Completely moved out!

Tonight, with one last carload of stuff, I completely moved out of my old place!! Aww, it's a little sad since I spent about 9 months there but I'm pretty psyched about my new place so I'll get over it. It was kind of a quick decision to move and then get moved - it all happened in less than a month - but I'm so thrilled to stop looking. I'd always known the place I was living was only temporary so I spent a good part of the last nine months scouring apartment listings and roommate situations trying to find a good place. It's such a relief to be done with that, I can't even explain. My new place is bigger, cheaper and feels more like home already. Plus, it only takes me about 8 minutes to get to work in the morning, compared to what often was nearly 40 minutes but was a minimum of about 25 minutes. It's such a huge huge difference already. I'm still getting settled in but I'm well on my way. Anyway, excuse my absence the last couple of weeks. You might start hearing more from me now.

Hilton Head Kite Flying

I took some pictures of my family flying kites at the beach last week when we were in Hilton Head. Here is the link to the pictures in the album.

Hilton Head Kite Flying

Ow!

So I sprained my wrist the other day. I was out of town for a few days on a family vacation to Hilton Head, SC, and transportation back involved car, plane, layover, delay, plane, train, another train, walk to car, drive home... On the walk to the car, I tripped over my suitcase and went sprawling to the floor. I scraped up the right side of my body and apparently landed my left side solely on my wrist. I went to the doctor yesterday and they diagnosed it as a sprain with deep contusions. It really hurts, mostly when I try to use my fingers. The splint they gave me has helped stabilize it but it will probably be at least a week before it starts to feel much better. Could be worse, of course. I don't imagine I'll be writing on here much though because it hurts to type two-handed and I'm pretty impatient about typing one-handed.

Most Literate Cities

I saw a couple of places on the net today discussion of the "most literate" cities in the US. Minneapolis wins. What's interesting is to look at the actual report and see how cities placed in the different categories. For instance, Cleveland ranks #1 in library services, ranks #8 in periodical publishing, #10 in newspaper circulation, #9 in bookstores (so four top ten finishes) but only #67 in education for an overall ranking of #13. That's still a high ranking but it makes me wonder about which of the categories takes precedence. Also, it points out that the people of Cleveland clearly enjoy reading and learning but in order to be "literate," they must advance that into formal education. I'm not so sure I agree.

Christmas movie wrap-up 2007

Here are my final grades for the 2007 made-for-TV holiday movie season... I watched 16 movies between Thanksgiving and Dec. 26th! But that's apparently one less than last year.

A
The Note
Holiday in Handcuffs
The Christmas Shoes

A-
All I Want for Christmas
Lost Holiday: The Jim and Suzanne Shemwell Story
Christmas in Paradise
Snowglobe

B+
All She Wants for Christmas
The Family Holiday

B
Holiday Switch
A Grandpa for Christmas
Silver Bells
Like Father, Like Santa

B-
An Accidental Christmas

C
Christmas Caper
Christmas Child

Pulling up all of my reviews is a lot easier now that I've started labeling my posts. Also, this article from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review tells exactly why people (read: me!) love Christmas movies. Says Robert Thompson, "Christmas is one of those times where innovation is not what you're looking for... A Christmas story has got to tell some kind of tale of redemption, a return to a more spiritual, loving place. Or it's got to talk about a sacrifice made for other people."

The article even offers a fairly accurate "HOLIDAY TV-MOVIE PLOTLINE GENERATOR". Check it out!

Christmas movie review: The Family Holiday

Rating: B+

A cute premise for a movie but ruined by poor casting, A Family Holiday tells the story of the family that Doc Holiday, our main character, must quickly assemble around Christmastime in order to receive his uncle's inheritance. A lifelong con artist, Doc conveniently finds a couple of sweet orphaned kids, a dog and then quickly hires a nanny to serve as their mother and moves them into a rented house just in time for the 'judge' to come approve of his changed lifestyle and reward him the money. Is he in it for the money or for love? Of course, we all know that he's going to fall for the woman and end up wanting the kids but it was just a little too contrived for me. You don't pick up some orphans and adopt them as your own in 3 days. Nor do you hire a nanny, have her work 2 days, lie to her during those two days, and then marry her! My suspension of disbelief is not that great; particularly not when Dave Coulier is in the lead role. Who decided he needed to work again?

Christmas movie review: Snowglobe

Rating: A-

Snowglobe was really cute and had a lot going for it. It tells the story of a young woman, frustrated with her overbearing family who enjoy having lasagna for Christmas dinner and are always trying to set her up on dates, who receives a snowglobe as a present and soon finds herself transported to the idyllic snowglobe world whenever she takes a nap. At first she thinks it's merely a dream. Then she wakes up one morning wearing a glove she got in snowglobe world. THEN, her snowglobe world boyfriend comes finds her in New York City. It's cute and has the basic premise of sometimes what you think you want isn't exactly what you really want. Plus, I'm a big fan of movies that turn inanimate objects into real things. My one very small complaint was that Christina Millian, the actress/pop star playing the lead, broke into a very noticeable (and not that good in my opinion) Brooklyn accent at some very random times.

Home for Christmas

I went back home for about six days for Christmas, but was able to use only two vacation days, which is good since I don't have a lot. Now I'm back in DC. Here is a picture of our family tree on Christmas Day, before the gifts were unwrapped.


While I was home, I slept in, did some laundry, watched some movies, did all of my Christmas shopping and also tagged along while my parents did some of theirs, helped babysit my nephew one day, hung out with my family, wrapped dozens of presents for my mom, and relaxed. It was nice and just long enough to make it tough to come back to DC. Now it's back to work for a few days and then a family vacation in South Carolina! Oh, also, on my flight back in to Baltimore, my pilot's name was Captain Morgan! That's calming. But actually I loved him because he got us there nearly twenty minutes early, allowing me to catch the earlier bus!

Christmas movie review: The Christmas Shoes

Rating: A

A tear-jerker, that's what The Christmas Shoes is. Kimberly Williams plays a volunteer music teacher organizing the Christmas program who becomes ill with a terminal heart problem. Her son desperately wants to buy her a pair of Christmas shoes to wear into heaven and starts saving cans to turn in for a nickel apiece, hoping he can earn enough before she dies. And, she's deteriorating rapidly. Also in the same town, Rob Lowe plays a working-too-hard husband and father who is setting up interviews for his wife so she'll start working again and missing his daughter's chorale concerts (yes, she sings for Kimberly's character). Needless to say, his family is not pleased with him. Did I mention his mother dies too? Yep, this one is not chock full of happy, sweet, wonderful moments. The two stories take place simultaneously with the characters intersecting in magical ways. It's a really sweet story and has a little bit of everything. It first aired on CBS in 2002 and I'm not sure how I've missed it all these years!

Christmas movie review: All She Wants for Christmas

Rating: B+

All She Wants for Christmas, from 2006, tells the story of a business-minded local gal who is trying to save the town's ornament-making company. She needs to cut costs enough to make them sustainable. It's also part love story as she meets someone who is new to town and they start to date. And even though the viewer can see from a mile away who this new guy is, our main character cannot. Overall, it's an okay story with okay acting. No magic, just cute and agreeable.

Christmas movie review: Like Father, Like Santa

Rating: B

Like Father, Like Santa is nearly ten years old yet I'm pretty sure I had never seen it before. It stars Harry Hamlin as Santa's son who has forsaken the North Pole but still does use the naughty and nice list to get ammo on clients he wants to do business with. A nice touch. When his dad (Santa) gets kidnapped by disgruntled employees and Harry's character coincidentally is in the North Pole to get incriminating evidence for his latest business venture, the two men find themselves locked up together and sort of come to terms with their problems. It turns out that Harry resents his dad for putting his job before his family life, something that Harry soon realizes he does also. And of course, everything turns out rosy in the end. While I enjoyed this movie, I might have rated it higher if they hadn't included a half-hour or so of Santa and Harry trying to escape from their captors. Yawn. It went downhill at the end.

Christmas movie review: Christmas Child

Rating: C

Christmas Child bored me to tears. I usually am doing something else while I watch these Christmas movies but if I can't follow along while I do those other things, then it says something about the movie... because their plots are certainly not supposed to be complicated or intricate. I must have stopped this one and rewound it about ten times during the movie to try to figure out what was going on. Yawn! Loosely, it's about a journalist who is kind of estranged from his family and goes back to his hometown to investigate a story and ends up finding out stuff about himself. Like who his real father is. I'm not even sure if I have that right. And of course there is a happy ending. Boring, dull and unimpressive.

Christmas movie review: Christmas in Paradise

Rating: A-

I enjoyed Lifetime's Christmas in Paradise, which is new for 2007. It tells the story of two families missing one parent who hook up on Christmas Eve at a resort in Puerto Rico. There is a family of two boys and a mom whose father passed away in the last year. And, there is a family of two daughters and a dad whose mother just skipped out on them without any contact in the last year. Conveniently, there is a boy and a girl around the same age so they can all hang out in pairs, including the parents. Also, the youngest boy and the oldest girl are both very bitter and upset over their respective losses. Of course, during this Christmas, everyone starts to heal and love starts to bloom. It's a sweet story. The reasons why it got an A- rather than an A is because they tried to be all fancy with their camera work by doing a lot of split screens and it was very annoying. And also because everything basically took place in one day and that was a little hard for me to believe. But overall, it was good.

Christmas movie review: Silver Bells

Rating: B

Silver Bells, which originally aired in 2005, stars Anne Heche and Tate Donovan, which forces me to give it some props. Anytime a Christmas movie can cast actors that you actually know, it means that there is a little more credibility there. Unfortunately, I found this one really boring. At the center of the story is Tate's teenaged son who is forced every Christmas to sell Christmas trees with his family on the streets of Manhattan. He really wants to be a photographer, though, and gets to know Anne Heche, the manager of a local art gallery. One Christmas he runs away from his dad, who searches frantically for him for the next year. Meanwhile, Anne Heche keeps in touch with the son and even shows some of his photographs at the gallery. But she doesn't tell the father until about the time they share a kiss. Then she starts to feel guilty. The son tries to stay away from the father but eventually, everything works out and everyone lives happily ever after. The overall story was okay and admittingly a little different than many of the other holiday stories but I was bored and didn't really feel a connection to any of the characters. I didn't understand why the son had to run away; I didn't understand why the father was kind of a jerk; I didn't understand why Anne's character wouldn't tell that she'd heard from the son.... so many things I couldn't relate to.

Christmas movie review: A Grandpa for Christmas

Rating: B

There wasn't anything wrong or dislikeable about A Grandpa for Christmas, which tells the story of an estranged grandfather and granddaughter forced to live together when the mom gets into a car accident and is stuck in the hospital. There is fighting and malcontent at first and of course, by the end, the family loves each other and everyone lives happily ever after. It's a cute enough story as you see the relationship between the grandfather and granddaughter grow, despite all the horrible things she's heard about him all her life. I just rated it a little lower since the main characters are a child and a senior citizen. I prefer characters I can relate to more.

Trailer for the new season of Lost

Oh boy does this look AWESOME! I cannot wait. (via)

Christmas movie review: Holiday in Handcuffs

Rating: A

Holiday in Handcuffs is a romantic comedy Christmas movie. Poor Trudie (played by Melissa Joan Hart) gets dumped right before Christmas so she can't take her boyfriend up to meet her constantly disapproving parents. Temporarily insane thanks to her mother, she ends up taking someone hostage and forces him (played by Mario Lopez) to be her date. Of course, he tries to get out of it and resist but conveniently her parents live in a very secluded mountain area making escape difficult. Add to that the fact that her family is just crazy enough and desperate enough for their daughter to have a boyfriend that they refuse to believe it when he tells them he's been kidnapped. It's not going to come as a surprise to anyone to find out that Trudie and her hostage start to fall for each other. But it's a very cute story. There's no magic element (one of my favorite parts of Christmas movies) but combining a romantic comedy with a Christmas movie is always a good idea. Plus, Melissa & Mario do well with it.

Christmas movie review: The Note

Rating: A

I really enjoyed The Note. Maybe I'm biased because I've been a General Hospital addict for as long as I can remember and Genie Francis starred in this movie. Nonetheless, it tells the story of a struggling writer (Genie) who has been told she needs to improve her newspaper column by Christmas or she's out. Having a difficult time coming up with stories as she has sort of detached herself from feeling anything since her husband passed away, she tried to kill herself, and she gave their child up for adoption, she is drawn to the scene of a nearby plane crash and happens to find a note presumably written by one of the plane's passengers in his last moments. She decides to seek out the person who the note was written to and plays detecting, taking her readers along for the ride. Of course, her column improves and her self-detachment abides and things turn out happily ever after. She even begins a relationship with Ted McGinley, a fellow writer. Ted and Genie are really cute together. Anyway, this movie has a great mix of mystery and the required Christmas magic and was definitely one of the best I've seen this year.

"Digital divide still an issue in Minnesota"

This article talks about the Digital Divide, a big topic while we were in library school. While I do think many people in general might forget that there are indeed people in the US not online, the one statement from the article that baffles me is this: "More than 90 percent of people with incomes over $75,000 a year are online." It just surprises me that anyone making over $75,000 a year would not be online, even if it's just at work. What kind of jobs are out there that provide that kind of a salary but do not require any computer access or Internet capability? Construction workers, perhaps? Movie stars? Professional athletes? (via)

Merry Christmas from United

I'm sharing the Christmas e-card I got from United Airlines. It's the virtual version of displaying my Christmas cards on my fireplace mantel.