It’s only a movie…

Diane and I went to the movies bright and early this morning; the IBM Club had bought the Century 21 Theatre for a special showing of Revenge of the Sith. We got there too late to get great seats, but we weren’t forced to sit at the very front of the theatre, so it wasn’t too bad.

There was one interesting byproduct of going to a private showing — no commercials and no trailers. The first thing on the screen was the Lucasfilm logo, followed by those magical words: “A long time ago in a galaxy far away…”.

It’s a shame nobody can tell George Lucas when he’s going overboard — I thought that the battle scenes went far too long, and the first hour of the movie dragged a bit. But eventually, I got into it and quite enjoyed the last 75 minutes. I was pleased that George took care of the loose ends (like C-3PO’s not remembering Tatooine in A New Hope), even if he was less than subtle in a few places.

We’ll probably go back and see it again — I want to watch all six movies in order, and I’ll be very surprised if there isn’t a boxed set available in time for holiday buying. And a rewatching of Spaceballs and Hardware Wars is in order, too.

Moving in

I’d been thinking of moving my blog to its own top-level domain (and onto WordPress) for a while, but I couldn’t decide what domain to use. Until this weekend, when the name “ReadThisBlog” popped into my mind. I would have liked to have had readthisblog.com, but it’s parked at Network Solutions — but readthisblog.net should do just fine.

As time permits, I’ll move my old content here, but in the meantime, please visit Defenestration Corner for a historical view.

I’m still playing with the format here, too — what looks good on a 1400×1050 screen isn’t so great at 1024×768 (and I don’t want to think what it looks like at 800×600). So expect changes.

A month of endings

So far, May has been a month of endings:

Enterprise and Jack and Bobby broadcast their final episodes
Episode III finally arrived, bringing the saga to a triumphant middle (or so I’ve been told — Jeff’s seen it, but we won’t until Sunday)

And now our 2002 Prius has come to the end of the road. The insurance company called this afternoon — the estimate from the body shop had reached $13,000, and they hadn’t even taken the dashboard off yet, so they decided to total the car. I wasn’t surprised, but I’m still not happy about it. We’ll find out next week how much they’ll pay us for the car, and whether they were able to rescue the CD that was in the player.

I had hoped that if the car was going to be totaled that they would have told me yesterday, because Kehillah was auctioning a 2005 BC at the first annual gala, and we would have bid. But we didn’t know, and decided to be optimistic that the 2002 could be fixed. Oh, well; if we had bought, we would have wound up with two silver Priuses, and that might have been confusing.

We’re now on the queue for a Seaside Blue 2005 BC, and I will be calling more dealers over the weekend in hopes that there’s one available in the wild.

Progress on the car front

This morning, I visited Hertz and swapped the Cavalier for a Prius. I am much happier, even though the car is missing some of the bells and whistles that our new Prius has (like the Smart Entry/Smart Key system, the navigation system, and Bluetooth). But it’s wonderful being able to sit in the car without hurting!

And the insurance company called me — they needed me to contact the towing company to have the car moved to the body shop of my choice. Since I have no body shop experience, I asked them for a suggestion, and they suggested Swanson Collision Repair, which, by strange coincidence, is in the same building as Hertz. So I called the towing company, who told me I’d have to come in and sign a form before they could move the car; fortunately, they were only a few blocks away. And as long as I was there, I grabbed everything I could out of the car (including one of our garage door openers!), and took a picture of the damage:

Ouch!: I’m waiting to hear whether they’ll repair the car or not. I hope they let me know soon.

Still nasty

The insurance company called us today, wanting to know where the old car had been towed to, and what our favorite body shop was. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the message until after the adjuster had gone home for the day, but I left answers to the questions (we don’t have a favorite body shop, so I’ll let them pick one) on voicemail, and maybe things will happen tomorrow.

Hertz will have a Prius for me to rent tomorrow morning, which will definitely be an improvement over the Cavalier. I mentioned my dislike of the seat, and the person at Hertz said that they advise customers to bring a pillow — I find it hard to believe that Chevy could design a car which is so uncomfortable. Maybe that’s why GM is losing billions?

And Jack and Bobby got cancelled today; it wasn’t much of a surprise, given the ratings, but it was still disappointing news. Wonder how long before it shows up on DVD?