Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts

Date night

So, this is a fun perk about living in the same town as my parents. Yesterday, my mom called me and asked if Kerry and I were doing anything, and if we wanted her to babysit. We didn't have any plans, but we were more than willing to make some. Heh. It's very backwards for the babysitter to call and ask if you want to do something.

Kerry and I then went to the lovely Demarce theater and saw Couples Retreat. It was pretty much exactly what you'd expect from the trailer -- a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy. However, there was one scene in the movie that featured some rap-like cover of D'yer Mak'er. (Aside: By placing that link, I have found out a number of things. The pronunciation of the song's title is "Jamaica", a nod to its reggae feel. Huh. Didn't know that. Also, the person that "covered" it is Sean Kingston, and it's just a sample in a song called "Me Love", which was last night and still is lame. Ahh, Wikipedia...thanks for fillin' me in.) While that song played, a bunch of high school girls behind us (who had swooned heavily during the New Moon trailer) started singing along. I was like, "NO! No you little dweebs do NOT know this song! GRR!" Then I realized that I'm just old. Sigh.

Other than that, all is well around here. Just waitin' on the wifey to pop out child #2. Then I get to re-experience the thrill of not sleeping ever, and see what an effective lawyer I make.

Tired

Pashooooooooo...

It's been over a month since I've written anything. That's no good, but I assure you I have my reasons. See, I've been studying for the bar exam, and it's sucking up a lot of life. My bar review class meets essentially every night, and I'm still working full time of course. I don't get any time off of work until July 16th, but at that point I get 2 weeks off. I anticipate that my days will be full of studying at that point, however. No rest for the wicked, I guess.

My bar review course has been interesting and a bit grueling. Most of it is lecture, but there are always practice tests to complete, and some of them are actually turned in for grading. I've been told that the Barbri program tends to exaggerate when they grade practice exams -- exaggerate on the underside in order to motivate students to work harder. There have been two so far that have been graded, and my grades have certainly been crappy on them. Ugh.

One point of fun and relaxation thus far came last weekend when Kerry and I met a bunch of our friends for the triumphant return of Phish to Alpine Valley. The show was an absolute blast. The boys were completely on fire -- their playing was tight, the sets consisted of a bunch of songs that made Kerry and I very happy, and everything went off without a hitch. I really couldn't have asked for anything more. It even occurred during a lull in my classes, so that was fantastic.

I'm pretty tired this morning. It's early, of course...currently 6:46 but I've been up for a little while now. My daughter tends to wake up early. I was up late last night watching Clerks 2, and it was incredibly well done. Super funny movie, and very very true to the original. Makes me want to watch the rest of the Jersey movies. Well, not Jersey Girl. I still haven't seen that, but I've heard it's crap so I haven't had any motivation.

Well, that's about all I've got at the moment. I'll try to pop in again soon. Stay classy, Minneapolis.

Sick

Yep, it's the day after a day off, and I'm sick.  Staying home from work today.  Actually, my child and wife are both also sick.  Before anyone starts shunning us based on a swine flu scare, let me assure you that our symptoms don't necessarily fit into that category.  Gwen has had some mad diarrhea for the last several days, but seems to be getting better.  I've got a rather traditional "every muscle in my body aches" type thing going on, complete with a fever (albeit a low one).  Kerry is puking, but then again...it's morning.

Did I mention that Kerry is pregnant?  That's right folks!  I'm gonna be a daddy again!  The baby is due in early December, which means that if it's early like Gwen was, it'll probably be born in November.  We'll see.  Either way, it's gonna be a Benson Baby!  Not sure if that's where it will be born, but that's where it will live.

Graduation was surreal, and it passed in a blur.  I have no idea about anything that the speakers said, because I seriously could not pay attention.  It was 2 1/2 hours that felt like 10 minutes.  I now have a J.D.  Woot!

Work really sucks these days, and I have a feeling that people are going to be on my case for missing today.  My boss left work sick on Friday with a freakin' skip in her step and a smile on her face, though, so whatever.

Last week was rather hellish, with my ridiculous schedule.  Not sure if I mentioned it already, but I went to work at 7:00 am, stayed for one hour, took off for BarBri in St. Paul from 9:00 to 3:00 pm, and then drove back to work from 3:30 to 5:45.  That constitutes working a half day.  Not fun.

This weekend we went to the parents' lake cabin, and we had a good time...mostly.  I have three very obnoxious cousins that suck a lot of time and energy out of my parents, so it's hard to really spend any time with them while said cousins (ages 3, 5, and 8) are there.  Luckily we had arrived fairly early on Friday night, and they didn't get there until Saturday afternoon.

While I was at Target the other day, I scored the Karate Kid trilogy for $13.  That was a deal I couldn't pass on.  The third movie sucks liquid monkey butt, but the other two are icons of my youth.  I watched the first last night.  It was fun.

This week (aside from today) the schedule has returned to something resembling normal.  I'll be going to bar review during the nights and gettin' hassled by the man during the day.

Stress

Arrgh. It's been a week since I've blogged. Actually, it's because I've had little to nothing to talk about. Not much has changed since last Tuesday.

I'm under a bunch of stress lately, but that's nothing new at all. Work sucks, but that's nothing new, either. I just keep my head down and do what I have to do, and the rest will sort itself out in five months or so. :^O

Speaking of five months or so, I've got a bar exam application to fill out, and it's quite daunting. I need to have the names of every employer I've ever had for the last ten years. That doesn't sound like such a long time, but it is. I've had a few. Not nearly as many as some other people I know, but still enough to be an annoyance.

Furthermore, I need to supply a record of every time I've been caught on the wrong side o' the law: Yes folks, this means speeding tickets. The time frame on this one is ever. So yeah, I have speeding tickets out there that I can't even remember getting. I have no idea where to even begin looking for that information, and I'm kind of hoping that it will miraculously fall into my lap in a fate sort of situation.

I'm still (of course) trying to sell my dumb house. (It's not a dumb house in actuality. It's a very nice place, and I've loved it for like 6 years now. Still, I want to move. It's all part of my life plan, you see, which first and foremost involves graduating from law school and NOT working for the place I currently work.) To add insult to injury, there were spray paint marks in the yard of our vacant next door house. The guy that lived there died last year. OK so looking at that link I can see that it was actually the end of 2007. So a little over a year ago. Yeah, well it looks like that house has finally gone through probate and whatnot, been foreclosed upon, and will be going up for sale soon. For sale by some buttwad bank that only wants like three cold chickens and a nickle for it or something. I hate the world right now. I hate the market. Buy my house.

There's weird banging going on at work right now. It sounds almost as if someone is crawling around in the heating ducts. That would be kind of awesome, in a Die Hard way.

I've been watching the X-Files again lately, which rules. However, the only season that I own is season 4. It's very cool, but I now really want to start the entire season from the very beginning and watch it all again. Seriously, I love that show.

My weekend was awesome as well. I played some D&D, went skiing with some friend types, watched the Superbowl with some friend types, ate some cheese balls, drank some beer, drank some mead, drank some fine wine. All in all, it was a good and revitalizing weekend.

Weathery goodness

As per usual, the weather wasn't nearly as bad here as people were hyping it up to be. There was supposed to be this terrible blizzard that hit yesterday. Still, that doesn't mean that the weather is nice at all. I had a very slow drive in to work this morning.

Yesterday we had another open house, to which no one showed up because of the weather. There was freezing rain going on, and the no-show was kind of expected by yours truly. Oh well. We'll see how things go on that tip after the holidays.

Last night the snow was falling pretty fiercely, and I entertained a hope that work would be cancelled this morning. No such luck. Oh well, I didn't really expect it to happen. This morning's drive (as mentioned earlier) sucked, though. Snow plows hadn't hit Highway 100 when I left, and therefore traffic crawled. Luckily, I had left very early and thus ended up at work early.

I've probably mentioned it already somewhere in the world of the Ostrich, but when it snows around here, people that have been living here their whole lives suddenly become complete toolsheds. This affects people in various ways. First, there's the overcautious type. ONE snowflake on the road and Mr. Overcautious decides that going above 10 miles per hour is a very bad idea. Ugh. Then, when the weather actually gets to the point where driving is dangerous (case in point, this morning) you have Mr. Moron, who weaves in and out of stop-and-go traffic going 70 mph over the ice, thinking that his F-150 makes him invincible. Ugh. Sometimes people deserve to get in a car accident, and sadly it never happens to the people that deserve it.

I watched the movie Wanted last night, and it was exactly the type of movie that I wanted to see. Lots of action, very little of which was actually plausible, veiled beneath a rather weak plot about an age-old guild of assassins. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I also watched the first half of Pineapple Express with my wife. It was ok, but we turned it off because she got tired. There were some hilarious parts, but the "oh, he's high on weed" joke lost its luster rather quickly. Stoner movies just get kind of boring. So do stoners.

I have one final left to take this semester. It's coming my way on Thursday, in Workers' Compensation. I don't expect it to be so bad -- many of the themes of the class tie in with a bunch of other stuff I've taken, and a lot of it just makes sense. The rest is fairly simple math of the third-grade variety. That's about my speed. Shouldn't be bad.

Wowzers, I'm tired.

I am bone tired, but I finally got the paper done yesterday. I had stayed up until 1:00 on monday night writing the dang thing, and then I woke up at 5:45 the next morning to continue working. I was done as done is gonna get at about noon yesterday, and turned it in last night. I wish I would have gotten more sleep last night -- I went to bed decently early, but my daughter decided that she wanted to wake up at 5:30 this morning. Sweet. So yeah...I'm a tad weary this morning.

On the upside, if any of you want to know anything about the legality of gestational surrogacy contracts, just talk to me. I'll pretend to know what I'm talking about. Stupid paper.

Last night I watched the sneak peeks of "Legend of the Seeker" that were available on iTunes. I was disappointed, but I'll still watch it. When I've invested so much time into reading a book series, I don't like to see a screen representation completely change the story. I understand taking some liberties and whatnot, but from the relatively small amount that I've seen, it looks like they're really gonna change this one. (Umm, no magic of Orden mentioned at all? Kahlan has the Book of Counted Shadows? Richard doesn't know Zedd all that well? What?)

Sorry, I burst into a bit of nerdery there. Like I said, I'll still watch it. Part of my problem with the sneak peek things was that one of them was hosted by Lucy Lawless, and I couldn't help but laugh my arse off every time she came on the screen. Poor thing, she's got nothing better to do. Oh well. Visually, the show was pretty cool. ***slight spoiler*** However, they changed Darken Rahl's hair color to brown, (which makes him look just like Richard...ooh teh foreshadoweeng!) ***/slight spoiler***

The thing that really bugged me was when Terry Goodkind himself came on the screen and said that this story "has become a tale for every generation". What? Don't fluff yourself so much, dude -- the last three books rrrrrrrrrrrrrrreally sucked. And you're ugly. OK that was low.

After billions of recommendations from friends, I finally picked up American Gods by Neil Gaiman. It's excellent so far. Very cool concept.

I'm old!

They're married! Rhyno and Meghan tied the knot this weekend in a beautiful ceremony and a superfun reception. I was successful in most of my best-manly duties, and gave what I thought was a pretty darn good speech. The day was a lot of fun, and I offer sincere congratulations to both of them. Have fun in Cabo.

Yesterday was the anniversary of my birth. I am now officially 32. Funny, I don't feel a day older than 31. Har har har. It was a pretty low-key day, as the mornings after big weddings usually are. I took my tux back, did some hanging out with my parents, racked my mead, played some video games, read some more geek book, and watched most of a movie with Kerry. It was nice.

Kerry got me a kegging system! This means, ladies and gentlemen, that I will have my own homebrew on tap at my house. That is sofa king cool. No more running upstairs for beer during D&D sessions. Oh no! Just reach over to yon tap and fill thy frothing mug with ale! My lovely wifey also got me a Flogging Molly T-Shirt, because she rules.

Yesterday afternoon, our 2nd realtor came over after having done a market analysis. It was like night and day compared to the first lady that came (see previous post). The news was much more to our favor, and this lady really has her stuff together. The last chick seems to have been doing exactly what I thought: Trying to get a quick, small payment now rather than wait out the winter. Well, good luck to her in her endeavors, she won't be selling our house.

It sucks to be back at work, because the weekend went by like lightning. That's always the problem with a power-packed weekend. So, here goes. Time to work.

Fancy dinners and Star Wars elitism

Kerry and I had a nice dinner last night, in celebration of our seven-year anniversary. We went to Bacio, an Italian restaurant near Ridgedale, and stuffed ourselves silly. It’s amazing how much I now appreciate going out for a nice dinner with just my wife, after having a kid. Don’t get me wrong, I love Gwennerz to pieces and love spending time with her, but it’s very nice to take a break every once in a while. Anyway, if you want a nice dinner I recommend the place, the food was excellent.

In my hasty weekend update I forgot to mention that Kerry and I took Friday off to go see the Star Wars exhibit at the Science Museum. It was really neat, but we weren’t able to spend as much time there as I had thought we would. That’s fine -- I got to see everything I wanted to see. Perhaps I’m a bad person, but I started feeling a little bit elitist about the whole thing. I liken it to the feeling that a person who went and saw Jerry Garcia play with the Grateful Dead 120 times must feel when he sees a 13-year-old kid wearing a Grateful Dead t-shirt. Kind of a “Move over kid, and let me see Chewbacca…I was there, man, I saw it live” thing. I mean, there was a kid – about six years old, I’d say -- listening to his grandmother tell him about the Millennium Falcon. She was saying, “Ooh, this is the space station from the movie,”. GRRRRRR DOUBLE-FAULT! Now this kid (who wasn’t even there, mannn!) is being poisoned by the drivel coming out of the mouth of his ignorant grandmother (who also wasn’t there). Sorry for the rant, these things are dear to me.

Also -- and this is a note to parents everywhere – I am taking a picture of Darth Vader. I am not taking a picture of your kid. Your kid doesn’t know better, but you do. Kindly remove your kid from my Darth Vader shot, otherwise it will completely ruin my ability to capture the look of scorn and hope of redemption from his glossy visage.

One last gripe -- the Omni Theater showed a movie with the Star Wars exhibit. This movie was called "Special Effects". It was from freaking 1996 or so. It showed the filming of "new scenes for the Star Wars movies" and "a new blockbuster called Independence Day" and movie magic from freaking "Kazaam" starring Shaq. Seriously people, that stuff is over a decade old. Science changes in that time...especially the science of special effects. Come on, Science Museum. You can do better.

Keeping on the subject of being a dork, I was in Borders the other day and simply could not resist picking up a copy of “Shadowdale” by…some author. It’s a Forgotten Realms book. Yeah…I’m a dork who occasionally dips really deep into the murky pool of genre novels, but D&D books are good clean fun that can’t be replicated by…well, by better writers, really. Back off, man. I love it. Yes, I’ll lend it to you when I’m finished. ;^)

Last but not least, I got me a cork for my bunghole. That is seriously funny to me. So…maybe some mead will be made tonight. We’ll see.

Pirate ballads = the new bluegrass

Years back, the Cohen bros released the movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou” and billions of people bought the soundtrack…myself included. It was filled with old timey bluegrass music, and was quite good. I enjoyed it.

A year or two ago, I saw an ad for an album in Relix called “Rogue’s Gallery”. It’s a 2-disc collection of pirate ballads and sea shanties. I just got it, and it’s freaking amazing. I have a number of friends who are also thoroughly enjoying the collection. It was actually put together by Johnny Depp, who got into pirate songs (you guessed it) after doing the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. So anyway, once again a movie (or three) becomes a medium for releasing old fashioned music on the populace. I care not a whit for the musings of the populace, but I’m quite happy that I got the music.

This, of course, is all because of the infamous aforementioned Flock of Kobolds, who will soon be adding pirate ballads and sea shanties to their ever-growing pub-friendly repertoire. Fal riddle da, wack fol the riddle timmy roo dun dah.

This weekend was pretty uneventful, but fun. Kerry worked on Saturday, so I chilled at home with my lil’ girl. She was quite adorable, as usual. On Sunday the three of us (well, Kerry and I…Gwen didn’t have much input) tried to think of something to do and couldn’t, so we went to the park. Gwenner LOVES slides. She had a great time on the playground equipment.

Last night I got together with Ryan and Corey and we brewed some friggin’ beer. I love brewing, especially outdoors in the summer time. The smell of the wort is just fantastic, and sitting in the driveway tending a boiling kettle gives a sense of peace that can’t really be described, it’s just a good feeling.

The idea behind last night’s brewing is that the beer will be done and ready for drinking just in time for Rhyno’s bachelor party. We’ll have some blond ale a la Ryan, some Scottish ale courtesy of Corey, and some Honey Amber ale by yours truly. Yum times three.

Thursday thoughts

Holy flying-by week, Batman. Hmm, Batman…that’s a good place to start.

Kerry, Gwen and I went to the lake last weekend. It was awesome. We spent a lot of time with my parents and did a lot of hanging out. I went waterskiing, which is always a blast. Unfortunately for me it involves the use of muscles that I don’t normally use, so I pooped out rather quickly. Still tons of fun.

On Saturday night Kerry and I left the punk with the grandparents and headed to Alexandria to see The Dark Knight. Holy crap what an awesome movie. It was a perfect comic book movie. Eight-and-a-half out of five stars. We’ll call it an even nine for the disappearing pencil trick.

Of course, that led me to want to see more comic book movies that I haven’t seen, so last night Kerry and I watched Spider Man 3. Wow…that movie really sucked. There were some slightly cool parts, but basically it was the same plot as the previous two with a lot more unnecessary crap added. As a whole, it was just a bad movie. Negative six out of five stars.

Rewind a bit. Chronology is not my strong suit this morning. Ryan, Kristian and I went golfing on Tuesday, and we all shot really well compared to a couple years ago. Ryan sunk an astounding birdie put from about 30 feet. Kristian chipped and hit the pin twice. I had three birdie chances (all of which resulted in an unfortunate, choke-under-the-pressure three-putt). We all had fun. Afterward we went out for drinks at Ol’ Mexico. It was a very good night just hanging out with the guys.

Kerry and I have seen Creepyguy in his window a few times this week, but there’s a wonderful turn of events there. See, if he sees us in our yard or whatever, he bolts away from his window faster than you can say “sketchy stalker”. This is a victory for us. See, he’s afraid that we’ll call the cops on him. He’s scared in his own home. Turnabout is fair play. He’s not gone yet, but I’m hoping that this is his last day (as it’s July 31st today) and that we can go back to Defcon 5 after tonight.

My I.P.A. is ready for bottling, so I’ll be trying to motivate myself to get that done tonight.