Happy belated Thanksgiving!

I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving. I did. I took the day off. The next day, Friday, I took my niece to a movie and then that afternoon it was back to work.

As for the movie, we saw Fantastic Mr. Fox, which was weird and . . . bad. Stop motion animation complete with actors' facial expressions digitally rendered into fox faces complete with the odd moral that it's okay to steal as long as you're a wild animal did not really do it for me. Granted, only one of my ears was working during the movie, so I could be wrong. But I won't watch it again just to see. Rarely do I have the reaction that I want to tear my hair out during a movie, but I certainly had that reaction during this one. Humor fell flat, music was in lots of wrong places - not to mention the wrong style of music was used in the right places, and I'm pretty sure I recognized a few Apple/Logic Pro loops in there. Not good. But Niece the Younger liked it (she LOVES animation in film), so that's all that matters.

Other than that, I've basically been gorging on food and working. Now that the Christmas season is officially here, I will soon be starting my yearly re-read of Dickens's Christmas stories.

What are YOU doing this weekend??

Thanksgiving Weekend . . . harumph

At my folks for Thanksgiving, though they haven't seen much of me, as I tend to scurry off upstairs to work on my final project - a five-minute scene of a play by . . . I think it's Eugene O'Neill's play based on a Euripedes play. I don't know the titles of either, but they both have incest, matricide, betrayal, and general murder. I missed the incest part at first, and couldn't figure out why the actress was rubbing all over her "brother's" chest. Eventually I figured it out. Sometimes I'm slow, but I get there all the same.

I oscillate between hating the piece and liking it. I get frustrated because I know what I want to do, but what's in my head is grand and creepy and what comes out is tiny, quivering, shaky - and, believe it or not, too pretty. Or at least that's the way it seems in the thick of it. I suppose that's just the creative process.

It's been a peaceful Thanksgiving, otherwise. I didn't get to spend much time with my niece, but the school stuff just couldn't be ignored. During Christmas I hope to remedy that.

Other than that, I'm eating too much and drinking too much caffeine. But I FINALLY bought a pair of running shoes - Kohl's had a great sale - and some running clothes. Warm ones. So I hope to get back to that, however slowly and stilted, once we return to Chicago.