No creative titles today
Before I start the weekend recap, I realized over the weekend that I totally forgot to blog about a movie I watched the prior weekend in addition to the 28 series, Mr Bean’s Holiday. I never had seen a Mr Bean movie but I sort of remember hearing they were funny so I grabbed it for us to watch. Ali always says I don’t get enough comedies. The movie started and just looking at the guy was funny enough. He is a very weird looking man. I thought it was odd that during the first 5 minutes he didn’t really say anything and instead just made silly noises as he went from one physical comedy scene to another. Then it continued and continued and continued. Evidently Mr Bean is more or less a modern day mime and he didn’t say a complete sentence the entire movie. His silly appearance and noises kept me entertained briefly but after that it fell off into just bizarro world. When it was done I told Ali that I thought that it may have been the stupidest movie I ever saw in my life. How this guy has managed to make more than one film is astounding to me. Yuck. I’d give it a D.
My weekend had a pretty low chore quotient compared to most. Part of that was because we haven’t had to mow the grass for two weeks. I had almost my entire list done by noon on Saturday. On Saturday evening we picked up my mom to take her to her birthday dinner. I didn’t tell mom where we were going ahead of time. I kind of got the vibe that she may have suspected that I had picked the Turtle Club but she acted surprised. I had reservations for 5:45 but sunset was scheduled to go down a few minutes before that. I intentionally arrived early so we could possibly get seated before the big event. The plan worked out perfectly, they sat us right down and within 10 minutes we got to witness another perfect sunset. Mom was really excited about being there.
Just like the last time our dinner was very good. I kicked myself a bit when I realized that I hadn’t mentioned anything ahead of time about it being a birthday dinner for my mom to the restaurant staff. However when we ordered desert we just happened to mention it was mom’s birthday. The waiter brought the slice of key lime pie that mom and I were splitting with a single birthday candle in it and they had written Happy Birthday on the plate in some sort of raspberry sauce, which was very nice. The bill for 3 people was almost exactly 50% higher than the bill for two people as expected. After a very enjoyable meal we headed out and waited for the valet. The valet station was a bit of a circus. There was all sorts of confusion going on. They were bringing back vehicles that had no driver waiting for them while others waited and waited for their car to show up. I felt a bit bad when our Camry was brought back before a group of people that were waiting there before us. It seemed like all of the women that were in the crowd waiting were pretty wasted.
After dinner we asked mom if she would go to Lowe’s with us to help us pick out paint. Yes we are planning on finally putting some paint on the walls. The barren white walls that we have had since we built the house helps make the space feel big but it also makes it feel sterile and generic. We are starting out conservatively by painting the guest bathroom and bedroom. Most of the decision making process was left up to mom and Ali. Mom has a good decorating eye from her years in the furniture business something that definitely was not passed on to me. I can tell when a color scheme looks nice I just am not good at deciding what the scheme should be. The spare bedroom is going to be a grayish light purple color and the bathroom will be an earthy shade of green that I like. (green is my color) We are planning on doing the large living area of the house in some sort of tan, the shade of which has not been determined. Ali is very nervous about the prospect of painting. I am not. I don’t enjoy the process of painting but I am pretty assured that I will pleased with the end result. The walls have been long overdue in getting some attention if you ask me.
As part of the overhaul, Ali wants me to change up the surround sound system. We have a Bose lifestyle system that has little cube speakers that are white just like the walls. The normal person would hardly notice them. However to Ali these are a HUGE eyesore. Ali wants me to get speakers that I can mount flush with the wall and also wants to build some sort of door to hide the AV equipment above the tv.
It makes me chuckle when Ali goes on these tangents. She has this quirk about her where she focuses on the minute details of an issue instead of the big picture. We could have a room that is filled to the ceiling with junk and Ali would spend the time alphabetizing the post cards she found in a shoe box in the room. So likewise when faced with painting the interior of our house Ali’s primary focus goes to little things like stereo speakers. Hey I’m not complaining, you mean you WANT me to go out and buy a new up to date surround system? Twist my arm. I would welcome getting a new system that runs on infrared instead of the proprietary Bose RF shit that makes it not work with my Harmony remote. Then Ali mentioned further plans of hanging curtains on either side of the TV area that could be pulled back when we are watching it and closed when we aren’t. I may have to draw the line there.
So anyway I am hoping over the 4 day Thanksgiving holiday I have that we can get one if not both of the rooms painted. It should give those rooms an entirely different feel.
Sunday was another low key day. I performed my second week of water system bleaching. I am pretty convinced that the discoloration we have been seeing in our water is a result of algae in the holding tank. With our old water system I could pull the lid off the holding tank and after removing any frogs or bugs that had squeezed in there, I was able to drain it and blast the algae out of the inside with a pressure washer. Well the new fancy tank is totally sealed. great for keeping frogs out, shitty for keeping algae from forming. So what I have to do is drain the tank and then as I refill it I add bleach to a small hole that is normally used to pull air into the system to help bubble out the sulfur. Both last week and this week I added probably a couple cups of bleach. I have already noticed the water looks better than it did. I plan to do it for 2 more weeks and see the results.
We watched the Eagles beat the Dolphins. For a long time the Eagles tried to let the 0-9 Dolphins win. In fact thanks to 3 first half interceptions deep in Dolphin territory, the Eagles were behind at halftime 7-3. Late in the first half Donovan McNabb went out with an ankle injury. I truly could have cared less. After a rough start AJ Feeley settled down in the second half and did a solid job. He is definitely a more accurate passer than Donovan. So anyway in the second half the Eagles managed to score a couple times to win. Even though it was a win it really said a lot of negative things about the team. They struggled to beat an 0-9 team, at home, that was starting a rookie quarterback whom was playing in his first regular season game. Against this 0-9 team with a rookie quarterback they managed to register zero turnovers and get zero sacks. They are going to get so smashed by the Patriots next week. I hope they have a lot of body bags.
Sunday night we watched Die Hard 4. I really liked the original Die Hard. The sequels have been so so. It seemed like each sequel tried to outdo the prior one in terms of action and implausible acts of heroism by John McLain. Well Die Hard 4 takes the cake, it was a disappointment of blockbuster proportions to me. Ok the movie is doomed from the very get go because of one simple fact, the bad guy in it SUCKS. In order for a movie like this to be good, you HAVE to have a good villain. In Die Hard 4 they cast some metrosexual looking guy that looked like they painted a few gray hairs into his side burns. When the guy tried to portray anger he instead looked like he was ready to cry. What a joke. If there is such a thing as too much action in a movie, Die Hard 4 has it. Ridiculous scenario after ridiculous scenario goes down scene after scene. One minute John McLain can barely walk, the next minute he is sprinting like Marion Jones on roids. Some of the feats he pulled off would make Superman jealous. By the end Ali and I were just laughing at how silly things were getting. The movie was lame, plain and simple. The first one was sooooo much better. Die Hard 4 is lucky to get a C from me.
Last night before bed Ali was watching one of her many Oprah episodes on the Tivo. As I was getting Tuki water the scene on the TV caught my eye. It was a living room that was FILLED with junk on either side, piled 5 feet high with only a small walking path in the middle. I sat down and watched in horror as they showed the rest of the house. Every single room of the house was like this, jammed full of clothes, shoes, housewares and any other sort of various material items that this woman could buy. I told Ali I had to see the woman that was responsible for this, it truly made me sick.
So they finally show the couple who own this house. A chubby, tear factory of a woman and her husband that makes excuses for not being able to stop her. I instantly had a severe dislike for this woman. Anybody that allows their home to become a warehouse of things like that is beyond pathetic in my book. I was angry. I said to Ali that the woman should just die she serves no purpose and is pathetic. Ali chastised me for taking such a severe, cold position about this woman. I couldn’t help myself. I just have zero tolerance for people that put themselves into a miserable situation by their own hand whether it is being morbidly obese or in this case a compulsive “hoarder”. I continued my rant to Ali saying there are already too many people on the planet, someone like this serves no purpose. Of course I knew what I was saying was harsh but I was just besides myself with disgust. The show was filled with the woman crying constantly, saying she was trying to fill a void in her life first from her kids growing up and second because she had some siblings die in recent years. She turned her house into this mess over the span of a decade or so.
Her husband frustrated me almost as much. He said he guessed he was “somewhat” responsible for allowing this to happen. Ya think so? Grow a set of balls and establish a line. Take her credit cards, check book and access to cash if the fat dumpling can’t control herself. His excuse was he didn’t know how to stop her. Unreal.
So anyway Oprah brought in a crew of 100 people to clean up this disaster area. I said to Ali that I can almost guarantee that once Oprah is done with her, this woman will fall right back into her hoarding ways. You can just tell, she has no self discipline. This woman was the poster child for disgusting American consumerism that so many of us are guilty of, taken to an extreme degree. I guess I am a heartless bastard. As I have said many times, the herd needs to be thinned.