So this is the short version of Catherine's Dance Recital. Even shortened it's almost five minutes. My guess is only family are going to be interested in watching the whole thing.
Updated: Since it may not be obvious, but Catherine is the one in blue.
Catherine's Dance Recital
I went and saw the movie on Friday with Ben (right, like Ginger has any interest in seeing this). I'll try my best to make this a spoiler free review. If you're thinking of going to see this movie, then judging from the box office for the weekend, you've already seen it. If you haven't seen it and are still wondering whether it's worth it, then this is for you. If you were following the movie you at all, then you were probably worried about the switch in directors. Bryan Singer directed the first two, but he bowed out of the third to direct "Superman Returns" (opening later this summer). The new director is Brett Ratner (who you probably know as the director of Rush Hour 1 and 2). I won't lie to you, the change in directors results in a noticeable difference in onscreen presentation. And to be fair, while that difference isn't for the better, it's not as much of a drop as I was expecting.
So where do we stand. Storywise, it's nowhere near as good as the second installment, and it's not better than the first one either (but I would say it's probably close to being on par with the first). As for the visual effects / fight scenes. Again, not as good as the second installment, but much better than the first one. Although while the effects were not better than the second installment, I would say there were more effects than in the second one.
Where the movie goes wrong is it's trying too hard to do too much. I think I could point out like 6 distinct storylines running through the movie. It's simply too much and no one piece really gets the screen time it deserves. The same could be said of the individual actors I believe. Hugh Jackman gets the majority of the screen time as Wolverine, but there are a lot of characters that are introduced, and there are simply too many for any of them to have adequate screen time. In fact I would have preferred more screen time for some of the other A list characters. The Wolverine "kicks some butt" fight scenes seemed dumbed down more than they were in the second film. If you've seen the second film you'll remember the fight for the mansion with claws going through an intruder and into the refrigerator. You get nothing like that in this one. Most of the 'claw' attacks are just out of camera view or the 'victim' is facing away from the camera and you don't see result.
Having said that, there are some good things about the movie. There's some good character development with Eric (Magneto) that makes you feel he isn't completely evil (I personally like it when the bad guys are written with a justifiable point of view). There are also some nice special effects. Although I will say there's one scene in particular that I feel was done just for the special effect and when you stop and ask, "Why exactly did they do that versus this?", you really can't answer it. I think the story works better when you have special effects driven by the story rather than having the story driven by the special effects. If you're familiar with the comic stories behind this movie, then you may be disappointed with how some stuff plays out and explanations that are given. Frankly, the departures from the original story didn't bother me at all (and you had be expecting some major changes to get everything to fit into a movie).
All in all, a fun popcorn action adventure movie. Don't go in expecting Shakespeare and you won't be disappointed. Oh yea, and don't leave when the credits role. There's a small scene after the credits that you should stay and see.
One of my other Saturday news events I had to post about was Ken and Karen inviting us over to attend the Viva Vienna Fair with their daughter Amanda. We didn't see any of the entertainment, but there were rides for the kids. The kids had an absolute blast. It is a bit of a money sinkhole at approximately $2 per ride, but the kids really enjoyed it as they ran from ride to ride. The kids favorite ride was the mini roller coaster which they all rode multiple times. Most of the rides are kiddy type rides, but we did let them ride the Ferris 
Wheel. Since that's not a ride they can go on by themselves I got to ride with all three kids. For the record, I'm not scared of heights, but what I am apparently scared of is my kids and heights. Since I had all three, it was my job to keep them from killing themselves by climbing out of the car. All I can say is I'm glad Amanda was so well mannered and just sat there, because both of my kids were like monkeys, each of them climbing up a side of the car and looking over the edge (with me trying to keep hold of both of them).
Anyway, the kids had a great time, and the majority of the rides are 3 to 7 year old friendly (with more of them being geared towards the lower end of the age spectrum). The kids liked the fair so much that they really wanted to go back, so we ended up taking them back them again tonight (we met up with Ken and Amanda again while there). I didn't take any pictures tonight, but I've got a ton from yesterday. Since no one probably wants to see all of them, I'll hit some of the highlights.
Today is our wedding anniversary. Ginger and I have now been together for 11 years (funny, it seems like longer). We did our semi annual tradition of breaking out the wedding video and watching that. I say semi annual because we used to always do it until we had the kids, then we missed a couple of years. As we get older that video is getting more and more painful to watch (and I'm not just referring to the 30 minutes of line dancing at the end of the tape either). In addition to the fact that it's simply a VCR tape and it's starting to show signs of aging, we've both noticed how young we looked back then (which sort implies we don't think we look young now). Other than the age thing, it's nice to be able to look back to see what started it all. As we got to the part where we were saying our vows, Ginger looked over at me and made the comment "That's where I should have started running."
I also got to see Curt's passionate on tape reminiscencing. Fun stuff that. So one of the things I did for our wedding reception was to write a small program that allowed people to enter advice to us (actually they could pick Ginger, me or us as a couple). So I checked out some of the stuff from that too. I may post all of it at some point, but here's a bit of advice Curt gave addressed to both of us. To be fair to Curt, this was the last thing entered, which means that at this point a lot (and I mean a lot) of alcohol had been consumed (that fact does not invalidate the advice he offered in the slightest though).Advice From Sawyer, Curtis M., CAPT USS Excalibur
05-27-1995
LCDR Fitzgerald, LT(jg) Johnston Fitzgerald:
1) Get James to buy a damn watch.
2) Get James to look at the damn watch.
3) Teach James to tell time.
4) Get James to understand the meaning of the word "late".
5) Get James to decide not to be "late" anymore.
6) Have a long and productive life together.
7) Take the damn cats as soon as you can.
---CAPT Sawyer
I couldn't decide which title to use so I used both. Just when I thought things around here were slowing down a bit (no pun intended as you'll see in a bit), I have a day where there are so many things to post about that I can't figure how to get them all in. So I'll start somewhere near the beginning.
I can already tell I'm going to get a ton of ribbing about this, but I got myself a speeding ticket. Yep, my first ticket in about 12 years. The cops had a little speed trap set up and I got tagged by it. Now here is the interesting part, if the speed trap wasn't there, I wouldn't have gotten a ticket. And believe me, I know how that sounds, like the most obvious and stupid statement I could make, but what I really mean by that is if the speed trap hadn't been there, I wouldn't have been speeding. Complicated? Yea, a bit. So let's back up some. I got up with the kids this morning, but they didn't want anything for breakfast. Eventually Ginger got up, and I didn't feel like it was right that she should have to fix breakfast (more on that in later post). So I suggested we go to McDonald's for breakfast. The kids really seem to like the pancakes, and it would keep Ginger from having to cook. The problem is at this point, it was already pretty late, and McDonald's stops serving breakfast at 10:30. So by the time we get ready and get into the car it is 10:20. So we start heading out, and make no mistake, I was driving aggressively at this point trying to get to McDonalds before breakfast stopped being served, but I wasn't speeding (well, no more than the normal 5 mile over the limit that I usually do). Then I get this one long stretch of road. And suddenly all the cars in front of me are doing 5 miles under the speed limit, so I go to pass the lot of them and that's when I got tagged. It's my own fault, I should have realized that many cars in NoVa wouldn't have been going under the speed limit unless there was a reason (all the cars in front of me had a view of the cop, while the SUV in front of me was preventing me from seeing it). Had the cars not been driving so slow, I wouldn't have tried to pass them, and had there not been a speed trap, the cars wouldn't have been driving slow.
Now here's the part that I just have been constantly kicking myself over. The reason we were even on this road instead of going to the McDonalds closer to our house was because this particular McDonalds we were trying to go to has the 2 hashbrowns for $1 special. Can you just feel the irony in this (and not the "rain on your wedding day" type of irony either)? In my stupid quest to save one dollar I now get to pay a traffic ticket.
The sad part of the tale is we still made it to McDonalds in time for breakfast (thanks to the speedy 4 minute ticket writeup), so even attempting to pass the cars was completely unnecessary. At least the kids enjoyed their pancakes. Catherine ate all of her pancakes and Quinn ate half of his and finished off 2 hashbrowns (saved $1, woot!).
While I'm still working on putting together Catherine's Movie I just slapped up some video I took of Quinn from before the event started. It's pretty short running just under a minute.
So what exactly do you call a male ballet dancer (please refrain from the obvious joke)? The closest word I could find was "danseur", but I have no clue if that's correct.
Quinn Dancing Before Catherine's Recital
Today was the day for Catherine's parent teacher conference. Basic stuff where they go over how she's doing in class and what not. I didn't get to attend due to meetings today, so Ginger went solo. From the way Ginger relayed the information it sounded like Catherine got a fairly glowing report. Works independently, quickly learns new tasks, follows direction, isn't upset about being in class (doesn't cry), and is starting to learn letters and sounds. The only negative thing I heard reported was she occasionally uses some items incorrectly (meaning she plays with them instead of doing the lessons). Sounded like it was all good to me. Ginger might chime in with stuff I'm sure I left out.
We watched the finale of Lost tonight. That was some crazy stuff. As different as season 2 was from season 1, it certainly looks like the show is going to change almost as much next year.
So I got a little frustrated with Google Video tonight. I uploaded a new video, and in my uploader program I had a video that I had uploaded several weeks ago (and has long since been verified and approved). However, once I uploaded the new video, the older video that was in the uploader program is now in the verification process again. Not sure what happened there since normally if you leave a file in the list it merely checks to see that it hasn't been modified and moves on to the next file in the list. But not tonight. Guess my new standard operating procedure will be to delete all previously uploaded items from the list before uploading. So after all that, here's a little video from last week when we were down in NC on vacation of Quinn jumping into the pool. It clocks in at 30+ seconds. It's really nothing special, my Mom was just testing her movie capability with her camera.
Quinn Jumps In The Pool
Catherine had her first dance recital today. I must admit, I was a little underwhelmed. I don't know what I was expecting, but I'm pretty sure standing along the wall of her dance room and just watching a regular class wasn't it. I moved from where I originally was sitting to go over and sit by Ginger before it started. That turned out to be a mistake since Catherine was constantly on the other side of the room. To make matters even more uninteresting I would say 50% of the time they had the group in a circle and Catherine was facing away from us. And 
then for the time she was facing us, she hardly did anything. She probably only actively participated and really danced during 3 or 4 songs, the rest of the time she just sort of stood there. She did dance her little heart out to the "Zippity Do Dah" song, but I had basically already seen her do that. And speaking of the songs, when did ballet start being done to the music of the Wiggles? Sure, the Wiggles are fairly effeminate, but I've never considered their music ballet music. And I joke about the Wiggles, but in order for an all male band for kids to work, they have to take a softer approach. Heck, for the kind of money those guys are probably bringing in, the manliness sacrifice is a price I would gladly pay.
I may try and put together a video of the Catherine in the recital, but it's going to be tough to keep it interesting since as I said most of the time she was on the other side of the room or facing away from us. Actually, I may be able to get a video of Quinn doing ballet moves since before the recital he was running around the room doing stuff. He was pretty funny, and while he wasn't as coordinated at the moves as Catherine, he was showing more enthusiasm doing them. I think part of Catherine's problem was she hadn't done her dance moves before in front of so many people before. At least I'm hoping that's what it was. After the recital I headed back to work while everyone else went out to eat at Wendy's. Once they all got home, Ginger, Grammy and Nana all took the kids on a bike ride to one of the local parks. Ginger managed to get a lot of pictures, and even apparently tried some artsy ones. The following are some of her pictures.
Prepare for a rant from me that's actually a bit more cynical than I usually am (yes, it's going to be that bad). I got a nice little letter from Wells Fargo while I was away. Seems they regret to inform me that a computer that contained a mortgage application of mine from 2002 with bunch of my information is missing, and may have been stolen. Lovely. So here's my question. I'm assuming the computer that was stolen (or misplaced) wasn't a mainframe. So why was my information on this computer? The info is from 2002, what the heck is it doing on a non mainframe computer at this point since I haven't had a mortgage with Wells Fargo for over a year? And how the heck did they know the computer that was stolen had my information on it. They have some centralized computer to track which computers have which pieces of information on them, but don't actually use the central computer for storage of that same data? Do they not actually have enough money for a mainframe and just have a ton of laptops sitting around with all the information from past applications on them? Suffice to say they aren't impressing me at this point.
They went on to assure me that everything is probably okay, since the computer had two layers of security on it. They don't mention what the security layers consists of though, so I'm betting one of those layers is just someone's login. And then it gets better. They don't mention when it was actually stolen (oh wait, I'm sorry, when it might have been stolen), but they delayed notifying people because they were afraid it would compromise the law enforcement's investigation. The fact that law enforcement is involved at all is enough reason in my mind to be able to give them crap for the use of "may" in describing whether the computer was stolen. And clue me in again on how telling people that their information was stolen is somehow going to jeopardize the actual catching of the crooks, because I'm not seeing it. So now they've decided that telling me will no longer jeopardize the investigation. My guess is it's now been so long they have no hope of recovering the computer, which to me says had they actually recovered it, they probably would have never mentioned this incident to me at all. But they still don't mentioned when they actually lost track of the computer. For all I know it could have been in 2002 and they're just now getting around to mentioning it.
In other news, Grammy and Nana are up so they can attend Catherine's dance recital tomorrow. I spent most of tonight mucking with Ginger's computer since it appears one of her drives is in the process of dying. So I was trying to copy as much data off of it as I could before it completely gives up the ghost. Then I had to sift through the registry entries and weed out any references to the bad drive letters. Real fun stuff there.
We got back late last night. Both kids went to sleep pretty quick. And then it was time to unload the car and unpack (I'm half done anyway). I also engaged in rousing games of "Don't step in the cat throw up", "Find the cat poop" and "What is that smell?" (while "What is that smell?" can be a variation on "Find the cat poop", unfortunately that isn't always the case).
Quinn was really slow to get up this morning. He had woken up at 6:45, but I convinced him to go back to sleep and then he slept till almost 9:30. And even once he was up, he was pretty on edge so he ended up not going to church and I stayed home with him. Ginger had nursery duty at Church this morning, so she had to go and Catherine went also. From some of the stories Ginger was telling when she got back, it didn't sound like a fun time.
So after some lunch and a short nap, the kids were up and raring to go. Quinn decided he wanted to ride his bike to a park (and he had to pick the one with the most hills between us and the park). Catherine decided she wanted to stay at home with Ginger. When Quinn and I got back we had everyone outside while Ginger and I trimmed the bushes (the kids eventually helped clean up also).
Since I've been back I'm in race with the Tivo to watch the shows we missed before it decides to delete them. Apparently the Prez gave a speech last Monday night and threw off the TV schedule so I'm missing half of a show. Speaking of new shows. If you blinked you missed the fact that trailer for Mercy Reef (or the teen adventures of Aquaman as most people will know it) was briefly up on youtube before the lawyers put the copyrighted material smackdown on them and had them remove it. Since the CW network doesn't have it on the schedule, it probably will never be aired (unless it's picked up as a midseason replacement). And speaking of the CW, could they have picked a worse name for a new network? Do they even have a website for the new network yet?
I'll leave you with another of my Friday night sunset pics. This one isn't as good as the previous one in my opinion. I mean, I didn't even keep the waterline in the background straight.
And it the vacation is over. We ended up not leaving until Saturday morning, even though we had originally planned on leaving Friday night to try and break the drive up across a couple of days. With the kids as exhausted as they were, we thought they would sleep in the car, but they didn't actually fall asleep until we were 20 minutes away from Grammy and Pop Pop's house in Richmond (at which point they woke up once we arrived and immediately started playing). And then later when we drove back home they didn't sleep at all. I really don't know how they were staying awake, but for Quinn I think it was because he spent most of the trip playing with his Game Boy Advance. Traffic on the trip home wasn't bad at all. We only slowed down once for a couple miles at the point on I64 where it goes from four lanes down to two.
It's amazing how much difference two degrees makes. With the thunderstorms last night and the wind today, the temperature of the pool was only 70 degrees instead of the 72 it has been for the past couple of days. Those two degrees make a world of difference between "Pretty comfortable" and "Man that's cold". That didn't stop Quinn and Catherine from getting in though. I wussed out and never got in leaving that responsibility to Ginger and Nana. Today (and some yesterday) Quinn has been practicing diving in the pool. Basically we throw some toys into the pool and he dives down and gets them (horseshoes in this case).
We were going to take the kids to go see a lighthouse, but they're all pretty far away. And when we gave Quinn and Catherine the choice to go see a lighthouse or to go play mini golf they decided on mini golf. Mini golf was brutal. Let me preface this by saying I know we have two kids and don't play that fast, but the group in front of us had four or five kids (all appeared to be 3 to 5 except for one that was maybe 7) and two adults. And this group was taking forever. Every shot they had to determine who was further away and who's turn it was and how many shots they had taken. Sadly there was actually a group in front of them that was taking even longer to play (since we had considered passing the group in front of us and couldn't). Once we were finished I felt like we had spent the amount of time it would have taken to play a full 18 holes of regular golf. After checking the time it only took an hour and a half, which I still think is a really long time for mini golf.
Once we got back we went to the beach again for a bit. Quinn flew his kite until it broke. It broke just like it did last year with the crossbar punching through the material that holds it in. We got both kites from KittyHawk kites down here, so I'm having a hard time justifying buying from them again. I left the beach early to go take some sunset pictures. Apparently it just wasn't meant to be though. This was the best night of the week for taking sunset pictures, and my camera's battery died. That's one of the few things I don't like about the Nikon D70, the battery will say full, then it will suddenly show the battery at half full, then you can only take about 5 more pictures before the battery just dies. It's really my fault for not charging it regularly (I hadn't charged it the entire time I was down here this week). I managed to get the following before it completely died. I really wish I would have had the opportunity to take some more, it looked like it was going to be a really good night for it.
We seem to have fallen into a routine here as we did more of the regular stuff. More playing in the pool, more laying outside and another trip to the beach. Catherine didn't actually feel like going to the beach today though, so it was just Quinn, my Mom and myself. There was enough wind that Quinn was actually able to fly his kite some today.
I couldn't decide between that for the title of the post, or "MC Hammock: It's Hammock Time". The title is a quote from Quinn when we were at the beach. And no, we didn't let him pee on the sand.
We spent a lot longer in the pool today than we have for the past couple of days. This put us a bit behind schedule. Not that we're really on a schedule, but we didn't end up getting out of the pool until close to twelve thirty. No hot tub today. The temperature on it was 100 when we opened it. We dialed it down to 91 before we got into the pool, and well over an hour later the temperature on the hot tub actually went up to 101 (from being in the sun I suppose). The forecast for today was suppose to be a high of 71, but the thermometer was showing 100+ in the sun and low 80s when it was in the shade. So it was a warm one today.
We had planned on going to the beach after lunch, but Catherine was having one meltdown after another during lunch. We assumed it was a combination of her being tired coupled with being hungry, but once getting some food into her it only slightly diminished the number of meltdowns, so we decided she would have to have a nap immediately (missing her nap yesterday and getting less sleep than usual last night has really taken a toll on her). Quinn didn't nap while Catherine did, and once Catherine did wake up, we went outside and played some.
For some reason the picture of Quinn above reminds me of Hee Haw. The house next to ours has a children's play set. The people staying there this week appear to be college students from UVA. I had talked to them earlier in the week and they said they had no problem if we used the play equipment. So the kids played on that for a bit then we decided to hit the beach anyway. I mean, we're not going there for the sun, we're just going so the kids can play in the sand and surf. So we did some beach stuff. We dug some holes, put footprints in the sand and let the waves wash them away. The beach was pretty vacant except for us and the occasional beach walker. It's too bad we didn't take Quinn's kite. I think the wind would have been really conducive to kite flying.
By the time we headed home, it was time for dinner. While Ginger was cooking dinner, I cruised to the end of the block and snapped some pictures of the sunset across the sound. I really need a new laptop. This one I'm using is just unusable. I can't run GTalk or Picasa on it (they require Windows 2000 or XP, the laptop is running Windows ME). The laptop only has 96 MB of RAM, so doing just about anything practically brings the machine to it's knees. And the hard drive is only 9 Gig, and there's only about 700 Meg still available and I've been loading pictures my Mom and I have been taking on it so that's been eating into the 'swap' space. I would complain even more, but it was given to us, so I shouldn't complain too much (that doesn't appear to have stopped me though). Anyway, what I was getting at is I've gotten used to being able to see images and to do some minor tweaking to them if the camera setting on automatic went nuts. That hasn't been the case while I've been down here. To be honest, even the pictures I do put up, I can't really tell how they look (the monitor on this laptop is pretty bad). I may revisit some of the pictures next week once I'm back home. And finally, for some crazy reason Scott wanted to see my sunburn. Since I imagine not everyone is interested (and to be honest, Scott probably was just kidding about the sheer number of pictures I put up) if you really want to see the burn, click the linkie.
Ok, so maybe stole is a bit inaccurate. We had to take Ginger's into the shop to get the back passenger seat belt fixed so that when Catherine upgrades to the next size car seat the seat belt is ready. The good news is that this was a free fix. The bad news is this is one more thing that broke. The other bad news is this meant that Ginger needed to take my car for the day, so I had to get chauffeured to and from work. By the time Ginger picked me up from work and we picked up her car and got home, it was almost 8. The kids and I played outside a bit until dinner was ready. Catherine dug in the mulch and made piles which were "cakes" that she made for me (she's so thoughtful). Quinn on the other hand simply played soccer, rode his bike and played some baseball. It was probably somewhat good that it was so late that we were outside, because with the heat for the past couple of days, I'm not sure I could 
have stood being outside any earlier. Yesterday was in the low 90s and today was at least the high 80s. Even being outside for as little as I was and as late as it was, I was still sweating by the time I came inside. And I know it was hot yesterday since I was on one of the floors at work that had no AC yesterday. That was positively brutal, luckily it was fixed today. 
