Ahh, my favorite kind of day… it’s snowing lightly outside, it’s close to the holidays so humanity is sleeping in, and I’m sitting here with my ever-present cup of Earl Grey and listening to my ‘old people’ music.
It’s a really nice snow, the kind with the really big flakes that float slowly to the ground… They don’t obscure ones vision, but they do tend to soften the edges of everything. It makes everything seem so much calmer.
So today let’s have more update and less rant shall we?
Hmm, let’s start with movies… I recently saw the special effect bonanza called ‘Narnia’ and I rather liked it. Of course I’ve read the entire book series almost every other year since I learned to read and therefore could be labeled as a ‘fan’, but it was still a good movie. But I’m also a bit nit-picky regarding my mythological beasties and I just wasn’t happy with the centaurs; they got the proportions all wrong – too much horse, not enough human – a centaur, for those of you who don’t know any, is fully capable of braiding his or her own tail, checking their hind hooves, and other such feats. The ones in the movie would have had a hard time even reaching their own rump.
Now the fauns were well done, especially Mr. Tumnus who really got the spit and polish treatment as he got the most screen time of all the Narnians with maybe the exception of Mr. and Mrs. Beaver.
Oh, and Aslan should have been bigger.
I really liked the more Germanic representation of Father Christmas in the movie, which holds true to the book quite well and which also segues nicely into the holiday portion of this update.
For those of you who have created some sort of ritual out of my yearly ‘end of the world’ announcement, here it is:
There are, as of today, only 2550 shopping days left till the end of the world.
See previous announcements for further information.
My gift to myself this year is a really stellar (and equally expensive) 24” LCD monitor. This monitor has so much screen area that I can put three 8×10 pages of information, side by side, on the desktop at the same time. It’s color-correct, has an 8 millisecond refresh rate, and is just a real joy to sit in front of while working on the computer here… And it makes the high res desktop wallpapers I purchased from Roger Dean a few years back for my Mac look *really* good.
Let’s see, what else… Oh, I’ll be flying out of Denver on the morning of the 25th and landing in Richmond that afternoon. From there I’ll be hopping into one of Scott’s 2005 Chrysler ‘PT Cruisers’ and driving cross country back to Denver. Sound like fun? It doesn’t to me either… But these are the sorts of things we do for those we deem to be friends.
See, Scott, aka ZeZe, will be moving in with Jae and I right before new years. This is a good thing as ZeZe is required for a lot of the side projects I want to do and will take some of the work load off of me at work by being able to perform the I.T. role better than anyone has in the history of the company… No more people coming into my office and griping about something not working because Jon and/or I are too busy with our regular jobs to really fix the damn thing.
This also drops the monthly rent for everyone here at Chateau D’Isaster to less than $350 a month and the rest of the bills by one third, which frees up more income for the fun things in life. Fortunately Chateau D’Isaster has enough room for about five people to live comfortably – it’s a huge place – so three people are pretty easy to deal with.
Another thing that having ZeZe here will provide is the drive to finish the theater… One quarter of the living room, known as ‘the cave’, has been ear-marked since we moved in as the home theater… Unfortunately neither Jae nor I watch TV and we tend to go to the theater for actual movies. ZeZe on the other hand does watch TV and has quite the collection of gear dedicated to this pursuit, so I’m sure with his prompting we’ll finally get the theater finished.
Well, I’ve exhausted my free time for journaling this morning and have to move on to the next item on my list. Have a safe and happy holiday everyone!