Baby it’s COLD Outside!

I’m supposed to be blogging at 70 Days of Sweat today. but there is some sort of technical difficulty with my post (Help me, Alison! I’ll be your best friend!) and until that is resolved, you won’t get to hear about my rocking writing outfit (it involves robots).

It’s also officially winter around here, and I hate to whine, considering how hard they are getting it in the Northeast and the Midwest, but holy schmoly, why anyone would want to live out outside the tropics still baffles me. I have entered that period of time where I’m just permanently cold and will be staying that way until May. SB keeps talking about how great it will be when it snows, but…no.

This was a big audience weekend for me. I went to see Amanda Brice dance in The Nutcracker on Saturday night. I don’t think I’ve seen The Nutcracker since I was a little girl, and I never remembered being a big fan. I really enjoyed it this weekend, however, and I think I realized why I didn’t like it as a child. It was because the story was over halfway through the show. They defeated the Mouse King, and then the second half of the ballet was just… celebration? Fun, but boring to a my childhood self. As an adult, I was able to set aside my ravenous need for story and simply enjoy some dancing. (The E.T.A. Hoffman story, by the way, has a whole other act with the Mouse Queen and a quest and it isn’t until the very end that the spell on the nutcracker is broken, but it didn’t leave as much room for dances of sugar plum fairies…)

Then, on Sunday, I watched Live Free or Die Hard (if you like the Die Hard franchise, and I do, and like Justin Long, and I very much do), and then Waitress, which I was really looking forward to, and was really disappointed by (totally lost my sympathy for the main character, which is an important lesson in storytelling), and then Tin Man, which I was also very much looking forward to.

I remain undecided about it. On the plus side, woo, fun! Steampunk! Plus, I’m so intrigued by any vividly imagined retelling of something so a part of the cultural consciousness. Also, having read almost all of the Baum books, I gotta say, this is far from the weirdest thing he ever came up with (the vegetable people living inside the hollow earth might take the prize there), so it’s not that much of a stretch, and I don’t think he would be against any of it. And, Alan Cumming. Plus, they set up the Caine character SO FREAKIN’ WELL (his first name is Wyatt, and I love it!) and that torture was brilliant. Brilliant story.

On the minus side, I think they’ve got a lot of interesting ideas there that they aren’t really exploring, I’m not totally sold on Zooey Deschanel’s choices in portraying DG (is she for even one minute surprised about the things she’s seeing?), and so much of the plot seems to hinge on, whenever they get in a pickle, they know someone, and whenever things are going well, they come across some other invention of Azkadelia’s that is in their way. (“Azkadelia’s vapors?” Come on. On top of her flying monkey tattoos and life-sucking breath and psychic-lion-brain-sucking machine, and brain-removal surgery, and the iron torture device/life-support machine –not to mention that’s plenty enough reason for him to be a “tin man” without needing to resort to calling cops “tin men” and also, why, if he was a cop, did he live way out in the woods…?) Anyway, I am sitting on my hands, waiting for it to come together in the next installment. (Speaking of the next installment, if you’re trying to become the queen of a given kingdom, why would you invent a machine that could destroy said kingdom, as the Mystic man seems to intimate in the previews? Questions…) Right now, I’m wondering if Glitch actually did invent all this stuff for her, which would be a cool twist and character-wise, etc…

And we watched Desk Set. I love that movie.

What did you do this weekend?