Love to all.
EMDJ

Somebody asked us, “Well, are you getting Verizon Fios?”  Thing is, we already have it.  It’s been working just fine.  So I need to be patient and understanding that with this new, “upgraded” fiber optic network things will be better for more people.  That’s great.

But here’s the thing, Folks.  I work from home.  I am in graduate school.  My office (on the front of the house, facing the front yard) is my high-productivity place of awesomeness.  So how am I supposed to be awesome with this going on outside my house?

And this is the infernal noise it makes.

Dreadful.  As a result, I’m unable to get any reading or writing done.  And yes, I did try going to a different part of the house.  No better.  The dining room is on the same level as the noisy drill, and the family room is underground, so the whole room is shaking like a dog pooping razor blades.   I hope it doesn’t hurt the large TV.

So, since I luckily have some work to do that does not require my whole brain, I’m submitting articles (and of course one of the article submission sites is being an utter pain in the patookis) and watching horror movies on my office DVD player.  The kitty is hanging right in here with me, curled up in the circle chair in my office.

I started with the original Halloween, which is (as far as I’m concerned) one of the most awesome horror movies of all time.  It has the right amount of terror, a strong heroine, and a horrifying bad guy.  Halloween II was next, which gives us a little background on Michael Myers, and shows us that he is, in fact, invincible and evil.  Invincibly evil.  Evilly invincible.  Is fantastic.  My favorite parts are when Laurie’s wanna-be boyfriend finds the nurse that Michael Myers had drained all the blood out of, and he totally does a slapstick-type slip up and lands flat on his back in all the blood, and when Michael gets shot in the head and the blood runs into his eyes, making it so that he can’t see and therefore just swipes blindly at Dr. Loomis with the knife.  I know.  I’m a weirdo.

I skipped Halloween III, because it’s completely unrelated, and I don’t have IV, V, or VI, so I skipped straight to Halloween H20:  20 Years Later, because it pretends that those other ones never happened, either.

I haven’t seen the Rob Zombie remakes.  If someone wants to send them to me for free I’ll review them.  Otherwise I have to wait until they cost less than $20 each.  My horror budget is depleted.  I also bought Nightmare on Elm Street I, II, III, and IV all in the same little package.  I don’t like those as much as the Halloween movies, but the third one is quite fun.

More about that later.  Back to the work I can accomplish with this infuriating noise going on, and when they finally stop maybe I can get some copy written and some schoolwork done.  Or, I might have beat my head against the wall until I’m blissfully unconscious by then.

I will now amuse you with badly-taken photographs of a dog I met recently.  I can’t remember his name, because it was an odd, exotic name, and I didn’t really hear it the first three times the dog’s owner told it to me.

Meet Whats-His-Name, the adorable French Bulldog:

Cute, huh?

So here are a few snippets of things that have occupied/amused me in the past few days that I thought I’d share with you:

1.  I saw some real Gideons.  They were giving out tiny green Bibles on campus on Tuesday.  The tiny Bible has the New Testament, and also Proverbs and Psalms.  It’s like a “best of” compilation…all the important Jesus stuff plus all the highly quotable and frequently quoted stuff.  The man handed it to me and said, “Keys to the kingdom?”  I thanked him and smiled.  Later, walking to a class, I saw one of the tiny green Bibles on the ground in Schafer Court.  Its cover was slightly crumpled.  That made me sad.  I picked it up (it was slightly sticky) and carried it to my next class, and put it on a bookshelf in the conference room.  There.  That was better.

Incidentally, I’d like to admit freely that in retrospect I really wanted the Gideons to be wearing fezzes.

2.  Speaking of fezzes, Hubs and I went to the Pork Festival at RIR a few weekends ago.  I was DD, because the guys fully intended on abusing the “all you can drink” portion of the event.  Hubs didn’t really believe it was “all you can drink” and hightailed it over to the beer truck asking the attendant “can I really come back as many times as I want?” to which she replied, “Yep.”  He wasn’t so much asking for himself, but for our friends who might have incited a riot if told that there was a minimum.  Hubs didn’t get housed, but friends got pretty toasty and sang hymns on the way back to the car (which, even with  me sober, took 20 minutes to find).

Right.  Fezzes.  The Pork Festival was put on by the Acca Temple, who are Shriners.  I was expecting lots of fezzes and maybe even some tiny cars.  I was truly hoping for the opportunity to ask a Shriner where they buy their tiny cars.  Do they come in kits?  This is a question that I’ve wondered about for a long time.  Alas, there were only two Dudes in Fezzes and no tiny cars.

This tiny picture represents my very favorite part of the festival.  These guys are the Acca Temple Country Western Band.  As you see, the upright bass player is one of the two fez-wearers I could find.  They were awesome.  I would seriously go to a Shriner event to see them play again.  I want to write them up on that Richmond website I write for.

So that’s just two, Folks.  I have to go finish this crazy project I’m working on (crazy because I got WAY too in depth on it) and then write some articles, go make copies of the crazy presentation, and head myself down to VCU.

I won’t be such a stranger.  Promise.  Plus, I should have a guest blogger coming up sometime soon.  Won’t that be nice?

There are certain movies that whenever they are on TV, I watch them. A League of Their Own is one of those movies. But I’m not going to talk about that movie (or PCU, or The Fifth Element), though I will likely tell you all about the finer points of all those movies in the future. Tonight I’m going to say a few words on The Bodyguard, starring Whitney Houston (pre-coked-up hot mess madness) and Kevin (I Have No Facial Expressions) Costner.

I will say one thing. They both do OK in this movie, because neither of them are acting. Kevin Costner is the same guy he was in, say, Dances with Wolves, or even A Perfect World (which I actually love). He’s expressionless, gruff, reticent…you know, Costner-ish. Whitney Houston is an absolute vision – she’s beautiful, she has an undeniably gorgeous voice, and her performance is not laughable, even though it’s not very believable during the actual acting parts (ie her interaction with other actors). All in all it’s not bad. For a first movie, it’s actually pretty OK.

My main beef is with Michele Lamar Richards, who plays Whitney’s jealous and (spoiler alert!) murder-conspiring sister. She’s only done a handful of films (one was a vehicle for MC Lyte – just imagine) and a LOT of TV. I’ve not seen any of that, so I can’t pass judgment on her as an actor in THOSE things. But in The Bodyguard she’s just awful. She alternates between looking terrified and looking drunk (BESIDES the scene where she actually is supposed to be drunk) and then in her pivotal scene where she IS drunk and she’s telling all about how she hired someone to kill her sister she looks like she’s going to sneeze the whole time. Then she gets killed, so there is no chance of her acting her way back out of that.

Backing up though, there is that scene where Kevin Costner and his dad are walking around outside and the sister’s out on the porch singing “Jesus Loves Me” and I’m sitting here thinking WHO DOES THAT? Who goes out to some stranger’s cabin in the middle of the damn woods when you’ve hired someone to KILL your SISTER and sings “Jesus Loves Me” in a self-conscious way. Plus, isn’t hard to sing in the cold? Don’t your vocal cords get all cold and stuff? Inquiring minds want to know.

You judge:

And another thing. It’s just a leetle too convenient that the hired killer turns out to be Kevin Costner’s character’s old partner or coworker or whatever. We meet him earlier in the movie and Whitney Houston makes out with him a little and he’s all pushy and stuff.

Wait a minute. Is that how it ends? I said I always watch it when it’s on TV, but that doesn’t mean I usually finish it. Being self righteously critical is exhausting, you know?

So, recap. Shoulder pads, inappropriate singing, silver pop helmets, murderous sisters. Sorry I didn’t get to the shoulder pads or the silver pop helmet. Always leave ‘em wanting more, my grandma always says.

I have an awesome part time job writing for a fantastic SEO Company full of terribly nice people. Among other things, I write a blog about Richmond that talks about the best of the city and highlights certain things and people and places. It’s www.richmondvapresents.com and I would love it if you’d visit it let me know what you think. Also, if you’re a Richmonder and have a business or thing (not THAT thing, you perv) you’d like me to write about, I’ll consider it.

I am in graduate school and beating my head against a wall for taking three (3) THREE literature-intensive classes this semester. The reading alone is enough to blind you, and on top of that you’re expected to be able to form cohesive thoughts and scholarly opinions about things. Don’t let me fool you – I love it, but I’m totally overwhelmed and freaking out.

Those are the two main things going on in my life other than The Hubs, The Rents, The Cat, The Dog, and The House, which are all doing pretty good and say hi, Internet.

Off to the weekend, which will not feel like a weekend at all because I have to do a ton of work and write a paper, prepare a presentation, and read practically everything Oscar Wilde ever wrote. But it will be fun, so who needs a weekend?

So, I’m freaking out about grad school. I’ve stepped in it with my boss. I’m generally in an 11:38 PM place where I haven’t gotten enough done and I am alternating between tears and hysterical laughter. Just another Thursday night.

So for background I put on “Dirty Dancing” because it was on TV the other day and I caught a minute or two and then I went to Best Buy to try to buy Wonderfalls and it (Dirty Dancing – the 20th Anniversary Edition) was on sale for $7, so I bought it.

A few pieces of criticism, as it makes me feel like I’m in control of my life (and I’m obviously not).

When Neil comes to Johnny to tell him that he wants to switch up the final dance of the season from something other than the Mambo, and Johnny shows him a few steps of the thing Johnny has in mind before Neil totally jocks him, those steps? Those are the ONLY steps the whole “staff” does at the end of the movie, while Jennifer Gray is standing there smiling maniacally and swishing her skirt. Really? Maybe he should have tried to verbally conceptualize the dance instead of showing off the ONLY MOVES that he planned on putting into this revolutionary final dance.

The 80′s music injected into a period piece? Not so great. Although I did learn how to play “She’s Like the Wind” on piano, that song “Yes” that they play when the sister is walking to get some for the first time with Robbie? And the use of “Hungry Eyes?” Not so good. Granted, I owned this soundtrack on cassette when I was 10 and found no fault in it whatsoever, I chalk that up to the fact that every girl wanted to be mousy ol’ Baby and find a hunky dancing Patrick Swayze to adore her and declare that she shouldn’t be put in a corner. Didn’t help that Jennifer Gray went and got decidedly un-mousy and let all us mousy girls down.

The lift at the end? From a pure dancing perspective (and I do have some authority to say so, since I did dance semi-professionally for a little while) it wasn’t so clever. Baby nods, gets lifted to the jumping point, runs at Johnny, and then just stays suspended in the air while everyone claps. Like a dog show, but with prettier clothes.

This is what I do when I’m freaked out. I ply you guys with semi-valid observations about 80′s movies. I’ve just put on Moonstruck, wherein I’ll roll around on the floor and wallow in my lack of productivity and mind-numbing fear.

The other night, while drinking out of a bottle of Smart Water, I opened the linen closet door. My depth perception is obviously a little off, as I smacked the door into the bottom of the bottle, thus ramming the mouthpiece of the bottle into my pursed lips. I now have two fat lips with little cuts where the bottle smooshed my lip up against my teeth. It is unfortunate.

There is fall in the breeze, and when I catch a whiff of it it reminds me of unending possibilities and newness. It makes me feel happy.