Postcards arrived today! They are labeled 2/5, 3/5, 4/5 which is good news in that I can read the middle of the message all at once. Much better than if 1/5, 3/5 and 5/5 arrived.
On this postcard (2/5) Sara realizes that she has missed my birthday entirely. She is very sorry. Her explanation makes sense to me, and I’m okay with her missing the day. She’s kind of busy.
On this postcard, good birthday wishes continue and she’s distracted enough to not comment on the bird on the front, which would have normally been a point of discussion.
And on this card—which I’m just now realized I photographed upside down, sorry Nanci Yermakoff—she continues to narrate her upset about the lack of birthday remembrance. No worries, Sara, I knew birthday wishes would be coming soon.
I look forward to seeing what future mail deliveries bring and thanks for the birthday wishes!
George Tillman Jr.’s The Hate U Give is full of love: between family members, between people, between friends. It’s also grounded by incredible performances by Amandla Stenberg as Starr Carter and Russell Hornsby as Maverick, Starr’s father. Based on the book I picked as last year’s zeitgeist read, this is a worthy adaptation and worth watching for the performances, for the loss, and for the love.*
Cost: $5.55 (though actually $11.90 because I watched it twice, though actually actually free due to a gift card.) Where watched: Regal City Center Stadium 12, by myself, and then with Matt. Because when a movie is this good, you come back with someone else.
I guess I didn’t take a picture for the 10/28 report. Pretend you can’t see into the future
Another eight hours this week! I’m back on track for my hours per week goal.
I did all eight hours Monday–Thursday after I got home from work. By Thursday, it was rather grueling.
Part of this 60/30 exercise is to do a trial of how it will be to come home from work and get right to work again. I learned that I need to have my dinner plated ahead of time. This week I often would not be hungry when I came home and I would get right to work. But then, around seven o’clock, the hunger appeared, but I didn’t want to stop what I was doing to get a plate of food, so I would eat bits of things. My goal next week is to plate my food for dinner when I am putting together my lunch.
I got a lot done, though. 3SMR is coming along nicely. It now has a lists page, and there are category descriptions for each category. (I think this helps with SEO?) I also picked posters to illustrate each of my genre categories and am excited that every single one of the movies on that page is directed by a woman. Katherine Bigelow has three separate posters. Women need to direct more action and suspense movies.
I also got some help on fivrr this week. That’s a gig economy website where people offer to do things for not very much money. I have contracted with a woman to make a spreadsheet of all the movies I’ve watched since 2008. This will help me with my tracking and recommending.
The other thing I did on fivrr was to have an informal logo design contest. I picked four logo designers (pretty much at random) and sent all four the same information about what I wanted. They all sent me back logos, between one and five logos per designer. For this, I paid $38.00. Total. There’s one logo I really like so I’m going to contract with that designer to give me the logo in several sizes and also a favicon (that’s the square thing in the browser tab, next to the name of the site.)
Finally, I uploaded all my three sentence movie reviews posts from this blog to the new website. I was worried about that process but it turned out to be super easy. Now comes the very long slog of tagging all the posts into the new format. It takes me an hour to do about 20. I have 53 total pages. It will be a slow and steady wins the race project.
While the site is live right this second, I haven’t advertised the fact. My plan is to do a little site design and re-tag 20 posts each work session. Once I get to 100 posts re-tagged, I will officially “launch” my site.
I’m 44 today. It’s my fourth double number birthday and the second-to-last one that I can use my two hands to illustrate. (Age 66 will require an extra digit on both hands.)
Some age calculator at some time predicted I’d live to 89 years old. If that’s true, I’m halfway through my double number journey. But I could go at any time, This might be my last one, or I could have passed the halfway point at 33, or 22.
While some people might be put off by spending the day they entered this realm contemplating their exit, I feel a thrill of glee. The date and time of my death is probably the biggest surprise left in my life. There will be a lot of smaller surprises along the way, of course. And as long as my hands can keep working and my brain can keep working, I’m up for sticking around and seeing what develops.
Here’s to double number birthdays!
(Of note: this photo was really hard to take. I ended up setting the camera on the ledge that divides the kitchen from the living room and using the self-timer. Even so, it took six tries. Plus, I had to acknowledge that my hands don’t look like I’m 20 anymore. But why should they be any different than the rest of me?)
*An homage to Taylor Kitsch’s Tim Riggins in Friday Night Lights. “Fours” was how he referred to Luke Cafferty, who wore number 44. The inherent laziness of translating three syllables into one and then stretching out that one syllable to last as long as it would have taken to say all three syllables was one of the things that made Tim Riggins such a delightful character.
I ordered three boxes of tiny binder clips, along with other items. The binder clips lagged behind and rather than hold the entire order to come in one reasonably sized box, I got this large box, a catalog, and a bunch of plastic filler material.
This is a tremendous waste. I’d like companies to be charged for over packaging in this manner. I’d like to be able to check a box indicating that my items don’t need to be in pristine shape. They just need to get to me.
Whew! 8 hours this week. And that was with feeling under the weather on Monday and not hitting my 2-hour goal.
This week was my transformation week. I went from feeling uncomfortable with the Jupiter theme to having something click. Tech support helped me make a page where all the posts went. And I finished most of the home page and set up the framework for all of the pages. It’s looking like a draft website now.
Also, I enlisted the help of my writer’s group and they wrote some tag lines for both sites. I put together a google survey and put it on Facebook. We shall see if anyone fills it out or not.
I’ve got a few cleanup things to do, but I think next week will be the week I import all my existing three sentence movie review posts. I’m very nervous about this. Importing posts has gone well in the past, but who knows if it will still go well when I do it this time.
And once things are imported successfully, there comes the long task of coding all the posts to the new framework. And will I have to download all the posters again? Time will tell.
How many three sentence movie reviews do I have, anyway? I just sorted my posts by category and it seems as though I have 1,080 posts tagged as three sentence movie reviews. Yikes.
There was a little too much glow in the window when I took these pictures, but I think it’s important to note this transition.
Darlene Robinett’s 7 Bucks a Wack barber shop was a fixture in downtown Kenton. From her obituary, I learned that she bought the barber shop in 1996, with an inheritance from her mother. She enjoyed coming to work every day.
7 Bucks a Wack is no more, but I’m glad Darlene made the Kenton neighborhood so unique.
Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men is a good action movie, of the regular-people type.* For me though, it suffered from me having read the book which goes deeper into the relationships than the movie does.** The movie achieves a tense vibe throughout, but I found I didn’t care about the people because I knew too little about them.***
Cost: Free from the Multnomah County Library Where watched: at home in preparation for Filmspotting’s 2019 March Madness: Best of the 2000s
*Any of the Bourne films? I couldn’t do all that stuff. I could do the action stuff in this film. **I read the book over 20 years ago, which is a sign of a book with staying power. ***This also suffers from the White Guys in Suits problem (although in this case it was a Radical Insurgents in Black problem) in that I couldn’t tell some men apart and a key plot point flew by me.
Taika Waititi is a fabulous director of children* and his talent is on full display in Boy, the story of a Alamein, a boy living in New Zealand in 1984. Alamein tells his friends a lot of stories about the adventures his father is having, and then must reckon with the reality of who his father is, once he appears. Boy contains 80s touchstones, abounds with the earnest/slacker New Zealand accent, includes really great fantasy sequences, and is a movie that is a masterpiece of the wonder and fantasy of childhood, while also doesn’t spare childhood’s dark places.
Cost: free via the Multnomah County Library’s Kanopy service (first movie watched via that platform!) Where watched: at home with Matt when we were both feeling under the weather.
