Dodge Dennis, Batman Blows, hodge podge
We resumed our lucky streak by dodging the brunt of Dennis. Even though Dennis passed us a good 200 miles offshore it still affected our weather for the better part of 3 days. We did mild hurricane prep by putting any loose outside items away as well as pulling all the stuff on the lanai into the wall by the sliding door. I braced a few of the fragile trees in the orchard. I did special work on the one apple tree that has an active mockingbird nest in it. I secured it with rubber tree supports and then took the branches that the nest was built upon, pulled them up and tied them to make a more secure foundation to prevent the nest with 3 little birds in it from blowing away.
Friday night was the biggest rain event for us. When I woke up Saturday morning we had over 3.5″ of rain in the gauge. Our property which had most of the standing water gone on Wednesday is once again surrounded by a series of standing water small lakes. Saturday and Sunday was mostly gusty with periods of light to medium rain. By Sunday morning I was able to put the stuff back outside. I’m glad to report the little birds and their home survived.
On Saturday we had a majorly lazy day. Dennis dictated indoor activities with the constant wind and rain. Ali loves lazy days, she could just lay in bed for hours. Lazy days make me stir crazy. The plus side was I used all the lax time to play hours upon hours of WoW, my guilty obsession. I feel bad at times about sitting there so long, spending so much time trying to acheive various cyber goals that mean nothing outside the context of the game. But it keeps my mind busy, keeps me entertained and insulates me from other things. Well late in the afternoon we did a bit of “work” when we cleaned out some more of the clutter in the bathroom and I installed a makeshift shelf in the bathroom cabinet to double our available space down there, allowing us to clean stuff up.
On Sunday we decided to go running even though it was still overcast and gusty. I expected the stiff wind that was in our face for half the track’s length to significantly slow our times. I was very surprised for us to beat our previous best lap times by a full 6 seconds. The wind affected Ali’s breathing enough that she couldn’t run as many continuous laps as last week so we would stop and walk one then run one for the last couple laps. On lap 12 I told Ali I wanted to run one as fast as I could just to see what kind of time I could do. So I took off, extended my stride and went hard. I’m sure I looked as silly as ever. When I run my natural technique keeps my upper body very upright and straight, even though my legs are moving. It got me the nickname “Road Runner” during my baseball playing days. Anyway, I turned the lap in 1:45 about a 7 minute mile pace, not bad and about the same pace as when I ran the 12 minute run in the Junior High fitness test. I was pleased with that. As we finished the run it started to rain again but the cool rain felt good on our overheated skin.
Over the weekend we saw two movies. On Saturday night we watched Blade 3 on pay-per-view. I wanted to see this in theaters but we never got around to seeing it. It was a good flick, along the lines of the other ones. Great fighting, sweet special affects, a good villian who gets what he deserves in the end. I’d give the film a solid B.
On Sunday we went to the movies. There are 3 movies out currently I wanted to see, Batman Begins, War of the Worlds and Fantastic Four. Since Batman Begins has been out the longest we figured it wouldn’t be out that much longer and the theater should be less crowded. I heard it was a darker Batman and it has made decent money so I figured it was pretty good. I like superhero flicks. Well I didn’t like this one. I thought it was borderline terrible. To compound it’s badness, it was a long movie, well over 2 hours. The storyline bordered on ridiculous. So much of it just didn’t make any sense. Much of the movie is filmed in a dark manner that I guess is supposed to convey the darkness of Batman but in reality all it did was make it hard to see what was going on. The guy that played Batman was lousy. I thought it was stupid how he changed his voice and overacted when he was Batman, speaking in a deep silly voice that didn’t work at all. Batman gets his powers from basically being rich and really pissed off somehow. I don’t want to go into great details to ruin it for any of you victims that didn’t see it yet. I found it odd that in several scenes Mandy Moore had blatantly protruding nipples. I assume this is a look they wanted but it, like so much else in the movie, didn’t fit in and just seemed like an obvious bone thrown to the male audience. Sure there are lots of things blown up, a fast car but none of it really mattered, the plot was just so ridiculous at times, nothing could pull me back into caring about the movie. It gets a D. Hopefully the other two won’t be such disappointments.