Goals 2020 -- April Recap

Massive success!  Here's my April calendar recording of my outdoor activities -- six days per week!

Movies -- A Recap -- Part III

We decided to temper all that outdoor excitement with a bit of a downer: The Accountant of Auschwitz.  It's a documentary about the eventual trial of Oskar Groning.  He was barely out of his teens when, as a member of the SS, he had the job of taking personal belongings from Jews who were brought to Auschwitz.

It was an interesting partner to We Were the Lucky Ones, which I just finished reading.  More history, less personal story, but definitely an opposing perspective on the events of 1944.


I didn't remember much about Sling Blade from when it came out, except really not understanding the clip of it that I saw when Billy Bob Thornton was nominated for an Academy Award.  It turns out, it's quite good.  It's a simple story with simple characters, but tells the touching if someone fantastic story of a developmentally delayed man released from a mental hospital where he had lived since he murdered his mother and her lover as a child.




For some reason, we had The Place Beyond the Pines on our Netflix list.  I had no idea why, no idea what it was about, but we decided to watch it recently.  It's an interesting good-guy-bad-guy story, one of those morally ambiguous story lines that leave you thinking about the situation someone finds himself in, the cascade of choices that led to that point, and the life that follows.

Beware of act three: the teenagers' accents are infuriating.  And from that point, it goes downhill.


Palm Trees in the Snow was a random Netflix pick.  It had a lot of potential, and it didn't entirely disappoint.  It didn't fully satisfy either.  When a young Spanish woman's father dies, she finds papers among his personal possessions that lead her on a quest to discover her family's history, tracing it all the way back to family's plantation in Africa and uncovering the stories that were never supposed to be revealed.

Movies -- A Recap -- Part II

Blow the Man Down was one of those obscure movies that we picked out of the blue despite neither of us ever having heard of it.  It turned out to be a dark and cold film, in that north country kind of way.  But it's also surprisingly heartwarming, in a way I did not quite expect.







S found Uncorked for us to watch, and it was a good bet for me right out of the gate.  A barbecue joint kid has such a bug for wine that he applies to take the master somm exam.  It's got the best of both worlds for me -- food and drink!  The plot was predictable, but I found it immensely charming.  And, despite hip-hop really not being my type of music independent of context, it fit well into the movie and I very much enjoyed it overall.




We had one very long movie night in which we watched a slew of outdoor documentaries:

- We started with Sea Gypsies, a true story of a group of ragtag sailors who set off from New Zealand bound for Patagonia in a 120-foot monohull sailboat.  It's a completely unlikely adventure, but fun to go along for the ride.








- The second movie in our marathon was The Hell of the North (County), a recounting of the 2018 Canyon Belgian Waffle Ride, a breakfast-provided century-and-a-half gravel/road/dirt race through the hills near San Diego.  Looks fun and terribly miserable all at the same time.







- Finally came Live the Stream, a biopic about Joe Humphreys, a fly-fishing legend from Pennsylvania.  Though I have been a fisherman (or "fisherperson," as E prefers that we be called) for years, I never got much into the lore of fly fishing, other than to periodically read or watch A River Runs Through It.  (Although, let's not forget about that trip to the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame and Museum in Wisconsin!)  Apparently this guy is a living part of the fishing lore; how much of this movie is just hero-worship is unclear to me, but this guy's wonderful attitude and good spirit make it fun to watch anyway.

Movies -- A Recap -- Part I

S and I, as with much of the country and the world, have been watching a lot of movies lately.  Here's a recap with some quick thoughts:

Zombieland: Double Tap is the sequel to -- you guessed it -- Zombieland.  It is less entertaining than the original, although it probably is suffering in part from overly-high expectations.  I expected nothing from the first movie, and so was pleasantly surprised.  I expected this one to be as funny, so when it was slightly less good, it seemed like a disappointment.






As I recall, I never saw the last few episodes of the show, but that doesn't at all impair one's ability to follow the story line of the Downton Abbey movie.  And, though it was a delight to visit with the beloved characters again, the movie itself just isn't that great.

I remember when The Fighter came out.  I recall some Oscar buzz, and I'm basically predestined to like anything that has Amy Adams in it, and Mark Wahlberg doesn't hurt a movie's case either.  And any movie like this is made all the better when the fairy tale is based on a real live person.

S found a super cute movie called Troop Zero for us to watch.  And when I say "super cute," it's a movie about kids, so you sure know that I mean it!  100% adorable.  Totally love everything about it; very touching.  And the lead child actress was spectacular.







I had head the ridiculous name Awkwafina before, but it seems even dumber when associated with someone in the film The Farewell, which is otherwise a reasonably thoughtful appreciation of a particular cultural oddity.  And I really just wanted the girl with the weird name to stand up straight, rather than slumping forward all the time, for Pete's sake!

We found the cult classic Clue, which was both better than I imagined and unsurprisingly inappropriate.  But enjoyable despite all the terrible 1980s comedy which abounds, although I could do without all the shrieking.








Go! was passable as entertainment, but not spectacular for any other purpose.  It's a teenage love story flying in circles around a go kart track.  It's fun and cute, in a very teenage way.  So also probably not worth the time.

We Were the Lucky Ones -- Take 2

We all made an exception to our Postal Book Club page limit to read We Were the Lucky Ones, which was on all of our lists.

Despite my initial excitement about this book (due in no small part to the family tree at the opening), it took me a little while to get going on in.  In fact, about 50 pages in, I took a break to read The Girl in the Spider's Web.  In retrospect, I believe this needed break was due more to the pandemic than anything else.  There was a lot going on in the process of trying to figure out what was the right thing to do, getting myself set up to work from home, figuring out whether S would be able to work from home, whether it was even safe to buy groceries, and all that other stuff.  I needed a little light reading while I figured all that out.

Once I finished Spider's Web and went back to this one, I couldn't put it down.

It is the story of the Kurc family, Jews living mostly in the Polish city of Radom out the outbreak of World War II in Europe.  The story forks as the family is broken up, both voluntarily and involuntarily.  The chapters rotate through different family members, tracking them through the war years as they lose touch with each other and desperately try to stay alive.  It is a surprisingly gripping story, with each rotation to a different family member bringing different horrors and new perspectives on what survival can be, no matter how meager the means.

It is based on the story of the author's family, which makes it all the more fascinating.

What I Read -- The Girl in the Spider's Web

As I mentioned a while back, I accidentally picked up the sixth book in the Millennium series at the library more than a month ago.  I did end up going back and swapping out book 6 for book 4: The Girl in the Spider's Web.

This was not my favorite of the books in the series.  I don't know whether it was just that I didn't find the details of the story as compelling, or whether it has more to do with David Lagercrantz's writing.  I didn't have any trouble getting through the book, which makes me think that it is the former.

This picks up the story of Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander several months after the prior book left off.  Lisbeth has all but disappeared; Mikael hasn't written anything worth reading in the meantime and his magazine, Millennium, is struggling mightily.  The murder of an IT genius brings them back together, on an unusual quest to find the man's lost research and save his autistic child, the only witness to the murder.

Saying much more would spoil things, so I won't.  Despite being so far my least favorite of the four books in the series that I've read, it's still a page turner.

Being Mortal -- Take 2

I have gotten very behind on my posts.  The consequence of that is that many of my memories of books read and movies watched are fading, and for that I apologize.  Nevertheless, I will do my best to share my thoughts about my recent (and not-so-recent) selections.

First up, Being Mortal.  I had heard generally positive things about Atul Gawande's many books, but had never previously read any of them.  I found Being Mortal to be a very easy read.  Rather than being overly preachy about the importance of end-of-life planning, those lessons come in the context of stories -- many of them personal stories about his own parents.  There are also some good, practical questions that we should all think through, even if we are not planning on needing end-of-life care in the near future.  It's better to think about these critical issues when the situation isn't critical.

Perhaps my favorite part of the book, though, was the historical context in which he places these questions.  At the beginning, people just didn't live that long, so these questions didn't need to be answered.  Then, once they did start living longer, we didn't know what to do with them so we put them in nursing homes, which generally were pretty horrid, jail-like places.  Following that, the assisted living revolution came along.  Where it still truly is "assisted living," it is an improvement over the prior situation.  However, many facilities that call themselves assisted living are no better than the original nursing homes they were meant to replace.  The latest shift is in favor of hospice or palliative care -- for both cost and preference reasons.  It is more important than ever (for a variety of reasons) for people to feel that they can remain independent, even with some limitations, and the costs of assisted living facilities or nursing homes are more than many can afford, especially in light of how much longer people are living.

Even since I finished reading this book a couple of months ago, I have seen some stories about user-friendly approaches to end-of-life care, especially for patients with dementia. One is a completely enclosed village in Holland; one in Cleveland is designed to look like a small town from the 1930s or 1940s, to remind people of where they grew up.  How neat is that?  As a bit of a dovetail, there was also recently an episode of Hidden Brain called "The Bomb That Didn't Explode: Why Our Fears About Population Growth Didn't Come True."  One of the many reasons that nursing homes took off like they did was that people were having fewer children -- one of the subjects covered by this podcast, although it also goes into other issues such as government support payments to the elderly and the significance of immigration into countries with a low birth rate.

Overall, I found the book informative and easy to read; recommended for everyone, however difficult the content may be.

Goals 2020 -- April Edition

I struggled to select a goal for April.  In less strange times, my goal might be something like "get all my garden beds planted" or "get outside and enjoy the spring weather."  Those seemed somehow unsatisfying with all the craziness around us.

But then I thought about it some more.  I am one of the lucky people with lots of green space around me.  I am not confined to a small 12th floor studio apartment.  I have a house with land (not to mention lots of outside chores that need to be done -- although S did me the favor of cutting the yard for the first time this season while I was inside working!).

So, says I, this is exactly the time to be outside.  Because I can, and safely.  I have all the space and projects I need.  My goal is go get outside, at least for a little bit, 5 days each week this month.  (I'm giving myself a little leeway because it's spring in St. Louis, which also means rain.)  Even if that means sitting on the porch reading my book, I'll do it.

Happy April Fools' Day

In this surreal world we're living in, I'm just waiting for someone to jump out from behind a tree (at least 6' away) and scream: "April Fools!"