A Very Serious Political Question

Is it just me or does Joe Biden look kind of like the politician that Carrie dated on “Sex and the City”? Let's hope they don't share other interests (if you know what I mean.)

Oscar 2008 Recap

Boo-yah! I'm all finished with my Oscar movies. Here's my recap of them all. Winners are in bold.

Performance by an actor in a leading role
Nominees: George Clooney in Michael Clayton, Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Tommy Lee Jones in In the Valley of Elah, Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises

Comments: I guess since I didn’t really like any of these movies I wouldn’t really have had a vested interest in this category. They all had their moments, although perhaps Viggo’s accent would have won me over.

Performance by an actor in a supporting role
Nominees: Casey Affleck in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Wilson's War, Hal Holbrook in Into the Wild, Tom Wilkinson in Michael Clayton

Comments: I’m surprised Javier Bardem is considered a supporting actor in No Country for Old Men. Isn’t he the main character? No complaints about this winner.

Performance by an actress in a leading role
Nominees: Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Julie Christie in Away from Her, Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose, Laura Linney in The Savages, Ellen Page in Juno

Comments: This is a tough one. Marion Cotillard did a wonderful job, but so did the other ladies. I honestly liked all of them. I’m glad I’m not a voting member.

Performance by an actress in a supporting role
Nominees: Cate Blanchett in I'm Not There, Ruby Dee in American Gangster, Saoirse Ronan in Atonement, Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone, Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton

Comments: I don’t even remember who Ruby Dee was and the others were all pretty much equal to me. Perhaps Cate Blanchett would have edged out the others because she played a guy. Dunno. Tilda Swinton does always freak me out though. There’s just something about her look…

Best animated feature film of the year
Nominees: Persepolis, Ratatouille, Surf's Up

Comments: Persepolis, while definitely animated, is really not in the same league as the other two. It’s about the struggles of an Iranian woman while the others are about talking animals. I don’t know that it was fair to judge them all on the same plane.

Achievement in art direction
Nominees: American Gangster, Atonement, The Golden Compass, Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, There Will Be Blood

Comments: I'm not entirely sure what this category entails. Is art direction the same as set decoration and props and stuff? In that case, sure, Sweeney Todd had some cool sets. If not, I have no idea what to judge...

Achievement in cinematography
Nominees: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Atonement, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood

Comments: Once again, I have no idea what this category is based on. For such a boring movie, There Will Be Blood won an awful lot of awards...

Achievement in costume design
Nominees: Across the Universe, Atonement, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, La Vie en Rose, Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Comments: No question to me that Elizabeth had the most complicated and involved costume work. Across the Universe and La Vie en Rose were pretty much modern day settings, Atonement was still in the last century, and Sweeney Todd was your usual theatrical garb. Elizabeth had period dresses and all kinds of other details to worry about.

Achievement in directing
Nominees: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood

Comments: Nothing much to say here. Not a film-maker, have no idea what it takes to direct or how to choose one over another.

Achievement in film editing
Nominees: The Bourne Ultimatum, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Into the Wild, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood

Comments: Don't really know what to say about this category either. I didn't notice anything particularly grating about any of these movies related to cuts and scene changes...

Achievement in makeup
Nominees: La Vie en Rose, Norbit, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Comments: I suppose Norbit could win for making Eddie Murphy a fat woman. And an Asian guy. But we’ve all seen that before. Even the Pirates movie had a lot of the same characters as the first two. Still impressive though. I don’t know that Edith Piaf’s transformation from a young street singer to an old arthritic was the best of these three, but that’s what won. There you go.

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original score)
Nominees: Atonement, The Kite Runner, Michael Clayton, Ratatouille, 3:10 to Yuma

Comments: I don't really remember any of these movies having particularly great soundtracks. But at least There Will Be Blood wasn't nominated. Horrible, horrible music in that one...

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original song)
Nominees: Falling Slowly from Once, Happy Working Song from Enchanted, Raise It Up from August Rush, So Close from Enchanted, That's How You Know from Enchanted

Comments: Funny how the rules changed after Alan Menken was nominated for three songs from one movie. Heh. The songs from Enchanted were your usual Disney movie fluff. I don’t even remember the song from August Rush. The right one won this category.

Best motion picture of the year
Nominees: Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood

Comments: Ugh. Considering the only one of the nominees I actually liked was Juno I think my vote would be swayed. Not sure what made No Country for Old Men better than the others. The haircut?

Achievement in sound editing
Nominees: The Bourne Ultimatum, No Country for Old Men, Ratatouille, There Will Be Blood, Transformers

Comments: Er, don't have any opinion on this one either. I totally suck at this.

Achievement in sound mixing
Nominees: The Bourne Ultimatum, No Country for Old Men, Ratatouille, 3:10 to Yuma, Transformers

Comments: What is the difference between "sound editing" and "sound mixing?" Seriously.

Achievement in visual effects
Nominees: The Golden Compass, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Transformers

Comments: I thought Transformers should have won something. It was a surprisingly good movie. I suppose The Golden Compass had some trippy CGI stuff, but it was still more boring than Transformers.

Adapted screenplay
Nominees: Atonement, Away from Her, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood

Comments: Screenwriting awards are very subjective I think. If you didn’t care for the plot lines or subject matter, you might have a hard time differentiating those points from the overall script construction. I don’t really have an opinion on most of these. The time travel bugged me in Atonement, but the others all really were ok.

Original screenplay
Nominees: Juno, Lars and the Real Girl, Michael Clayton, Ratatouille, The Savages

Comments: Also very subjective. I think Lars and the Real Girl was an adorable movie but I don’t know if it’s just because the screenplay was good. Same with Juno and The Savages. I don’t know how the voters determine which is the best in some of these categories. Surely there must be some guidelines to prevent people from just voting for their friends?

Only five more months until the 2009 nominations are announced! :)

Camping in Door County

I'd like to tell you we went up to Door County on Friday afternoon and had a great night. But I'd be lying. We took a look at the weather forecast on Friday morning and decided to forget the camping thing altogether. We suck.

We did drive up Saturday morning though. We left bright and early and just made the 9am ferry to Washington Island. The back gate was actually up when we pulled up and they lowered it back down for us since they weren't full. Awesome. One short ferry ride later we stopped for a bathroom break at the visitor's center. We then headed to Mann's looking for some fish for Adam. Didn't find fish, but did find a t-shirt for Adam and some interesting beer bread mix. Cheddar bacon. Yum. Looking forward to trying that out. By that time the farm was open so we were first in line. All the usual suspects were there:

The peacock


The donkey (who really didn't like Adam...)


The ostriches


The potbelly pig (so cute!)


Otto (not sure what he is, but also, so cute!)


The miniature horse


The goats (no live births this year)


The sheep


And of course, the camel. Ollie. Who is in love with Adam. I didn't get a picture of the huge lip thing he does, but I did manage to get a video of the funniest part of the whole trip:



You don't get to hear me laughing hysterically for five minutes while Adam goes back to the front to get another bucket of food.

Anyway, another good time with the animals at the Double K W Ostrich Farm.

We then went to lunch at The Albatross. We had intended to stop there last year but ended up catching the ferry and eating at The Viking Grill instead. Adam tortured everyone by putting money into the juxebox and playing Jimmy Buffet songs. After lunch we got back in line for the ferry and headed back to the mainland. We stopped at Charlie's for Adam's smoked fish fix. We also hit the Confectionery and Lautenbach's. Our final stop was a farm market where I found the hugest cucumbers ever.

We came home to hungry cats and leftover chicken. Yay.

So camping this year? Not so great. We'll see what next season brings.

Odd things cats do...

Practically every time I go to the bathroom JC follows me in. He paces back and forth by my legs and then climbs into my pants. Seriously. Every time. This afternoon he refused to move when I tried to claim them back so I just stepped out of them, went and got the camera, and took a picture:



I have no idea why the cat likes napping in my pants. It's kind of annoying, yet kind of cute at the same time.

Also, it weird that the other cats often accompany me to the bathroom? It's like they decide to have a kitty party outside the door. Conner lays down along the wall and Ted sits directly in front of the door. They're strange.

Recent Movie Viewings

Ok, so about those movies I mentioned. The first was another Oscar movie – Across the Universe. Now, I’m definitely not a Beatles fan. At all. But the obnoxiousness of this movie didn’t come from the fact that the songs were Beatles music. It came from the fact that people randomly broke into song for no apparent reason. It got pretty annoying. The storyline is pretty unoriginal, the acting is ok, but I think the mass appeal of this movie came from rabid Beatles fans looking for all the hidden references. Not being a Beatles fan I probably missed most of them. But the minute I heard the guy’s name was Jude I knew I was going to hear “Hey, Jude” at some point. I was not disappointed. And the girl’s name was Lucy. It goes on and on. I suppose that was the point of this movie – an homage to all things John, Paul, Ringo, and George. But really, it got old.

The second film was The Secret. It’s a remake of a Japanese film and I don’t think it was ever released in the US. I found it under it’s original name Si J’etais toi – meaning “if I were you.” (Ah, the conditional tense. How I miss you, French grammar...) It’s an interesting plot concept – a mother and daughter get into a car accident and while in the ER somehow the mother’s soul gets transported into the daughter’s body. The mother’s body dies. It takes a bit for the daughter (well, the mother in the daughter’s body) to convince the dad/husband that she isn’t crazy. But it causes a lot of problems in their relationship. Obviously. The husband decides that it’s best for them to keep this a secret and the mother should continue to live their daughter’s life in case the daughter’s soul returns at some point. They then discover they really didn’t know their daughter at all. It’s kind of a supernaturally themed film, but not to the point where you must completely suspend reality.

I also watched La Vie En Rose. Once again, a pretty long movie at 2 hours and 15 minutes. But I didn’t mind since this was one I wanted to watch. Having taken French throughout high school and college I knew who Edith Piaf was. I wasn’t aware of the level of crappiness her life included. I knew of her boozing, drug addicted, abrasive personality thing. No idea about the other stuff. Marion Cotillard did an outstanding job portraying a young Edith at 20 as well as a quickly fading Edith near her death. And the voice. That voice is one of a kind. One of the few Oscar films I’ve liked lately.

One more to go – Into the Wild arrived today – and then I’ll do an overall recap of my Oscar film viewing experience.

Today we went to the theater and saw House Bunny. There are many similarities to both Legally Blonde and Sydney White. So while not entirely an original concept, it's still a cute and enjoyable comedy. Although I'm still not sure how one of the "loser sorority" girls is hugely pregnant for almost the whole movie since they supposedly don't know how to talk to guys... but whatever. Suspension of belief is needed I guess. Both Adam and I were amazed by the number of older audience members, but I guess Friday's are "senior day" at the theater...

A cheesy situation - and many other tangents

I think I might have a problem.

We went out to The Melting Pot as planned last night for our anniversary dinner. We got what we usually get – the Big Night Out with cheddar cheese fondue, the lobster main course for Adam, and the S’mores Chocolate. Yum. I usually stick with the chicken and ravioli and dip with the ginger plum, teriyaki, and occasionally the Green Goddess (unless Adam eats it all before I get to it, which happens sometimes.) Last night I decided to branch out. I tried the mango barbecue sauce at Adam’s urging and didn’t like it at all. I still avoided the cocktail and curry sauces. But I also tried the gorgonzola port sauce. And it was wonderful.

So here’s my dilemma: I’m not a cheese person. And I’m definitely not a bleu cheese person. That whole veins of mold growing in the food thing is kind of off-putting. But this sauce was creamy, sweet but salty, delicious. I ate it on pretty much everything. This discovery has shaken my “foods I don’t like” beliefs. I even spent some time this morning trying to find a recipe for it. That’s how much I liked it. Argh. Must resist the temptation to buy gross-looking cheese.

Somewhat along the same lines, this weekend was full of fine dining. We went to Koehring's Grand Central House on Saturday with my dad and Cheryl. It’s an interesting restaurant with eclectic decorating taste. The food was great – everyone had seafood except for me – and it was a good time. We had champagne! Adam had a Schuam Torte for dessert and was then bitten with the “let’s make meringue” bug. I don’t do meringue (it’s that whole not having any patience thing. Egg whites take a while to beat) so I told him to have fun. He found a recipe on Sunday morning, went to Copps to get a carton of egg whites (since I told him we didn’t have enough eggs for him to use just the whites of since I’d have no use for just yolks and I wasn’t going to separate them for him anyway) and went to work. I don’t know what went on since I was in the bedroom watching a movie, but he beat those eggs for a long time. Like more than an hour. He baked it for an hour, let it cool, and then threw it all out when he discovered the center was still raw. Oh well. Like he said, a fun egg white experiment. Perhaps I’ll discover a well of cooking related patience some day and make some meringue and baklava and homemade ravioli. Or not…

With a steady schedule of meals out I didn’t cook much this weekend. Or at all. Adam went golfing last Thursday afternoon and I was by myself for dinner. I cooked up the gnocchi that were on the menu, but instead of making the thyme butter sauce I just cooked up a few pieces of bacon and added that. Yum. I was tempted to eat it all myself, but I was nice and left half of it for Adam to eat when he got home. Friday night I had a chicken Caesar salad with mini sliders on the menu. I discovered we had no more ground beef in the freezer (and luckily it was on sale last week so I could stock up) so I added the last two leftover chicken breasts from the cookout instead. I did make croutons (from leftover hamburger rolls) so that was good. That was pretty much the extent of my cooking for the weekend. I made frozen pizza two days in a row for lunch. So sad.

But I’m back in the saddle for this coming week. I bought three new cooking magazines in an effort to find a replacement for Cooking Light, of which I’m not much of a fan. Two Taste of Home spinoffs – Healthy Cooking and Cooking for Two, and one that appears to be Food Network related – Clean Eating. I browsed through them and found some good stuff to try out. Adam looked through the Cooking for Two issue and picked out some stuff as well. Mostly desserts. :) I plan to try out a few of those soon, although probably not this weekend since we’ll be camping.

Speaking of desserts (man, this tangent thing leads to long blog posts…) I went out and bought a cake decorating kit on Sunday afternoon. That whole mint brownie pie fiasco had gotten me thinking about the things that were still missing from my kitchen collection. I missed having a spatula when I made that pecan cake a ways back and had intended to pick one up at some point. Then with the need for pastry tips for the torte I figured I might as well go ahead and pick up a set for future use. Now I’m looking for an excuse to bake and decorate a cake. Not that I need one, really, but it would be nice to be able to justify making a cake and eating it all. Hey wait! People eat cake for anniversaries! I could just make a belated Happy Anniversary to Us cake. There. Perfect.

On another tangent, speaking of camping, we decided that we’ll go for only one night this time. There’s not a lot going on up in Door County this weekend and we really can’t come up with things to keep us busy for two days. We’re also going minimalistic, planning to eat our meals at restaurants rather than cook at the campsite. We’ll still be sleeping in a tent so that still counts as camping in my mind. We also plan to do the s’mores/campfire thing so it’s kind of authentic. We plan to head to Washington Island, stop at the candy store we like, maybe do a winery tour. With the crappy growing season, cherry crops suck so there’s no picking going on anymore. That’s really about all we can figure to do without spending lots of money or too much time out in the sun. I think we’ll still have a good time as long as the weather is good.

Ok, I’m going to cut this off before I go on way too long. Even though I watched two movies. That will have to be in another entry.

Hah-Hah!

Got him!



Yes, this is Conner. Asleep!

And JC conked out in the hall.



And since they don't get enough air time anymore, here are Mo and Einstein along with Howie and his huge honey treat. Seriously, it's bigger than he is.

One Year Ago...

Another milestone completed. I don’t really have a lot to say about it, but in some ways it’s like the year flew by, in others it seems like it’s been way more than a year. Things are pretty much the same as they were last year with the exception of the addition of three cats and loss of two hamsters. Some furniture moved, some trashed, some new stuff brought in. But the past year wasn’t tumultuous. We didn’t fight more than the year before. We spent pretty much every night together except for the few days that Adam was in California for work. I say “pretty much” because there were some nights that I (voluntarily) kicked myself out of bed and slept in the guest room when I had that hacking cough and cold that seemed like it would never end because Adam complained that I kept him up with my coughing and snoring.

I don’t know that being married has been harder than being engaged or just dating. Living with another person requires compromise and flexibility. There have definitely been times when I get annoyed, but that’s to be expected. I’ve come to terms with the ridiculous amount of wrestling that Adam watches on a weekly basis. He seems to have come to terms with my “Project Runway”, “Tori and Dean” “Denise Richards” and “Kathy Griffin” DVR-ing and has even started to watch some of them with me.

Anyway, this whole post is kind of pointless and doesn’t say much. Happy one year, Adam. Now let’s go TP our own house to celebrate our paper anniversary with flair.

How's about some year-old wedding cake?

The party went well this past weekend. We had a few new people over (some of Adam’s co-workers), it was a beautiful day, and everyone fit on the deck at the same time. We dug the cake out of the freezer on Friday night to let it thaw for a couple days. Adam unwrapped it and we discovered we had thawed it upside down.



Whoops. In our defense, it’s not like it was labeled. It had held up to almost a year in the freezer with no sign of its age. It was as moist and delicious as it was last year.



And we still shared it with everyone. Aren’t we nice? We did pretty well with leftovers too – that is not having a ton of them. Good planning on our part.

This week will be pretty light on cooking duty. We should be done with the majority of the leftovers tonight. This coming weekend will be full of fun dining. We’ll be heading to Kiel on Saturday to have dinner with my dad and Cheryl. Sunday night we have reservations at The Melting Pot. We really worked this one out well. We have a coupon for free chocolate fondue since Adam’s a member of their club and they know our anniversary. We also have a Supple Restaurant Group gift card from one of Adam’s co-workers and The Melting Pot is part of their empire here in the Fox Valley. So we could potentially eat there for nothing (or way less than normal) out of pocket. Sweet deal. Looking forward to that. That’s pretty much our anniversary celebration plans.

This afternoon we (finally) have our first meeting with an estate planning lawyer. Not that either of us have any great stash we need to protect, but we figured we should get the power of attorney, pull the plug kind of thing taken care of. We called for the appointment back in May but this was the earliest we could get in. Crazy. It should be a good time, sharing with a lawyer how much we don’t have in net worth. Our home equity is still in the negative range, but it’s slowly creeping up to zero. Adam suggested we just make an extra payment to zero it out. Tempting, but since we don’t plan to sell or try and take out loans anytime soon I’m in no hurry to throw money in that direction. It is kind of depressing to see that negative each month though. Boo.

Tomorrow is the annual summer employee cookout here at Milprint. It’s usually catered in by La Sure’s and it’s pretty good. We don’t have a company picnic or anything like some places do. We have a summer cookout, a Christmas dinner, and an omelet breakfast throughout the year. Tomorrow afternoon is the meeting about the new wellness program they’re forcing on everyone. In order to get health insurance through Bemis, everyone must go through biometric testing for Kersh Wellness. They’ve had this program for a few years giving employees the opportunity to lower their part of the premium by documenting stuff or something. I avoided it since I’m totally lazy. But now I am kind of forced to participate. Granted, I don’t have to wear a pedometer to track steps or anything, but I will have to be unwillingly examined and have blood drawn in September. Not happy about that, but whatever. Hopefully the meeting tomorrow will help me to resent it less. We’ll see.

That’s about it for this week I think. We need to start planning for our one and only camping trip next week. I think we’re still kicking around whether we want to do one night or two. There’s not a lot going on up there right now since the cherry season suffered from bad weather. We’ll go up to Washington Island to visit the camels and we’ll stop at the candy store. Other than that, who knows?

Sleeping Cats

Cats are like babies: they're cute when they're asleep, but can be terrors when they're awake. (Of course, I don't have any babies so I'm just speaking from blind assumptions and commonly accepted details of parenthood.)

Ted's fighting it:


JC really likes the dead mouse pillow from IKEA:


Ted lost:


JC's favorite nap spot:


You may notice the lack of sleeping Conner pictures. That cat is so paranoid it's rare that he relaxes long enough around us to even lay down and shut his eyes, let alone sleep. We're working on that.

They also roll around a lot:


And this picture of Ted taken by Adam from outside was just so cool I had to share it:

Crock pot and pictures!

Ok, so 3:10 to Yuma wasn’t that horrible. It reminded me of a lot of other movies throughout. Not outstanding, but no Cinderella Man either. I’m now down to 3 Oscar movies. We’ll see what order Blockbuster decides to give them to me.

Adam has had a lot of time off from work these past two weeks between air conditioning problems and lack of work at the beginning of the new fiscal year. So he’s had some time to sit at home and accomplish things. Yesterday he rented a pressure washer and cleaned the siding. Something we’d meant to do before we even moved in over a year ago. Hey, better late than never, right? He also went out and got me another anniversary gift: a 4-quart programmable crock pot.



I’d been looking for a smaller one since the current 6-quart always makes way too many leftovers for the two of us to wade through. It was hard to find a smaller version with a timer and auto-warm feature. I had found the model he ended up getting but couldn’t justify spending that much. But I’m ok with him spending it. Heh. I have a crock pot recipe on the menu for tomorrow so maybe I’ll try it out then. I still haven’t tried out the big spaghetti pot. The recipe I thought I was going to use it for turned out to not cook the noodles before putting them in the oven. Hrm. Eventually I’ll make some pasta or steam some veggies.

We’ve got a lot of cleaning ahead of us for this weekend. That’s the bad thing about throwing parties at your house – you have to make it presentable and temporarily banish the kitties. They never seem to be very happy about being shut up in their room, but when we open the door back up they’re undoubtedly all sleeping curled up in a ball on the bed. Cats…

Speaking of cats, it’s been a little while since I posted some sickeningly cute photos. Prepare to “Awwww.”







Ok, so that last one's not a cat, but still pretty cute, eh?

More Movies

A couple more movies seen, neither of them from the Oscar list. We rented Witless Protection simply for its fourth-grader type humor. And it did not disappoint. Fart jokes and inappropriate innuendo abound, all tucked up in a cute comedy with just a hint of social commentary. Larry the Cable Guy isn’t going to win any acting awards any time soon, but there’s nothing wrong with enjoying the “blue collar comedy” every once in a while. Except for Ron White. Cannot stand him.

Anywho, the other movie we saw this past weekend was The Dark Knight. We went early on Sunday afternoon, the first show of the day. It wasn’t crowded at all, which is what we were going for. We were originally going to try and see it down in Madison on the IMAX. But with Adam’s year-end and now my month-end, there really wasn’t a good day to take off from work and go down there. We also missed it on the UltraScreen here in town as it got bumped by The Mummy III this week. *sigh* So regular screen it was. It’s on the longer side, about two and a half hours, but unlike another movie I endured recently (*cough* Jesse James *cough*) it didn’t seem that long. Well, ok, it seemed like it was three movies in one, but it wasn’t hard to sit through the whole thing. There is so much in terms of plot points, action sequences, etc. that it would be hard to sum the whole thing up easily. I pity the people who go to write the synopsis on IMDB. It’s going to be a long one. But it’s a good movie, perhaps slightly over-hyped, but not much. And $400 million at the box office thus far doesn’t indicate a failure either, now does it?

Blockbuster tells me that 3:10 to Yuma is one its way to us for our viewing pleasure. It should come as no surprise when I say I don’t even want to watch it. But I will. For the good of mankind. And to fulfill my Oscar Movie Challenge. *sigh*

Didn’t do much this past weekend again. Shopping, church, movie, cleaning. We are so boring. I finally managed to get the cooking blog back up to date with the various dishes we’ve tried lately. Nothing too impressive, but I plan to make a mint brownie cake this weekend. I bought the ingredients for it last week but didn’t get around to it. Which puzzles me, since we did pretty much nothing. Who knows where the time goes.

We’re hoping we have a good turnout at the party on Sunday. We cast a bigger invitation net than previous cookouts. It also appears that Adam’s 3-on-3 will be cancelled so we’ll have the next weekend free as well. We’re still messing with actual anniversary plans. We’ve got a coupon to The Melting Pot, but we’ve also got a gift card to Fratellos. Hmm. We’ll see what happens.

Me = Slacker Blogger

So, wow. Not really keeping up on this blogging thing again.

Firstly, some sad news to report. Our duck saga is over. Sometime last Friday night something came and ransacked the nest. Who knows if mama duck was there at the time, but on Saturday morning all but four of the eggs had been smashed. The other four were gone Sunday morning. I know that’s how nature works and all, but it was exciting to potentially have a family of ducks in the backyard. And just like that they’re gone. We’re not sure who is responsible for this murderous rampage. There was a hawk hanging around the deck on Saturday and then a random stray cat wandering around the yard on Sunday. I don’t think we’ll ever know. But no baby ducks for us this year. Boo.

In other news, not much is happening again. We went up to Green Bay last Sunday to visit with Adam’s grandma. She just put her house on the market and will be moving in September. Adam painted the bottoms of the front railing while I conversed with her inside. She seems really excited to be moving to her new place. I guess that’s a good thing. Changes…

Speaking of changes, last Saturday Adam was at work (it was his year-end) and when he came out to come home apparently his tire was flat. In checking his tread he discovered he needed new tires. So we headed to the tire store. Got them swapped out that afternoon. Good deal. But July was definitely an expensive car month for Adam’s car. 60,000 mile check-up and new tires. Yeesh! My tires will need to be replaced sometime before winter as well, but I think I need a few weeks to recover from his before I start seriously looking for mine.

We finally got around to watching the latest Oscar movie to arrive – The Assassination of Jesse James. We’d been putting it off because it’s OVER TWO AND A HALF HOURS LONG. What is with these ridiculously long movies? I swear, over half of the movies on the Oscar list this year were over two hours long. Is this a new trend? Because I don’t like it. But we bit the bullet (no pun intended) last night. The movie is so slow. So boring. If they’d cut out the stupid “suspenseful” scenes of people sitting around looking at each other they could get the movie done in like an hour. Grr. In any case, not a fan of this genre, didn’t really care about the story, and I just wanted it to be over. And the music? So annoying after about 10 minutes. So, yeah, thumbs down from me. But I made it all the way through it! I’m down to four. Doing well.

It’s been quiet around here lately. August will be a little more exciting than July perhaps with a few vacation days planned and our informal get-together next weekend. We'll see. Maybe then I'll have more to blog about than just the hot weather or crazy cats.