Goodbye 2011

Why are my neighbors shooting off fireworks? Oh yah it's New Years Eve! They must be wondering why I'm painting my dining room. Well, so I can put up curtains! Ok OK, enough of that. This New Years is just another number to me. That might seem like a negative thing, but it's really just an indicator that I've got way more things to think about. 2012...this year is going to be insane. The apocolypse and another presidential loss for the Republican party. Whaaaaa!!!

2011 has been an odd year. The beginning was an emotional rollercaoster with my mind so focused on death. Luckily no death happened. Then the middle was just this stressball of not having a house, quickly followed by stressball of having a house and working on it everyday nonstop. We've still got a ton to do, but it's less stressful now. Things have settled down a little I spose.

I finished the year with 937 miles. 60% of my runs were outside. I'm not sure what it was for 2010, but I'm guessing about double which is good. I enjoy running outside more now. I miss running in Vegas...I guess I just miss the desert and the mountains.

Anyway, Happy New Year to all of you. There are fresh baked chocolate chip cookies emanating from the kitchen. (insert Ming The Merciless laugh!!!)

Prometheous

It seems I fell off the blogging wagon. Hope everyones holidays are going well.

Watched a bunch of movies lately.

The Town - very cool!

The Adjustment Bureau - was decent. Lets face it, Emily Blunt is good reason to stand up to the Agents of Fate.

Hall Pass - WTH was I thinking. Just painful enough for me to keep watching.

Bridemaids - was ok. I thought it would be funnier for me, but I found many of the scenes just made me anxious.

The Help - Bryce Dallas Howard and Emma Stone? Double red headed amazinginity! haha Seriously though, it was good.

And..thats it!

Now, theres something thats been brewing in my head last few days and I have to spit it out.

If you read my blog, then you know I'm a fanboy for the movie Alien. Even though it's really just a slasher film, it's done so in such a stylized way that for me it steps into the Venn circle of art. So in my little movie vault in my head, it has a top shelf spot. I was showing my dad my ipad the other day ( I fixed it by dropping it on the floor!) and was looking up the new Batman movie trailer. What's this Prometheous movie about? I read the tagline, "The search for our beginning cold lead to our end" I thought WTH is that crap, bah let's watch the trailer.

As soon as I saw the space craft engines, my name this movie in one note instincts flared up. Then the letter segments came on and I knew this was Ridley Scott's Alien prequel....finally after all these years. Holy Crap!!! Turns out it's not really a prequel, but a separate movie that has elements from the Alien movie. So I watched the trailer about 20 times that day and began scouring the corners of the interent for information. Scifi forums, imdb, youtube, ..heck I even googled script leak. I found some detailed plot synopsis too. For me, there's none of this I wanna be surprised when I see BS. I read both Aliens and Alien 3 novels before I saw the movies. With Aliens I was a super nerd and after seeing it 10 times in a row, I swear I could recite the movie's entire dialogue with minimal error. With Alien 3, I threw the book down and yelled No F'in way when I finished. I thought Alien 3 was a big disappointment too.

So Prometheous is coming next summer. How exciting! Lets look at some of the details of this movie. And while I'm thinking here, if you want to have no spoilers in your head, then just bookmark this badboy for another day. I may have to mention some spoilers here and there. But watch out, Fox is already putting out disinformation, so who knows.

Who better to make this movie? I had high hope for Tron 2.0 and still kinda hope Kazinski (is that his name?) cna do justice to The Black Hole, but he really dropped the ball I thought. So instead of a new upcoming director, we have the original director himself Sir Ridely Scott coming back into the mix. Scott has made some killer movies. Heres a list of them I liked:

Alien
BladeRunner
Legend
Black Rain
Thelma & Louise
GI Jane
Blackhawk Down
Gladiator

Alien, Bladerunner,Legend, Blackhawk, and Gladiator I think all kinda set the bar in some way for their Genre. They are movies that are used as reference points. Like someone will say oh District 9 is like BlackHawk Down meets whatever. So Scott has some potent cred to his name. He's made some "not so good" movies too. And some would say, he hasn't made anything good in a while. So i think he's due for some awesomeness.

The cast seems pretty good too. Thank Gawd Russell Crowe is not in it! They all seem capable of delivering strong performances. One thing I loved about the first Alien movie is how rough they all looked. Cartwright and Weaver had like zero makeup. Harry Dean Stanton as a mechanic is the real deal. Yaphet..dude what have you been up to. But they were miners right, whereas this crew is corporate scientists? It just always rubs me when the cast looks so clean. Small nit pick perhaps.

So good director- check good cast - check, but what about writers? One writer has hardly any cred and the movie Darkest Hour which he wrote for is getting horrible reviews. Lindelof seems to have passion for the material ,but his effort for Cowboys & Aliens doesn't really inspire. So this is kind of a scary part. Thw writing could really suck for this movie. So much of what made Alien good was the dialogue. Scott seems to be really pumped about Lindelof's work though when watching the Comic Con video so that is hopeful.

Finally, the plot synopsis I have read online have seemed ..well like they could easily be stupid. But then again if one read the plot for Alien, before it was released, you might think...really? Thats it? That's stupid. Ahhh but it wasn't was it. So here's hoping some magic happens with this movie.

Mashed Borg

Went to a 6 yr old birthday party on Saturday. The cake had some blue icing that was industrial strength. It turned everything..you know..EVERYTHING blue! The party was at a Putt Putt type place and they had a bunch of older video games there. These are video games that came out at the dying end of arcade gaming. One of them was a sit in the booth 3 token game for Star Trek Voyager. A really basic 3d shooter with a pistol. All you do is shoot borg while the crew of the Voyager runs around like morons and you hear "you will be assimilated" over and over. I couldn't help but laugh at the huge picture of Jeri Ryan on the side of the game with her busty silver borg boobs placed ever so strategically to lure young males into the game. Oh Jeri..resistance is futile!

Today I tricked my daughter into eating mashed potatoes from a mixer beater. I excitedly asked her if she wanted some ice cream and in a moment of unusual food trust, she licked some off. Then I laughed and said surprise it's mashed potatoes! What do you think she did? Screamed ewwwww , yucky? Maybe spit it out and ask for a drink? Maybe demand some real ice cream? Nope, she vomitted in her hand and then proceeded to continue to vomit in the trash can. I suddenly became the "bad" daddy. Really, I just have to roll my eyes on that one.

Make Peace with the Pantry

Sometimes my day can be consumed with inconveniences that act like they may be the end of the world. Hopefully, I don't go too long before gaining some perspective on what really matters. So my cabinet hardware is uneven....cry me a river mister.

But seriously, I am just so ocd somtimes about things being level or lining up. You can't have everything flush and centered, but you try. I had what seemed like a disaster when my pantry cabinet handles were about an 8th of an inch off, one higher than the other. It took me all day to come up with a solution and test it out on spare wood before redoing my cabinet. And when I finally went for it, it was looking bad. It was as if a football team had been making a long tedious drive downfield, but when 20 yards to goal, they throw an interception. Somehow they stopped the drive or recovered the ball and made a field goal. Bottom line my pantry cabinet handles are good, not perfect mind you, but acceptable.

Anyway, not too bore you with the tedious details of my cabinet adventures, but it just consumed my day. So much so, I didn't even get a run. Damn I needed one too.

On the way home tonight, my conversation with my daughter:

"Dad, I want to skip being married. I want to live with you and mom forever."

Ok I say.

Yayyy! You know I'll end up growing old and the dogs will die. Then we will die. Why do we die?

Well, you'll find the answer to that question someday, but as it is everything dies, it's only a matter of time.

Yahh (said in an I give up sort of way)

Pickles

Connie Nielsen is an actress most notably for me from Gladiator as Phoenix's sister Lucilla. The beauty of IMDB and WIKI together really. Did you know she hooked up with Metallica's drummer Lars Ulrich. According to wiki, she can speak 8 languages. Wow! She looks so amazing in Gladiator too.

Good input =

Since getting a sink and cooking appliances back in the kitchen, my eating habits have already improved. In combination with the cool weather, my runs and my body definitely feel better. (its really just those chia seeds!)

I had a stroke of luck today. Our ovens came with a trim piece that was metal and white. It was a floor model from Tampa, so I thought we just got suckered into a white piece since it needed to be black or stainless. So I spray painted it gloss black, but there was a crack in the paint. I thought, ughhh I really should have put some primer on it first. So to heck with it, I began to peel the paint off and lo and behold...it pulled the white paint off perfectly revealing a perfect stainless finish. Awesome!

Off to get my flu shot tomorrow and do some xmas shopping. Yo ho ho!

A chilly day

Put my legs in the pool today. Temp was about 57 degrees or so according to the pool thermometer. Ooof man that seemed cold! I couldn't keep my legs in for very long before I had to let them out. When it felt like blood flow did return to my legs a few seconds later though, howww refreshing. I did this a few times before deciding I'd had enough. This is of course after running. Was quite chilly outside today. I prolly just got warmed up by the time I was done at 40 minutes. The whole run I felt slow and out of breath. Not the best run ever, but it's prolly just the cold messing with my brain. I gotta dig up my fleece sleeves for a windy cold run that soon to come.

Hawk Attack!

Spent 5 hours with the electrician today. It was an interesting time for sure. We went to the local electric supply store to pick up some parts where he knew everyone there and kidded around with them like old friends. Then we had to go to Home Depot to pick up some more parts and turns out, he used to be manager at this Home Depot. Everywhere in the store, employees would come up to him and greet him as a long lost friend. He told me a story about how a hawk got in the store for a while and hunted all the small Starlings in the store. He also said that there was a lot of theft in the store and that often crooks would get homeless people to steal stuff for them and then pay them for their theft right across the street at Wal Greens. My electrician was also in the 82 airborne in Vietnam and manager of a plant of GM. Wow!

We also managed to get my appliances installed. Gotta get a impact dril! but yah, I can actually cook in the kitchen now. It's like ...a real kitchen! Time to make some soup damn it! Hmm well as soon as I find the stock pot anyway.

NImsod

Scoopin the glush and floppin the leafy grittle

Yikes, not as bad as a busted water main, but 4 levels of excrement is pretty bad.

Clean, clean, clean and load, load , load

Go back you can't wear crocs here silly man.
Stop at the red light _ WE SEE YOU!
Green Light, go weigh yourself, check in, spin around, yell Mo-Chaka

Behold the 2 story mountain of cardboard and plastic. I fling my cardboard like giant killer saltines.

I suck down my fish tacos watching two guys who just make me squirm.

Later I recall the image of floating above bodies as if watching in on a warm place

Think Think Think ... hmmm, how about the term Halogen Snuggles?

Serisouly, 2 eagles screeching and then a thump of squirrel body, a flash out of my peripheral( whoosh)

What!! Really an Owl? Get inside Dory, quick.

127 Hours of VD

So I actually had some alone time today since Liz and Asa went shopping with the family. What to do?!! Maybe watch 127 Hours? Maybe go run till my legs fall off? It was so nice outside today though, and what better way to feel that then to drive my old car with the sunroof down and listen to some freshly downloaded music.

I went to the BX to do some Xmas gift checking as well. It was very crowded, with what seemed like a lot of extra perfume sprayed everywhere. Ughhh! The BX just left me feeling blaahhh. I didn't find anything cool, and it just seemed to make me tired. So I went to the commissary and bought some fruit. These past couple of weeks I have barely eaten any fruit. I keep seeing pomegranates on sale too. I finally have a sink now to eat me some POM!! I think my body misses fruit....though I must admit Fudge sounds pretty dang good.

Man....that Virgin Diaries show is on right now. I can't blog anymore. This is just too distracting!

Frito Bake Man

I wrastled...you gotta say that like a snarly cowpoke.. some sprinklers today. Well I fixed one and then another one exploded, so I had to snap that guy into shape too. Got plenty wet in the process which made it a bit nippy. Earlier I went to Ace Hardware and bought these small plastic washers for the sink plumbing. Somehow I lost them and had to go back and buy them again. Grrrrrrr!!

Watched a documentary on Superheroes today. Was interesting to see how these different people with different skills and backgrounds all came into being Superheroes. It's one thing to wear a costume, but to patrol the night streets as someone not in costume, but as a Superhero? It's interesting to me how philanthropy, having fun, and personal demons fuel these passions.

Finally ate at this small cafe next to my parents house. It used to be a hair salon for years when I was growing up. The special of the day.....Frito Bake! Ha! I haven't eaten frito bake in yyeeeeaaarrrrss! They were slammed and I had to wait a while for the food, but it was worth the wait. Lots of cheese and sour creme. Yum!

I like watching my dogs sleep. Usually about this time at night (1030) , they both are just crashed and often have dreams. They look so comfy and so peaceful too. I just want to sneak up on them and squish them. hahahahaha