Wrong!

Enjoying science fiction requires a certain suspension of disbelief — after all, wouldn’t you think that people on the Enterprise would notice that wearing red was a death sentence?

But this movie snapped my suspenders of disbelief in the first two minutes, when Annie (Kate Capshaw) doesn’t get chosen for a mission and, therefore, has to go play nursemaid at Space Camp. And it went downhill from there, with one of the low points being the introduction of Jinx, the robot who talks like E. T. (remember, this movie is set in 1986 or so, and last I looked, we didn’t have any autonomous talking robots then). I could go on and on, but why bother — suffice it to say that the plot had enough holes to blast a space shuttle through, and that the acting wasn’t much better.

And it didn’t make Jeffrey any more interested in Space Camp than before; probably less, in fact. Oh, well, so much for grand schemes.

As is our custom (boy, that sounds pretentious!), we had a New Year’s Day brunch for our Havurah. I like lox and bagels, so we always buy a bunch of each for the brunch — and we usually have some left over. This year, I guess I overestimated the demand more than usual, because there were two dozen bagels left as well as most of a pound package of lox (thank you, Trader Joe’s, for making it affordable!). So I’ve been having lox every day for lunch, and today, I finished it off. I won’t say that it was too much lox, but I won’t mind skipping a few days, either.

We have a quiet weekend planned — we’re coordinating the Oneg Shabbat at Temple this evening, then going to Torah study and services tomorrow morning. The Kids’ Youth Group has an ice skating event on Sunday, and Jeffrey’s going; I’m not.

Shabbat Shalom!

I decided to practice self-discipline tonight and work on the Temple bulletin before flipping my page. Much to my surprise, editing other people’s writing has burnt out my writing need for tonight, so this is going to be a very short entry.

Today at work, a colleague asked me why I update my ‘blog faithfully (even if it’s not always daily, unlike some truly dedicated folks). I had to think about it for a bit, but in the end, my answer was rather selfish — I write for me.

Usually, it’s just to get something off my chest (I could talk about today’s travel agent experience, but let’s just leave that one alone), but sometimes, the mere act of writing here helps me clarify issues in my mind.

At other times, I write to remember — that’s the purpose of my “Wine of the Day” entries; we don’t have wine all the time, not by any means, and until I started keeping track here, I’d forget what we’d drunk and how we liked it (and it wasn’t due to the quantity of alcohol!).

Occasionally, I write to recommend (or warn), though I haven’t done that for a while (the ARRL License Manuals aren’t exactly “Book of the Day” material, though they were very helpful to me).

Once in a while, I even have a story to tell or pictures to share.

I’m delighted when other people enjoy what I’ve written (I find the data on my referers page interesting, as is the info I gather from the Site Meter report), and feedback in the discussion area is always welcome.

And parts of my far-flung family read this ‘blog regularly, saving me postage (just kidding, Mom!).

But in the final analysis, I write here because I enjoy doing so, and I am grateful to Dave and Userland for giving me the opportunity to so.

And for tonight, that’s about all the enjoyment I need on this front. Time to get up from the keyboard for the evening!

We’ve also continued on our movie-watching streak, which will come to an abrupt end when Jeffrey starts getting homework again. Last night, we saw High Noon — now I want to watch Outland and Blazing Saddles again. And we also finally got around to seeing Wrongfully Accused (hey, it was the best DVD I could find at the nearby Blockbuster, and I had coupons to use up!). I was pleased to find that not all Blockbusters have as bad a selection of DVDs than the two closest to me, but I wish there were some decent rental places nearby. Laserland has a good selection, but has short rental periods, so it’s hard for us to see a movie without paying overtime fees.

We watched several more Iron Chef episodes on New Year’s Day; it’s much nicer with subtitling and dubbing (I’m glad they subtitle Kaga instead of dubbing him, though) than it was trying to figure it out without such aids.

Oops…plumbing problems to take care of…more later, maybe….

I dunno what happened — Diane came in and said that there was water all over the bathroom floor. It seems to have come from the toilet, but it stopped when she jiggled the handle. So I adjusted the water level (we have 3.5-gallon toilets with weird mechanisms; I don’t want to have to replace them with 1.6-gallon units with even weirder innards until I have to!) and we’ll see what that does.

And just so the plumbing doesn’t feel superior, the oldest computer has started to act funny, too. We tried to shut it down, and it got as far as blanking the display in preparation for showing the “Please wait for Windows to shut down” screen…but never quite got there. A jab at the reset button brought it back up, and this time it shut down cleanly. But it’s been getting more and more blue screens of death lately; perhaps it’s trying to tell me that BillG needs more money?

Not much has happened since I last posted, a millennium ago — we’re watching fireworks on TV. It is nice to see live coverage of New Year’s in the Pacific time zone instead of just seeing three-hour-old replays of Times Square.

I’m already getting tired of the references to 2001: A Space Odyssey; last year, of course, was Y2K, and 1999 had its share of implications as well (Space 1999 comes to mind, as does the Prince song (though I’ve never actually heard it)). I can’t think of anything associated with 2002, so that’s something to look forward to (already!).