Angela Law

animal lover, gardener, knitter, and gourmet cook
 
holidays

ready for christmas

Well, I’m somewhat ready for Christmas at this point. I finally finished up my shopping today. Thank God for the internet. Normally, I complete my shopping by Thanksgiving, but I guess a week later isn’t too bad. The issue is that I’m out of ideas for a number of people, so it’s hard to decide on something to buy for them.

I’m ahead with my cards this year, too. Not only do I have them addressed and stamped and ready to go, they’re all hand-made as well. They’ve been done for a few weeks. I guess the time I saved on shopping enabled me to get ahead on the cards.

I always said I would never have an artifical Christmas tree, but guess what we bought this year–an artifical Christmas tree. It looks pretty nice, too. I’m looking forward to not having evergreen needles all over the house this year. We usually put our tree up and do the decorating in mid-December. Now that we have the artifical tree, I wonder if these things will happen earlier this year. I guess it will depend on our schedules.

I always do a little baking–a couple of batches of cookies. We get a little bit of company over the holidays, so it’s nice to have something to put out. Not sure when I’ll do those. Most of the time I like to do them early and throw them in the freezer. In previous years, I always made a bunch of dog treats for my pooches and the other ones I know, but I don’t think that is going to happen this year. The thought of making all of those treats and Ripley not being around to enjoy them just makes me sad.

movies

the devil’s rejects

I was holding out to watch this movie until we got to see it’s prequel, House of 1000 Corpses, but things didn’t work out. For whatever reason, it’s been on backorder at Blockbuster Online for the past few weeks. Perhaps it has a new popularity due to the recent DVD release of The Devil’s Rejects. That said, we watched The Devil’s Rejects last night. The plot was not so complex that we couldn’t figure things out seeing the movies out of order.

I’m not a slasher film buff by any means, but I like Rob Zombie and this movie got good reviews, so I figured what the heck? After the initial nausea passed, I began to enjoy the film. There were a couple of funny things in the movie where we both laughed out loud. This is more than I can say about some recent comedies we’ve watched (Office Space comes to mind).

I hate to nitpick, but the flimsy body armor the clan had on at the beginning of the movie hardly seems like it would deflect a gunshot. It just wasn’t realistic. But, like Brian pointed out, a family of serial killers isn’t all that realistic, either. Right. But apparently I can get past one unrealistic point for the sake of a story, but not two. Other than that, I don’t have any problems with the plot.

The soundtrack was rather interesting–all classic rock from the 70s. You would not think this would work for a movie of this genre, yet somehow it worked perfectly. I could’ve done without hearing Freebird at the end, though. In fact, I could go my whole life and not listen to Freebird again and I would be a happier person for it. Freebird! Skynyrd! Yeah–heard that enough times.

movies

the interpreter

Last night, Brian and I caught this one while drinking Margaritas (of course). Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman starred in the movie, so you know it had to be good. And good it was–full of political intrigue and whatnot. The movie really held my interest throughout. It was a story about an interpreter (Kidman) at the U.N. who overhears an assassination plot for an African leader who will be speaking at the U.N. It took a lot of twists and turns and we find out that Kidman has ties to the country in question, which further complicates the plot. Penn played a member of the Secret Service who was assigned to the case. His acting is always good, and this movie was no exception, but his part wasn’t all that interesting. Still, a pretty good movie.

movies

riding the bullet

Brian and I watched this movie last night (it was a lender from one of his friends). It was based on the eBook (by Stephen King) of the same name. I vaguely remember reading the eBook a few years ago. I did not enjoy the format (that much I do remember). Anyway, the original story was ok and the movie followed it pretty well from what I can recall. A lot of the story was the internal dialog of the main character. It was interesting how they pulled this off in the movie–they had two versions of the actor in those scenes and the “extra” character would talk to the main character. This movie also cemented the fact that David Arquette is a horrible actor. Luckily, he was not the main character, but he had the second largest role in the film. Still, it was probably the best thing on TV last night.