Partial to the bean…

I’ve just completed stocking our freezer with 60 lbs of locally-raised grass-fed beef, thereby guaranteeing a catastrophic power outage, lasting no less than 3 days, sometime within the next 4 months. Anth, we may want to put some of our tax refund towards a backup generator.

The girls and I went to see Rango today. It is certainly a very different movie. Yup. The plot’s yer basic western — very straightforward, rather cliché. But the movie that’s built around that plot is so completely over-the-top bat-split insane. By the time they made the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas reference, I was in love. Despite the animation, it’s definitely pitched to adults, although there’s enough crazy action and funny talking animals to keep the kiddies more or less entertained. Alice had a little more trouble following it, because she’s old enough to need more than colored lights and fuzzy bunnies, but too young to have real working knowledge of the Western genre plot framework. She had a good time, though. We all did. I recommend this movie to all lovers of the surreal.

A few weeks ago, we went to see Beastly, which Alice and I found pretty mediocre (except for Neil Patrick Harris, who was great). Sammi liked it, but then she’s a movie lover like her ma, but too young to be as jaded and hypercritical as her ma is. It was a fair-to-middling adaptation of a classic fairy tale that worked best when it referred to the original and got really dull whenever it tried to break new ground. *shrug* It passed the time,

There are so many movies we want to go see that are out or coming out right now. Some or all of the three of us want to see: Sucker Punch, Paul, The Adjustment Bureau, Hop, Your Highness, and Arthur. That’s just the stuff that’s out or nearly out; there are several others that are still a month or two away that I’m highly anticipating, like Priest, which I’ve been waiting for for mooooonths.

We love the movies. It’s a good thing I use all my cashback bonuses for movie gift cards. Heh.

I solemnly swear that I will never again pick up a bag of potatoes in the produce aisle just because I think, “hey, potatoes, good to have on hand,” even though I don’t have a recipe in mind for using them. I do that just about every time I get groceries, and then I get them home and completely forget about them and then later I find them again once they have turned into besprouted monstrosities and that’s another $5 in the garbage.

One of the worst things about having a s-l-o-w computer is when you click the wrong button, and then you have to wait while the computer processes that action and performs the computations necessary to pop up the window to tell you that you’ve clicked the wrong button so you can click “OK” because you already know you clicked the wrong button and then it has to clear the pop-up window before you can go ahead and click the damn button you meant to click in the first place. I’m just sayin’.

Can anyone guess why this recipe gets easily 20 times more hits than any other recipe I’ve posted? It got over 2000 hits in the past year, while only a few others got over 100. I tried Googling sites that link to it but got nothing. So odd…

Anth is in the process of decommissioning all of the custom JavaScript stuff he’s written for me over the years, because it’s all hosted somewhere really expensive and stupid, and it’s really hard to find cheap and intelligent JavaScript hosting anywhere else. So bye-bye comments on the old version of my blog (he’s hardwired all of the old comments, so nothing’s been lost, but just in case anyone was toying with the idea of commenting on a really old post, give it up because you can’t), and bye-bye to the custom picture browser I’ve been using to post pictures all these years. (That’s a part, a very small part, of why I haven’t blogged in the past week: Even if I’d wanted to put up a batch of pictures, which I actually kind of did, I can’t do it because we’re between “systems” and it’s best if I just leave it all alone for now.)

The picture browser will be missed, but maintaining it is becoming too much of a headache and a money drain. I’m going to try moving to Flickr for posting pictures in the future. If anyone’s got any screaming reason why I shouldn’t do that, feel free to scream about it in the comments. Once all of the old pictures and comments are backed up and hardwired, I’ll close out the current batch of pictures early, and then I’ll start playing with putting stuff on Flickr. Expect some transitional difficulties. I’ll try to keep the swearing to a minimum.