Interlude

Fields of Memory

I am still in the process of packing and moving. Moving day is 2 days away. I should take pictures of the mountains of boxes everywhere.

In the meantime, here is a little something for you.

My first published poem. From many many years ago:

Childhood

Within the nooks and crannies of my mind,
The child I still am, she does hide.
To live the memories I do cherish,
Within the nooks and crannies of my mind.

It came to me in the shower when I was thinking up good names for a children’s bookstore.

Moving is Exhausting

I feel bad, not only am I behind in writting, I’m behind in reading!  REALLY far behind. 

I’m busy working, and packing, and sleeping, and packing, and eat, and packing.

Did I mention I’m doing a lot of packing.  And Sleeping.  I started this with a cold.  And because of that I wasn’t sleeping well.  You would think that would give me more time to pack.  In reality, it made me really slow and sluggish.  Now I’m sleeping better. But sleeping to much.  Its like I’m trying to make up for a week of sleep every day.  But my number of boxes packed is going up.  Still, I’m way behind because of week one.  I am going to try to catch up this weekend. 

In the mean time, I hope to eventually hop back on the blogging bandwagon.  I’ve got some writing demands I’m behind on.  Maybe I’ll find a window of opportunity.

Projects

I have several things going on that are slowing me down.  One that I will show you has not actually been started.  But I can’t wait to work on it. 

Mill Hill
Frightful Delight
Debbie Mumm

Since I’m not yet working on it, it isn’t slowing me down. But packing and weeding out stuff, in an attempt to reduce my stuff by 20%, and getting it all boxed up in 4 weeks will take some time.

We are moving to a newer unit across the road. Our building sits on a hill. The weather hits our corner pretty hard. The master bedroom has two outside walls that get bombarded with cold wind and rain and snow.

This means my roommate’s room can be a good 10 degrees colder that the rest of the apartment. Oddly enough, the room next to it, the computer room, can be an average of 10 degrees hotter than the living room, kitchen, and front bedroom. Hotter when both of us are in there and both computers are running. SO on a bad day, the two rooms, side by side, can be as much as 30 degrees apart.

The other place is going to be on the middle floor, with several buildings in front of us, to block the weather. Hopefully, the master bedroom won’t get hit so hard with cold air there.

What is going on….

I have not been coming up with as many good ideas as last year.  Or, I do have a few, but when I have time to jot them down, I can’t remember them.

So I’ve posted less.

And it looks like I’m in for another move again.  Fairly soon too.  So I may end up having a moving process to talk about. 

Tonight is my gaming night, but tomorrow I’m going to start the ambitious task of whittling my stuff down my 25%.  It may be painful.  But I need to have less stuff.  I really do.

So, it will be slice of stuff for a bit. 

I do need to write about a rather bad movie I saw last week.  I was watching 1980′s comedies.  One movie with an all star cast was not funny at all.  It was sad.  Just sad. But more about that later.

Tax Day

It is that day again. 

I did mine and they were electronical shipped off already. 

My roommate had his done and back already.

Have you finished yours?

Did you owe, did you get money back?

I expect the refund I have from the feds will be taken to pay on the error they claimed I made on my 2007 return.  I think they are wrong and redoing it came up the same as I turned in the first time.  All I can say is I must be missing something. 

But fighting the IRS on it was a major energy drain so I’m just paying it off.  Slowly.  Because that’s the best I can do.  It’s awfully hard to fight the IRS. 

 

The cultures of North Korea and China: conflict escalation explained

Reblogged from China Daily Mail:

What's with the rhetoric, fist pounding, and war-drumming?

North Korea has a long history of making threats whenever they need food. In the past, war-talk resulted in lots of food and supplies being sent to North Korea a short time after.

Maybe there were talks somewhere in that process, maybe not. But the West kowtowed to the North Koreans like Chamberlain tried to appease…

Read more… 500 more words

7:00 Movie Hour — The Evil Dead

Some days I have a 9:00 Raid.  So I have to start a movie by about 7:00 if I’m going to fit one in before the raid, hence the name.  Admittedly, if it isn’t raid night then I may start the movie anytime.

 

I know I saw the Evil Dead way back when.  Not in 1981 when it was released, I was only 11 then, but somewhere between 1987 and 1991 mostly likely. What I really remember is that I was with a friend at someone else’s home.  Someone I didn’t know.  It was someone she knew.  There were too many people in too small a living room and they had Chihuahuas.  I remember being uncomfortable the entire time. 

 

Possessed Linda

On the whole, this is a pretty bad film and I don’t see why it is so popular.  The second and third are much better as they bring out comedy elements missing from the first one.   I love The Evil Dead: Army of Darkness.  This one fell flat for me.  Here are a few reasons why.

 

1. There is a reason the only actor from this movie anyone knows is Bruce Campbell.  He was the only one who could act.  The woman playing his sister, Cheryl, was passable.  Ellen Sandweiss, I guess her name is vaguely familiar.  But if I hadn’t looked her up, I would have said, “yeah, sounds familiar, can’t think of who she is though”.  The woman who played Linda must have been picked because she could giggle maniacally. 
2. Discontinuity.  There was SO much of it.  Just to name a couple off the top of my head: After attempting to bury a body, Ash gets a geyser of blood sprayed in his face.  Upon getting up from the ground, his face is mostly clean.  Cheryl goes outside to investigate and the key ring, which had been taken inside with them all, is suddenly on the top of the door frame again.  A tree branch breaks a window in the living room that evening, a couple hours from morning, Ash shoots through the window that is suddenly not broken out anymore. 
3. Storyline got a little jumbled.  Or maybe the scenes were out of order when they assembled them.  But Cheryl gets possessed enough to perform some automatic writing and draws the book before they actually find the book and recordings and play the incantation that wakes up the demons. 
4. Special Effects.  I’m usually pretty good at watching special effects for the particular time in which a film is made.  The inaccurately spraying blood didn’t bother me.  The strange, semen-like white stuff which followed the blood was strange but I ran with it.  It was the stuff like over-cooked oatmeal that really snapped me out of being able to accept the rest of it.  It is strange to realize it was the number one, splatter film at the time.  The utter lack of realism makes it easy to watch. Too much realism is why I don’t like splatter films in general. 
5. Some of the injuries were real as Raimi felt actors who were in real pain and suffering would convey horror better.  This seems a cop-out and, to me, would indicate poor acting skills if they need real pain to get the point across.  Oh, wait, I already noted that the most of the actors couldn’t act.  No wonder he tried to torture his cast.

So, now that I covered what didn’t work for me I’ll move on to what I liked.

 

1. Bruce Campbell. He was pretty to look at.
2. The over-all story idea.
3. The nod to archeology.
4. The knife.
5. The plant rape scene was probably the best done scene in the film.
6. The magnifying glass necklace.  A very pretty trinket but a strange pendant to get a girlfriend.
7. The brief appearance of the chainsaw. 
8. Bruce Campbell screaming as something rushes towards him. 

 

Yeah, now I need to get my hands on the second film.  I think the scene I was trying to remember must be in part two.  I know it wasn’t in Army of Darkness.