It's 1 am...Can You Smell Your Pets?

Boy, I can! Well, really only one. We brought home a kitten and she's a doll. Even Eric likes her.

Problem is, she was fed something that apparently didn't agree with her, because it's 1 AM AND I'M CHASING HER AROUND THE HOUSE CLEANING UP DIARRHEA!

I'm giving this until Thursday. If I have to live in a house that smells like a litter pan, she's going back, because I won't do it. Normal dog smell is one thing, but cat crap is totally another.

Oh my god, even Pine-Sol isn't helping the smell in the room I have to sleep in tonight. I think I'm going to cry.

The Dark Knight

POSSIBLE SPOILERS OF THE DARK KNIGHT

So we took our son to The Dark Knight midnight showing. OK, really 12.05 am, but close enough.

This movie is a massive assault on the senses. I loved it. We even saw it at one of the older theaters in our city, so I can't imagine what it would have been like on IMAX.

The Rachel Dawes replacement wasn't a match for Katie Holmes, but everyone else was great. The new girl can act and all, but she looked like she'd lived an incredibly hard life....bags under her eyes, saggy jowls, etc. I know that's really critical, but I had a hard time looking at her and not wishing Miss Katie was still doing the role. Katie Holmes is a bit hard for me to hate, despite her poor taste in men.

Morgan Freeman and Micheal Caine as always are fantastic, and nearly any movie with either of them in it is worth watching just to watch them doing what they do so well.

My real reason for posting about this though is to laud Heath Ledger as Joker. I've read several reviews that pretty much tell Jack Nicholson to sit down and shut up because Heath's portrayal is the new standard by which all future performances will be judged. I thought it was a little much to say this, thinking that perhaps the reviews were due in part to his death earlier this year.

After seeing this movie, I'm convinced they were right. Ledger's performance was a little shy of the mark at the beginning of the movie, but as the character was developed, there was a depth and subtlety, lending themselves to the illusion of a very unstable anarchist. This Joker was scary, not silly.

However, one nitpick I definitely have about this movie is the 'social experiment' of the two boats Joker had rigged to explode. Each had the detonator for the other boat. Joker informed them the first one to push the button would live, and if neither pushed the button, both boats would be destroyed. Social psychology pretty much tells us what would happen in this circumstance. SOMEONE WOULD DIE. There is no way that a boat full of convicts and a boat full of civilians would refuse to kill each other. Even if they were sick of the corruption of Gotham, they would not be THAT noble.

It does make me sad to think that Heath Ledger will never reprise his role as Joker. It's my hope that the franchise will pay him respects by allowing the character to sit out for the next movie, and THEN find someone who can do the role justice Heath Ledger style.

White N Nerdy

Holy crap, I'm such a nerd.

I am starting a new class tonight in my bachelor's psychology program at Ottawa. It's History and Systems of Psychology. I was just looking through the book and got all kinds of excited. How nerdy is it to get excited over the history of psychology coming from ancient India and Buddha, from ancient Greek philosophers, from Rome and the Middle Ages? Of course, after that, I think the book gets rather boring, because then it's modern foundations of psychology, which I have thus far found uninteresting in previous classes. (The foundations, not current theories, mind you.)

And now I realize just what a nerd I am by reading what I've just written. Why can't I stop?!?

nice long break is over...

My grandfather passed away a day or two after my last post. It was way more difficult than I realized it would be. Those people who I was griping about before did not come to the funeral. I suppose it may have been for the best.

However, my husband did something absolutely amazing. He spent considerable money and time working up a slideshow for my grandfather's funeral. It's amazing. I watch it even now, and I'm doing ok until I see pictures of him holding me as a baby, then I just lose it. It was such an amazing thing to do, and other members of my family who never got to meet Eric before were amazed that he would take the time to do such a thing when 'he isn't a member of the family'. Of course, they just meant that he's not a blood relation, so they were surprised. My great uncle 'Chick' immediately requested a copy of the slideshow, and I was amazed at how many people stood around staring at the screen just watching the photos. Things like this that Eric pulls out of nowhere just serve to remind me of how much I love him and how incredible he is sometimes.

I took a nice long break from blogging because I was too full of emotion. I was physically and mentally exhausted. However, in the interest of getting back in the swing of things, here's my little story from the past two months...

I am now the mother of a teenager. He's only 9.

I was searching for images online of a specific stretch so I could email it to a client to show how to properly do it. I found a hilarious site that uses an articulated Spiderman figure to show how to do stretches. I called my son over to look.

"Shawn, you gotta see this!"

Shawn comes running over and looks at the page, getting a confused look on his face.

"What? The girl in the bikini?"

My turn to get confused. I scanned the page and way off to the side, was a weight loss ad with a girl in a bikini. Apparently women have suddenly become more interesting than superheroes, the travesty that was Spiderman 3 aside.

Poor kid has no idea why I was laughing so hard.

For Whom The Bell Tolls...

My grandfather is dying. He is doing very badly right now, and it's been touch-and-go for the last week. Just when things started to look better for him, it all failed again. He is 95 years old, so he's had a long life, but it's still kind of stressful. I remember the way he used to take me into his garden and show me how to weed his strawberries, and the koi tanks in his yard, the willow tree where I used to play. (To my cousins: I don't care what you remember, I DID get to help with his strawberries at least once!) Some of my family harbors only resentment toward him, and I understand they had a very different relationship with him.

The reason I even mention this is because a couple of years ago my grandmother on the other side of the family died, and I refused to go to her funeral. She made my life miserable by saying mean things to me, telling me I was just like my mother (whom she hated), and generally being a pain in my ass. She yelled at me a lot. Other people in my family grew up with her. Literally. Lived with her for a while. Me, on the other hand, she refused to speak to for several years prior to her death.

I was the target of a lot of angst when she died. I made a lot of people mad by not going.
Does that mean I get to return the bitchiness when they don't come to Grandpa's funeral? I suppose I would be entitled, but I'm trying very hard to be a little bigger than that. I guarantee though, that if one more word is ever said to me about my family loyalties, I am likely to explode and perhaps turn into a chainsaw-wielding crazy person.

Of course, if some of them show up, it will only make things more stressful, and I hope they don't. Honestly, I know each person will have to make a decision, but I wish they wouldn't say things to me about the old man 'croaking'. He may not know it's being said, but I do. I always had a good relationship with him when I was a kid, and no one should step on that.