Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Oscar films

I've decided I'm going to attempt to see every film that was nominated for an Oscar in 2005. This excludes shorts, documentaries, and the foreign films as well as any scientfic or technical award nominees. The list I've come up with is below. The ones I've already seen are italicized. The reviews will be on my Rotten Tomatoes site of course. Link is to the right. :)

A History of Violence
Batman Begins
Brokeback Mountain
Capote

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Cinderella Man
Crash
Good Night, and Good Luck.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Howl’s Moving Castle
Hustle & Flow
Junebug
King Kong
Match Point

Memoirs of a Geisha
Mrs. Henderson Presents
Munich
North Country
Pride & Prejudice
Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith
Syriana
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The Constant Gardener
The New World
The Squid and the Whale
Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride
Transamerica
Walk the Line
Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
War of the Worlds

Book Update

Current Progress: as of 4/26/2006
Days Gone: 116 (31.78%)
Books Read: 14(ish) (26.00%)
Pages Read: 4,353 (29.02%)

I had to return the Concise History of the Catholic Church today because I renewed it too many times. Heh. I'll check it out again in a month or so and try to plug through the second half.

I finished Invisible Man today and the review is posted. Next book is The Black Notebooks by Toi Derricotte. Seems like I've got a pattern going on here. Interestingly enough, the reason I'm reading this book is because I met the author in France back in 2003 while I was there with UNO doing my (really, really, super fun) study abroad deal. She's a very interesting lady so I decided I might as well go ahead and read her book.

Wierd Wisconsin Words

I found this article while browsing the news this morning. I thought it was interesting, considering how I had complained a while ago about commercials that annoyed me, mentioning one for a check-cashing company that was obviously not a local company because of their hideous mispronunciation of city names. I admit we have some pretty strange pronunciations going on around here. We even make up new words for some things (bubbler, anyone?) Dialects are wonderful. Especially when they don’t make any sense.

“MILWAUKEE (AP) — There are just some Wisconsin-related words that people butcher: Chequamegon forest, Lake Butte des Morts, Lac Courte Oreilles tribe and even Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz.

So radio reporter Jackie Johnson decided she was tired of it and wanted to give newcomers, tourists and even natives a resource to find the correct pronunciation. She recently started the Web site http://misspronouncer.com.

"They can't be expected to know. It's not their fault," said Johnson, a capitol reporter for Wisconsin Radio Network. "But there is no where to go."

By the way, it's shee-WAM'-eh-gehn forest, Lake BEWD'-eh-moore, lak-COOT-o-ray tribe and Madison Mayor Dave ches-LEV'-ich.

Johnson, who has lived in Wisconsin most of her life, said she has worked in radio for years and was embarrassed when she mispronounced words and didn't know where to go to get it right.

The site has recordings of her pronouncing Wisconsin's 190 cities, 400 villages, and 1,260 towns. She also pronounces names of judges, famous Wisconsin people, like Brett Favre, state officials and legislators. She even recorded some of them pronouncing their own names.

"If they tell me the wrong pronunciation, it's not my fault," she said.”

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Odd Billboard Part 2

I forgot about this. Remember the Odd Billboard I mentioned a while back. Well, now the ad has changed. M Schettl is still on one side and the other side has changed to a Children’s Hospital ad. Now two cute little boys just happen to be sitting in the right spot to have the deer antlers. *sigh*

Stop the world - I want to get off

*sigh* I don’t know how it happens, but time just seems to get away from me sometimes. The week flies by and before you know it it’s been a long time since my last blog posting.

Ok, time to catch up on things. Let’s start with last week. On Sunday (the 9th) Adam fainted at work, drove himself home (grr) and proceeded to fall into bed. He stayed there for pretty much the whole week. I took him to the doctor on Monday where they told him nothing. Just to sleep, drink fluids, and take Tylenol because he had a fever of 106 or something. Tuesday and Wednesday were more of the same. Thursday was our anniversary and we had planned to go to dinner and then to The Mikado down at the PAC. Thursday morning he got up and planned to go to work. He took a shower, ate some pudding, threw the pudding back up in about 2 minutes, and crawled back into bed. At this point we gave our tickets to the show to his parents and canceled the dinner reservation.

He called me at work around 3:30 and told me he felt lots better and wanted to go to dinner and the show. Ok… So we went. He did look a lot better and aside from the horrible coughing seemed to be healed. The show was great, just as funny as I remembered it to be. Unfortunately the seats at the PAC are designed for anorexic teenagers. I suffered from “indented thigh-itis” as well as “crazy (possibly drunk) woman next to me laughing hysterically and jabbing me in the side-itis” for most of the show. It was also pretty warm. Next time we get box seats in the wings, Adam says. Anywho, we went back home and went to sleep. Friday morning (we both had vacation – we had been planning a crazy night…) I got up and putzed around until Adam emerged from the bedroom around noon. It was the incessant blaring of a car alarm (I’m talking about 10 minutes straight) that convinced him he was meant to be awake. We did some shopping and I think we rented movies. He went back to work on Saturday and seems to be fine now.

This week has been relatively boring in comparison. I had my monthly IMA meeting on Tuesday and was bored out of my mind with the IT guy’s presentation. Next month is the last meeting of the year and is CEO (ie. invite your boss) night. I’m as yet undecided about whether I want to invite my boss(es). I’d feel bad because I really wouldn’t be able to spend a lot of time with them. I’m the busiest person there most of the time. This is a working meeting for me. I have to think about it still. Tomorrow I have a lunch meeting over at Banner – the company that joined up with Milprint and the location to which we’ll all be moving in June. Should be interesting to see the new place and meet my new co-workers.

There’s really not much else planned until the trip to New York. Adam’s parents are going on a cruise the beginning of May but it looks like his sister will be driving them to the airport instead of him (as was originally planned.) Next week looks to be possibly even more boring than this one. I’ll be out in New London next Friday, but that’s about the most exciting thing. I’m finishing up some tax stuff this week for corporate. Meh. May is a nice month with the 1st falling on a Monday making our working days really simple to count. I was able to get my plant closed in about 3 days last month so we’ll see if I can do the same thing this next month.

I was thinking about the summer this morning and wondering if we shouldn’t get some days reserved up in Door County for our camping trip(s). I suppose I should talk to Adam (and Catherine and Tony) to see what they think.

Plans for Memorial Day are getting firmed up. I suppose I should get in touch with Cheryl and Catherine again since I kind of dragged them into this. Heh. I’ve been so bad about answering e-mails lately. I read them, I just don’t reply to anyone.

Ok I think you’re pretty much caught up. I should have a book update to post today or tomorrow. I’m still way behind but I’m trying to catch up.

Saturday, April 15, 2006

We have an addiction...

... to hamsters. We went to buy Pigster a bigger cage yesterday. We had the original 10 gallon aquarium that he learned to climb out of and the wire top part to keep him contained. The problem is he was sticking his head through the wires to chew on them and it gave him ugly sores on his face. To remedy the situation, we bought him a bigger aquarium - 29 gallons. He's got a lot more room and he'll have to pull some amazing gymnastic type feats to climb out of this one.

This left us with an empty 10 gallon aquarium. What to do? Buy another hamster of course. *sigh* Meet Barry:



He's a black bear hamster (hence the name "Barry" ha ha), about 3 weeks old. He seems sweet so far, but we've only had him for a day so he needs time to become psychotic.

And to recap our hamster situation:

There is Howie, the sweet and calm Russian hamster:


There is Pigster, the gigantic teddy bear (it's mostly fur):


There is Duey, the psychotic Russian hamster:


And now there is Barry, the black bear hamster:


It's getting to be a zoo around here. :)

Rotten Tomatoes Journal

I just added a link to my Rotten Tomatoes movie review journal over to the right. I had been slacking on reviewing the movies I'd been seeing but I hope to get better about that. I just added a bunch this morning so go ahead and check it out. :)

Sunday, April 09, 2006

Book Update

Current Progress:
Days Gone: 99 (27.12%)
Books Read: 11(ish) (22.00%)
Pages Read: 3,518 (23.45%)

Argh! So far behind!

Just finished Anywhere But Here and have started on The World Set Free.

Must read like the wind and catch up!

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Stuff

It’s been a little while so I figured I’d post a little something to let everyone know I’m still alive. Ha. I’ve kind of been making some plans over the past week or so. My mom informed me that Catherine would be returning with my dad and Cheryl after her graduation in May so I starting thinking about what to do when she’s here. Right now the plans are in action for a Memorial Day cook-out at Adam’s parents’ house with his family and part of mine. If things work out as planned it should be an interesting day. Adam's parents are on board and Cheryl seemed to be ok with it too. I also plan to take Catherine to the airport when she leaves since she’s flying out of Appleton. Not sure if Dad and Cheryl knew that yet, but now they do. :) I don’t know if anything else will go on since Catherine says she wants to pretty much do nothing. Post-college, pre-med school relaxation break.

Ok, so that’s really all I’ve accomplished in the last week. Well, I did finish Twenty Years After so perhaps I’ll post a book update later. I’m kind of afraid to see my stats right now though. Total slackage! I’ve got a cold again as does apparently everyone else in the office. *sigh* Taking DayQuil doesn’t seem to help. It’s all in my nose again. We’ll be trying out another recipe tonight for dinner and Adam called me a little while ago to tell me my new cookbook has arrived so I’m sure there will be lots more new recipes coming. I have two more planned for this week and we’ll see what happens thereafter. I suppose we really should eat up all the food we have packed into the fridge and freezers. We could probably quit going grocery shopping for a month (aside from stuff like milk.) It’s nice to be able to buy food that’s not ramen noodles. Ah, the sweet taste of success. Too bad it’s all going to my stomach and hips.