Netflix Resolution

In a move that caught me completely by surprise, Netflix has decided to reverse it's decision to do away with profiles. Read all about it here at their blog. Two things about this really stand out. 1) I'm glad Netflix realized this feature is useful for families, and hopefully they'll start promoting it more in the future. And 2) Netflix has a blog? Really? Do I have to include them in my blog roll now? Seriously though, I had never heard of Netflix having a blog before this. And from the looks of the blog it certainly looks like they're just using blogspot. It's probably for the best, if they couldn't figure out how to improve their website and maintain profiles I wouldn't want them spending a lot of time maintaining their own blog software. Now everyone out there that had never heard of profiles before should go out and create one so we don't have to go through this scare again.

In Bruges

So I watched In Bruges the other night. I knew almost nothing about it other than I had seen a poster for it in the theater way back when I went and saw Cloverfield. I hadn't even thought about it since, but then this past week I saw the DVD got released on Tuesday, so I slapped it on my Netflix queue and there amazingly enough there was no wait at all even though it was a brand new movie. Perhaps considering it hadn't been released yet in January and here it's already on DVD in June might have something to do with that fact.

After watching it I was amazed that this movie hasn't gotten more attention. It's really good. At least I think so. And I almost forgot, the movie had midgets. And as anyone who has played Balderdash with me knows, I have a thing for movies with midgets. The big negative is just about anything that would make a movie R rated is there in spades. Just about every sentence has some foul language, if not multiple instances of it. Oh, and it's got drug use, alcohol abuse, violence and prostitues. Hmmm, in retrospect this movie isn't going to be for everyone. Colin Farrel is in it and turns in what I thought was a spot on performance considering he's sharing screen time with Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes. It's hard to describe the film, other than a couple of guys who work as hitmen have a hit go bad and end up getting sent to Bruges until things die down. The movie is mostly dialogue, which is fast paced and believable. The movie also has a bit of an action finish. And I must say some of the scenic shots of the town itself are absolutely gorgeous. This movie is nothing like your typical Hollywood movie and I must say the end result was a pleasure to watch.

Saturday In Three Parts

Turns out that I'm still flying solo here at the house. Due to Pop Pop getting into an unfortunate fender bender on the way home (wasn't his fault) he got home late and that threw off all the scheduled plans for going to see the Indy time trails or maybe there was some race they didn't get to see. They eventually made it there, but they didn't get to see something that they wanted to see and Quinn was a bit disappointed. Never fear because they just decided to stay in Richmond and get tickets to the actual race the next day and go to that. The picture above is from Friday night.


Meanwhile Catherine had a play date with Maddie (and I always get the details on how they're related wrong, so I won't even try and describe other than they're some form of cousins). The play date consisted of at least Catherine attend Maddie's gym class. I don't know if it involved anything other than that or not though.


All this mean I was on my own again for the day and as such I felt I was able to go ahead and attended Clara's yearly pool party since I got an invite (turns out it was a family friendly event and so we could have gone even if the family had been here). This meant I briefly got to see her new baby Isabella when she was awake. She's sooo cute! The party was also heavily attended by folks that used to be former employees of my current company, so it was nice being able to catch up with some of those folks and see what kind of opportunities they were currently tackling.

Get Smart

With both Ben's and my better halves were out of town I got to have an evening out on a man date with Ben tonight. Movie choices for the night were Incredible Hulk or Get Smart (Wanted would have been the obvious choice, but wasn't on the table as an option since Katylin wants to see that one with Ben). In a surprise unanimous decision we ended up deciding on going to see the new Get Smart movie. I was a big fan of the original show when I was growing up. Since I wasn't old enough to be aware of show when it originally aired (see, I'm not *that* old) I watched it in syndication. But I can remember watching it almost daily. And the humor in the TV show appealed to me. The new movie is obviously an update to the classic show, and they've retooled it ever so slightly. Max is slightly more competent than he was in the old TV show. Back then he would seem to be unaware and yet would somehow manage to stumble his way into success. Now he's moderately competent with less bumbling, but still manages to eek out success. If you were a fan of the old show it takes some getting used to but the good news is you can and will adjust. There are some really good one liners scattered throughout the movie. It's not a constantly funny / bombard you with laughing movie, but it manages to stay entertaining throughout and I believe near the end the visual jokes fly faster and faster. The one negative about the comedy is that a lot of the joke set is telegraphed so much that you see it coming and it's slightly less funny when it happens, sometimes though that makes it all the better. I think one are where the movie made a slight error by including some pot shots at the mannerisms of our current president. I seriously doubt those jokes will hold up well over time (I will say I long for the day when people will look back and have trouble remembering how things were during the Bush presidency). They also tried really hard to work in some of the catch phrases and items from the old show. Some of these attempts work okay, others it feel like they just should have let it go, but it does feel like they wanted to remain somewhat faithful to the original source material. Overall though the movie scores well in my opinion and may even be one I might consider purchasing on DVD (I suspect we'll rent it and if Ginger likes it also then we may get it).

QCTV Episode 3: Hula Hoops

Wow, this took way longer to make than I thought it was going to take. Then it ended up being super long (on the order of 14 mintues), but youtube only allows 10 minute videos now so I had to go in and rework it. So after it took 80 minutes to create and save the movie to disk the first time I later spent another 60 minutes saving it again. Lots of stuff ended up on the cutting room floor. A section where people would have been able to make fun of me as I attempted performance dance with the hula hoop. The end section has been greatly shortened, there used to be more going on with the guest stars, but that got cut back. I ended up speeding up a couple pieces just to get it under the 10 minutes. Was it worth it? Probably not. Could and should I have cut even more, probably. Let's see, what else. Right, how could I forget, I'm apparently a terrible actor / host. And did I mention how long it is? Seriously, if you watch this whole thing, give yourself a cookie. I will say if you're going to watch this (which since it is rather long I don't expect everyone will) head over to the actual youtube page for it and click the "watch in high quality" option, it looks a lot better in high quality.

Make The Smiling Stop

This is just creepy. A smiling Batman. Isn't he suppose to be dark, grim and gritty these days? A smiling Batman just gives you the creeps and gives me flashbacks to the Adam West version of Batman. It is labeled as a Super Friend, but that TV show hasn't been on since the 70s. Guess the movie versions of Batman probably aren't what you would call kid friendly.

Bowling In Richmond

Based on feedback from Ginger and the kids it seems as if today while in Richmond they went bowling. I hear tell that Catherine elected to not bowl and it appears she did some drawing instead.

Power Wash

We're getting our deck power washed. In fact we're getting most of outside of the house cleaned since it's something we haven't done really since we moved into the house. But it's somewhat startling to see the difference it makes when you look at a section that's been power washed and compare it side by side with a section that they haven't cleaned yet. I don't know that I would say it makes the deck look brand new, but the difference is significant. Now we just have to seal it, can't wait to start doing that.

Putt Putt And Racing

Ginger and the kids have vamoosed off to Richmond for the week. So because of that I'm stuck here at home without the kids and no responsibilities. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it. Ginger sent me a a bundle of pictures from the kid's outing today at the putt-putt in Richmond where there's mini golf and go-karts.








Even though the pictures only show Ginger and Quinn's car I was assured there were other drivers on the course. In fact according to Ginger there was a whole group that obviously knew each other that were running into each other and intentionally trying to wreck one another.

Juno

Ginger and I watched Juno a while back. As you may remember we both ended up getting a copy through Netflix since it was on both of our lists (although with the future elimination of profiles we won't have to worry about that being an issue anymore). Basic plot is teenage girl gets pregnant and decides to have the baby and give it away to a yuppie couple. As plots go it's pretty simply. Overall I liked it a lot (I think I gave it four out of five stars in my Netflix rating, but all my rating will also be eliminated once profiles are gone, not that this bothers me). I think I liked the previous stand out indie film Little Miss Sunshine a bit more that this one, but this was pretty good also. The one bad thing about the movie was by the time I got around to watching it I believe I had been exposed to all the really good lines in the commercials leading up to the movie's release and the DVD promotion. It's clearly intended to be a thinking person's movie with the quick conversation beats and you can easily miss some crucial dialogue if you aren't paying attention. In fact, the dialogue reminded me a lot of Kevin Smith's films (from me that's a compliment in case you couldn't figure that one out). In fact I only have a couple of critiques of the movie. One issue I had is even though this is a movie about kids, no kids I've met talk like the kids in this movie. Everyone's conversations are way more sophisticated than many conversations I have today (one could say this is a ding on me more than the movie itself though). The main character, who is still a teenager, clearly has a better grasp on many of life's issues than most people in their twenty's. The other issue I had, and I don't know if this was intentional on the part of the filmmakers, but I think it downplays the emotional attachment that most woman would experience in the described situation. The movie is a mixed bag of nuts from a "moral" point of view, and quite frankly given the current attitudes in the nation I'm amazed it was embraced as much as it was. On the one hand it seems to implicitly advocate a pro-life message (which is probably why a lot of people got behind it), but at the same time the decision at the end doesn't exactly jive with what is typically considered a traditional family. I won't even mention the fact that there's no real discussion about whether she herself should keep the baby, that never seems to be presented as even a remote possibility. So I guess what I'm saying is if the movie was trying to promote a specific message / value, I think it fails miserably at that. Luckily I don't think it was attempting to do that and it was a just a well written and acted film.

Recital Video

For those that missed it here is Catherine's on stage dress rehearsal performance. We weren't allowed to video tape the actual performance (they gotta make a buck or two selling us the DVD of that). But we were allowed to tape the earlier practice. It's basically the same two songs that you saw (or didn't see if you didn't click the link) earlier in the week.

Dance Dance Recital

Today was Catherine dance recital. Today was also the dress rehearsal. Which started at 9 AM which meant we had to be there a bit after 8:30. Strangely enough ever since the kids have been out of school they've been getting up earlier and earlier. I think the worst was a couple days ago when they were up at 5:30 AM. So I found it odd the one day we needed for them to get up Catherine ended up sleeping in until eight. Seeing Catherine all dolled up with lipstick and glitter makeup though was a bit of a shock. That's one of those things you just figure you have a lot more time before you have to think about and yet there she is.




The dress rehearsal performance was uneventful for the most part (Catherine didn't fall down and did most of her moves correctly). It was obvious that most kids didn't know the whole routine and were mimicking the moves of their instructor who was doing to the dance off the side of the stage. And when I say most kids I'm not trying to imply that Catherine had everything memorized, in fact I would say 80% of the time she was staring off to the side to get her cues from the instructor.






It was more difficult to get "interesting" shots of the tap dancing number since there's only so much a picture can convey regarding foot tapping.




For the actual recital which was later in the afternoon Catherine's fan club of Nana, Grammy and Pop Pop all came to see the show. I personally think Catherine did a bit better in the dress rehearsal that morning than the performance, but again she didn't fall down or anything (although it seemed touch and go there for a sec). After the performance we dropped off some stuff Ginger's parents brought us (some chairs and some very nice silver pieces that Ginger proceeded to drop) and then they all went out to eat at Coastal Flats while I stayed home and took a nice long nap. But before they went to dinner though I had people pose for some family photos.

This last one was obviously from the blooper stack.

Hula Hoopin'

When the Ginger and kids got home tonight they had new hula hoops. I guess playing the virtual ones on the Wii Fit made them want some of their own. It was an absolute riot watching them try and hula hoop. I got video of it, but I'll need some time to package it up (full disclosure, I got some video of me trying it and apparently I'm incapable of hula hooping). Suffice to say though, that even though they were both terrible initially, within about five minutes Catherine had mastered it while Quinn and I still couldn't figure out what we were suppose to be doing. I would say it must be a girl thing, but Ginger gave it a shot also and apparently has lost the touch she used to have when she was younger since she claims she used to be able to do it (I've been forbidden from putting video of that up).

Netflix Followup And August Rush

So Curt has sent me a couple of links to articles where other people are complaining about Netflix doing away with profiles (if you look closely at the comments in this article you'll see Curt commented basically saying he doesn't care since he never knew about profiles). This guy's blog post has links to a bunch of name brand news articles about it too. Basically the big difference between these other articles and what I wrote yesterday is apparently people actually are reading these other articles. That first article even links to an online petition. So far there are over thousand signatures. After seeing that I thought maybe there would be some hope that Netflix would change their mind, then I searched and found the number of Netflix subscribers is 8.65 million. Hmmm, let's see, 1200 /8.65 million is ... pretty insignificant. I've seen articles claiming profiles were used by up to 5% of Netflix customers, but I think Netflix themselves have said that only about 1% of it's subscribers use the feature. This means less than 1% of the 1% of customers are "outraged" enough to even sign an online petition. So while the separate queues going away is annoying, it appears we'll have to learn to live with it since I don't see a couple thousand people changing Netflix's mind. But I predict their ratings and recommendations are going to be end up being worthless.

Consider the movie August Rush. This was a rental Ginger got last week that we've watched. It's a feel good story. On the surface the movie's plot is completely unbelievable, but believe it or not that's okay, because early in the movie they basically hang a lantern on it by telling you it's a modern day fairy tale (the main character at one point says he believes in the power of music more than fairy tales). The story is about an orphan who believes he can use music to reconnect with his parents. It's a nice touching story and it's got some really nice original music in it that ranges from indie love ballad, to street performances, to classical music. I liked the movie. It hits the right notes so to speak and given that they've told you it's fairy tale in that context I think it works. I rated it as three stars on Netflix. Ginger, however, absolutely loved the movie. She gave it five stars. In fact she just sent the movie back today after watching it four or five times. And the only reason I think she sent it back today was she bought the DVD and the soundtrack from Amazon and they arrived today.

So what happens without profiles. We only get one rating for the movie, and that's going to drive the recommendations. The same thing happens in reverse though, I've taken a liking to the series The Wire, whereas Ginger hates the show. Ultimately I think this is going to end up making movie recommendations from Netflix completely worthless for accounts with multiple users whereas with the profiles we could rate movies separately and recommendations were tailored to us based on our ratings.

Gripe Session

So many things to complain about and so little time. First up, Netflix. A big "Boo" to Netflix. They're doing away with profiles which allowed you to have multiple DVD queues under one account. It also let you rate movies based on profiles also. Now all that's going away as of Sept 1. And why are they doing this? According to them "While it may be disappointing to see this feature go away, this change will help us to continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers." I call shenanigans. Since I'm one of their customers I don't see this as an improvement. And I would wager anyone that is a customer and is taking advantage of profiles won't see it that way either. This means we'll have to go back to one movie queue and Ginger and I will have to manually adjust the queue almost daily to determine which movie shows up and we'll have to come up with some system for allocating who gets the next rental. All in all pretty annoying considering the profile system solved all that for us. If there was a way to do multiple accounts at the combined account rate I would probably consider that if it was an option.

Also what's up with Google's feed reader? If you use Google's home page to read RSS feeds then you may have noticed over the past week it's been sluggish (and I think that's putting it mildly). At the moment it's not uncommon for a feed to be two days behind on updates. One of the guys where I work has quit and is going to work for Google, and I made my displeasure about this known to him. Luckily he assured me it would be the first thing he would look into once he starts.

And then there's the new Firefox. The big 3.0 is out now. Can't say I'm thrilled with some of the changes they've made. Like the word completion when you're typing in a URL, were people clamoring to have the title and the address icon information available when displaying previously visited addresses? That just seems like information overload to me. And I'm really not thrilled with the changes to the default font that is being used. I may have to search around and see if there are some settings I can use to change back to the fonts being used in 2.x.


And I have no particularly good reason for interspersing the hydrangea pictures in this post, but I felt there needed to be something good to offset some of the venom in the post itself. Plus I liked how some of the recent shots I took turned out.

Rehearsal Videos

Here's the videos from yesterday:


I put the second video first. Not because I hate Polka songs or because I like the butchered rendition of an old Lionel Richie song, but rather because this is the one where you can see her the best. This is the Jazz / tap dance number in case it's not immediately obvious.


This is the ballet number. She's in the second row and obscured a good portion of the time. Family will probably want to watch both, others I suspect will have no interest in either video. For entertainment purposes she does wipeout at about 1:18 in the ballet video.

For at least the second video (and I suspect the first) the look better if you go to the youtube page and click on "watch in high quality" link. The youtube links are here for the Jazz dance and here for the ballet one.

Catherine's Ballet Recital Rehearsal

Catherine's ballet class today was a recital rehearsal (the actual recital is this coming weekend). She did two numbers, the Polka Dot Polka (a ballet dance) and Dancing on the Ceiling (a Jazz type dance). We have video of the event, but even after waiting late into the night, youtube was offline for maintenance. So you're stuck with just pictures. I'll try and get the videos uploaded sometime this week.

Father's Day

I got to spend a nice relaxing Father's Day with my family. Who could ask for more. Wait, I could, I also got loot. I got seasons one and two of the animated Tick series on DVD plus a very pretty piece of pottery that Catherine made for me. Ginger later joked that since it was Father's Day she should obviously be going out to see a movie with some of her friends while I stayed at home (a not so subtle jab reminding me of this past Mother's Day).

Play Date With Amanda

We had Ken and Amanda over today for an extended afternoon play date. We had thought about trying to get by the pool, but a lunch that wouldn't seem to end plus a storm rolling through later in the afternoon nixed that plan. I will say Quinn did fantastic today at eating some new stuff. He ate an entire huge piece of pineapple in order to get a new Wii game that I had bought for him months ago. At the time I told him if he ate a significant piece of some new fruit he could have the game. Up until now that had never been an incentive, I think in part because I never told him what the game was, just that I had new game that he could earn. Today we told him the name of the game was Spider-Man: Friend or Foe and suddenly earning the game became a real priority (I also told him the name of the other game we have that he can earn, which is the new Lego Indiana Jones game). The game meets my new criteria for games I buy for Quinn which is it has a co-op mode and allows us both to play. This way he never gets too frustrated if he can't get past something and it allows us to have something we do together.


While Quinn was hanging around finishing his pineapple and roping Ken, Ginger and myself into playing one of his NASCAR games Catherine and Amanda were off playing together.


Once Quinn had earned the Spider-Man game and we played a level, we switched over to Mario Kart so everyone could play. Unfortunately Amanda was having a bit of trouble keeping her car on the road and Ginger ended up having to play for her instead.

Haircuts

Today apparently was haircut day as Quinn and I both got haircuts. Catherine got her bang trimmed, but has decided she doesn't want short hair for the summer (we'll see how long that lasts once it gets hotter outside). We all got our haircut by the same person, but I got mine done that night after the kids had gone to bed.

So I show up a little before 8:10 for my 8:15 appointment and I'm told it's going to be a couple of minutes. At 8:35 my stylist and what I can only assume is her current customer come up to the front, they part ways and my stylist takes me back and sits me in the chair. About this point the previous customer and another one of the stylists in the front are having a heated discussion, they then head towards the back of the store. While this is going on I hear the previous customer saying stuff like "This isn't what I wanted." and "How am I suppose to style this? I'm embarrassed to even leave the store in case I see someone I know." So basically what I got was she was really unhappy with the way her hair was done.

Now having seen the woman's hair, I know what her issue was, it was that she got a cut that's currently "in". In the middle back had a inverted V pattern to the hair and then the two long pieces went over the front shoulders leaving the middle back completely exposed. I know this is apparently an "in" look these days, but I personally don't like it that much, and apparently neither did this woman. Once they were in the back that didn't stop anyone from being able to her the conversation as the lady was being pretty vocal in her displeasure. At this point my stylist excuses herself and says she needs about five minutes and disappears into the back also (I assume to try and defend herself). But I never hear her say anything and I think she got told to leave the conversation because she eventually shows back up and proceeds to cut my hair. To say this was awkward would be an understatement. There was no small talk at all (the conversation in the back went on for another five minutes before they reached a decision that the customer would wait until another stylist was available to try and "fix" her problem).

So my stylist asks me how I want my hair done and I say I want it "Pretty short, like you did Quinn's earlier." She gives me an okay and starts cutting.

My guess is my stylist got a bit frazzled and from this point on was worried about making another mistake because when she got to the top she says "Where do you part your hair?"

I replied with "I want it short enough that I shouldn't have to worry about the part."

And she looks at me and says "Ok, so which side do you part it on?"

At this point I'm resigned to the fact that this is going to be a long night. I tell her where I normally part it when it's long, but reiterate that I want it short enough to not be concerned about where it gets parted. Part of the problem I had misremembered Quinn's haircut as not being as short as I thought it was. The other problem I had was since it's been so long since my last haircut that if I followed normal 4 week haircut interval I could see where she would think I don't want it that short. But it's been about nine weeks, and this is the same woman that cut my hair last time (nd that time I had said that time I wanted it really short and we had to cut it three times before I got the length I wanted). This time it only took two times, but it still wasn't as short as I wanted but since it was already closing in on 9:30 and I really didn't want to be there any longer. I finally just said it was good enough and left. In case anyone is curious the woman that was upset was still there getting her hair done when I left, so I don't know how that whole situation turned out.


In case anyone was curious how it turned out...

This Was Wii-eally Funny

It case you haven't decided to get a Wii Fit (or even if you have), watch this video.

UPDATE: Since Ginger and Rob have both mentioned that this video is not safe for kids, I figure I should add the warning. Sorry for not having it up previously. I've also removed the video itself and replaced it with a link.

End Of School Ceremony

Today was Quinn's last day of school for the year. It was also the night of graduation ceremony from the elementary school. Since it's such a small school they only had one person graduating out of sixth grade. But the school has a rule where all the elementary kids have to attend the ceremony. I assume it's one of those things where the kid(s) don't have to feel bad then if no one shows up. The original plan was I was going to stay home with Catherine and Ginger would take Quinn since it started at seven and that's right around Catherine's bedtime. That was all well and good until Catherine insisted on going also. Once we got there we found out that Quinn and Franco are practically twins. There was no dress code at the school last night, but I'm guessing we must all shop at the same place or something. And it came as no surprise to Ginger or myself that once we were there Catherine was exhausted and crawled up in Ginger lap and looked like she might fall asleep.


During the ceremony the whole elementary class performed a few musical numbers. My guess this is a bone they're tossing the parents that have to bring the kids that aren't graduating to the ceremony. Sort of a "Yea, we're putting you out a bit, but you get to see your kid perform." If you'll remember Quinn's last school singing performance (not counting the Opera) was the last day of school before the winter break (I'm starting to think there's a correlation between school ending and singing performances). In that performance he had a stomach virus and was doubling over the entire time. Luckily there was no stomach bug this time, but that doesn't mean we got off scott free. No, right before the performance Quinn was sitting next to us constantly grabbing his crotch telling us it was itching (you can see where this is going). So of course during the singing for a couple of sections Quinn was there grabbing away in front of everyone. The last song he didn't know the words and had to read off a sheet of paper, so luckily there was no grabbing during the last song.

More Blog Pimpage

I've finally unlocked just about everything barring a Mii character in Mario Kart. Took a lot longer than I would have thought, and frankly some of the races it's just plain luck it seems whether you'll finish first or get reamed by the computer AI. Getting the star ranking requires finishing first in just about every race (if you get enough hidden points you can still finish second in one race and get a star rank). Now that I've finished though it let me send a picture to the Wii Message Board, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to get that picture off the Wii. If anyone knows I would be very interested in hearing. Meanwhile while I'm using the Wii to goof off and play games like Mario Kart, Ginger's been pretty diligent about using the Wii Fit on a regular basis.


More blog pimpage. You should remember that my cousin Will (that's him on the right) started up a new blog as a way of sharing with us what he was doing out in California (check out Will's latest entry for pictures of some art sketches he's done). Now that Will has started a blog it seems to have inspired his buddy Wayne (that's him on the left) to start a blog also. Wayne's blog is called Green Paper Bag. I have absolutely no idea what it means. So far there's not a lot there. More on this as it develops.

And Rob has also gone and created a real blog thing versus that Wiki page he was using before. So the link to the side has been updated from "Robert's Stuff" to "Road of Disaster" (his name, not mine). Rob decided to skip using an online service to host his blog and instead is running all the software himself on his own home computer. This probably explains why tonight when I tried to look at it I got the old "The connection has timed out. The server at www.dashrb.org is taking too long to respond." So it may or may not be accessible if you follow the link.

20 Questions

As a way to pass the time on the way to school (and as a method to get the kids to eat a bit faster at dinner) I've started playing 20 questions with them. Most of the time I can easily figure out what they'r thinking of, but every now and then I have a bit of trouble because they're giving me the wrong information. Once you get the basics down it's usually pretty easy to guess what Catherine is thinking of, but it's getting to that basic information that can be a challenge:

Me: Does it have four legs?
Catherine: No.
Me: Ok, so it doesn't have four legs.
Catherine: Oh wait, it does.
Me: Ok, so it does have four legs?
Catherine: .....
Catherine: What was the question? I forgot.

Quinn on the other hand simply provides incorrect information at times. I doubt it's intentional, but sometimes he just doesn't think.

Quinn: I've got one you can't guess.
Me: Is it alive?
Quinn: No.
Me: Does it have wheels?
Quinn: No.
Me: Does it move?
Quinn: Yes.
Me: Is it in our neighborhood?
Quinn: No.
Me: Do we pass it on the way to school?
Quinn: No.
Me: Can you get in it?
Quinn: No
Me: Do people that work use it?
Quinn: Yes.
....[After using up all my questions]...
Me: I give up, what is it.
Quinn: A garage.
Me: Wait, that's in our neighborhood and we pass lots of them going to school.
Quinn: Oh yea.
Me: And how does that move?
Quinn: The door opens.
Me: And I thought you said people can't get in it.
Quinn: I told you it was a hard one.
Me: That you did.

Crappy Comedy

What is it with Hollywood rolling out these completely formulaic movies these days? Ginger rented the movie 27 Dresses and for some reason I decided to watch it also. About 20 minutes into it Ginger already thought it was a terrible movie and decided she didn't need to continue watching it until later. Since she obviously didn't like the movie I foolishly thought it was acceptable to talk about the plot, and yet when I made an offhand comment about what of was going to happen through the rest of the movie and how it was going to end up I ended up getting the dreaded look. Later we forced ourselves to finish watching it and lo and behold things went exactly as I predicted. This is a pretty thin attempt at a romantic comedy that's lacking in both the romance and the comedy departments. I mean I remember it wasn't all that long ago you at least had somewhat original movies. Now everything seems focus grouped into established patterns and story lines that just get reused over and over with different actors.

On the subject of movies, it looks like I'm wasting a Netflix DVD rental. Ginger and I both had Juno at the top of list of our Netflix queue. It was listed as "Long Wait" for both of us. I've had it on my list since the movie was in theaters, as has Ginger. So what are the odds today that Netflix decides to ship a copy to both of us. I'll go ahead and say this one is my fault, since I didn't move it from the top of my list when Ginger told me she had it on her list also. I had left it there thinking with both of us having it on the the list we would have a better chance of getting it. Not even once did it occur to me that we would both get it simultaneously. Seriously, what are the odds?

Hot Sunday

It twas hot today. Very hot. So hot that we're under heat advisory. Unfortunately this severely limits what we can do. Since Ginger refuses (and rightly so) to let the kids play outside in these conditions. In theory we could go to the pool to cool off, but Ginger thinks the air conditions might make it so that's not a good idea either. So all we can do is play inside. That and Catherine is having a play date tomorrow with one of her friends from school, which meant a large portion of the day was spent tidying up the house. And given how long it takes to motivate the kids to clean, that took quite a while. I'm a bit worried that the excessive heat is going to end up prematurely killing the hydrangeas outside. Not to mention the poor bunnies, has anyone stopped to consider them?