against the #2 as "the game of the century."

Really?  The game of the century?  The game of the year, I'd buy maybe, although even then you're going to end up with another #1 vs. #2 in the BCS championship game, so you're kind of underselling that already.  But at this early point in the century, they're already willing to go out on a limb and say there will not be a comparable game at any time in the next 89 years?  I guess I can stop watching college ball on TV for the rest of my life then.

"I'm a count, not a saint!"

Love little in-jokes in shows, along the lines of Rick Castle's space-cowboy Halloween costume and the way he learned to speak Mandarin "from a TV show I used to love."  Tonight's "Person of Interest" had one -- maybe, anyway.  Reese and his "number of  the week" were hiding out in an apartment where a high school student was reading The Count of Monte Cristo.  Just as he was saying "Edmond's cool," they cut to a shot of Reese giving a little smile in the corner.  Jim Caviezel, of course, starred as Edmond Dantes in a very fun film version of the novel almost a decade ago.  The episode ended up referencing the plot of the novel before it was over, so maybe it was just a coincidence, but....

Oh, and Keith Mars in what looks to be a recurring role!

...and Eric's takings