Holidays are exhausting

It has been a very relaxing and very productively long holiday weekend.

I brought work home, but I don't think I'm going to do any of it tonight. I figure that work will always be available, but holidays don't come around that often and I should take advantage of them when they do arrive.

We went over to an old church friend's home for Thanksgiving on Thursday. Ruth, as always made delicious turkey, ham, potatoes, stuffing, seven-layer salad (my favorite thing), white chocolate cheesecake, date bars, and a nice relaxing time. Our kids played a bit with her grandchildren and best of all, we didn't have to cook anything at all (though we did help clean up a bit).

Lynda went shopping early Friday morning and I stayed home with the kids. Yesterday we pulled out all of the Christmas decorations and started getting ready for the Christmas season.

We got out our original tree and started putting decorations on it. The girls enjoyed putting on the ornaments and rocking out to "Holiday" music.



This year we bought a second tree (it was on sale) since we now have so many decorations that we can't fit them all on our original tree. And it gives us the opportunity to instigate a plan we formulated last year, but didn't implement until now--a theme tree, showing off the numerous snowmen ornaments that we have been collecting for the past many years.

It wasn't planned, but we suddenly realized a few years ago that we seemed to have quite a lot of snowmen stuff. So we decided to make it intentional.




Other than these typical holiday pursuits, Lynda and I did watch a few movies this long weekend.

First there was Pi, the Darren Aronofsky movie about a mathematician that is obsessed with finding the mathematical predictability behind humans systems. In the single-minded pursuit of his goal, he runs afoul of mystical Rabbis in search of God's true name as well as a criminal group looking to use his promised mathematical system to crack the stock market.

Lynda fell asleep about halfway through, as I suspected she might. But I found it to be an interesting film. It brought up things such as the underlying mysteries of the universe and whether or not we can understand them, the importance of numbers and number sequences, and odd obsessions with computers. Frankly, it reminded me a lot of some of the broader themes of LOST and I can see, after watching Pi, why Aronofsky wanted and tried to direct an episode of LOST during season 2. I hope he has the time and desire to try again in seasons 3 or 4. I think he would bring some interesting angles to the show.

The other film that we watched was in a theater--Stranger than Fiction, the Will Farrell movie about a ordinary man that discovers he is the character in a woman's book and she is planning to kill him off. We both thought that this movie was tons of fun to watch and we able to just relax and enjoy ourselves. Ferrell was funny and very understated in his role of Henry Glick. Dustin Hoffman was interesting as a English Lit professor pulled into service to try and identify the mysterious author that is omnisciently narrating Glick's life. Emma Thompson plays the author that is tortured with writer's block and then faced with remorse when she realizes that her literary musings might really affect someone's life. And Maggie Gyllenhaal rises above her brother to portray a bakery owner that gets intertwined in the story of Henry's impending demise.

Some parts of the movie made me think of J.K. Rowling writing the final Harry Potter book as we speak; I speculated if she shows remorse for her characters as she plots their demise. Whether you care about that or not, if you want some light entertaining fun, go see this movie that has a distinct visual style and is fun to immerse yourself in for a few hours.

Well, I'm going to stop this ramble now. It is a bit disjointed, but that's where my brain in right now, befogged with too much turkey, desserts, and relaxation. I'll try to sharpen my game a bit next time.