Goal #13

Goal #13: pack and move.

"What?!" you might exclaim.  "You bought a place of your own finally?"

No, no I did not.  But I will be spending this week helping other people move heavy things.  Hopefully I don't drop anything on my toes.

Recap of goal #12: so many parties!  For his birthday, T and I went to dinner at Sportsman's Park then went to see Tim's Vermeer (more on that later).  That was Tuesday.

Friday night I went out to dinner with G&G, M, and A for Grandma's birthday.  We ate at Mad Tomato, which was good, but not particularly worthy of a post in itself.  Grandpa and M were big fans of their beer selection though - Grandpa for some special Budweiser that they had, and M for the Goose Island Matilda, a Belgian ale.  I started with a pear salad which was disappointing in that it only had two slices of pear, but otherwise fine.  Dinner was a mushroom pizza.  The flavor was great (I still have two pieces left over), but it was pretty greasy.  We were all so stuffed that no one had dessert.

Last night was my friend M's birthday (different one from the Matilda drinker).  I made him some cookies and a group of his friends (myself included) went and had food and drinks at The Sports Pub down in Oakville.

And speaking of SoCo, I'll be there again tonight for T's actual family birthday fete!

Hyperbole and a Half -- Take 2

Oh, Allie Brosch.  You are such a strange being. 

Much of what is in this book is pulled directly from her now-rarely-updated blog, but I'm pretty sure there are some new ones too (or at least ones that I don't remember from the blog).  As with any book of short stories, which is essentially what this is, some stories are better than others.  There were some that were so funny I laughed until I couldn't read any more.  Others were just moderately amusing.

For anyone who doesn't know (though you can take a peek at the blog to see), Allie illustrates her stories with crude pictures created in MS Paint; the cover of the book is her own, um, art.  So I guess the best description of this book is that it's a collection of short stories in graphic novel form.  And what I love about short stories is that you can easily read one or two when it's convenient.  And this was a most excellent way to end the evening and get ready for sleep.

Thanks, K!

Random Links

Super Mario, the new ancient version.

From T: "Overlong article on the evils of frat life ... But the first few paragraphs are well-written and very, very funny. The first sentence of the third paragraph should achieve immortality in the field of legal writing."

To steal other T's thoughts on this article, which I think are dead on: he tries to tie together two very different ideas, and that's rather tenuous.  But the bigger point seems right nonetheless.

Could you do this?

Funny dogs.

The disciplined pursuit of less.

Happy Birthday, Grandma!

Happy Birthday, T!

It's a punny picture for you!

Goal #12

Goal #12: celebrations!

Both T and G have birthdays this week, and we need to celebrate!

Recap of goal #11: I did pretty well drinking tea during the week.  Iced tea, it turns out, is an okay drink.  But this past weekend when I was in KC, I went back to coffee.  I was at a lovely B&B (more on this later), and the coffee was so delicious and plentiful!

What I Watched -- August: Osage County

I have been on a film kick!  August: Osage County was my next movie, and I'm going to say something similar about it as I said about Dallas Buyers Club.

The acting was good, and it was quite a cast: Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper (whom I love),  Ewan MacGregor, Sam Shepard in a bit part, Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch (whom I will now only ever refer to by his full name), Dermot Mulroney (also kind of an awesome name), and Juliette Lewis, among others.

And this really was a movie about acting.  Before I saw it, someone told me not to bother, because I would just be watching famous people scream at each other over dinner for two hours.  I watched it anyway, and they were right.  But it was emotional yelling, emphatic yelling, and well done.

Bottom line: the actors really do get into these roles, and it's like watching actual family members really fight with each other.  Well done, but why?

Orchids All Around

T and I made our annual trek to the Missouri Botanical Garden for the orchid show a couple of weeks ago.

It was one of the few lovely days we've had outside, so even after we saw all the lovely orchids which are kept inside, we wandered the grounds for a bit just to enjoy the sunshine.  Unfortunately none of the trees have started to leaf out yet, so it was pretty drab as far as photo opportunities go, but we did happen upon a stray dog which, according to park personnel, has been living quite happily inside the park for some months now.  They have so far been unsuccessful in catching her, and she in indeed quite skittish.  Probably nothing you couldn't cure with a few packages of hot dogs though.  I wanted to take her home!

Taste of Fiction

Another awesome St. Louis food event!  A Taste of Fiction was a fundraiser for the St. Louis Public Library Foundation, and they did the best possible thing they could have done, by also bringing in the food community.

Supporters (including Letter J and yours truly) got canapes and drinks to tide them over, but the real treat were the cakes (not for eating! -- although there were mini cupcakes as a consolation prize).  The cakes were lit-inspired creations put together by some of the best pastry chefs in St. Louis.  It would have been a bit gosh for me to be taking pictures, but there were a number of professional photographers there, so I'll rip off what I can from the interwebs (really from StL Today) for your viewing pleasure:

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The Jungle Book (and I think the night's winning cake, not that winners were picked) by Rudyard Kipling

 Life of Pi by Yann Martel

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Twenty-Seventh City by Jonathan Franzen

The only possible addition I can make to these pictures is to remind you that this was all set in the main hall of the lovely Central Library.  If you haven't seen it, you need to.

What I Watched -- Dallas Buyers Club

I didn't make it to Dallas Buyers Club before awards season ended, but I did finally make it.  It's a bit of a tough movie to watch, but a good story with a number of redeeming characters.

And speaking of characters, Matthew McConaughey as Ron Woodruff and Jared Leto as Rayon both deserved their Oscars.  They completely disappeared into their characters.  The movie as a whole was alright.  It was a good story, but I wasn't enthralled.

Bottom line: great acting, good heart, decent story.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Goal #11

Goal #11: less coffee, more tea.

For some reason last week, I started drinking iced tea at work. We have it at our office every day, but for some reason until last week I only ever drank coffee.  With the warm weather coming on (I hope), some iced tea might be a nice change.  Hot tea, which has been a goal before, is okay too!

Recap of goal #10: I worked -- very late on Monday night.  I climbed twice -- and did well both times!  I had two lovely dinners -- Ernesto's Wine Bar and The Melting Pot.  Whew, I was busy!

What I Watched -- Days of Wine and Roses

C, the movie lover in my office with whom I often share a drink, recommended this movie to me.  Given the two facts I just told you about him, you can imagine my surprise when he recommended it by saying, "it'll make you want to quit drinking."

I haven't quit drinking, but having now seen the movie, I can see why he thought I might. This movie is a tour-de-force exploration of the effects that alcohol can have on a person.

Jack Lemmon plays Joe.  Joe meets Kirsten, played by the lovely Lee Remick.  Jack is a hard-drinking PR man.  Kirsten is the prim and proper assistant of one of Jack's clients.  Kirsten doesn't drink, she eats chocolate -- until the day she tries a brandy Alexander.

Then they drink together.  They have fun.  They get married.  They drink more.  It becomes a problem, and things fall apart.  They never stop loving each other, but they stop being functional people.  They try, with varying levels of success, to clean up their lives, but it's clear that it can never be the way it was.  All the while, you see their marriage disintegrating and see the people around them brought down by their alcoholism.  It's dark.

Bottom line: a heartbreaking peek into what could have been such a normal life.

Goal #10

Goal #10: work, work, work.

Really this is a goal for the next three days.  I have a trial and a couple of settlement conferences early this week.

Must.  Work.  Lots.

After that, smooth sailing for a couple of days -- thank goodness!

Recap of goal #9: I made it to a yoga class!  Now if I could only make that a weekly occurrence, at least!

Legos!

Legos are far and away the coolest toys ever invented.  I still have all mine from when I was a kid.  So what option did I have when The Lego Movie came out besides to go see it?

None.  That's the answer.  No other option.

And going to see it was a brilliant choice!  In the grand tradition of classic Pixar films (which it's actually not - it's a Warner Bros. creation), it has something for everyone.

It's the same basic obvious-bad-guy, unassuming-good-guy story.  Our unassuming good guy is Emmet, a construction worker who is mistaken for "The Special," the one who will save the Lego world from destruction by President Business (yes, there is politics in this movie too - are you surprised?  You shouldn't be.)

Bottom line: aside from possibly the most nuclear-missile-grade earworm of an original song ever, it was laugh-out-loud (yes, I really did) funny.

12 Years a Slave

12 Years a Slave won the Academy Award for Best Picture.  I don't think I ever wrote about it, but I did actually see this movie.  I didn't like it much.  Maybe that's why I didn't write about it.

I do like to say the name Chiwetel Ejiofor though, so maybe I should write.

The aforementioned Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Solomon Northup, a free black man who is captured and sold into slavery for -- you guessed it -- 12 years.  Clever title, eh?  He wants to get home.  The whole thing is unjust.

Okay, we get that.  It's not that it wasn't unjust.  It's not that this didn't really happen (actually based on a true story).  It's just that I'm sort of tired of these movies.  That's all.

Bottom line: too much introspection for a story you've heard a hundred times.  There were better options to win the Oscar.  Like, probably, any of them.

Ginastera and Rachmaninoff and Elgar, Oh My!

Grandpa shared a set of symphony tickets with me last weekend.  A solid show all the way through, and fairly contemporary, as classical music goes.

Let's start at the beginning.  First was Ginastera's Variaciones Concertantes.  The music wasn't my favorite, but what was awesome about it was that each movement highlighted a different instrument.  It didn't hurt a bit that it opened with a cello solo, and the first cello is probably my favorite musician in the whole place.  Each section of the music moved on to a new section of the orchestra: flute, clarinet, oboe, contrabassoon, and on and on.  It was neat.

Then came the Rachmaninoff, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.  It was amazing to watch the pianist's hands fly over the keys.  Very impressive.

We finished with the title piece, Elgar's Enigma Variations.  I was good and read the blurb in the program about this piece before it started (it was entertaining!), and I found out that he patterned and named each movement after a friend of his, except the last, which he named after himself.  (Humble guy.)  Nimrod, Variation IX, is the most famous.

The piece starts.  We travel from movement to movement.  I'm really not counting.  Then I hear it, and I know this has to be Variation IX -- probably because it sounded familiar and IX was the one I was most likely to have heard before.  Sure enough, I count the rest of the movements and we hit the finale, the trombones play, and Variation XIV, E.D.U., wraps up the show.

It only could have been better if one of my favorite conductors had been there.

Art in Bloom

Rather than venture into the Mardi Gras craziness, T and I set out for the St. Louis Art Museum on Saturday night for their Art in Bloom event.

We started the evening with a lecture by Judith Farr, set designer for Downton Abbey as well as a number of well-known movies.  She talked about the work she does generally, and specifically about working in the castle they use to shoot the TV show, what's shot there and elsewhere, how they get everything set up, continuity between scenes, and so on, with a specific focus on the floral arrangements because of the particular event that was going on.  She is quite a gardener herself, and had a few pictures of her own house; they used flowers from her garden for a number of shots, including several of the wedding posies!  (British people are awesome.  Just FYI.)

From there we wandered the museum to see the works of art in bloom, which is exactly what they were - and quite impressive! Floral designers took inspiration from a work in the museum and created a floral piece which mirrored or interpreted it.  The floral pieces were placed in the galleries close to the originals, which made it easy to see where the design came from.

One of my favorites, though I don't think it won any awards was inspired by Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion.  Want to see the works yourself?  Put it on the calendar for next year.

Goal #9

Goal #9: yoga!

This is a simple goal.  I just need to go once this week.  Good?  Good.  Okay.

Recap of goal #8: I actually got a lot of errands done!  Post office, REI, grocery store, Home Depot, tailor, the haircut (!).  All sorts of things.  I meant to stop at Goodwill, but started daydreaming and drove right past the drop-off location.  T was going by the same spot the next day and offered to take my stuff for me.  So I count that as a total win, but only half mine.  Thanks T!