Stay indoors and watch movies! I watched two today. Adam and I went to see "Knocked Up" this morning (yes, morning...if you go before noon it's only $6, and it's empty!). Despite the sexism (which I was prepared for, just based on the commercials), it was a pretty funny movie, and made me want a baby RIGHT NOW. Adam said no, though.

This evening we watched "Yellow Submarine," which I borrowed from the library because it looked fun. Even watching it sober is pretty trippy, and Adam started drinking halfway through (so, ask for his review!). It ranks right up there with "Ciao! Manhattan."

Next up on my movie watching list: the VH1 special on Warren Zevon. For those of you who are cool and love Warren, you know that "enjoy every sandwich" is his postmortem catchphrase, thanks to his final Letterman appearance. When I was at Video Vault, the guy working there asked if I was a Warren fan. I said, of course I am. Then the guy was all, "well, I thought the great thing about him was that when he found out he was dying, he said something about a ham sandwich!" Yeah. Clearly not a true Warren fan.

I haven't left the house today...too hot out. Or so I'll assume. Instead, I watched Cold Mountain. My feelings about that film are pretty mixed.

First the negative side: the whole film is structured around reuniting two people who claim to be in love, but who only interacted about three times before one of them went off to war. One of these people is the horridly miscast Nicole Kidman, the other is the not-as-bad-as-I-thought-he'd-be Jude Law. If I recall, there was one year where Jude Law was in about ten movies simultaneously; still, I managed to avoid seeing a single one of his movies until today. I assumed he was a crap actor, because he's just so pretty, but it turns out he's not necessarily just eye candy. Anywho, there is so little to base their "romance" on that I didn't care in the slightest whether or not they found each other. Also, the film trots out so many actors (usually in bit parts) that it's impossible to keep making believe this all happens in 1864. Not only do we have Nicole Kidman and Jude Law, but also: Renee Zellweger (1.5 hours of the 2.5 hour film), Brendon Gleason (1 hour), Philip Seymour Hoffman (20 minutes), Jack White of White Stripes fame (15 minutes), the fat guy from "My Name is Earl" (15 minutes), Natalie Portman (10 minutes), the girl from "Saved" and "Donnie Darko" (too lazy to look up her name) (2 minutes), and Cillian Murphy (1 minute). Plus sundry others who I vaguely recognized, but who didn't make enough of an impact for me to bother retaining/looking up. Finally, we've got a British guy and an Australian lady taking questionable stabs at American southern accents. Not so great. Oh wait, and also one of the recurring villains is a creepy, souless albino man. It's always the albino man.

The good parts of the movie? It's violent in a delightful way. Bloody enough to cringe, but not enough to feel gratuitous. The one war scene is really, really awesome, and puts the entire 4-hour epic "Gettysburg" to shame. I won't spoil it for anyone, but there's this part where one of the younger Confederate soldiers is standing alone, looking all weirdly into a haze of fog and debris, and then you slowly realize the utterly massive Union army is thundering toward him through the fog. Man, I love Civil War movies. Also, despite my dislike for Renee Zellwegger in all films except the first Bridget Jones, she wasn't quite so hateful here. She sorta took the southern hillbilly thing to an extreme, but at least she looked as though she belonged in the era (unlike Nicole Kidman, who despite toiling HATLESS in the fields for a summer remained eerily white, clean, and make-upped). Another great thing is how pretty the landscape is. It turns out they filmed it all in Romania, but I still believed it was North Carolina. It made me wistful for a time before highways and malls and technology (a time I've never actually experienced, of course). Let's see...what else...I like that LOADS of people get killed. Again, I don't want to spoil anything, but I was startled often by who got knocked off (and, alternately, who was allowed to live). Finally, the very very best part of the movie was the realization that Cillian Murphy was in it! I love him, excessively. Even if he's only there for one minute. I've been itching to rent "Breakfast on Pluto" because he plays a drag queen in it (not that I have a thing for drag queens), and maybe takes his clothes off.

Hm, for feeling so lousy when I woke up, I've done a lot today (and it's only 1:00!). Two loads of laundry - AND, I folded Adam's underpants for him, which I usually don't do because they're a bit billowy and unwieldy. Also I walked all my donation clothes and shoes down the street to the thrift store. It's really nice to not have the write-on competition dangling over my head anymore. Turning it in yesterday took a good hour, and $15+ in copy fees and envelopes, but it's DONE, and I don't have to think about it until July, when I start obsessing over whether or not any journal will accept me.

The queasy is back, so I'm off to nap.

I love the new Tori Amos CD! (note: I'm not usually a fan)

I would just like to quickly point out that Adam's posts sometimes remind me of the Nick Hornby book "How to be Good," because one of the main characters has a newspaper column called "The Angriest Man in Holloway," where he gripes about all the little things that make him angry. I guess my posts can be that way too though :)

Yesterday was fabulous, mostly because I got a new puzzle from the new toy store down the street. I'm a big puzzle fan, but I gave away all my puzzles when I moved out of the Arlington apartment because I was sick of them, having done each one at least 25 times. They had 1000 piece puzzles at the store, and I got a touristy DC one - it's a map (of the national mall, mostly) with tourist attractions around the border, and it was super fun to assemble. Unfortunately it only took me yesterday and today...I was hoping it would last me more like a week. There is nothing more fun than putting a bunch of new CDs in and doing a puzzle while a crazy hail storm rages outside the window.

Here's how it started. The knife is in there for scale purposes (it's a pretty big puzzle!)



I worked for an hour or two before taking a cupcake break.



Here's where I left it before going to bed:



And today, the puzzle, she is finished.