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I'm finally chipping away at the stuff I wanted to get done over the weekend. Jonah and I got through his toy box downstairs and quite a bit of his room yesterday. Jonah was somewhat resistant and was onto me as soon as I pulled out two boxes and started throwing stuff in them. He walks up and says, "are those toys to take to Goodwill?" Then starts saying, "no! I want to keep that one." He protested even after I presented the prospect of having new toys by the end of the weekend to replace them or if I said something was broken (and broken might mean has dead batteries). I never should have let him watch Toy Story. Eventually he got sidetracked enough with playing fireman that he left the fate of his toys in my hands.

I still need to go through his closet and all of the non-clothing drawers. We're about to get him a new bed and the changing table where we stored toys isn't going to be there anymore. I'm trying to prepare for not only the new toys he's about to get, but also the rearranging of his room once we get the bed.

I'd love to set up stations in his room like they do at school (i.e. all his Lego in one spot, all his Hot Wheels in one spot, all his dress up/pretend stuff in one spot, etc.). The idea is you play with and store the stuff in one area so theoretically things don't get strewn everywhere. Theoretically. He seemed interested yesterday in wanting a place to hang up his fireman hat and jacket "just like a real fire station" and I know he helps put things away at school. So as long as I have labels and he knows where things go, he might participate in cleaning up with a little prodding.

Anyway, It felt good to get a huge chunk of that done, even if I didn't get some of the other cleaning and errands done I wanted to yesterday. Now I want to do it to the rest of the house! This might just be the beginning of me getting pulled out of my funk. Organizing usually helps. I love to organize! I'm a freak like that. I've designated a journal sized spiral notebook to decluttering/organizing. Jonah and I sat down and made a list of containers and storage he would require for his various categories of toys. His Hot Wheels and Lego have outgrown their containers and his Star Wars figures appear to require their own small box now as well.



Of the happy, apart from feeling really accomplished in Jonah's part of the house:

Jonah and I made dark chocolate peppermint bark yesterday morning. That was a lot of fun and very tasty! Jonah loved smashing the candy canes the best, I think.

I found Giraffie! Jonah's cuddle toy that he sleeps with every night has been missing for a couple of weeks, but I discovered him stuffed under a chair cushion in the living room. He's handled it pretty well, except for one day on the way to school he had a little bit of a breakdown. There weren't big tears, but I could tell he wasn't just whining and was really missing his little friend. I diverted him with the notion that he was only going for a half day and wouldn't have rest time and therefore wouldn't have been taking Giraffie to school anyway. If you could have seen the way this little boy was literally bouncing around when I pulled that little blanket/stuffed animal hybrid out of the chair. He was the very picture of giddiness. I think he hugged him as tightly as he possibly could. It was very sweet.

I installed Swype on my phone and it is FREAKIN' AWESOME! If you have an Android phone and don't already have it, I highly, HIGHLY recommend installing the beta that's available right now! I'm sure it will be even better as I get more comfortable with the keyboard layout (it's slightly different than the one I was used to, in terms of where numbers and punctuation keys are).

In the past two nights, we've seen Robot Chicken Star Wars III and It's A Trap! (Family Guy Return of the Jedi). Both are fantastic! But I think Robot Chicken was a better effort, no matter how much Seth MacFarlane likes to dog on Seth Green in his episodes (which is a funny gag, don't get me wrong, and even better was when all the other voice actors turned it around on him). I could have done without about 2 minutes worth of the nodding scene. I totally realize that going beyond the time limit of the joke was part of the gag. I just find those sort of annoying and lazy, like the 5 minutes of Conway Twitty in the middle of a 20 minute episode or Peter skinning his knee. Thankfully, after sitting through 5 minutes of nodding, the Darth Twitty gag was blessedly short.

And of ultimate happy, I read the new Hyperbole and a Half.
mellymell: (Default)
Yesterday can go to hell! So, it was pretty hard to find something happy.

But, I did get to see Inception, which was pretty good and not nearly as hard to follow as I was expecting. I'm not a huge DiCaprio fan, but I love Ellen Page and she was great!

One problem I had with it was the notion that you can't alter your subconscious. What about lucid dreaming? And isn't that what meditation is all about? And what about therapy, is that totally pointless? If Ariadne's subconscious was building the world and capable of changing it in mid-dream, why couldn't the projections that populated it be controlled and changed as well? Didn't it all come from someone's subconscious?

There were a few other little things like that which sort of felt like holes in the pretense of the story. However, none of that made it unwatchable. It was still very entertaining, which is the whole point of a movie anyway, so it gets a thumbs up from me.
mellymell: (Default)
Our anniversary weekend. )
mellymell: (Default)
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Most of them.

Stop it Hollywood! Call it a reboot if you want. I call it LAZY!

Also in movie news, we watched Avatar last night. That was nearly 3 hours of my life I could have spent complaining about something else.
mellymell: (Default)
Ironman )

2009 movie count: 3
mellymell: (Default)
I'm going to try to keep track of the movies I've seen this year. I can't promise to do an in depth review of each one, but I will try to at least mention it. I'm going to do the same for the books I read. I hope to see a lot more movies (and with a Netflix subscription, that shouldn't be difficult as long as we keep up with it) and read a lot more books this year. I did better last year than I have, perhaps ever, but there's a lot more fiction I'd like to read this year, since I broke my streak of reading nothing but non-fiction last year.

Now, on to the two movies I've seen so far this year. I'll try to always put these behind a cut since I don't intend to be careful about spoilers.

Burn After Reading )

Wall-E )

2009 movie count: 2
mellymell: (Default)
Favorite movie and least favorite movie and why...

Answer can be found here.
mellymell: (Default)
Favorite movie and least favorite movie and why...

My impulse answer would be Lord of the Rings and if I had to pick a single movie of the trilogy, it would be Return of the King. It's just so fantastically done. Sure there are liberties taken with the storyline, but I believe their executed in such a way that it still holds true to Tolkien's world and ultimate vision. And let's face it, a book adaptation is just not going to be able to stick to the original story word for word or event for event anyway. Aesthetically, it's beautiful, even the orcs and cave trolls. There's such an insane amount of detail that was put into those movies that we don't even really get to see on screen. The costumes, the sets, all the pieces of paper used in the film that were hand written and drawn (maps, books, the decree banishing Eomer from Rohan, etc. and several copies of each), the time they spent with each actor perfecting battle techniques, languages, horseback riding, etc.. You don't ever see all the effort they truly put into these films but you'd certainly miss it if it weren't there. I remember the two times I visited the costume and prop exhibit at the Indiana State Museum a few years ago. Getting up close to some of those pieces, they're just works of art. You never notice there are Celtic patterns etched into Theoden's armor on screen, but it's there and it's amazing!

But, if I sat back and thought about it for a minute, I think I'd have to say my all time favorite movie is The Wizard of Oz. It's just a classic and has been very dear to my heart since I was a little girl. I just love the story and I always wanted my very own flying monkey. In first grade, my mom made me a Dorothy costume for a book character day at school. I cherished my ruby slippers until I grew out of them later that year. There again, for the time it was made, there was an amazing amount of detail and hard work put into that film. I guess it's mostly a nostalgia factor that makes me love it so much. But after possibly hundreds of viewings of it (and yes, some of which were synced with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon), I still love it just as much.

Most hated movie (yes, it deserves more than just "least favorite"), Das Boot. I explain all about why here. Granted there are worse films out there, but I tend to avoid them based on trailers. I specifically feel this one is my worst movie ever because it's hailed to be such a great film. As mentioned in my entry on it, its on IMDB's top 50 movies of all time list. Surely there's a movie more deserving of it's spot on the list.

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