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Today would have been my father's 70th birthday.

Hard to imagine him being 70. But then, even while he was alive, I never even quite wrapped my mind around the idea that he was in his sixties.

Today is also the 29th anniversary of my mother's death.

Some years I'm okay on November 11; some not so much. This year I've been kind of tense for the past few days; not a lot, but a bit more than usual.

So last night, ended up taking the evening off from magazine stuff to watch a couple of movies with Twig.

We started with Impromptu, which is still good, but isn't nearly as continuously hilarious as I remembered it being. The latest in a series of re-watching old favorite movies that I haven't enjoyed as much as I used to. Disappointing. Especially because Twig hadn't seen it before, so I told her how incredibly funny it was, so she went into it with too-high expectations.

So it was with some trepidation that I turned to the second movie of the evening, which we had both seen: The Sting. I've been thinking fondly of that movie lately because of watching Leverage, and I figured it was time to see it again.

And it turned out to be every bit as good as I'd remembered. The first time through, I had been completely taken in by at least one major plot twist; this time, I remembered that one, but enjoyed watching it unfold anyway. And was completely surprised by another major plot twist that I had forgotten all about. It really is a great movie—funny, sad in places, tightly plotted, brilliantly executed. I may talk more about it, with spoilers, in another entry, but for the purposes of this entry, suffice it to say that it did an admirable job of lightening my spirits and distracting me.

Today has been mostly okay. Working at home, which was the right choice except that there was about two hours of loud chainsaw use from the other side of my fence in the afternoon. But eventually I realized that it was making me tense, and not long after that I remembered that I had headphones, so I put on loud music and things got better.

Also tried today to put the blog about Peter up again; we sort of abandoned it in early 2008, and then some changes to my blog publishing system led to it going offline entirely. Unfortunately, Movable Type turns out to be very poorly documented in some ways, so after a lot of frustration I've given up on making that work for now. Perhaps sometime soon, perhaps not.

Anyway.

. . . Four years ago on this date, I wrote up a list of some appropriate activities to remember my parents by. I was kind of embarrassed about that list, but also kind of liked it, so I'm linking to it again.

This evening, I think I'll watch another movie or two. I have a few on hand that should be kind of fun and fluffy, which I think is about what I need right now.