A Christmas Carol (the movie)

I'm knee-deep in Christmas again. We started working on our church's annual musical/drama and now we're getting to crunch time.

This year, it's a continuation from last year's Victorian wonder which means some can be reused and some cannot. Costumes are well underway (and fabulous - a lady that moved to town is letting us use much of her vintage clothing collection, even down to some authentic 1850s items!) We started building sets in earnest last week (We're putting a SHIP on stage - the builder has been getting jokes about the ark in his yard) even though we can't set up for a couple weeks.

And the director took me to see the new animated A Christmas Carol yesterday. She'd been to it earlier in the week and came out bouncing off the walls with ideas, characters, costumes, etc. So she wanted me to see it before I started painting sets. It was research. She came out excited, she went back in to the theater excited and she came out even more excited. And what did I get out of it?

Motion sickness.

In fairness, it is an amazing movie. The capture animation lived up to its billing and the attention to detail was stunning. The actors were amazing, perspective was used with elan and technically, it deserves just about every accolade you could give it. Although I wouldn't put it high on the family-friendly rating - unless you regularly take your little angels to horror movies. It was technically just that good.

In fact, it was too good. There's a lot of flying through the air, falling down things, swooping over roof lines and generally getting tossed about. After the first sequence, my head started to spin and my stomach started rotating with it. I'm getting queasy just thinking about it.

Thank goodness we only saw it in 2D or I would have upchucked on the director's shoes.

Technical difficulties

It's a nerd thing again ...

My 15 minutes

I was out yesterday doing some errands and this might seem vain but it seemed I was getting more second looks than usual. It surprised me a little (particularly since I wasn't exactly feeling I looked my best) but as I went through a couple more stores, I became more and more convinced, people were looking at me. And usually with that sort of hint of a smile around the eyes that suggests you should be recognizing them.

It was getting a little unnerving.

So I finally made it through my last stop at a very crowded building - people half catching my eye and giving me that small smile - and headed for the car, thinking that, well, I guess I'd had my 15 minutes in the limelight. And then I saw my reflection in the car window.

I had a small beetle in my hair.




There's really not much to say after realizing that...

Flu season

Okay, we all know flu season is here again. And if your neighborhood is like mine, you're being pressured to get your annual flu vaccine and especially the H1N1 vaccine, even though the H1N1 vaccine is not readily available to the general public yet.

I won't go there (any more than I already have) but have to say, I noticed the difference the flu information is making when I went to my doctor's office last week and again today. What did I notice?

All the reading material is gone.

Yep - no month-old magazines to read. No gossip papers. No nothing. Except the words on the side of the tissue box.

And the waiting rooms are now divided in half. Flueys on one side; generally run-of-the-mill, need-a-doctor's-opinion on the other. Hand sanitizer and face masks placed closer to the fluey side than the not-fluey. And, by some odd mental connection, the fluey side got individual pages of sudoku puzzles on their side. I think the logic was "You're feeling like death warmed over anyways, might as well do math, too."

Anyways, this lack of reading material (in the offices too) meant I had to read the information on the walls. And there I saw a pamphlet for - you guessed it - H1N1 information. And a brochure about virtual colonoscopies.

Virtual colonoscopies?

Virtual colonoscopies?

Virtual colonoscopies?

Is there any way to say that, or even consider it, that would reduce the "eeeeew" factor?

Needless to say, I didn't read the brochure. It might have flu germs on it, you know.

Playing my tune?

Okay, I'm doing another video but how cool is this?

Apples to apples

Some language warning (and a potty warning - this makes me laugh THAT hard ... )

Soap in my eyes?

With Halloween just around the corner, I've been feeling relatively immune to random body parts on display. So it really was not a surprise to find a bag full of eyes at the bottom of my laundry basket today.

Googly eyes, to be exact.

Trouble is, I have no idea where they came from or how they got to my laundry basket. Did they spontaneously appear there? Did they migrate? Have they been breeding? Did they start as Mr. and Mrs. Googly and then decide they had room to expand their family?

I'm still trying to figure it out. And they're still at the bottom of my laundry basket, winking at me every time I dig to the bottom. I'm leaving them there just in case whoever left them comes looking for them.