Goodbye 2005
Highlights of the trip:
- Cooking and listening to new music on Christmas day with a short mid-afternoon break to play a highly competitive game of bocce. "Steve Holt!"
- Eating Christmas dinner: goose with fruit and chestnut stuffing, standing rib roast, winter root vegetables in a mustard cream sauce, green beans with with mushrooms and almonds, salad and bread made by my dad and latvians. For dessert there were lots of sweets, including homemade (by Austin) egg-nog.
- Driving around the island with Lenore and Austin taking pictures. Lyla, Tracy and I also took some pictures of an old plantation on the way to Savannah.
- Christmas Eve dinner with Tommy, Sandy, Little T and Sandy's parents in Savannah. I always enjoying being there to see them and their yard which has beautiful old huge live oaks and tall southern pines. Sandy's parents brought over some southern iced teas which was a real treat.
- Assembling the Christmas Contest prizes in the waiting room while waiting for Lynda's blood work results
- Hiking the Edisto State Park 3.5 mile trail
- Seeing that guy on the side of the road to Charleston speaking or singing into a microphone again. I saw him when I was there last August.
Haven't seen enough pictures? Look here
Tis The Season
I am almost ready for Christmas. I leave for SC on Thursday. Hopefully the weather will stay good and we will all get there on time.
Long Time Gone
And then there is the Christmas contest. It's coming along. I have found that working on black velvet requires daylight.
And I have also been working on images and little movies that will be used in my friend Dana's dance performance in March. I am enjoying doing the research and video-taping and video-editing but I am now starting to think of the hundreds of people including dance critics from major newspapers who will see the performance. I am now wishing I had gone for that BA in Art instead of that BA in Astronomy.
Here are two pictures I took recently.
Some more
movie/DVD reviews
Mystic
River
Excellent story, very engaging, beautifully
filmed, great acting. My only complaint was the
last scene that seemed tacked on and unnecessary.
It should have ended with the Sean Penn character
walking down the middle of the street away from
the Kevin Bacon character.
Jay and
Silent Bob Strike Back
After the inital 15 minutes where the vulgar to
funny ratio was a bit high I really started to
enjoy the movie. I really like Jay's ramblings in
this movie as I did in Clerks and the
silly plot was actually interesting.
Craftiness and Cuteness
I went over to Austin and William's place today to visit with them and my aunt Zita as they prepared for Thanksgiving dinner. I did not stay because I decided to work on my Christmas Contest entry and have a nice quiet veggie Thanksgiving dinner with Joe. We had a corn pudding, the traditional and apparently 50 year old green bean/cream of mushroom soup/french fried onions casserole, pull-apart rolls and cookies that Austin made this morning for dessert. I did make some progress on my Christmas Contest entry but I still have a long way to go before it is a true work of velvet art.
Austin and William's table looked quite elegant with a touch of cuteness. Austin made the napkins and I loved all the textures on and around the table.
Some more
movie/DVD reviews
Koi... Mil
Gaya
A Hindi movie that steals liberally from E.T. The
Extra-Terrestrial, Close
Encounters of the Third Kind and Charly.
A mentally retarded young man, his younger
friends and a pretty girl find an alien and try
to hide him from the authorities. It was fairly
dumb.
The
Secret Lives of Dentists
A family man and dentist thinks his wife, also a
dentist, might be having an affair. He decides
not to do anything about it but soon the jealousy
and worry manifests itself in an imaginary
alter-ego type character played by Dennis Leary
(whom I really liked in his short-lived TV show
The Job) who says what the dentist is
thinking but dare not say. It is an interesting
film, funny in parts but mostly kind of
depressing because the family is falling
apart.
Hospital Life
When I was not at the hospital I was putting in some work hours at Lynda's house. It was actually pleasant sitting looking out her back door at the birds and turtles. Willow the cat kept me entertained by trying to be the lion of her backyard although she mostly chased bugs. Graeme and I watched TV together but he was working on a school project so we did not have time to do much else. Here are some pictures from my trip.