Partial to the bean…

So today I went to see Kick-Ass (or, as the movie marquee called it, “Kick A,” because we live in rural America and some words are just too terrifying for public consumption). I was the only person in the theater, which was mostly cool because I could yell at the screen if I needed to, but a little bit lonely during some of the tense bits.

I’d brought the first two volumes of Scott Pilgrim*, in case I got to the theater early, but thanks to a parade of slow drivers, red lights, bizarre situations that kind of looked vaguely criminal, and just about every other possible delay, I got there just before the lights went down.

* I’ve already read these, but I’m currently trying to make Alice into a Scott Pilgrim fan in time for the movie, so I got them out of the library for her, and I kinda wanna reread them before the movie comes out because they’re great. I mention this mostly because Scott Pilgrim is namechecked in the movie, which tickled me immensely.

There was a large crop of previews (I love the previews!):

• The Expendables, which looks completely over-the-top and ridiculous, but has freaking everybody in it — Sly Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Danny Trejo, Steve Austin, Jason Statham… It’s like a freakin’ testosterone extravaganza. Might be fun in a stupid kind of way.
• Grown Ups, which just looks stupid, but does have Salma Hayak and Steve Buscemi in it, so I might rent it sometime, in spite of the people who are actually starring.
• Iron Man 2, which I was planning on going to see, but which now I am eager to see because I found out it has Sam Rockwell in it. Now I’m wondering if I should rent the first one and let the kids see it and decide if they’re interested in seeing 2 with me.
• Prince of Persia: The Whatever of the Blahblah, which might be a fun summer movie with the kids in tow.
• The A-Team, about which I really have no opinion at all. I never watched the show as a kid. Anth watched it a lot, though. I wonder if he’d like to go see this with me. (Probably not.)
• Killers, which looks pretty fun, even though the leads generally annoy me. Honestly, I’m looking at this movie’s IMDb page and I can’t really think of a single reason why I’d want to go see it, but the trailer made it look relatively entertaining. Maybe worth a rental.

Anyway, Kick-Ass, right?. Reading this review-type-thingy (LANGUAGE ALERT!) on Cracked.com is what even put this movie on my radar. In particular, the line “It’s socially irresponsible, morally irredeemable and pretty goddamned glorious to behold.” That string of adjectives, in combination with each other, is basically catnip to me.

For me, the movie split pretty neatly into two sub-movies. The first half (and it clocks in at just under 120 minutes, so we’re talking about the first hour here) is all about this kid, this nerdy weedy high schooler, and we’re supposed to care about him and like him, and blah blah he has a crush on this girl and blah blah his life’s angsty in an average teen sort of way, and blah blah he wants to be a superhero, and blah blah blah. I did not care about this kid — I thought he was a twit, and kind of an idiot, and I basically never stopped rooting for him to die so I wouldn’t have to watch him do stupid crap any more. So that half of the movie was kind of tedious for me, and I did a lot of squirming and sighing and checking my watch.

The second half, though, is amazing balls-out in-your-face violence, beautiful and terrible in that John Woo sort of way. I totally cared about and liked the other leads, Hit Girl and Big Daddy. I liked them a lot, particularly the lethal 11-year-old Hit Girl. I’m sure the Mommy part of my brain would have something to say about the terrible things that Hit Girl says and does in this movie, but I shut that part of my brain off for the duration; the pre-teen girl part of my brain wants to be Hit Girl very, very much. Maybe too much. Anyway, that’s between me and my therapist. Moving on…

Anyway, yeah, sum total, I really enjoyed the movie. I didn’t notice Nic Cage overacting, but then my favorite Nic Cage movie is Vampire’s Kiss, so I’m probably not the best judge. The actress that played Hit Girl, Chloe Moretz, was amazing. Christopher Mintz-Plasse was great fun to watch. If they’d cut out maybe 20 minutes of the teenager kid’s story, I’d have called this movie just about perfect, for what it is (i.e. socially irresponsible, morally irredeemable and pretty goddamned glorious to behold).

Someone asked after my cat via email, so I thought I’d share here what I wrote there:

She’s actually much much better. I’m starting to think she will outlive us all. The up-and-down-and-up-again has left us all feeling a bit jerked around; we’d already started coming to terms with making the arrangements to put her down, etc. and were actually rather pleased about the prospect of a summer free of all pet care. She’s pretty much back to “normal”, although I did move all litter boxes upstairs so (a) it’s more convenient for me to keep them clean and monitor her output, and (b) she doesn’t have to navigate the stairs any more. She’s totally down with it in the pee department, but has been pretty much holding her poop for a week, waiting for me to let her back into the downstairs again. It’s a battle of wills.

This is cool: Positive Discipline app for the iPhone

At the risk of this becoming Anth’s blog, here’s another link he sent me. This one has been sitting in my inbox for 3 weeks, but I finally got around to looking at it, and now I’m sharing it with you: Earth Hour 2010 – before and after pictures, very cool.

Photography’s Longest Exposure (hint: six months)

When I dropped the kids off at school this morning, I saw the best thing ever. It was a note:

Sorry Jill for accidently kicking you in the face. Here is a picture of you kicking mine. Your pal Jack

And then below that there was a drawing of one stick figure delivering a flying face-kick to another stick figure, and the figures were helpfully labelled “Jack” and “Jill”, with arrows.

(All names have been changed to protect the innocent.)

I know you’re all obsessively clicking refresh on my blog, waiting to hear what’s up with my cat. Well, not much. She’s sleeping a lot, eating and drinking tiny bits, letting me carry her to the litter area periodically for peepee time, and nothing else, really. I made her a secondary bed over by the deck door this afternoon, because she wanted to sleep in the sunny spot and smell the breezes for a while. I did some Googling and found a few vets in the area who do house calls; I emailed one, but she is going to be out of town for the next week. I’m waiting on contacting anyone else until I have a better idea of how long my cat’s going to be able to maintain at this level of minimal function…

Okay, I think I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve made some variation of this blog post, but once again, and maybe for reals this time, I think that my cat is close to the end of her life. She turned 19 on Thursday, and in the past day or two she has changed in significant ways. The rest of this post will be me rambling about this, so feel free to skip it if you don’t need the details.

She’s always been a kitty with litter box issues, and figuring out how to keep her going where she should and not where she shouldn’t has been a theme of her life. We hit a good groove in the past year, with an elaborate system of multiple boxes and pans, a nightlight (I think her night vision has been going, and it seemed like she was having more out-of-box experiences overnight, so I plugged in a little light near her boxes and that seemed to really help), and a scrupulous routine of twice-a-day cleaning. On Monday, though, she left some pee puddles in places that could not be explained away by simple carelessness or bad vision, and then yesterday she peed on her kitty bed and her favorite blanket, upstairs in the main living room. I don’t think she can handle the stairs any more (her bathroom area was downstairs in the storage room), so I’ve moved her box/pans up here under the kitchen table (yuck). We have wall-to-wall carpet upstairs (except for the kitchen, of course), so I’m pretty anxious about accidents up here.

Today she is visibly different — moving with a lot of difficulty, holding herself in a way that looks like she is uncomfortable even when she is trying to sleep, and her voice has changed, oddly enough. She’s still eating and drinking. Every time I pick her up (which she hates and has always hated) and put her in her pan, she pees. She has hereditary kidney issues, and I think her kidneys are finally giving up for good.

So I’m trying to figure out how to know when it’s time for her to be put to sleep. I so don’t want to have to take her in to the vet’s office for that — she is so scared of being picked up, of being in the carrier, of riding in the car, and (most of all) of being in the vet’s office with all of those scary smells and noises. I don’t want to have to put her through all of that right at the end of her life. *sigh* I just hope that things will become clear-cut soon — I am not morally okay with putting her down simply because she’s peeing in inconvenient places (no matter how much that sucks for all of us), so while I don’t want her to suffer, I would feel more clarity if I could be sure that she is unhappy and unable to be made comfortable any more.

Math made Sammy cry today. They were doing super-hard problems like 17-11 and it was so hard she hated it so much. She says math is getting harder probably every second and she hates it. Poor little sweetie.

I really really really want to write a real blog post right now, but I can’t. I want to tell you that we saw How to Train Your Dragon (in 3D) yesterday and really liked it, and why, but I can’t. I want to post more pictures, but I can’t. I am utterly overwhelmed with a massive project plus many smaller baby projects that all need to be completed this week. I can’t do anything fun. Bye.

This made me laugh until I cried. Alice fell over.

I’ve just put up another batch of (extremely cute) pictures, starting here.

- Friday was 1 month since our accident. Anth has now not sneezed, or slept on his side, in over a month.

- I took the Christmas lights down yesterday. Yeah!!

- Our chest freezer, our portly little friend full of food who lived in the garage, had a meltdown (get it?!? meltdown?!?) yesterday. I managed to save almost everything that was in there. Some items didn’t need to be frozen but were being frozen anyway to extend shelf life (like butter, bread, and Girl Scout cookies) — those were relegated to fridge or cupboard for now. Some items were stuffed into the small freezer attached to my fridge, which is now full to bursting. Some items I cooked — I made a giant pot of vegetable soup (8 bags frozen vegetables, 2 packs ground beef) and a huge batch of banana bread (13 frozen bananas, 1 bag pecans), and they turned out stellar, if troublesomely voluminous. Only a few things (a container of ice cream that was liquid before the situation was discovered; a bag of gorgonzola and walnut tortellini that was well past its sell-by date and, frankly, was never going to be eaten because its calorie count was stratospheric; one box each filo and puff pastry, fully thawed and soggy) were truly lost. I’m not sure if the freezer is dead or can be repaired; we bought it when I was pregnant with Sammy so I could cook and freeze meals ahead for the postpartum weeks, so it might just be too far past its prime to salvage.

- The kids are off school this week, but the public school kids were off last week. So much for planning playdates with our non-school-friends. Bleh. We have plans, though: clothes shopping, dentist appointments, meetups with school friends, etc.

I’ve just put up a small batch of pictures, starting here. These are from June — Sammy’s birthday (but not her actual birthday pix, which have already been posted), and the first day of the weeklong Movie Camp that we did with some lovely homeschooling friends.

Super-cool buggy dew pictures! (Thanks to nwhiker for the linky!)

Something seems to have happened to Google today. How strange! On the up side, Thinkgeek has some wonderful new products available!

At least none of these have come to pass.

Have you seen anything unusual today?