A bit of good news. Last week I was promoted to Web Technology Manager. Now I’m responsible for all web projects for the college. I’ve been working to grow towards the web arena for the last few years, so I’m quite excited about the new position. My first initiative is to replace our old, tired CMS with a shiny new one so that our staff can get their content up on the website quickly and easily.
We spent Thanksgiving with Aaron’s family in Washington DC. We stayed with Lisa and Josh and were thrilled to spend lots of quality time with our favorite nieces and nephew: Molly, Emily and Andrew. In addition to having a great meal, we spent a long weekend together watching movies, playing games and visiting. To see the full album from the weekend, click on the above photo of Andrew and me.
Every Thanksgiving Molly, Emily, Andrew, Aaron and I make centerpieces for the table out of ready-made pizza dough. We make the molds out of aluminum foil, wrap them in dough, apply an egg wash and then bake. It’s a fun tradition we enjoy together every year. This year Aaron and Andrew made a frog and Molly, Emily and I made a bunch of small cornucopias. Click on the photo above to view the album of the entire process and the final products.
We went to see A History of Violence last week. Although it felt a little heavy handed at times (illustrating the happy family, the small town, the bad men, etc.), it was generally an entertaining film. Viggo Mortensen was well cast and convincingly portrayed someone with something to hide. The movie felt almost vicious, but was compelling and full of tension. And although Viggo looked good, I still say he’s at his best with long hair, and covered in dirt and grime, i.e. Strider/Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings movies.
Sarah- We sat down Saturday night to watch Blood Simple. It’s an early Coen brother movie, so I had relatively high expectations – I loved Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but this film proved to be a let down. The basic plot is a man hires a private investigator to kill both his cheating wife and her new lover and things don’t go as planned. My first complaint is that the movie is VERY slow moving (even Aaron admitted to that). As a result I started to get sleepy about 30 minutes into it and at the 45-minute mark I gave up and took a nap. My other issue is that during the portion of the movie I watched, I never became invested in any of the characters. I didn’t care to follow the story because I didn’t care about the fates of any of the players. Overall the movie was totally boring, but my nap was great.
Aaron- First off, the wife misquoted me. The beginning was slow. About a minute before things started to get interesting, Sah tuned out, so she missed the payoff. Anyway, my opinion of the film is quite different from hers. I found that it had an excellent story, very good acting (Frances McDormand is one of my favorites), and just the right sprinkling of dark humor that the Coen brothers are known for. In some ways it’s more pure than their other more recent films. It didn’t have a big budget, with well-known actors, and new cinematic technology. But they were able to beautifully convey what they wanted to with simpler techniques. If you like Coen brothers’ movies, I’d recommend this.
So, if you’re thinking about renting this film, you can consider my opinion, which was in part informed by consciousness, or you can trust a pile of snore.
I recently read, Falling Leaves : The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter by Adeline Yen Mah. The book is a memoir in which the author chronicles her unhappy childhood growing up in a wealthy, yet emotionally abusive family in 20th Century China and Hong Kong. In summary, the author’s mother dies giving birth to her, thus labeling her birth a bad omen. Her father then remarries a selfish woman who is cruel to the author throughout her life.
While reading about the author’s childhood I sympathized with her and the struggles she faced both within her own family and her culture. However, once she became a successful adult and moved to the United States, I found her a bit pathetic. I tried to remain culturally sensitive, as I recognize it was indeed a different time and place. That said, the author continued to make the same mistakes over and over and over. As she continued to set herself up time and time again for more abuse, I lost sympathy and started to question her intelligence. At some point, you’ve got to say to yourself, it’s time to cut my losses and move on. Much to my surprise the author never did that. And so as I got to the end of the book and the author is telling her final tragic anecdote I certainly wasn’t surprised at the outcome (although the author somehow was) and perhaps more significantly, I found I really didn’t care.
The first weekend in November our good friends Bonney and Patrick came east from Portland, OR to stay with us for a visit. They were in town for a small annual gaming event, Lobster Trap. The four of us spent a long weekend together playing games (board and video), catching up and relaxing. The above photo was taken late on Saturday night during a competitive game of Fusion Frenzy.
During Bonney and Pat’s visit, they surprised us with an early Christmas gift – the beautiful hand-made quilt pictured above. Bonney’s parents have been making quilts together for years and we have had an on-going joke that someday they would make one for me. This past weekend, I was shocked to learn that the entire family (Bonney’s parents, sister Molly and Bonney) had been working together on this quilt for months. We were touched and thrilled to receive such a beautiful gift. If Aaron’s lucky, I might let him sleep under a corner of it… :)
At work, I have spent the past couple of months training several new clinical data managers. They are young and eager to work and full of all that first job enthusiasm (ah yes, I remember those days). Anyway, I have spent a considerable amount of time with them the past couple of months. A couple weeks ago we were discussing birthdays and when they asked when mine was I replied that generally I preferred to keep my personal life separate from my professional life, so nothing personal to either of them, but I wasn’t saying. So over the next couple of weeks I was harassed for the information and finally gave in. A couple of days later the sign in the photo above was posted in the cubicle of one of my devoted trainees. They update it everyday and are enjoying my extreme discomfort. Oh, of note, I also mentioned my strong dislike of bananas – hence their adornment of the sign.
My friend Richard and I are both big Ewan McGregor fans. So, a couple of weekends ago we went to the movies together to see Ewan’s latest film, Stay. The movie had been out for just over a week and it had already been bumped from some theaters and was down to a single showing in the big multiplexes…and now I know why. It tried to be artful, it tried to be metaphysical, it tried to be dark, but really it was just bad. There was of course the now expected “twist” at the end, but it made the few pieces of the story that actually worked together unravel more than come together, making the whole movie feel like a waste of time.
