Tired snippets

* The combination of working both days this weekend, then having everyone home for MLK Day Monday has left me deeply confused about what day of the week it is. Not that I'm complaining - it was nice to be able to have a day off together after working all weekend, and the short week is an extra treat. But I'm drifting through the week never sure what today is - Tuesday? Wednesday? A week from next Friday? Who can tell at this point?

* After a dry December, a lot of our favorite shows are back - Chuck, Leverage, Burn Notice, White Collar and Psych. The alert will notice a certain similarity in all of those titles. I would say our appetite for hour-long spy/caper/mystery dramedies is completely sated for the moment.

* Speaking of caper/mysteries, we did manage to make it to a movie while we in Michigan, and saw Sherlock Holmes. We emjoyed it immensely, and not just because it was the first time we've been out together without a child since the night before Alec was born. It helped, of course, that Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law between them have 50 pounds of charisma in a five pound bag. It oozes out of their eyeballs, and they could make people enjoy watching them play Quaker Meeting. But the movie itself was pretty good. This is where I admit that I was never able to get into the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was younger. But I enjoyed watching a Holmes who was clearly flawed as well as brilliant, who showed the negative as well as positive sides of his genius.

* The other day, K brought a baby over to me and holding its hands behind its back, she asked me to tie them together. When I asked why, she said, "She's going to jail." Well. I tied the prisoner's hands good and tight. Far be it from me to stand in the way of the mighty hand of Justice.

*******

Last night was a poop in the bathtub kind of night, both literally and figuratively. It was the sort of night with two wailing children, two aggravated parents and a disgusting mess to clean up. It was a continuation K's ongoing poop issues, and I am sorry to report that we did not deal with it with the sort of patience and grace one would hope for. It wasn't really her fault, yet it was next to impossible not to take some of our frustration out on her. I wasn't terribly sympathetic to her tears, I said things that at the time were meant to point out the consequences of her actions but in hindsight were more like rubbing it in, and she didn't get a bedtime story, which wasn't consciously meant to be a punishment, but I'm sure it felt like it to her.

We all have evenings like that, and I'm sure there will be more. One of the things that I'm becoming more aware of as K gets older is that she's now old enough that she's going to be able to remember a lot of the things that are happening her. Six months later, she's still talking about the day the window shattered in the door, and I suspect it's going to be a lasting memory (a couple weeks ago, as we were going out the door, she patiently explained to me that I needed to be careful when I closed it). The window didn't shatter because I was angry and slammed the door. It was already cracked and I had my hand on the window as I closed the door, so I suspect it would have happened anyway. But I find myself wondering if K is going to remember it as the day Mommy got angry and smashed a window. It's a chastening thought.

But what can you do? Today, before I put K in the car after school, I asked her for a hug and apologized for having such a grumpy night last night, and that I know she doesn't have poop issues on purpose. I can hope that if she's going to remember the times I traumatize her, she'll remember these moments too.

At the movies

I decided today that instead of sitting around gnashing my teeth over the fact that I've been wanting to go see Julie and Julia but not enough to spend babysitting money on it, and instead tucked Alec into the sling and went to see it on my own today. He slept angelically the entire time and I enjoyed myself immensely.

My parents were fans of Julia Child, so they passed their appreciation of her on to me as I was growing up. I was always predisposed to like a movie based on her, particularly when she's played by Meryl Streep, but this one did well capturing her humor and strength of personality. And on the Julie side of the story, they did a good job depicting the trials and humor inherent in learning to cook. I particularly appreciated the lobster scene since it was almost identical to my mother's story of the first time she cooked lobster.

Other movies we've watched lately:

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince: Great! I don't have a lot of insightful things to say about it except that we enjoyed it and I'm glad we made the effort to see it in the theatre. It wasn't identical to the book, but they got the atmosphere right and the changes still got the story where it needed to go.

The Ramen Girl: A really sweet little movie about a young American woman living in Japan who becomes obsessed with training to become a ramen chef. I was a little hesitant at first because we've been being burned lately by movies that Netflix calls "quirky." A quirky fun movie about a man who takes his British wife to meet his eccentric Southern family... until there's a stillbirth! A quirky fun movie about a difficult, prickly woman who goes visit her sister to attend the sister's wedding... until the fiance turns out to be a pedophile! Great fun all around. I never interpreted quirky movie to mean "leaves me slightly queasy with a sharp pain between my eyes" before, but a few more movies like that will have cemented the definition for me. But Ramen Girl really was a sweet, quirky movie, with a slight Like Water for Chocolate vibe.

Parker Lewis Can't Lose: A tv series actually. Back in 1989, NBC produced a sitcom based on Ferris Bueller's Day Off that didn't last very long. Simultaneously, Fox produced a sitcom very much like it that actually did Ferris Bueller right. That sitcom was Parker Lewis Can't Lose. The first season just came out on dvd, to my great delight. To my even greater delight, it's pretty much as good as I remembered. Watching it and seeing all of the 80s fashions and pop culture references is quite a trip too.

Random blather

When I got up this morning, my eyes were the paaaalest shade of pink. What you would call "Maiden's blush" if you saw it on a paint chip. I stared at myself in the mirror for a long time, then decided to go to work and resolved to wash my hands a lot.

It was more or less the right decision. I'm still pretty tired and not feeling great, but I still managed to get some stuff done and they really needed me since all of the museum staff was in a workshop all morning. One good thing I discovered is that our Uberboss is preparing the budget for the next fiscal year, which will have money for the children's collection in it. Yippee! Soon we may have science books written within the past decade, if you'll allow me to let my dreams get big for a moment.

So did I mention we managed to see Iron Man while we were in Michigan? We really liked it, although it seemed like without Robert Downey Jr's charisma, it would have been a somewhat boring superhero movie with really great computer graphics. The measure of how good the computer graphics were is that I didn't even think about them until after someone else mentioned them later. There was never a moment during the action when I caught something unnatural looking and thought, "Hmm, computery." They were so good that they blended seamlessly with the rest of the action, which is really a huge accomplishment. The best success in cgi is when it goes completely unnoticed.

Fortunately, RD Jr was just delicious, and refreshingly had chemistry with his romantic foil (although I suspect he could have chemistry with a ceramic plate), so it wasn't boring, and good enough that I'm looking forward to the sequel they were so clearly building up to.