Tim got a new job!  He’s going back to the university.  He’ll be back at the same pay rate he was at when he left (a $4K raise from current), occupying an office he’s been in before, with a roommate he already knows from before, working under the same supervisor he used to.  Should be a relatively easy transition, as such things go.  He will work here until our vacation (we leave on 6/16) and start at the university when we get back (6/26).

Aside from the money, there’s the insurance plans, the six weeks of vacation, the fact that his job will in no way rely on contracts (either having his time contracted, or the company getting enough contracts to cover him out of overhead), the benefits of being back in town instead of forty minutes away from home…  I’ll miss driving to work with him every morning, but it’s a price I’ll gladly pay in order to have the rest of that!

Congratulations, honey! 

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It’s been an unusual weekend; we went and saw two–count ‘em, two–movies in the theater.  We saw X-Men III:  The Last Stand on Friday with Mike and Sara, and then on a whim we went to see Over the Hedge yesterday afternoon.

X-Men was…  Meh.  It wasn’t a bad movie, not by any means.  (It might have been a bad adaptation of the comics; I don’t know them that well, but I’m fairly sure there were quite a few things that happened differently or were fabricated entirely for the movie.  For one thing, I’ll be disappointed if I find that “Phoenix” really was an alternate personality of Jean’s which had existed and been using that name all along–kind of misses the whole significance of the name.  Death and rebirth, anyone?)  It wasn’t a wonderful movie either, though.  It felt kind of thrown-together, just kind of slapping an ending (OR IS IT?) on to round out the trilogy.  There was too much going on, and not enough time given to process it all, which made it really hard for me to connect to the characters or the plot or anything emotionally.  But it was entertaining, and there were some neat action sequences, and some wonderful performances turned out all around.  Stay for the credits, by the way; there’s a scene after them which, while it feels like a cheap shot at leaving the door open for more films (there were audible grumblings about it at the screening we attended), you probably should see.  Just to round the story out.

Over the Hedge I thoroughly enjoyed.  It was a wonderfully fun, lighthearted, summer-afternoon sort of movie.  The animation does have its flaws, mostly involving the human beings.  I of course fully expect them to be cartoon representations of humans, not photo-realistic, but it would have been nice if their movement could be a little more natural.  (And, having also re-watched Advent Children this weekend, I know that “more natural” is possible.  Dreamworks just needs to figure out how to do it.)  It’s a little distracting to see a woman waving her elbows around when she’s just walking and talking on a cell phone…  But humans are not the focus of the movie, so it’s not a problem that affects that much of the film.  The animals are much better-done, the voice cast did a great job, the storyline is fairly well-written and heartwarming without being sappy.  Totally go see it.

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Tim and I were sitting around doing not much of anything today.  We knew that we had to go for a walk at some point today–Monday, Wednesday, Friday are walking days.  We decided to do a wild and crazy thing…  and actually go to a state park to do our walking.  We have a choice of three relatively nearby–McCormick’s Creek, Brown County, and Spring Mill.  Though Spring Mill is the farthest away of the three (around 40-45 minutes), we decided to go there.  Neither of us had been there for ages.

Our first stop, and the bulk of our visit, was the park’s best-known attraction:  the pioneer village.  I neglected to note when we were there, and cannot for the life of me find now, the timeframe in which one might consider the village “established”; however, the Hamers, who played a large part in its history, took ownership in 1832.  The village was more or less abandoned around 1890, and then restored in the 1930′s.  The pride of the village is the three-story grist mill, which actually operates today–you can buy bags of cornmeal for $2.  There is also an apothecary, a mercantile, a wood shop, a distillery, a tavern, a nursery/school, a blacksmith, a meeting house, a weaver’s shop, a leatherworker, and a number of houses.  (The Hamers’ house includes a summer kitchen and formal gardens.)  And today while we were there, there were some people camping out in the village in proper ninteenth-century style.

None of this, really, is original–the buildings had rotted away by the time the restoration began, I think.  Certainly the mill run was gone, and of the Hamers’ house only the fireplaces were left standing.  The mill wheel was rotted away, and in fact was the most difficult thing to restore because they didn’t know how large it had been.  (This problem was solved when the crew finally stumbled across a piece of the outer rim that had survived after all, allowing them to reconstruct the full circle.)  Still, even if these buildings are only reconstructed (and even if some of them are electrified to some degree, which we don’t think is probably period), it’s quite a thing to walk through them.  To imagine the lives that were once lived here, the people who once trod the main street and the paths.  To explore.

Tim and I instantly decided that when we have kids, by god they are coming to this park.    We also discovered that, surprise surprise, we both really, really liked doing this.  Getting out and walking around in the park.  I think we had both forgotten what it was like.  We’ve been in town too long; we’d lost that sense of needing to just go out in the woods once in a while.  Well, not lost…  just mistaken it for other things, and not paid enough attention to it.  I think we are going to start making more trips to state parks, not just those around us but also those farther away.  We’re going to get to know the outdoors in Indiana a little better.  We’re going to get out and away from the television a little more.

That’s the theory, anyway. 

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Animated Movies For Adults?

It’s not so much the story here as it is the headline.  (The story actually kind of goes in a different direction than the headline implies.)  Apparently it’s a huge newsflash that animation is not necessarily just for kids.  I’d add “anymore” to that, but I don’t think it was actually all that proprietary to the childrens’ entertainment industry in the first place.

Why is A Scanner Darkly is suddenly prompting this epiphany for whoever wrote this story?  There have been animated movies made for adults for years.  Decades even.  The new thing about A Scanner Darkly, as I understand it, is the rotoscoping technique, not that it’s an animated movie for adults.

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All I have to say about the season finale (aired Monday, I just finally watched it last night) is… wow, that was a let-down.

Well, OK, maybe a little more.

There are a lot of things about this episode I don’t get. I don’t get, for example, why Mr. IAB Guy (whose name I can never remember) suddenly had a change of heart about ratting out his fiancee. I don’t get why, if he’s so determined to kill the bastard that he’s going to follow him to Brazil, Horatio didn’t shoot the guy who set up the hit on Marisol while he had the chance. Failing that, I don’t get why Horatio would be such a dumbass as to holster his gun with it still cocked. I don’t get what Marisol’s having bought marijuana from the guy previously had to do with anything, really. While we’re on the topic of Marisol, I still don’t get her and Horatio. I don’t get why the FBI’s criminalists, who presumably know proper evidence-handling procedure in the first place and have been reminded of it by every single person in the lab just in case they’ve forgotten, would miss the fact that the envelope had been mishandled, or that there was still trace clinging to it. (For that matter, I’m not sure I really get how the cornstarch was still there after how much that envelope had been handled.) I especially don’t get why they would be such incompetent idiots as to not be able to put this all together and come to a conclusion that took Wolfe about five seconds to arrive at. Oh, and I don’t get why, if everyone is so upset about Jessop’s death and it’s such a big deal, they only spent like five minutes of screen time on it.

But all that is secondary to the really obvious, blatant error which completely obliterated my ability to suspend my disbelief for this episode. Horatio and Delko should not be working Marisol’s case–nor any case related to it. Which is actually two errors. The second one is that, with the FBI crawling all over the lab looking for something wrong, they would somehow miss the fact that Horatio had assigned himself and Delko to the murder of his wife, Delko’s sister. Which has got to be, like, the biggest conflict of interest ever, and probably the most suspect thing that’s happened in this lab since I started watching the series. Hell, Mr. IAB Guy’s Fiancee didn’t need to invent the problem of the missing money–all she had to do was crack down on Horatio and Delko! I guess that makes three errors: Why invent probable cause for investigating the lab when a perfectly good reason already exists?

But finally… I love how Horatio and Delko are just like, “We’re going to Brazil,” at the end of the episode. Because apparently the day shift CSI supervisor and one of his, like, three subordinants can both take off work indefinitely to pursue an international vendetta, especially since the case has already been officially closed. Not to mention that Tall Skinny Agent Guy had a point: sometimes you gotta look at the greater good, and avenging Marisol’s death, while perhaps satisfying, is not necessarily in the interest of the greater good. Sucks, but it’s reality.

It’s a pretty sad season finale when you end it wondering what the writers were smoking and disliking most of the characters. (I still hold out hope for Calleigh, though it would have been nice to see her deck someone. Big Bad FBI Guy, Mr. IAB Guy, Boa Vista, even Wolfe in order to bring him to his senses when he was trying to beat up Not-The-Mole. I just kept waiting for her to punch someone.)

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Indiana is not a state with a lot of easy weather transitions, nor logical ones.  A friend from Jersey was startled to find out that the weather we’ve been having is typical…  and it is.

It never fails.  At the beginning of summer, we get one false start where the weather thinks it’s early summer for about a week.  It’s sunny and 78 for, like, a whole week.  Then we get a couple of months of hovering between 40 and 60 degrees, and rain.  And rain.  And rain.  And some tornado warnings… and rain.  Then, near the end of May, there’s one day when the environment suddenly wakes up and goes, “Oh.  Summer, right.”  Suddenly we have only moderate precipitation, and the temperatures shoot up into the 80′s.  They’ll continue to edge their way up, and the humidity level will do the same, until we peak in August with temperatures in the 90s and even spilling over into the triple digits, and humidity at about the same level.

And then, just as suddenly as it began, some day in September summer will be over, and we’ll be back to rainy and 55 for weeks on end.

Today is That Day, I think, the day when summer really begins.  Already we could feel the heat coming on when we walked out the door at 7am.  It’s supposed to be 88 today, and similar temperatures into the weekend, with increasing amounts of sunshine.  Just in time for Memorial Day… as usual.

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When the darkness falls like a curtain
And the night ahead is a long and uncertain
Dream
Beyond the loss and the hope of redemption

–October Project, “Sunday Morning Yellow Sky”

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Although I no longer do much actual writing, and no longer think of myself as a writer in the same sense that I used to, I do still have one big project going. One huge project, one novel that will never be because I can never make myself buckle down and write the parts inbetween my favorite scenes, and because I can’t stop messing with what I will write, and because I’m just so attached to it that I’m not sure I really want to share it anymore. That is how I’ve thought of myself for a few years now. But today, I realized something.

I don’t just have one ongoing project. I have two. It’s an odd realization, because the tragic heroic-fantasy multiple-world-spanning epic that is the story of Alexys Daemnian consumes so much of my “writing” thoughts that there isn’t much room for anything else… But something else is there, something that keeps floating to the surface.

Years and years ago, back in the days of the Young Writers’ Forum, we were messing around in chat one night throwing ideas around and being silly. From somewhere in that session came the concept of Krissitni. The basic premise is fairly simple: girl has psychic dreams, dreams get interfered with by another psychic, chaos and/or hijinks ensue. The execution has been a bit of a problem, though, and in the end I’ve written it at least once and started at least three other versions (two of them in novel format for NaNoWriMo 2004), but never gotten the matter resolved to my satisfaction.

I hadn’t even thought about it until I was reading through some archives and ran across my NaNoWriMo attempts. And it kind of hit me that really, only one other project has stayed with me this long, and that’s Alex. And yeah, whenever I want a prose project again… The thought process goes like this: 1. I want to write prose again. 2. Well, the obvious thing to work on is Alex’s story. 3. I hate writing that one down, it always sounds so good in my head and looks so stupid on paper. 4. Well, what about Krissitni again?

I got up to 18,550 words on that last attempt. Which is–wow. Seriously a lot, for me. I can’t believe I got up that high. Especially in the time period I was working on it in, not even the whole month. The story started to crash and burn a week or two in; I scrapped it and started over. I think I need to remember to take Krissitni (now known as a more conventional Christina, though her story will always bear the label “Krissitni” in my mind) a little more seriously.

Which shouldn’t be that difficult at the moment, since she–or rather Akumiko, the little scary-child that keeps showing up in her dreams–has been on my mind again lately. I’ve got some ideas in that direction which may help to at least fill out the dream sequences over the course of the story/novella/novel/whatever, though I’m not sure they’ll help with the waking part.

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http://www.imdb.com/rg/rss/news/news/wenn/2006-05-19/celeb/5

You know, I don’t like Britney Spears, but I’m beginning to actually feel a bit sorry for her. This is three times recently, now, that the press has gotten all up in her face about her parenting ability. The first couple–OK, you should know better than to drive around with your baby on your lap instead of in a car seat, in this day and age. And really you probably ought to know which way the thing is supposed to face, too. And those are examples of the sort of attention that comes from being the kind of mega-star I hate to admit that BritBit is. The kind of things that would barely cause any comment if anyone else did them, and very likely actually did not result in the baby being in direct danger, much less hurt–but because you’re Britney Spears, the paparazzi surrounding you every minute you’re in public (and some that you’re not) catch every mistake you make and magnify it.

This one’s just ridiculous, though. She tripped. That’s not even an error, it’s an accident. And she didn’t drop the baby. The fact that she does not have perfect balance every second of every day does not make her a bad mother. And actually I’m of the opinion that neither do the two previously reported incidents–sure, they weren’t good decisions, but two isolated bad decisions do not a bad mother make.

One more reason I never, ever want to be famous.

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I have a new favorite review.  IMDb reports:  “A.O. Scott concludes his review in the New York Times by remarking that in the cinema such matters as the divinity of Christ and the search for the Holy Grail ‘are best left to Monty Python. [Indeed one British critic called it 'Spamalot without the jokes.']…”

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