ASNN

...and then.

WARNING: serious introspection ahead.

So how can 2003 top 2002? I don't know. All I know is that I'm excited to see what God is going to do this coming year. 2002 was a blessing beyond our wildest imagination when it looked (on 1/1/2002) like it would be "just another year"; I cannot imagine what will transpire this coming year. However, here's what I'd like to see:

• Our family needs to get settled into our new home and find a new church. Finding a new church has always been the most difficult part of moving, but we have a couple of good leads this time. God willing, this will lead to a body with which we can worship for years to come.
• Ilyana is going to be entering kindergarten and Andrew will be in fourth grade. I pray that they would both be beacons of God's light for their friends, and that they would quit growing up so fast. I also pray that we would be able to enjoy them where they are at without expecting so much from them.
• Unlike a lot of families, we already have a budget. However, we don't really stick to it that well. This coming year, I would like for us to live within our means and stick to our budget.
• In general, I want to be a better steward of my time. As the old preacher's tale goes, the man on his death bed doesn't say, "I wish I had spent more time at work." I need to hang out with my son more. I need to read to my daughter more. I need to reinforce my son's desire to play sports, and be more involved with that. I need to play Barbies with my daughter more. This also applies to my TV-watching time. Our children are limited to one hour per day; why do I sit and watch Cops or Forensic Files hour after hour?

Those are probably not very "cool" to mention; for instance, I don't have great desires or plans for world events. (Not that those are bad; quite the contrary, I'm interested in political and legal issues in the US and around the world, and I'm appreciative of the people who pour their hearts into such things.) But those are the things that I think are important in my life for 2003.

Now...

I think Ron is right: it's funnier to be pessimistic. Try as I may, though, I just can't be negative about the past year OR the coming year. I have a lot that happened in the past year for which I am thankful:

• Nase was healed. Previously, she was taking a handful of medications to treat fibromyalgia. She went to the Walk to Emmaus in Wrightwood and God just healed her. Recently, she cut back to about 5% of the medication she was previously taking, leaving NO pain medication and NO antidepressants. She still has occasional pain, but she's learning what not to do and how to work around it, and she's 1000% better for it.
• The rest of my family has continued to enjoy good health and good spirits. Andrew and Ilyana are about all we could have ever asked for (and everything we could ever handle!) and I'm as healthy as ever. (Well, mostly; excuse me as I go get my anti-carpal tunnel syndrome gloves...)
• We sold our house in Michigan, only one year after putting it on the market. "only" is not sarcastic, as we entered a "buyer's market" where nothing was selling. At the end, we got our asking price with VERY favorable terms.
• We were able to buy a new house. I don't think I've bragged enough about this, but I'll leave that for later. Suffice it to say that, at 27 years old, we basically have our dream house in a perfect neighborhood with wonderful schools, quiet neighbors, and lots of mountains.
• My job is great. While I didn't do all of the things I set out to do around 1/1/2002 WRT work, it was still a very good year. Not to mention my wonderful business that I own with two of the neatest guys around. Lots of good stuff in 2002 for work ventures...

Without trying to sound too clichéd: God is good, all the time. We haven't won the lottery yet, work and family still introduce interesting challenges... but all in all, it's been the best year yet. Stay tuned for my 2003 post.

Best Buy spending spree

I ended up with nearly $150 to spend at Best Buy from various Christmas gifts. I finally started spending that money.

My philosophy is to make that money go as far as it can possibly go. That means that I will rarely spend more than $10 on a CD or $15 on a DVD, except in rare cases (which, of course, they didn't have in stock). So here's what I ended up with:

DVD: Run Lola Run
DVD: Das Boot (Director's Cut, widescreen)
DVD: The Nightmare Before Christmas. This is a special one because this was the movie Nase and I saw on our first date. Besides, it's just a load of fun... and it's got Danny Elfman in it, for heaven's sake.
CD: Home, The Dixie Chicks. Regardless of what my wife thinks of me for it, I really like their music. I already have their first album, Wide Open Spaces on order from Amazon.
CD: Purple Rain, Prince and the Revolution.
CD: In Utero, Nirvana.
CD: The White Stripes, The White Stripes. White Blood Cells is fairly good, De Stijl is amazing. Hoping this one works as well.

I also got some more lithium AA batteries for my digital camera, so we should have some more pictures of the house online RSN. Maybe we'll head up tomorrow...

What, me pontificate?

First, my list of favorite all-time movies was not in any order. I hesitate to say any one movie is the best movie ever. Also, the main characteristic that makes each of those movies great is the depth of plot, character interaction, and emotion.

1. Amadeus was my first favorite movie. Since I took classical piano lessons for about 12 years, I could certainly relate to Mozart's plight (of being so brilliant). ;-)
   
   The best part of Amadeus is the relationships: Mozart to his father, Salieri to Mozart, Frau Mozart to Salieri... and how each of those were expressed in the movie through Mozart's amazing music. The next best part was how Shaffer depicted just how driven, neurotic, and consumptive Mozart was: in music, in alcohol, in women, and in life. The last point that I'll mention about Amadeus was the brilliant religious tones, both subtle (Mozart's vision of God being shaped by his father, yielding a fiery Requiem death mass) and not-so-subtle (Salieri declaring war on God and "His chosen").
   
   
2. Citizen Kane could have been made fifty years later and it still would have been visually stunning. As it was made in 1941, it was something from another world. The camerawork is jaw-dropping; Welles was known to carve out grooves in the floor to make the protagonist appear even larger and more overwhelming than he was. The use of lighting is phenomenal; few, if any, color films can capture the same drama simply by turning a light up or down. Welles, as an actor, is engrossing, especially considering the fact that this was his first major role.
   
   I haven't even mentioned the story itself. One of the first "epics", the movie follows (the somewhat-fictionalized version of William Randolph Hearst, or) Charles Foster Kane from birth to innocent childhood to cock-sure twenties... all the way through to his miserable, lonely demise. It is a dense two hours, but the story neither drags nor jumps around. Simply riveting.
   
   
3. Chariots of Fire is simply beautiful and inspiring. Watch this movie (based on a true story and, apparently, fairly honestly so) to see what the Christian idea of "taking every thought captive" really looks like.
   
   
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey is Stanley Kubrick at his best without all of that wacky Stanley Kubrick-ness (like teenage prostitution or psychotic PFCs or haunted hotels or masquerade sex parties or a bit of the ultraviolence... my, that man was weird). The "10+ hours of...apes" at the beginning tends to be a deterrent for lots of people, but it's important.
   
   2001 is an unexpectedly suspenseful film largely because of this one element: the whole movie happens from the protagonists' perspectives. We watch 40 minutes of apes because that's what the apes (our heroes) are watching and doing. We know no more than they do. Something weird is going on, it doesn't involve flashy spaceships with a musical penchant or probing of any sort, and we aren't quite sure what we're looking for. We spend 20 minutes approaching the monolith on the moon. We spend 40 minutes going through the Jupiter stargate. It's all because we are experiencing this, not watching it.
   
   The other reason 2001 is one of the best movies of all times is probably the more commonly-given answer: it is visually brilliant. There just aren't enough superlatives to describe Kubrick's ability to create a beautiful film, and 2001 is his piece de resistance. I find it one of the easiest movies to watch, if only because its beauty and continuity (everything rotates, for instance) is enough to make it great.

There were plenty of other movies that got close, but while picking the top four came fairly naturally, picking the fifth didn't. So that's that.

The best movies ever

My top five movies of all time:

1. Amadeus
2. Citizen Kane
3. Chariots of Fire
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey

I didn't put a fifth because a fifth movie didn't really stand out in my mind (among the above four). What have I forgotten (or not seen)?

Looking at the IMDb top 250 films, I don't really understand how people rated some of these. I mean, Memento was a good movie, but was it really better than Das Boot? And WTF is The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (in Italian) even doing on the list?! Ah well, there's no accounting for "taste" I guess.

DISCLAIMER: I am not trained to officially like or dislike movies; the above is just my opinion.

It's the most wonderful time of the year!

This is my favorite time of the year. The mad Christmas rush is over; Christmas dinner has been cooked, eaten, enjoyed, and packaged up for leftovers; I can choose to head out and spend money from my various gift cards (rather than having to rush out and gifts for those people I forgot); I'm wearing nice new jeans and a nice new sweater. Through all of this, I'm still on flex time at work, which means I need to take care of urgent business, but shouldn't worry about doing anything more. (I hope I'm not, like, divulging company secrets.) So I'm sitting here drinking coffee, listening to music, and playing with my blog.

Christmas lunch went very well. I made a pork center-cut loin roast for the main course (seasoned with hairy-back spice, rosemary, pepper, and chunks of garlic cloves in the pan), twice-baked potatoes, fresh-snapped green beans, and a garden salad. Dessert was Nase's pumpkin roll and my pine-nut-and-honey tart, a new (and expensive!) experiment. To drink, we had a 2001 Fetzer Gewurtztraminer and a 1999 Parducci Petit Syrah to start, and a 1999 Buena Vista Chardonnay and 1999 Berringer Founder's Estate Merlot for lunch. All in all, one of the best Christmas meals I've been a part of. :-)

More pictures of the house are up. We took the kids and a couple of their friends up to BVS to look at the house and play in the snow. It was fun, albeit quite muddy. Still no firm move-in date yet, but we seem to be on schedule. YAY!

Random thoughts on a Friday

Well, it finally happened. I'm starting to get pain and numbness in my left hand (esp. the pinky), wrist, and forearm. Could have something to do with the fact that I'm at my computer from about 7a to 5p, then 8p to midnight every day.

The VH1 series, I love the 80's, is awesome. Radical. Totally. I just hope they put it on DVD so I can waste my money reminiscing about that oh-so-vacant decade.

I've been listening to The Dixie Chicks Fly for about three days straight now. Am I a bad person? (Before you answer, just consider that at least I'm not infatuated with an elf.) I'm listening to The Colour and the Shape right now to try to swing the music karma pendulum back in the right direction.

I tried watching Ed the other night. I'm sorry, I just don't get it. Commence mocking.

No, I haven't seen it

I suppose I'm about the only person I know that hasn't seen The Two Towers at least once. Leave me alone, I'm getting around to it.

I'm trying to think of what to get my wife for Christmas. She's talked about some wacky floor cleaner (the Floormate, y'know, the one with the sexy Australian man in the commercial), but I don't have a good vibe about that. I think I'll get her set up with a website for one; that'll give her a place to write stuff and put pictures up of her art. Big brownie points...

She wants a circular saw. (Yes, my wife is not your run-of-the-mill girlie girl.) But she's already getting a gift certificate to Home Depot, from which she can buy her belovéd saw.

This brings up the subject of Christmas. I hate the Americanized concept of Christmas. I love the idea of remembering Jesus' birth, of remembering (more importantly!) His life, death, and resurrection... but I just hate the requisite warm fuzzies that go along with buying retarded fad gifts and generally spending a bunch of money. I've figured that between the $100 worth of gifts I get and the $100 worth of gifts I give, it's a push. So why bother?

It'll blow your mind

20 cool things about pcg's life beyond what he deserves.

1) I have an amazing, artistic, gorgeous wife (who happens to not be pregnant).
2) I have a beautiful, talented, caring son.
3) I have a gorgeous, funny, intelligent daughter.
4) I can have as much unprotected sex as I want (nearly) without worrying about more children, diseases, or burning in hell.
5) I have a brand-new, never-before-used house.
6) I live in the best state in the Union.
7) I can taste the difference between a Syrah and a Petit Syrah.
8) I've lived in three different countries and four states. I've been in ten countries and all but about ten states.
9) I can spell "weird".
10) I've eaten weisswurst (heavenly!).
11) I've written the entire script to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, including gestures and stage movements, from memory.
12) I've gone 120mph in a 1971 Camaro on Interstate 15.
13) I've seen the best drummer in the world live in concert.
14) I've climbed Half Dome.
15) I've programmed a Sparc assembler... in Perl.
16) I've eaten crème brûlée at the Cygnus. Twice.
17) I've flown a small plane on numerous occasions.
18) I've never had a car break down.
19) As a foodserver, I waited on Kenny Rogers. (Okay, only a 1/2 point for that one.)
19.5) I've owned and driven a British Racing Green 1965 Ford Ranchero with "three on the tree" and a missing floorboard. (Another 1/2 point, even though I thought it was pretty cool.)
20) I own CDs of music by, among others, Garth Brooks, Minor Threat, J.S. Bach, Cream, and The Fugees.

I'll be thinking of what I want to see on your web page, alan.

Weather

Even though I don't particular aspire to be as self-loathing as some of my friends, it's hard not to fall into it naturally.

The highlight of my day today? The weather. The high winds blew down (2) 6-foot sections of our fence and animals ran wild. Rain blew under the tiles on the roof and created a very minor leak in the dining room. (Even the leak wasn't exciting enough to be more than a drop every 20 seconds or so. Whoopee.)

The highlight of my weekend? I bought appliances for our house. Does anyone else find it exciting to go refrigerator shopping at Sears? No, I didn't think so.

My blog doesn't have cool stuff on it like movie reviews (I rarely get a chance to see movies, and you really don't need to read about what I think about a five-year-old movie just because it took me that long to see it) or even pictures (which I have, but don't really have much time to organize, since I'm working approximately 53.46 hours per day). I even had a sort of moral quandary linking to Byz' blog since it's (already) so much cooler than mine.

I don't cook wonderful meals, I don't buy lots of cool electronics or gaming systems, I don't have drinkin' buddies, and I don't know the names of waitresses at my local pub. I don't even get to play cool online games anymore.

Oh well, enough puling. Pizza's here.

I want a Pickwick...

Instead, I'm here drinking a 2000 Midnight Syrah... *sigh*...

I'm finding that the adage that "time is the most precious commodity" is really true. (Or if it isn't an adage, I hereby declare it as such.) Between my day job, my moonlighting job, my new house, and myriad other things (some of which are truly beautiful) I don't hardly have time to stop and relax.

When I have relaxed in the last little bit, I've been bitten by my own curiosity to see awful movies like Urban Legend (which I SWEAR I got for my wife). OTOH, I've recently re-seen Dr. Strangelove [etc.] which gets better every time I see it. I even had occasion to use the last scene (where Peter Sellers, as Dr. Strangelove, miraculously finds his legs after being "paralyzed" throughout the movie) IRL:

The pastor of my church didn't show up to service one day, as he was sick. As it turns out, he was exhausted to the point where he was sick in the morning, but he was out and around in the afternoon. I could just imagine one of the parishoners approaching him in public where he would miraculously claim:

Mein Führer! I can valk!

Unfortunately, I think I'm one of the only people who gets that.

Finally, I'm listening to Oingo Boingo again today, right now "Violent Love" off of their Boingo Alive double album. Apparently, it's actually an old remake of a song by Otis Rush and Willie Dixon. (Sorry, I'm too lazy to look up URLs. Google for it yourself... just don't bother googling on "violent love" alone...)

P.S., long story short...

(5 points for the reference in the title.)

The electrician had already run CAT5e throughout the entire house, natch. I never knew buying a new house would be so much fun. :-D

My cat's breath smells like cat food.

It's pretty bad when "going out on Friday night" means picking up a Christmas tree stand.

Anyhoo, I finally ended up getting a digital camera yesterday. It turns out Wal-Mart (oddly enough?) is an official HP reseller, and I was able to track down the one store within 50 miles that had one left. It takes SD/MMC cards, so I can fit like four billion pictures (+/- a couple billion) on my 64MB SD card.

Cut to today, when we drove up to Bear Valley Springs to check in on our new house. As you might have guessed, I got a little happy with the camera and ended up taking 91 pictures and movies of the house and the surrounding area.

Cut to the present, where I'm finishing off my Fruity Pebbles and trying to figure out how to get these and other various pictures into an album thing. I'm not real interested in writing my own; I just want some dumb piece of point-and-drool software that does it all for me. Any suggestions?

<INSERT TITLE HERE>

Heading out to go get a digital camera soon. It was out of the question until: (1) we got a reimbursement check in the mail, and (2) I convinced Nase that she needs one. That means I should have pictures of the house up soon.

Speaking of the house, the electrician was in there yesterday and today wiring it up. I had talked to the builder about going in there with him and running CAT5 everywhere, but I snoozed, so I lose. Plus, my big spool of CAT5 is about two hours away, in the opposite direction from the house (which is one hour away). Oh well, guess I'll just have to find a way to justify buying a bunch of wireless equipment...

I'm still pissed about No Doubt, but I suspect that I screwed up in reading the bill. So as I actually recover from that humiliation, I might report back on the concert itself... which come to think of it was quite good. Stay tuned. (Or don't, see if I care.)

oh yeah

And yes, the new design "breaks" in Internet Explorer. I'm usually not a browser snob, but I really couldn't care less. If you have a problem with that, use a real browser. Nyeh.

New design

Okay, now I'm really done mucking with this stupid thing for a while. And alan, if you copy my design (or read my mind) again, you are a right bastard.

stupid concert

We went to see No Doubt and Garbage play last night. What we got wasn't exactly that... while I distinctly remember that being the bill on Ticketmaster's site (which is the *only* reason I paid $45/ticket), Garbage somehow wasn't scheduled to play. Some weak, poseur, pop-punk, check-out-our-fake-British-accents band named New Found Glory opened (with a one-hour nightmarish set). No Doubt came on and played for over two hours, which was cool. But still, quite disappointing; I was more looking forward to Garbage (who had excellent shows the preceding week in Long Beach) than No Doubt. Oh well...

Oh, and browsing the Garbage web site, I learned a new word: "gwenabe". This is your traditional wannabe, but since there are so many Gwen Stefani wannabes, a new terms was created just for them. To quote, some major traits for a "gwenabe" are:

Running around with BAD bleach jobs
Horrific tattered clothing
Incredible stupidity
Saying, "ummm, like yeah for sure," valley girl dim shit.

Gee, Garbage fans can be pretty brutal on their message board, eh? Of course, most of them probably aren't old enough to remember "Madonnabes" who exhibited many of the same qualities (like their idol continues to do). ;-)

Final bitter note of the day: Gwen really has a potty mouth. I mean, I don't have any particular problem with a little cursing, and I was even expecting to hear Shirley Manson swearing a blue streak on stage. But Gwen just peppered her language, somewhat haltingly, and it was really unbecoming of her. (Conversely, and somewhat oddly, it's quite becoming of Shirley.) I guess I wanted her to be more Orange County and less Compton. I am getting old.