The storm blew a couple of panels off our barn roof.
The barn, shockingly, is not up to modern code, and our lovely and helpful city gives us a world of grief whenever we attempt to repair it. I’ll go throw myself on their mercy on Monday, begging for a permit.
Bleah.
On the plus side, beautiful new skylight!
I’m merciful to comedies. If I laugh a couple of times, and am not sickened, I’m pretty happy. And I laughed a couple of times in the first third of No Strings Attached.
Alas, it ran out of steam. And got a little insulting. Mostly boring, trite, and predictable.
Natalie Portman might have been an Oscar contender for Black Swan, but the choice to do this crappy film will ruin all those chances.
Still, hey, I laughed. A little.
Thoughtful film about a relationship’s opening and closing.
I had heard this was a tearjerker, so when the opening scene shows a little girl wandering through a field next to a busy road, crying, “Megan? Megan?” I was concerned that there would be dead children involved.
I hate that.
And yes, Blue Valentine is sad, but there nobody gets killed or maimed. They just have grown apart.
I liked that the movie shows the charming beginning and pathetic end, without any of the transitional stuff in the years in between. You can kind of imagine it, but it isn’t important.
Earlier this week Mary inexplicably received a kilogram of baby formula in the mail. What’s up with that? My guess is that she’s recently signed up for health insurance (with Kaiser Permanente), and that somehow targeted her as a good market for this sort of product.
Obviously we have no need of baby formula (unless Mary’s not telling me something). I don’t know anybody at the moment with an infant. And I support women who choose breastfeeding over formula, anyway.
So what do I do with this? I suspect ebaying it would be quite right, and my distaste for waste keeps me from just throwing it away.
Maybe I’ll save it for my cereal on some morning that we run out of milk. Is that wrong?
Danny Boyle has made a lot of movies I loved, including Shallow Grave (***1/2), Trainspotting (****), 28 Days Later (***1/2), and Slumdog Millionaire (***1/2). Somehow, though, it’s hard to get excited about going to see a movie about a guy trapped in the desert all by himself for a week.
That said, it’s a pretty good movie — though not the kind of thing I’d personally put in Oscar contention.
I sold all my Apple stock last year right before the iPad came out, on the theory that there was a ton of hype, and there was no possible way the device could live up to expectations. I figured there was a good chance the market would say, “Meh.” And when it did, I was going to buy my Apple back at a significant discount.
Oops.
I sold at $221, and it’s at $344 today, meaning I missed out on $25,000 in profit — substantially more than my salary last year. Ah, well.
So I bought an iPad when they came out, just to see what it was like. Turns out I rarely leave my desk, so it’s not super useful for me. That said, it’s a pleasing, well-designed, well-built device. Lyra Meadow uses it constantly to watch movies and play games.
I’m listing my iPad for sale on ebay. I paid $499, and it wouldn’t surprise me to get back over $400 — I generally have good luck selling electronics. I figure the iPad 2 will be coming out in a couple of months, and I’ll get better value for the iPad now, while it’s not obsolete.
It’s once again time for my car to be smogged. Once again my crappy 1984 Chevy Cavalier convertible passed with flying colors, with from a third to a fiftieth the allowable emissions — about half or less than that of the average passing vehicle.
Doesn’t it seem like my hardly-maintained 27-year-old car should have higher than average emissions?
If only my upholstery and nonfunctional ragtop were in condition as good as my engine…
