Last Weekend for March 23-25
I went into this weekend with comparatively little on the schedule, and it ended up involving a lot of reading, eating and movies. Victory!
1. M had three high school friends come into town for their annual "Ladies Weekend" mini reunion. I joined them for dinner at Angelo's Pizza, which I really love. They did too. Afterwords, they joined me when I went to Addicted Coffee & Ice Cream for the first time. The ice cream was certainly good, but it was nothing special, and I suspect that in the past I will stick with Ice Cream Joy, which fills basically the same niche with better ice cream, or Malley's for the old fashioned ice cream parlor feel.
After dinner and dessert M and friends went off to do Ladies Weekend things. I started and finished The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. It was a solid novel, but frankly not up to the levels of most of my recent reading list.
2. Saturday was very relaxed. After running some errands, I spent the late afternoon and early evening reading a big chunk of Troilus and Cressida. From there I walked over to Smokin' Thyme for the first time and had a burger and fries. It was a respectable burger, but the quality/price combo was not nearly good enough to dislodge Buckeye Beer Engine from the top of my "walking distance from my house" burger rankings.
To close the evening, I caught Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. This was actually my third attempt to see this move. Back on January 19, M and I mistakenly assumed (ok, *I* mistakenly assumed) that after four weeks in the theater it wouldn't be sold out on a Friday night, and then two weeks ago I tried to go and even more embarrassingly confused the theater it was playing at. The third time was the charm, and I'm pleased to report that the movie was good fun, with a lot of video game meta jokes and a recurring gag about The Rock possessing "Smoldering Intensity" as one of his video game powers. It's not great cinema at all, but I really enjoyed it.
3. Sunday morning I gave platelets for the fourth time in 2018. I decided that Troilus and Cressida wouldn't be enough reading for two hours so in lieu of finishing that I started The Dark Forest, which is the second book in the trilogy I started last week with The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. I got over half way through it, and am pleased to report that it is just as good as the first book. If you like hard science fiction, you really need to read these. Of course, this means I now have two half finished books. Such a problem to have.
I feel like my radio show was particularly good this week, which often seems to happen after a week off.
Sunday night M, gieves and I went to see Pacific Rim Uprising. Regrettably, this movie was a significant step down in quality from its predecessor. The first movie was delightfully goofy enough and had enough interesting action scenes to carry it through a thin plot. The sequel was apparently made by someone who thought the first one needed more bad plot and less robot/monster fights. There was a good movie in there somewhere, but it drowned in poor choices. I cannot recommend it. At least the company was good.
1. M had three high school friends come into town for their annual "Ladies Weekend" mini reunion. I joined them for dinner at Angelo's Pizza, which I really love. They did too. Afterwords, they joined me when I went to Addicted Coffee & Ice Cream for the first time. The ice cream was certainly good, but it was nothing special, and I suspect that in the past I will stick with Ice Cream Joy, which fills basically the same niche with better ice cream, or Malley's for the old fashioned ice cream parlor feel.
After dinner and dessert M and friends went off to do Ladies Weekend things. I started and finished The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. It was a solid novel, but frankly not up to the levels of most of my recent reading list.
2. Saturday was very relaxed. After running some errands, I spent the late afternoon and early evening reading a big chunk of Troilus and Cressida. From there I walked over to Smokin' Thyme for the first time and had a burger and fries. It was a respectable burger, but the quality/price combo was not nearly good enough to dislodge Buckeye Beer Engine from the top of my "walking distance from my house" burger rankings.
To close the evening, I caught Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. This was actually my third attempt to see this move. Back on January 19, M and I mistakenly assumed (ok, *I* mistakenly assumed) that after four weeks in the theater it wouldn't be sold out on a Friday night, and then two weeks ago I tried to go and even more embarrassingly confused the theater it was playing at. The third time was the charm, and I'm pleased to report that the movie was good fun, with a lot of video game meta jokes and a recurring gag about The Rock possessing "Smoldering Intensity" as one of his video game powers. It's not great cinema at all, but I really enjoyed it.
3. Sunday morning I gave platelets for the fourth time in 2018. I decided that Troilus and Cressida wouldn't be enough reading for two hours so in lieu of finishing that I started The Dark Forest, which is the second book in the trilogy I started last week with The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. I got over half way through it, and am pleased to report that it is just as good as the first book. If you like hard science fiction, you really need to read these. Of course, this means I now have two half finished books. Such a problem to have.
I feel like my radio show was particularly good this week, which often seems to happen after a week off.
Sunday night M, gieves and I went to see Pacific Rim Uprising. Regrettably, this movie was a significant step down in quality from its predecessor. The first movie was delightfully goofy enough and had enough interesting action scenes to carry it through a thin plot. The sequel was apparently made by someone who thought the first one needed more bad plot and less robot/monster fights. There was a good movie in there somewhere, but it drowned in poor choices. I cannot recommend it. At least the company was good.