Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Monday, November 29, 2010 M. Ovie Reviews: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 I know that in another movie review earlier this year, I talked about how maybe my hook as a reviewer should be willful, exquisite ignorance of source material when it comes to adaptations. I pretty much broke that rule with HP7p1, which is good, because I would have been totally lost. I missed HP6 last year and don't remember much of the book, and I only read Deathly Hallows once, shortly after it came out two years ago, so it wasn't exactly fresh in my mind. In fact, to extend the freshness metaphor, some parts of this movie were like cleaning out the fridge and there's some stuff in the back that makes you think, "Whoa, what was this from? When did we have calamari, and why are the Malfoys so stressed out?" You know how some directors like to talk about their movies "standing alone" and "speaking for themselves"? Well, this is the opposite of that. If you were to walk into the theater after undergoing an obliviate spell that removed all memories of Harry Potter from your brain (thus making room for all of your relatives' birthdays, anniversaries, and genome codes) and decided to give this a try instead of all the sequels in the multiplex because this one's got Part 1 right in the title, you would be so screwed. Hell, even the opening credits don't show up until the end. It's not just the fact that seven films' worth of stuntBritcasting make these movies feel like channel-surfing between PBS and if they held the Oscars on Halloween (although it's a little odd to see John Hurt show up for one line, Michael Gambon for none, and a small crowd of Harry's Hogwarts classmates being reduced to extras with names). It's that over all this time, the long-term plot has become almost insurmountably crufty. But this isn't really a fair criticism of the movie, or even a criticism of it per se. Rowling had a lot of unanswered questions to address in the last book, so of course she introduced twice as many new ones. We're already having to spend two long movies covering those, so it's not like there's a lot of time to remind everyone what the old ones are. Besides, it's not like anyone's going to be jumping into the film series at this point. The only people who still know nothing about Harry Potter are the ones who have been actively avoiding him for over a decade now, and if the movie spent the hour necessary to bring them all up to speed the other 99.9999% of the audience would get pretty pissed off. That said, there are some pretty gnarly pacing challenges. By definition, a movie that's half of one book is going to be closely scrutinized for its use of time, plus this one has the added difficulty that large parts consist mainly of the heroes wandering around feeling lost and purposeless (when in fact the purpose is to keep the main antagonists apart long enough to arbitrarily fill up a whole school year like in all the rest of the books). Oddly, it feels both rushed and slow at the same time. One minute I was thinking, Wait, what was this bit again? Give me a minute to catch up here, and the next I was all, Yes, yes, lovely scenery, let's keep this moving. But at the same time, you have to be paying pretty close attention to learn that Snape's been made headmaster and Death Eaters are on the Hogwarts staff. I did have two favorite parts, which I don't think were supposed to be my favorites. One was the beautifully animated telling of the tale of the Three Brothers that is the origin story of the Deathly Hallows, which was so good it was almost jarring. The other was when our heroes use polyjuice potion to impersonate some low-level Ministry of Magic functionaries, which means three no-names end up playing the leads for that sequence. I'd never seen any of them before, but they did a fantastic job of acting like Harry, Ron, and Hermione were inside their respective bodies. Unfortunately that mainly served to remind me how the only part of Chamber of Secrets I liked was the performances by Crabbe and Goyle as Harry and Ron, so that's barely a net positive. And I have no quibble with where the first part ends, on a tragic note with a cliffhanger kicker. Couldn't have done it better myself. Of course, I know better than to try. Sometimes I'm amazed the producers didn't crack open Deathly Hallows and say, "Oh, fuck it. Six is a good run." I have to give them credit for meeting most of the challenges. posted by M. Giant 11:23 AM 3 comments 3 Comments:Well said M.Giant, I thought just the same thing about the pacing and the two really good bits you talked about. I did especially enjoy that sequence in the Ministry of Magic. The guy Ron impersonated, Reg Cattermole, was played by a fantastic Welsh actor called Stefan Rhoddri, best known in the UK for his role in the sitcom Gavin and Stacey. In it he plays a coach driver called Dave Coaches - look for him on Youtube or something, because he really is a wonderful actor!
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Agreed on the animation sequence being mesmerizing - it was SO creative and beautiful.
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I thought the animated sequence was just lovely, as well...I thought it was extremely well done as the way to introduce the entire concept of the Deathly Hallows themselves - for a minute I was afraid they were simply going to show Hermione reading it. It's haunted me in a positive way.
By Tuesday, November 23, 2010 Gator Aid M. Edium is amazing in a lot of ways, but imagination and creativity aren't his strongest points. All of his stuffed friends are named after either what kind of animal they are or after himself, and while most kids are always making up stories and starring in the movies in their heads, M. Edium makes up newspaper articles and stars in mental documentaries. So Trash and I weren't surprised when we went to conferences with his kindergarten teacher and she showed us some of his artwork. It was all pretty devoid of flights of fancy. There was a cutaway view of our house, with all of us in it. There he was with his karate trophy, smiling a giant smile. There was an airplane with little word balloons pointing to where we were inside the cabin (a few rows ahead of the wings, as always). There was his bedroom, with his bunk bed and his dresser, with Bucky in his exercise ball on the floor. His dresser had a few extra drawers, but that might have just been wishful thinking. And then there was the last one, which showed him being chased by an alligator past a windmill. "Okay, we promise this never happened," we told his teacher, who by this point is probably almost as familiar with his verité worldview as we are. We know that teachers are required to report any signs of abuse, so we were momentarily worried that maybe Social Services had already heard horror stories about us trying to feed our child to large aquatic predators. In the Netherlands. His teacher assured us that wasn't the case; he had only drawn a picture of one of his favorite parts of our trip to Colorado -- the part where we played miniature golf. Which we would have known if we'd bothered to flip the sheet over to read the full-page caption that he writes on the back of all his school pictures, instead of instantly freaking out. Just to be sure, though, when we got home, we made sure M. Edium knows what to do in the event of an alligator attack. He knows to get low and go if there's a house fire, and thanks to karate he knows lots of ways to foil a kidnapper, but now we know that if he's getting chased by an alligator he runs inside and locks the door. "And then give him some Gatorade™," M. Edium added, referring to the punch line of his favorite riddle, which asks what an alligator's favorite drink is. So maybe he's not as literal-minded as we thought. posted by M. Giant 6:49 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Sunday, November 21, 2010 The Ice Storm We were supposed to drive down to Iowa today, but the first sign that might not happen came when I took one step out the front door and my foot just kept going. Long story short, we'd gotten an overnight coating of freezing rain. It was like the world had been laminated and then greased. But we'd been putting off this drive for weeks, so I skated on down to the street and started chipping the frozen veneer off the windows of Trash's car so I could go fill up the gas tank. It was trickier than I expected. Our street goes ever-so-gently uphill as it goes north, not that one can even tell on most days. I could tell this morning, because every step I took I slid inexorably south. It was like being on a slow-moving treadmill, and I had to either keep walking or I'd find myself at the park. But eventually I got the windows carved clear and was ready to go. Normally I would have made a u-turn to head back down the street, but today, once I got off the dry patch of pavement under where the car was, it was more like a pivot. With every passing second it became more and more apparent that we weren't going to Iowa. Freezing rain was still collecting on the windshield, and stop signs were mere suggestions. At least there weren't any other cars on the streets to crash into, because all of our neighbors were smarter than me. A few blocks from our house is a short block that rises uphill on a ten-degree slope. I didn't have to take that street to get to the gas station, but I wanted to see if I could. A running start was out of the question, because there's a stop sign at the bottom of the hill that I had to brake for. This is not to say I succeeded in actually stopping at it, but there wasn't a lot of momentum when I headed up the hill. Still, I managed to get halfway up -- the dashboard telling me "LOW TRAC" the whole way -- before I stopped. But I didn't stay stopped for long. I was going back down the hill whether I wanted to or not. Fortunately there was nobody coming up behind me, because all of our neighbors were still smarter than me. While sliding down, I became aware that the front end was slowly slewing to one side. In retrospect, that makes sense, since that's the heavier end of the car (and the end you want to avoid if you're ever trying to crash through a roadblock, for future reference). It was just a little disorienting to have it be swinging to the right, like I was doing a backwards u-turn. Or a clockwise swivel that was a bit faster than the counterclockwise one I'd done in front of the house. I braked and turned the wheel, but I might as well have been doing so in a shopping cart. The good news was that by the time I got to the bottom of the hill I was more or less pointed in the right direction, assuming I wanted to take a hard left, which I didn't. I did make it to the gas station and back home, and Trash and I agreed on the safest way to deal with the drive to Iowa: not to do it. posted by M. Giant 5:00 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
Looks like you'll be getting another opportunity to slide very very soon...
By Tuesday, November 16, 2010 Denver Scramble Last month, our flight back to Minneapolis from Denver was delayed by an hour or so, which isn't unusual to anybody who has ever flown anywhere ever. In even less surprising news, the given reason was weather, because the given reason is always weather, even if you land in sunny postcard-perfect conditions. At three in the morning. It was supposed to be about a two-hour flight, which isn't even long enough to wear out the batteries on M. Edium's portable DVD player. There was a slightly unusual announcement from the cockpit a bit before we were supposed to land, though. Due to the windy conditions -- which you may have read about at the time -- all the runways at Minneapolis-St. Paul International were shut down save one. Which meant a long wait before we could land. Two hours, in fact, circling over the city. Problem was, we didn't have fuel for two hours of flight. Long pause. Okay, actually, the captain didn't pause at all. But it's kind of amazing how quickly your brain works while you're waiting to hear what comes next. Especially if you're sitting next to your six-year-old son, who's also waiting to hear what comes next. Or, in Trash's case, if you're sitting next to your eight-year-old niece Deniece (who was already in an emotionally raw place as a result of the TSA confiscating her new miniature snowglobe ornaments because the combined tablespoon of liquid in them were a security risk), who is really not all that interested in having to wait much longer to see her parents after four days away from home. Anyway, rather than waiting in queue for the ninety minutes of powered flight we had left and then attempting to glide in circles for the next thirty until we could land, we were redirected to La Crosse, Wisconsin. That's about two hours southeast of home, just on the other side of the state line. Landing at a municipal airport on an island in the middle of the Mississippi River wasn't exactly what we'd expected, but I guess it was better than setting down on I-94 or something. That's when the waiting started. We've all heard the horror stories of people trapped in planes on the ground for longer than a Wal-Mart work shift, but I have to admit it wasn't that bad. There were a few reasons for this. 1. The plane wasn't that full to begin with. M. Edium and I had a group of three seats to ourselves. Or, more accurately, a seat for me, a seat for him, and a seat for his increasingly large group of stuffed "friends." 2. The plane got emptier after we landed. Passengers were given the option of bailing out and getting themselves home. Which, since it was only a two-hour drive and the wait on the ground might be indefinite, a fair number of people went for. We stuck it out, which was good because at that rinky-dink little airport, the rental cars got snapped up like Justin Beiber tickets. The fun part was that since the airport didn't have a gate available, passengers had to disembark through the tail cone. I've never seen out the back of a plane like that, and I'm glad it was on the ground when I did. 3. iPhones. Not too long ago, if you were sitting on the tarmac you were cut off from the outside world other than whatever dribs and drabs of information the flight crew saw fit to trickle out to you. But since most people on the flight were pretty well wired, updates were easy to both come by and disseminate. We got weather reports, flight status, and celebrity gossip. 4. Freedom of movement. You think of being stuck on the tarmac for multiple hours, and you think of being strapped into that uncomfortable chair the whole time. Not the case for us. Even if the four of us had had only four seats between us instead of the five, we got to walk around plenty. M. Edium went to the bathroom twice, although I think the second time was just to look out of the back of the plane again. There's a downside to this; if you can walk up and down the aisle, so can everyone else, and it got a little crowded at times. But everyone was as respectful of everyone else's limited space as they could be, just like a seasoned submarine crew or a box of Oreos. Except that guy who kept wandering back from First Class with his beer. I wouldn't have minded someone strapping him to his chair. 5. Well-behaved children. Not just the ones with us, either; all six of the kids on the plane under ten were calm, quiet, and not even remotely piercing. There was one girl with a five-syllable name who made a break for it up the aisle at one point, but she didn't get far and allowed herself to be apprehended quietly. 6. A wait of only two hours instead of eight. While we were sitting there assuming our takeoff time would continue being pushed off indefinitely until rental cars started coming back, the captain suddenly gave the order over the intercom for the flight attendants to prepare for takeoff, and we were in the air ten minutes later. Which brings me to the last reason this wait wasn't so bad: 7. No fear of death. Sitting on the tarmac, while tedious, is less stressful than sitting on an airplane that's landing in what we later learned would be considered hurricane conditions had we been over an ocean. Trash and I, on our separate sides of the aisle, white-knuckled it the whole long, motion-sickening way to the ground while the kids happily compared it to being on a roller coaster. Thank God children are stupid. By the time we got home, five hours later than scheduled (but still a few hours sooner than we would have had we simply driven home from Denver), Trash and I agreed that we weren't going anywhere for a while. At least not by plane. If we really need to travel, we can drive. Yes, we'll miss out on the crotch-groping that I've been hearing about lately, but I promised Trash I'd find a way to make that up to her. posted by M. Giant 7:14 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
This is the first post of yours that I read when I linked over here from TWOP (from your Burn Notice recaps, if you're interested) and it was so entertaining that I went aaaaaaaalll the way back in your archives to the very beginning and started reading from there. You know what? This blog is awesome. It's made me laugh so hard I almost peed, and it's made me cry so hard I wasn't able to see the words anymore. Thank you so much for all the time and effort you've put into this. It's provided a lot of entertainment and education (especially when it comes to having a kid - I'm preggers with my first) to me over the last few months.
By Sunday, November 14, 2010 In Defense of Dear Henry There are two kinds of people in the world: people who divide the world's population into two imaginary categories and people who don't. I've always been in the latter, but lately I've been wondering if I don't fall into the former. Of course there are liberals and conservatives, lovers and fighters, taste greats and less fillings, but what if there are also Dear Henrys and Dear Lizas? You may recall this dysfunctional couple from Sesame Street. He informs her (in song), that there's a hole in the bucket. She tells him to fix it. He asks with what. She tells him to use a stick. But the stick's too big, and the axe is too dull to whittle it, and he can't sharpen it because the sharpening stone is too dry, and he can't get any water for the stone because there's a freaking hole in the freaking bucket! Dear Henry is, no doubt, a moron and buffoon, and he's deliberately played that way. He's utterly befuddled by every tiny obstacle that's thrown his way, and makes Dear Liza have to be the one to solve all of his problems. What good is he, after all? But me, I sometimes wonder if maybe Dear Henry isn't getting a bad rap. Let's look at it a different way. Perhaps Dear Henry is just trying to communicate, rather than giving up and retreating to his man-cave (which, given the setting, is probably a literal cave). He's telling Dear Liza, look, here's this problem we have, and I'd be following all of your suggestions but look at the problems there. Meanwhile, Dear Liza sits on her ass in her rocking chair, not contributing anything useful to the process but an increasingly pissy mood. She expects stuff to just happen, like Dilbert's pointy-headed boss, without regard for how it's going to get done; it's Dear Henry who actually has to live in the real world, dealing with the facts on the ground. And yes, maybe Dear Henry was careless in letting his axe get dull. Living out on the frontier like that, it's borderline dangerous. And also, what kind of woods are they living in where the sticks only come in one size? But maybe Dear Henry is smarter than he seems. Maybe this is his way of getting Dear Liza to appreciate the daily challenges he faces. Maybe this was all some kind of clever Socratic trap set for Dear Liza, so carefully laid that he's been spending the last several weeks chopping copper pipes in half just to make the blade on his axe as dull as he seems, and then using the jagged metal stumps to bore holes in their pail. And Dear Liza walks right into it. In which case Dear Henry's a passive-aggressive psychopath, drawing Dear Liza unwittingly into a murder/suicide pact whereby the lack of any means to fetch, carry, or collect water will kill them both by this time next week. But that doesn't make him an idiot. So where does that leave Dear Liza? At best she's a quick-thinking problem-solver, at worst she's a shortsighted harridan, at middle she's an unwitting pawn in Dear Henry's mindgames. Where you fall on that question is probably a function of whether you see yourself as a Dear Liza or a Dear Henry. But who ever heard of fixing a bucket with a stick, anyway? I mean, honestly. posted by M. Giant 3:01 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
I love this song and sing it far too often for my childrens' tastes.
By A passive-aggressive psychopath and a short-sighted harridan. Hahahahahahahaha. Please will you do more nursery rhyme translations?
By Tuesday, November 09, 2010 Pickup This Several jobs ago, namely the one I was working at when I started this blog, I worked closely with someone I never met. This was when I was helping to run a large call center. Our company had another call center outside of Boston, and that call center had a person who had an equivalent position to mine in Minneapolis. Our job was to try to balance all the call volume coming into the two call centers in real time. As you can imagine, we spent a lot of time on the phone together. As I said, I never met her, but she seemed nice and she seemed to like me. We had a good working relationship. Obviously it was never inappropriate; I was married and I think she was engaged at the time. I haven't talked to her in ten years. Which is why it's weird how she might be stalking me. Her name was Charity. I don't know what her fiancé's last name was or if she opted to take it, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was Pickup. Because someone named Charity Pickup is calling our house constantly. At first we thought it was a telemarketing company, only one that asks you to leave your old stuff on your front step instead of buying stuff from them (that you will one day soon be leaving on your front step). But that doesn't make any sense. We're on all the Do-Not-Call lists, so those types of people Do Not Call. Normally what we do is just pick it up and then hang up right away, depending on what we're in the middle of at the time they call. Sometimes we ignore the ringing and let it go to voice mail. Occasionally we actually answer and tell them to stop calling. Of course the person on the other end of the phone is never Charity from my old job, which proves nothing except that she gets cold feet when we answer and hands the phone off to some middle-aged friend who pretends to be a solicitor for donations. Pathetic, really. She could at least update the script she gives them every once in a while. Or maybe Charity Pickup is a real operation. I still don't know, even though yesterday they made the mistake of calling me at the worst possible time: when I had a few minutes to talk to them. The lady who called asked for me by name. "This is," I said. She told me she was calling on behalf of something or other. "Are you?" I said, cheerfully enough to make her audibly hesitate. But she continued with her spiel. Today, I had decided to make time for Charity Pickup, so I let her continue for almost twenty seconds before cutting her off. I asked her to stop calling. Of course, I've asked these people to stop calling before, but in the same pleasant, even jaunty tone, I told her that, and that we were tired of getting these calls all the time. When we have stuff to give away, we know exactly where to take it, thank you very much, and we've told them several times to stop calling, and that meant that we wanted it to actually, you know, stop. I don't know if she was more thrown by my words or my manner, but she stammered that she would let her manager know and they would put me on the list of people not to call. I thanked her and we wished each other a good day. So when they call again tomorrow or the next day, I look forward to asking to speak to that manager. "Didn't the person who called the other day tell you? I thought I was pretty clear. Even clearer than the other dozen times." I just hope that "manager" doesn't end up being my old coworker Charity after all, because that could be all kinds of awkward. posted by M. Giant 9:20 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:Have you ever actually used Charity Pickup before? I ask because I made the horrible mistake of giving money to Public Television once and after you've done that, you may as well scrawl your phone number in every stall of the PBS rest rooms. The number and persistence of the calls got so bad that I did talk to the manager and told them their method pretty much ensured that I'd never be giving them another dime. I guess some people actually respond to telephone solicitation, but it beats me why.
By I was thrilled to discover our phone service offers the ability to block specific numbers, so we could block the people who kept calling from the same number to pitch us on some politician or pseudo-survey. Calls stop pretty quickly - assuming they keep coming from the same phone-spam source.
By Monday, November 08, 2010 High Camp After our last camping trip, which was plagued by heat, rain, mosquitoes, and ennui, Trash decided we were done amateur camping. We were going pro. This meant pro equipment. I wasn't entirely on board with this, but when she found a used pop-up camper on either eList or Craigsbay, I went to go check it out. It looked nice, and the owner had made some good improvements to it, but in the end it's a folding house that's half made of canvas, and entering it smelled like walking into laundry that sat in the washer for a month. I might have thought that was the end of it, but Trash soon found another prospect. It was about twice the price, but when M. Edium and I drove over to check it out, we were struck by the smell this time as well: new car. I'd done a little research on what to look for in a pop-up camper, and although a lot of it was over my head, I understand that I don't want to sleep on a bed that's not long enough to accommodate my large frame, so I stretched out on one. Looking up through the screen, I saw the clouds drift by overhead…then speed by overhead…and then I felt and heard the crash as that end of the camper tipped to the ground. "Whoa," said M. Edium, balancing like a surfer on a floor that had pitched fifteen degrees under his feet. I was glad I had gained this new experience and knowledge about pop-up trailers before having bought one…although, for all I knew, I had just bought this one. Fortunately, M. Edium and I were able to tip it back to level more gently, there was no damage, and the owner was really apologetic about having forgotten to deploy the leveling jacks. Thus I was able to check out some of the other amenities: a sink, a fridge, even heat and A/C, even if I had no idea how to hook up or use any of them. But we went ahead and did the deal. Trash never even saw it until we got it home, and even then she didn't get to go inside for a couple of days (it was still popped down). We haven't gone very far with it yet; all the advice I've read is that you should try it out on a shorter trip instead of breaking it in on some multi-state road trip, so that's what we did. A few weeks ago, we took it on a very short trip, from the garage to the driveway, and camped out behind the house for the first time ever. Although I'm not sure it counted as camping per se, because the camper was plugged into the garage outlet and Trash's laptop could still pick up our wireless signal. Thus the late evening hours were illuminated not by the campfire but by "It Gets Better" videos. It's changing the whole way we think about camping. Before, the place where we slept took up a fair percentage of our cargo space. Now, it's adding it. Even folded up, there's enough room in there to stash all of the camping gear that normally fills up 5% of our garage when it's home and 125% of our vehicle when we leave. It's freaky. I'm looking forward to our first trip, when we'll be able to see out of all the windows and nobody will have to sit with an Igloo cooler in their lap. My parents asked M. Edium what we need for the camper, and his answer was rather telling, if accurate: "A truck to pull it with." Yeah, so that's the next thing we'll need to work on, I guess. posted by M. Giant 7:15 AM 1 comments 1 Comments:
I sadly confess that my first real exposure to a pop-up camper was from the Oprah show that aired a couple of weeks ago where she and Gayle went to Yosemite.
By Wednesday, November 03, 2010 Key Change I lost my keys but good a few weeks ago. This happens sometimes. I lose my cell phone more often, but it has this handy feature where I can dial its number and it'll signal where it is, which is 90% of what I use my phone for. My keys have no such feature. I've heard about those thingies you can attach so you can whistle for them, but the only time anybody ever thinks about those is when their keys are missing and you couldn't attach it to the ring anyway. I knew they were somewhere on the property, because I had let myself into the house with them the night before. How far could they have gotten? I also knew that M. Edium hadn't hidden them, because while he sometimes hides my watch or my phone for fun, he doesn't lie about it when asked. Not convincingly, at least. I looked in all the first-tier places: the kitchen, the entryway the study, the pockets of the clothes I'd worn the day before. Then came the second-tier places: the floors under the tables, hanging from the locks outside the doors, the pockets of the clothes I'd worn two and three days before. I had to drive M. Edium to school with Trash's keys before I got to the third-tier places like the driveway, M. Edium's bed (trust but verify), and the freezer, but they came up empty too. I could function without my keys in the short term, but I was going to have to either find them or replace them in the next couple of days. Or, as I knew it was going to end up being, both. You see, M. Giant's Law still rears its ugly head around here once in a while. I try to keep my key chain slimmed down, so here's a quick rundown of what's on it: • A little electronic doohickey that generates a new password for my employer's remote network every thirty-six seconds. Since I don't get kicked out of the network every thirty-six seconds, more than half of those passwords go to waste. • The key and remotes for my car and Trash's, both Saturns. I tell them apart by how mine has the words "lock" and "unlock" on buttons that, on Trash's, have little pictures of locks. I keep meaning to look at her owner's manual to see if it's written the same way. • Key to our front door. • Key to our back door. • Key to our side door, which we only use when we're moving something very large in or out of the basement and which we only ever unlock from the inside anyway and now that I'm looking at it I'm not even sure that's what that key is for. • Key to a file cabinet I never lock and only carry around because it's tiny and otherwise I'll lose it and accidentally lock the file cabinet. • Mini membership card for CVS ExtraCare that I got two years ago, which is odd because I haven't been inside a CVS in four years. The little electronic doohickey could wait a few days, because I got a temporary static password that I could use. I borrowed Trash's keys to my car, because despite my admonitions she refuses to carry them around anyway. One of us is almost always home, so getting in and out just required a little planning ahead. But when my car got dropped off for repairs and I had to borrow Trash's -- and her keys -- it was time to invoke M. Giant's Law. After all, the keys had been gone for two days by this point. So I went to the neighborhood hardware store and got copies made of 25% of Trash's keys (she carries hers in a purse and doesn't abide by my size limitations, so I have no idea what the other 75% of the shit on her janitor-sized slagheap of a keyring is and I suspect neither does she). Soon I had my new versions of everything but the remote and key to Trash's car, the doohickey, and the stuff I wasn't worried about. But my keys still hadn't turned up. The next day, I was still living with my substitute keyring, just about resolved to the fact that it would be my permanent one, but just in case, I drove halfway across town to get a replacement key for Trash's car, at a cost of four bucks. I still didn't know what I was going to do about replacing the remote to Trash's car now that Saturn is just a planet again, and my temporary password was about to expire. And my keys were missing, even though I'd not only tossed and looked under all the furniture, I dissected it. I was starting to think I'd need to request a new doohickey from IT, buy a new file cabinet, and rejoin that CVS loyalty program I've never used. Then that afternoon I was taking M. Edium somewhere. I picked up his sweatshirt off the end of the couch where it had been draped, and there were my keys. "How could you have missed them there all this time?" Trash wondered. She didn't get it. "They weren't there all this time," I explained. I’m just glad they're back. Because there was one other key on there I didn't mention, and I probably would have needed to call a locksmith to get it replaced. The thing it locks is new, expensive, and not especially portable. posted by M. Giant 8:49 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:Oh, do tell...
By Tuesday, November 02, 2010 Rocky Mountain Huh We have an established pattern with M. Edium's birthdays: odd-number years we throw a party, even-number years we take him on a trip. This year we kind of accidentally did both, but we'll come back to the party another day. We had big plans for the trip. All of us loved the cabin we stayed in on Monte Sano over Huntsville, Alabama this summer. And M. Edium wanted to revisit the Space Center, where the Star Wars exhibit was scheduled to give way to a Narnia exhibit. We even planned to bring M. Edium's cousin Deniece, a Narnia fan of even longer standing than M. Edium. Never mind wondering what Narnia has to do with NASA, unless the exhibit includes a wardrobe that you can ride into orbit. But the timing didn't work out with everyone and by the time we were ready to order the plane tickets they'd doubled in price in that maddening way that airline tickets have of doing. I said after the fact that we should have bought them anyway, and then if we couldn't go we could just scalp them. You never see scalpers working the gates at the airport terminals, and I think there's a wide-open market niche that I should probably look into someday when I have more time. However, there were still cheap tickets to be had to Denver, so M. Edium went for that instead. And we were still staying in a mountain cabin -- just on one of many mountains instead of a single one. We planned to stay in Estes Park, a vacation community tucked halfway up the Front Range. If the Rockies were the Himalayas, Estes Park would be Everest Base Camp, if Everest Base Camp were more like a gentrified Wisconsin Dells or Branson and less like a tent city mined with human poo. There was just one thing we forgot to take into account, on the warm September day when I was reserving the cabin. Even though I got it for an "off-season special rate" of "third night free," I somehow didn't take into account the fact that in late October, in northern Colorado, at an altitude of 7,500 feet, it gets cold. Trash and I are not in the habit of checking luggage, and the only worse thing to deal with on a plane than a talkative seatmate is a winter coat, so we were pretty underpacked. We habitually went out in layered sweatshirts with the hoods up, if at all. Fortunately the cabin was equipped with a DVD player, board games you could borrow from the lodge, and a relentlessly hilarious dad for entertainment. But we still wanted to get out. Trash and I hadn't been up to the top of Trail Ridge Road since the mid-nineties, and we wanted to check it out again, if only to show it to the kids. Unfortunately most of it was closed, so we never got above 9,000 feet. Fortunately the kids didn't know any better than to think you couldn't drive to the top of the Rockies during any time of year. And I'm happy to say that even the whistling mountain wind and the blowing snow didn't prevent us from playing a couple of rounds of outdoor mini-golf. Or, I should say it didn't prevent the kids from playing. We adults weren't about to take our hands out of our pockets. Six feet from the door of our cabin was a boulder the size of a squashed school bus. On the top of the boulder was a depression filled with a cup or two of water, a source of endless fascination for M. Edium, who called it his "pond." On our last morning it had frozen solid, even after the water had been contaminated with other things M. Edium had added, like dirt, pebbles, a stick, bits of pine cone, his leftover tomato soup, and a not inconsiderable amount of his own spit. So it was cold. Being from Minnesota, we're not used to going on vacation in places that are colder than home. I'm not saying we won't do it again. But if we do, we'll try to do it on purpose. posted by M. Giant 7:31 AM 2 comments 2 Comments:
I just got back from a trip to visit a family member in Fort Collins- we went up to Estes Park for the day. So beautiful!
By Your kids will thank you. My family went to the Y almost every summer in Estes and I have such good memories. My dad used to hand me a $20, I'd buy a day pass on the trolley and head into town.
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