Panoply

I can't quite believe I forgot to include this in the list of weekend plans yesterday: neither B or I are working tomorrow. But we intend to heartlessly send our child to daycare anyway. So tomorrow, you will find us giddy with freedom at a movie theater, hopefully seeing Spiderwick. First movie in the theatre in four months! Hooray!

The traditional spring movie drought has been particularly parched this year. Last year, we were able to take K to a couple movies that we wouldn't have bothered to see otherwise, but we were desperate to get out of the house and they were child-appropriate. But there hasn't even been that this spring. Just tons of particularly hideous thrillers and horror movies, which, well, yuck. I truly don't understand the impulse to put something that ugly into the world, or to sit through it. I mean, I understand the adrenaline thrill that comes from being scared, but the previews I see and the synopses I read to these movies don't seem to be nearly so much about giving the audience a good scare as simply vomiting the most nightmarish scenario possible onto the screen, which makes Nightmare on Elm Street look like Mary Poppins.

I, for one, will be glad when the trend in movies swings back to vapid romantic comedies.

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Our method of coping with the Writers' Strike has been to watch a lot of Food Network. It helps that Good Eats is on every night now, and Iron Chef America is long and complex enough that it's usually worth watching more than once. I was very surprised at how much Throwdown with Bobby Flay has grown on me, since I don't like Bobby Flay. But the process he goes through of analyzing what exemplefies the archetype of the theme dish is something I like in a cooking program. And Flay isn't nearly as obnoxious as I expected. So I don't go out of my way for it, but I don't change the channel when it's on.

A program we've really gotten to like is Ace of Cakes. The process of making those fantastical cakes is fascinating. It's also giving me completely unrealistic ideas of what we should do for K's birthday cake this year. I was walking through a craft store the other day, passing the cake making aisle and saw boxes of pre-colored fondant. I kind of wish I hadn't - much like finding a bucket of radioactive glow-in-the-dark paint in the back shed, this sort of discovery could be dangerous. If you find yourself reading frustrated and overwrought posts from me revolving around cake-making disasters this June, don't say I didn't warn you.