Sunday, September 28, 2003

Movies...

Around getting caught up with some Noreascon 4 stuff this weekend, we went to the movies twice. We saw Under the Tuscan Sun (a mostly charming movie for adults!) and Secondhand Lions (a mostly fun flick). With Tuscan Sun, we saw a bunch of previews for adult comedies, including Mike Newell's ensemble piece Love, Actually and the new Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson movie. And, of course, with Secondhand Lions, we saw the trailer for Return of the King

Wow.

I knew what to expect. We'd already bought the first DVD of The Two Towers even though we'll buy the extended edition the day it comes out. So I'd seen the little "pre-trailer" for ROTK on that last month. I'd downloaded online video people had captured of the trailer on Japanese TV the other day, and even that looked impressive.

But seeing it all on the big screen was just terrific.

I've been hanging out some at theonering.net over the last year, the place where LOTR fans hang out. Today, they linked to a brilliant TTT review-parody - the DVD as reviewed by Gollum and Smeagol. Go read it - amazingly enough, it seems to have been written by just your average journalist for a newspaper down in Chattanooga.

Sunday, September 14, 2003

A Wedding!

Jim and I were up in Massachusetts attending Jim's brother Bill's wedding:

(from left) Laurie, Leslie, Jim, Bill, Heather, Bill and John Mann
(from left) Laurie, Leslie, Jim, Bill, Heather, Bill and John Mann

Bill is a chef down in Florida and Heather is in food/restaurant equipment sales. Jim's family keeps marrying women who were raised in Massachusetts!

The wedding was held at St. Stanislaus' in Chicopee, MA and the reception was held at the Sheraton Springfield (home of several Boskones in the late '80s and early '90s). The food was excellent!

I was hoping to drop by the Big E for a while on Saturday morning, but wound up way too busy (and, besides, it threatened to rain all day). The drive home, once we were out of the rain in Connecticut and New York, was uneventful.

Sunday, September 07, 2003

Back from Torcon!

I had a much better time than I expected to at Torcon. Due to work and way too much traveling the rest of the fall, we arrived Thursday afternoon and left the following Thursday morning. So we missed any early excitement and set-up, but were around for teardown and recovery.

I'm working on getting my pictures online (there's a start at http://www.dpsinfo.com/sf/torcon03/index.html#top).

I had a very weird summer. Due to chronic insomnia, I've been moving slowly, getting upset and being generally unable to multitask. Thus, one of the first things I pretty much stopped doing for a while was blogging (as in writing - I've still been reading a few blogs every day). I hope to start doing a little bit of blog-writing in and around all the stuff I have to do over the next year for N4. I've also been trying assorted things for my insomnia (getting a new bed, trying assorted meds) and finally found a combination that seems to be working. So if I looked out-of-sorts at Torcon, except for being tired I was in a good mood for the vast majority of the week. Insomnia makes my eyes look like I'm much older than I really am (as you could probably tell from the main page of my blog for the last 2 1/2 months).