Monday, February 24, 2014

‘The Monuments Men’ is not worth the price of admission, not by a long shot.  Since I didn’t walk out, I at least have to damn it publicly.  It has good actors and the true story sounds thrilling, but the movie isn’t.  The dialogue is flat and the plot is chopped up like liver.  The already tired theme of whether saving great works of art can justify the loss of  human life is exhausted by being repeated so often by George Clooney.  There isn’t enough tension generated by the scattered actions of the poorly developed characters to require any comic relief, so the humor that is present, how could Bill Murray not get a laugh, is gratuitous and not very funny anyway.  Even the settings are either unimpressive or have the look of the back lot about them.  One of the reviewers I read after seeing the movie summed it up well, “ it requires nerves of steel to get through.” 

Mondays for me are becoming what they should be for a good housewife, days of domestic work.  I wake at 5:50am to Skype with Jay and after a good chat, feel ready for breakfast and work, usually laundry, shopping for groceries and cooking.  The dust bunnies drifting around testify to the fact that I don’t get the vacuum out often enough.  I did a couple of weeks ago though and decided to clean the filters.  This had never been done since Jim and I bought it when we moved into the condo in Ottawa.  As I got my parents’ vacuum going over Christmas by changing the bag and cleaning the filters, which they had never done, I thought I’d better do my own.  The rule of nuts not falling far from trees holds again.

I have an appointment with the internist on Thursday to find out the results of the tests I had almost 2 weeks ago.  My heart can’t be going to fail imminently; he seems in no rush to follow up.  Good!  But it still means I won’t be joining the Pollocks and Don and Mela in Hawaii.  There’s always one of us whose health keeps them from the gathering.

At 4:00 this afternoon, I meet my tutor for the third lesson on the iPhone.  Again we’re going to a coffee shop because the library is still being cleaned up after the flood of 2 weeks ago. 

Wasn’t the Canadian Women’s gold medal hockey game spectacular!  The men’s game was great too.  They would have been well worth the price of admission.  

Canada's gold medal team

A Whiskey Jack on the snowshoe trail

My shopping list system, incorporating 2 Christmas gifts: the erasable, bamboo note pad that Barbara and Terry gave me and Jay's iPhone.  I take a picture of the former with the latter and look at the picture on my iPhone from time to time in the store.