Here We Go Again

I finished reading The Fellowship of The Ring to Simon on Friday night. We debated going out and buying or renting the movie, or all three, but decided to wait until Saturday instead. We ended up buying the extended edition of the first movie, because I figured that we'd probably end up with the extended editions eventually anyway, and why buy them twice?

So we watched the first disc on Saturday afternoon. Luke wasn't much interested, but at least he wasn't too disruptive--he recited some books to himself, not too loudly for the most part. Simon didn't seem too scared by any of it, the Balrog or the Nazgul or the Eye of Sauron; on the other hand, he didn't seem too scared when he first watched "Harry Potter & The Chamber of Secrets", but it seems nonetheless to have instilled in him a fear of things coming out of the plumbing.

Saturday night was the writers' group meeting; my dad had volunteered to babysit, so he joined us for supper and then we went over to Marg's. Now, attendance at meetings seems to fluctuate; once we had thirteen people, but usually it's more like six or seven. The minimum attendance for meeting is generally three, because Nicole and I almost always attend, and we've never had absolutely nobody else show up. This time, it was just us two and Marg. We did as best we could--we read our writing exercises, which all of us had done(I should post mine here later), we talked about our months, the writing we'd done and the things that had kept us from doing it. At 8:30, though, when the few "probably late"s had phoned and cancelled, we gave up and left, taking some of the food that Marg had set out at her insistence.

We decided to see if we could catch a late movie, since we had a babysitter anyway, but neither of the theatres we tried had much on at the right time. When did 9:00 movies go out of fashion? Maybe it was just growing up in a city with only two theatres, but I remember there being 7:00 and 9:00 shows and that was it. Now it seems that any decent theatre shows movies from early afternoon onward, and 8:00 and 10:00 are more the norm. The only show that was on before 10:00 that wasn't a kids' movie(which we'd rather see with the kids, of course)was "The Devil Wears Prada". Nicole, who's just started reading the book, was somewhat interested in it, but I decided I'd rather go home and watch "Veronica Mars" instead.

Since the end of the TV season we've been doing well on our Veronica Mars Season 1 DVDs, and we were down to only three episodes left. Dad had seen a few episodes, so he was willing to watch with us. So...well, in a nutshell we watched all three episodes back to back, and it was great fun. Except that the last episode left us wondering a few things...argggh! (Nicole couldn't stand it, so she looked up a plot summary for the beginning of Season 2, to clear up a few issues.)

We finished watching Fellowship on Sunday. Luke was a little more fractious this time, so Nicole had to take him while Simon and I watched it. Nicole had watched the EE before, at a writers' group sleepover(which I couldn't attend, just because it was women only. So what if 90% of the group is female?), so she was willing to make the sacrifice. I seem to recall that Luke didn't watch the Harry Potter movies the first time either, so maybe he'll watch it next time.

Simon's interested in D&D has been rekindled, too, perhaps partly because of the Tolkien but also partly because he's been reading The Manual of The Planes, which was always one of my favourite AD&D handbooks to reread. So I'll whip up some kind of a campaign for him just to try out. I'm just using the Random Dungeon Generator at the end of the Dungeon Master's Guide, which I always enjoyed playing with anyway. Simon's created a character--just a human fighter, which is okay with me because that's the easiest character type to start out with. Nicole is just using her ranger character from Darren's campaign, though I've reduced her to 1st level for balance. (She's still got 18/83 strength, though.)

We had our first session last night. Not much of a plot--Simon's fighter, Fleur, inherited a big house that was owned by his great-great-uncle, a mad wizard. I haven't detailed the house yet, but since there's no clerics in the party I've put in a mysterious cupboard that dispenses two healing potions a day, and I'm sure there will be other oddnesses. In the basement there's a mysterious staircase leading down into the dungeon, where there is rumoured to be treasure, as well as some kind of portal to other planes... They may run into an NPC or two--perhaps a thief would be useful. We'll try to play every few days, and see how we do.

Next week I'm on vacation. Yay! Not much planned, just a few day trips and probably just as many day stay-at-homes. Maybe we'll rent some movies or something.

Maybe That's Not Her Head

Courtesy of merde:

1. Randomly pick a song from your music library.
2. Find the lyrics.
3. Go to Google translation and translate the lyrics from English into German.
4. Take the new German lyrics and translate them into French.
5. Take the new French lyrics and translate them into English.
6. Post the NEW English lyrics and have people guess the original song.

Here we go:

You filled in top my directions like one night in the forest like the mountains in spring, like a manner in the rain like a storm in the desert, as a somnolent blue ocean fills you my directions, me fills in top come again. To come to love you to me to leave, me my life to be given to let me in your laughter drown one to be able, me in your arms to die one to be able me beside you to fix one to be able, me with his always making you come me to love you one to be able, to come to love me again.