Today we got up fairly early. Well actually we got up at normal time for a weekday :) Did a bit of a present thingie with the sweetie.
Then headed out to Yass for Stu's family's party. Was a really wet day, but at least a lovely temperature :)
Heaps of great food, ate way too much! I still haven't had any dinner.. hrmm.. :)
Love Actually is one of Fifi Box's favourite movies. She saw it over and over again at the cinemas. And I have to admit that it's grown on me too. The first time I saw it I enjoyed it but it passed my test of repeated viewings, and in fact I think I enjoy it more each time. Or maybe it's just Christmas :)
So last weekend in Sydney, we went and saw Up in 3D in the city.
It was pretty good!
(probable spoilers below..)
Due to my own ignorance/stupidity/inattention, I missed a couple of key plot points .. like who was the kid at the beginning? I didn't realise it was actually a girl! (Ellie of course, but I didn't quite make the connection and was left wondering what happened to that kid, and where did his wife come from .. duuhhhhh!!) .. and how the dogs could talk.. apparently some throwaway line about how Muntz had invented it (but how?? With what resources??)
Of course if it had been me, I'd have left the house *facing* the falls. What's the point of being right next to them if you can't actually see them? :)
Since we saw it in 3D, we had the funky polarised glasses. I didn't really notice while watching the movie (cause you get used to it, and the colours are so great anyway), but the colours do get diminished fairly significantly with the glasses. During the credits I was doing comparisons with/without the glasses, and the difference was pretty huge. Still, the 3D was pretty cool, and it'd be good to see other movies as they come out in 3D.
Squirrel!! I totally love that line.. it reminds me of me soo much ;)
Tonight Stu and I met up with Nat and Andrew for dinner (APK - had lasagna - nomm!) and then went and saw
Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea.
I'd not even heard about it until mentioned on
Blogography the other day, and then last night
The Pen also gave it a mention. So organised to go tonight.
As per the several other Ghibli/Miyazaki movies I've seen, it's beautifully animated and unbelievably *sweet*. Quite enjoyed it :)
Ok that was all out of order.
First up this morning as I stumbled out of bed I saw this... (I soooo need to do this!!)
The rest of the day was generally catching up, shopping and cleaning.
Tonight I made another bechamel sauce and used up the rest of the "meat" sauce and pasta sheets and made another lasagna. This one was a bit moister (added a bit of passata sauce to the mix first, and had a lot more bechamel sauce and cheese) and not cooked for as long. It was fan-fricken-tastic!! :)
Tonight we watched
Meet the Robinsons, which I'd never even heard of before. Wasn't too bad, aside from all the time-paradox stuff and other such impossibilities :) And then we watched
The Birds which I'd seen once years ago. King Kong (the original) is on now, but don't think we'll be staying up for it :)
I finished reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier last week. I actually had to read this book in high school in about year 10. It was probably one of the better books we read in high school, and I quite enjoyed reading it a second time. Although to be honest I have no idea why she fell in love with him. Maxim is distant and aloof at the beginning of the book - someone you might possibly have a crush on but not someone you could actually easily love. Meh. I probably threw out all my notes on the book from high school before I moved to Canberra, so can't look at what sort of work we had to do on it. Oh well.
Finished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl last week. And then saw the second half of the movie again after having read the second half of the book. So that was pretty cool.
Finished reading Inner Space by Nathan Elliot today. I really loved the movie, seeing it when it first came out at the movies. In fact when I saw the movie I had absolutely no idea what it was about, just that it was by Steven Spielberg so was likely to be good. So I picked up the book at a book fair last year. The book is actually pretty boring. Well not boring in terms of story line - but that's all it is - just a narration of the movie. It doesn't add anything to it, and apart from a few very tiny differences, is identical to the movie. Identical is fine, but a little character development to add some interest wouldn't have gone astray. This is basically just a kids book.
Three books finished in a week.. scary..!
Oh, just remembered I read Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl at the weekend too (yes, reading through the box set I got a while back, in chronological order :) )
I've had that song in my head since last night. Can't possibly be because we watched The Meaning of Life last night could it..? :)
A couple of weeks ago, Neil and I decided we needed to have a Monty Python night. We'd get some Monty Python Holy Grail and watch the movies. So had him and a couple of Davids over.
And there was much rejoicing.
Altho the others didn't drink nearly enough. Damn that whole having to drive home thing :/
Watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory tonight. I saw this at the movies in
2005. At the time I couldn't remember much about the book. But as it happens I'm half way through reading the book *right this moment*. And I was actually surprised how faithful to the book (to the point of quoting text line by line) it is.
... oh.. except the ending and Willie Wonka's dad stuff... :)
Willie Wonka, Willie Wonka, the amazing choclatier......
- decide on when we were *actually at* locations in local Japan time (except for Sydney and first plane trip photos which are on Sydney time)
- put the date/time stamp on everyone's photos and put that into the file name of each file in consistent format
- fix problems with cameras still set to Sydney time, problems with times being an hour out because of daylight savings
- script renaming files by an hour or two or three where necessary (which included movies that didn't have exif data so were renamed in the first instance by date modified)
- fix mistakes in renaming by adding back an hour where necessary
- fix script problems that sometimes renamed 00 to 0
- fix days that sometimes went into the next day
- sort each day's photos into day directories
- triple check I haven't missed any
- fix problems with some of Sandra's files that lost exif data
- sigh over Sandra's camera being twenty minutes slow
Yeah so that about sums up my brain.
On the plus side, I now have all photos with a consistent and accurate time/date stamp on them, so will make sorting them out and picking highlights that much easier ..... (for me anyway - anyone else would just pick the ones they liked and be done with it ;) )
I finished STVI a couple of weeks ago and would have watched the movie last Friday night except we had the Japan catchup night.
So we watched it tonight.
Star Trek VI by J.M. Dillard is one of my favouritest ever books. I've read it like four times, even more than the Harry Potter books. I'm not entirely sure why I like it so much. Probably because I can picture the movie (which is maybe my second favourite Star Trek movie after The Voyage Home (or even equal to)), but also because of the wonderful character development. In fact it wasn't until reading this book that I really understood what character development really was. (High school English essays might have benefited from this knowledge! ;) ).
I was always so surprised in the movie how hostile they were to the Klingons, especially after the end of STV where they're all chummy and drinking with them at the end of the movie. In the book of STVI they continue with the Carol Marcus thread (which hadn't been seen in the movies since STIII). Carol is injured in a Klingon attack and Kirk doesn't know if she'll survive. All the media about the event also influences the others' opinions too. So this stuff in the book made the story make much more sense.
So anyway. Great movie, great Friday night :)
Had a relatively relaxing day at work. Which was weird considering I got dumped with a big project that *had* to get done today. I wasn't meant to be looking after it, but the person who was had to go home to look after a sick child. In the end it all went relatively smoothly and so one more thing gets ticked off the big todo list.
Tonight we watched Star Trek V. I remember quite enjoying this when I saw it at the movies, simply because of the chemistry between Spock/Kirk/McCoy. The movie itself, especially the end, is quite lame of course. The book had more character development, some extra stuff with the Klingons, but not too much extra.
Electric blankie goes on the bed tomorrow!
