People, movies, books
I seem to go through periods of having far more to say than time in which to write it, alternating with periods of it not occurring to me to post an entry here.
This week has been mixed. Got to see a bunch of people—high school friends, college friends, post-college friends, my brother and sister-in-law—but also ended up spending a fair bit of time with various families who I don't know very well. I'm not so good at the group-of-people-I-don't-know-well thing; it's tiring, even if (as in these cases) the people in question seem to be cool folks. And I've been occasionally a little mopey and/or grumpy for unrelated reasons that I'm not going to go into (but I will thank Karen for cheering me up immensely on the phone last weekend).
And it hasn't helped that as usual I managed to plan about six months' worth of projects for this week that I've got off of work. Of course I didn't get very far in any of those projects. But I did make a little progress on a few of them.
I'd been missing watching movies the past few months; I've only seen an average of about one a month since May or so. Last Friday I went to the video store and rented six DVDs for five days each, figuring that would mean I wouldn't have to leave the house for the next week or so; as it turned out, I went out for several hours to hang out with people each of those next several days. I did end up seeing five of the six movies, though, plus The Two Towers. I wasn't impressed with Shadow of the Vampire; I thought Wonder Boys was surprisingly good for a movie about a writer (and didn't fall into two big cliches that I'd been led to expect), and though I wasn't all that thrilled with the first two-thirds of it, I quite liked the last third or so. I rather liked Ghost Dog, too, though I had a relatively minor structural problem with it toward the end. Was not so impressed with The Godfather, Part II, which was the only one of the top 20 movies in the IMDB top 250 that I hadn't previously seen. (Casablanca is the only one of those 20 that would go on my top-20 list, though, so I already knew my tastes don't necessarily match those of the IMDB raters.) (I'm still missing 9 of the movies ranked 21 through 50; will see most of those eventually.)
Have been reading Jennifer Crusie's Crazy for You (which, sadly, so far isn't nearly as much fun as Welcome to Temptation; it's reasonably entertaining fluff, but the formula seems more obvious and more forced than in Temptation) and Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog (after having finally finished reading Three Men in a Boat), which unfortunately also isn't really grabbing me; I'm afraid Willis's screwball comedies often don't quite work for me, and the handling of time travel (which appears to pretty much require some conscious force controlling what works and what doesn't) doesn't appeal to me. That said, it is engaging enough to keep me reading, and I'm about 3/4 of the way through it now.
I'm sure there's more to say, but instead I'm gonna run off to dinner.