Giggling Over The Hobbit

Tags

movies, reviews, the hobbit, tolkien

So, PH and I went to see the Hobbit the other night.

We went in knowing that we were going to be grumbly. We knew they would have to reverse engineer some things because Middle Earth changed significantly between The Hobbit and Lord of The Rings.

In order to make things match up with the LOTR world, they’d have to fix some inconsistencies – goblins instead of orcs, elves being more faerie-like than the archetypal Tolkien elves, etc.

Not to mention that The Hobbit makes me a little grumbly anyway, because what on Middle Earth was Gandalf doing helping these dwarves anyway? Thorin is a stupid, greedy little twerp who doesn’t really deserve that mountain any more than Smaug does. At least Smaug is clever (although apparently not clever enough to cover his bald spot).

And then Gandalf just goes “Oh, I’m going to go off and get rid of this Necromancer guy, you guys just hang out with the Wood Elves while I’m at it,” and disappears to have a battle with EFFING SAURON while we just watch the hobbit and dwarves go down a river in a barrels.

That being said, I enjoy The Hobbit as a book more so than The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, because it is much more concise and to-the-point without so much wandering off the point and rambling sentences about people’s great grandfathers.

So, I went in prepared to be amused and entertained without too much risk of being deeply offended.

And I’m not offended, but some of their choices make me go “wut?”

Some choices were good. They turned Thorin into an actually admirable character, which makes the whole Gandalf helping them thing much more rational. They also built up the whole Necromancer thing, which makes total sense.

Bilbo was fairly well done, if too slim.

They retrofitted the look of the elves to match the characters from LOTR which again makes sense, and brought in Galadriel just so that there would be at least ONE female in the entire movie.

Sure.

But I really didn’t get some of their other choices.

Like the whole Pale Orc thing.

They took a single sentence from The Hobbit about a goblin named Azog and turned it into this whole blood feud thing.

This goblin killed Thorin’s grandfather, and the story is mentioned with more detail in the LOTR trilogy, but they changed all of those details anyway.

Instead they made up this tale about how Thorin avenged his grandfather’s death by chopping off the Pale Orc’s left hand, and somehow Thorin assumed that this had killed the dude. Then of course it is revealed that OMG! The orc is still alive and now he’s PISSED!

This big white orc has apparently come down from the mines of Moria (remember how much of a pain those were for Frodo and company to get to in the first LOTR movie?) just to hunt down Thorin. In the place of his left hand he now has this weird metal stick thing with branches that make it look like a snowman’s arm.

You won’t find a picture of it anywhere because it looks so ridiculous, so all photos of this character are either right profile shots or above the shoulder shots.

This was the only one I could find:

So anyway, Frosty The Snow Orc is now on the hunt for Thorin, the way Captain Hook wants to kill the crocodile.

This elaborate addition probably plumped the movie out by forty minutes or so, which I could understand if the movie was otherwise looking thin (after all, they are breaking a single book which was short by Tolkien standards into a freaking trilogy) but the movie is almost three hours long!

Cut out Frosty and you’ll still have a two hour movie!

WHY DOES FROSTY EXIST?

It doesn’t help that orcs have been ruined for Perfect Husband and me by JourneyQuest, because of scenes like this:

I defy you to watch that video and then watch orcs talking in The Hobbit without giggling to yourself.

We couldn’t do it.

The first time the orcs started having subtitled grunting conversations we started laughing, and discovered that we were both imagining them arguing over grammar.

So all in all, we got some good laughs out of The Hobbit.

Maybe just not in the places where we were supposed to.

In Which My Birthdaycation Is Somewhat Interrupted By Motherhood

Tags

birthdays, motherhood, mothers, parenthood

My mother is down visiting for our birthdays (I was born the day before her birthday, possible the only time in my life I have evinced great timing) and it’s been nice.

Owl is completely enthralled with her/her Samsung tablet, and demands her constantly, leaving me free to move about the house unencumbered in a way that I have not experienced in two and a half years.

I took a couple of days off of work, which was nice because I’m just SO TIRED. Now that I am working five days a week AND the post-Christmas puppy season is at its height, I had been really scraping the bottom of the barrel for energy lately.

I’m not feeling overly rested, because Owl has taken to waking up at five forty five in the morning lately, but I have at least had time to sit and not work and not train. It’s a really nice change.

My birthday itself was not all it could have been, though.

After three straight days of Owl in the house, even my mother was beginning to get her fill of “MORE PUZZLE, NANA. WATCH DAT VIDEO, NANA!”

We planned to drop him off at daycare and have a mother daughter day shopping.

It’s not that I didn’t want Owl around on my birthday. I love him and his company. But motherhood and fun birthday celebrations don’t really go together well.

Yeah, about that…

Twenty minutes after I dropped him off, Daycare Lady called and said that Owl was crying for me and she thought he might have a fever. Since Owl NEVER cries for me at daycare and since Daycare Lady hardly ever calls to ask me to come get him, I went right out there.

So we lugged Owl to the mall with us. He seemed perfectly fine, if clingy, and the thermometer didn’t register a fever. But anyone who has tried shopping with a toddler will agree with me that it is not the same experience.

Twice I had to leave my mother in a store to guard the things we had set aside in a change room for me and carry Owl halfway across the mall to one of the TWO restrooms.

We had to interrupt our shopping for his midday nap, and then wrestle him back into coat and shoes to continue it once he woke up.

The simplest exchange between my mother and me sounded like this:

“Oh, dear, I think that looks, Owl, don’t do that, come over here please, thank you. Yes, dear, I think that it looks, Owl, don’t pull on your mother like that.”

“Yeah, it feels comfortable but the material is, no, Owl, honey, I can’t pick you up right now, Mommy needs to take this shirt off. Here, do you think I should try the, no, honey, fingers aren’t for eating.”

“Do you want me to get a larger Owl, stop that, you’re going to knock me over.”

and so on.

By the time we got home, I had a new outfit and an ottoman that would double as a toy chest for Owl, so it was ultimately a successful day, but we were so wiped that PH and I cancelled our plans to go to a movie.

Taking my exhausted mother and saying “Okay, can you put him to bed for us, thanks, bye!” seemed a little too cruel.

So instead we stayed home and went to bed early.

That’s a MOTHERHOOD birthday, that is!

The next day was my mother’s birthday, and it went better. I dropped Owl off at daycare again and he was just fine. Mum and I registered my business license at the town hall, went to Chapters, went to lunch, downloaded and played my cousin’s game Diamond Find (a fun little speed-reading choose-your-own-adventure which is filled with his quirky humour).

We organized Owl’s toy chest, and put on a load of laundry.

It was a good day.

I like this not working thing. Yes, it’s exhausting dealing with Owl all day, but it beats trying to meet people’s expectations in the real world.

Mum leaves tomorrow. Next… Disneyland!

The real world can suck it for ONE MORE WEEK.

So This Is 31*…

Tags

ageing, bad poety, getting older

…and what have I done?

Another year older.

New baby not begun.

And so this is 31,

And Owl sure is fun.

My little boy’s growing.

And bugging everyone.

This year I worked two jobs

and sure did work hard

my business is growing

as are the bills on credit cards.

And so this is 31,

I got employee of the year.

I’m definitely happy,

but suffering from fears

of dropping the balls

I have in the air.

But I just keep on juggling

and try to take care.

And so this is 31

I think I’ve done all right.

I just hope that next year

There’ll be mat leave in sight.

*with apologies to John Lennon.

Oh The Places We Will Go…

Tags

child development, childhood, fun, imagination

I am loving Owl’s imagination.

He was showing signs of imagination from a year and a half or so onwards – making vroom noises when playing with cars, telling us that a toy is sleeping, and so on. But in the months since he turned two his imagination has skyrocketed.

Everything, it seems, is actually something else.

His toy phone is a lollipop. A pine needle is a hockey stick. An upside down bucket is a stove. His poop is a seven. His toast is the letter C, no, it’s a turtle, no, now it’s a car, no, now it’s a dinosaur. RAAAWR!

He tells me that his toy monster/monkey/plastic toy man is a baby and that I shouldn’t touch it, because the baby is sleeping (my mother brought him my old baby doll from Nova Scotia so he can have an actual baby, which might be helpful in the future).

Driving him to daycare the other day I was told in quick succession that I was a cat, that we were both trains, that the car was a train, and then that I was a bicycle and he was a motorbike.

Last night he told me that his penis is a yo yo.

I love it.

First of all, it’s hilarious, and because he isn’t trapped by social conventions he thinks of the most bizarre and incongruous things, which I really enjoy. It’s a little like living with a crazy person. A cute one.

Second of all, it makes life easier and more fun.

One day he wouldn’t put his coat on while he kept insisting that he was a robot. I spared myself a tantrum by addressing him as “Mr. Robot”, and when thus appropriately dubbed he put on his coat and went out to the car quite cheerfully.

I’m really looking forward to when his ability to develop complex “let’s pretends” improves, so I can get him to do whatever I want by saying “Let’s pretend…”

If I want him to be well behaved in the grocery store I can invent a game where we have to pretend that we’re stocking up for a journey on the seven seas and talk like pirates the whole time.

If I want him to be quiet in a library we can pretend that the whole place is rigged for a bomb that will go off if we speak too loud.

If I want him to get dressed fast in the morning we can pretend we’re firemen, or that a dinosaur will eat us if we don’t hurry up and get out of the cave.

No only will it make things fun for him, it’ll make things fun for ME.

I spent my entire childhood in an elaborate game of “let’s pretend” which I remember quite vividly. A lot of my childhood memories have clearly fictional elements, like the memory of going out to see someone’s yacht and being followed by a large brontosaurus, or chatting with trees in the school playground.

I lost human playmates when I reached 13 years old, because everyone was too cool for let’s pretend. I had to play it quietly by myself in such a way that no one would notice.

Finally I was introduced to D ‘n D in my twenties before I found that again, and that’s not portable. I can go play D ‘n D, but then I have to go back to my boring old life.

Once Owl is old enough, life can be fun again.

Right now, penis = YoYo is the best he can manage.

But it’s a great start.

Wreck It Ralph – Perfectly Built

Tags

disney, jane lynch, lassiter, movies, plots, reviews, sarah silverman, Stories, wreck it ralph

I’ve been meaning to write about Wreck It Ralph since Perfect Husband and I saw it in theatres back in November. I thought you’d want to know about it since it was TOTALLY WICKED.

That’s right. I have zero complaints.

Me, the one who has found several movies to be… unsatisfactory.

*cough*Brave/HowToTrainYourDragon/MiloAndOtis/HungerGames/

TheHelp/HalfBloodPrince/DeathlyHallowsPartI…*cough*

Zero complaints.

ZE-RO.

I think it would be a fantastic movie for either gender of child to watch, although, since there are guns and enormous carnivorous bugs, I imagine it wouldn’t be great for little kids.

I think it carries an excellent message that it conveys eloquently.

I think it is filled with retro charm.

I think that the characters are three dimensional ones who grow and change throughout the story.

I think the humour is witty and sometimes understated.

I think the main female characters provide excellent role models for young girls.

I think that the development of the plot was a delight to experience.

A plot is a difficult and challenging thing to build well.

Believe me, I suck at them. Too simple, and it’s boring to sit through a predictable and pedestrian story, like, well, most children’s movies and an awful lot of adult ones. Too haphazard and you get a story that doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go, like Happy Feet.

But Wreck It Ralph is just… beautiful.

Every time I thought I knew where it was going, it threw a new wrench in the works. Every time I thought I knew how it fit together, it introduced a new twist. And yet everything did fit together, very well.

Yes, it had a couple of predictable bits, but then it was satisfying to see something so carefully constructed come to fruition.

I love Jane Lynch. Sure, she’s basically Sue from Glee, but I LOVE SUE FROM GLEE.

I love Sarah Silverman and the character of Vanellope. I even wore candy-striped hair pins at Christmas because they made me feel like her.

I love Ralph, of course.

I love the eye candy, by which I mean THE CANDY.

It’s just… perfect.

I can’t wait for Owl to be old enough to enjoy it. It has cars, it has candy, it has strong female characters, it has strong male characters, and only a couple of poop jokes.

Perfect.

Cracking Down On Our Craptacular Toilet

Tags

home improvement, toilets

When I was pregnant and my mother and I were waiting for the baby to be born, my mother tried to get the stink out of our toilet.

Our toilet was a whole world of stink. If I hadn’t lived in other places with PH long before we moved into this house, I would have thought he was missing the bowl, because our bathroom just reeked of stale pee.

And there were strange puddles every now and then – like we had a piddling ghost.

The linoleum behind the toilet was beginning to peel up.

Mum discovered that the toilet had a bizarre rim, not reachable by the standard toilet bowl brush, which retained all of the toilet filth. She put on gloves, broke out the bleach and scrubbed that thing.

But it wasn’t long before the stink was back. Cleaning the toilet became a truly disgusting but necessary routine, where I would have to scrub and rinse and scrub again and again to get all of the poop out of the bowl.

Imagine that your toilet hadn’t been cleaned in a year, and that a steady parade of fecally incontinent dysentery patients had been making use of it. That’s what our toilet was like every Saturday.

There were orange stains in the hinges of the cheap plastic lid that wouldn’t scrub out. No, I don’t know why white plastic was staining ORANGE.

And then the sediment started appearing.

A day or less after I scrubbed the thing, brown sediment would appear in the bottom of the bowl. I would scrub it clean, and flush, and OH LOOK, NEW SEDIMENT.

I scrubbed even more carefully under the rim. No use.

Oh, and a hairline crack in the bowl began to slowly expand and turn a shade of brown that could never be scrubbed away.

This is the cleanest our toilet ever got, 1 minute post scrubbing.

This summer my mother sent me some money to buy a new toilet. A friend of ours agreed to install it for us, but he’s a busy guy so we waited, and waited and waited.

One day, after twenty minutes of scrubbing crusted crap out of that filth bucket, I stormed out and frustratedly told PH, “we need to hire a plumber because OH MY GOD.”

Thankfully, shortly after our friend was able to come by. We got a new toilet and he installed it the next day.

We discovered that our old toilet was produced in 1988. EIGHTY EIGHT. People have been pooping in that toilet since Mulroney was Prime Minister. The Berlin Wall still stood when it was installed. People were listening to Rick Astley un-ironically. No one named Bush had been president yet. The WORLD WIDE WEB had not been invented when people started pooping in that toilet.

I was a gap toothed six year old when that toilet was put in.

I grew up, went to university, graduated and got married and people were still pooping in that toilet.

The interior of the toilet tank was lined in black gunk, a sediment that covered the bottom of the tank thickly and was no doubt the culprit behind the instantly re-dirtying toilet.

We lugged it outside, a sloshing, stinking, disgusting mess, and with a lot of banging and thumping, a new one was put in its place.

And OH HOLY CRAP (or lack thereof), what a difference.

This thing is amazing.

The seat is heavy and solid, not that flimsy, stained plastic.

And we have had that toilet bowl for TWO WEEKS and I have not had to scrub the bowl yet. It is as shiny and pristine as the day it was installed.

Owl still comments on the new toilet whenever he flushes it.

“New potty?”

“Yes, it’s a new potty.”

“Unca Mark fix it?”

“Yes, Uncle Mark put it in for us.”

“Tank oo, Unca Mark!”

Thank you, indeed.

It’s Blue Monday. Be A Unicorn. Or Be Blue. Or A Blue Unicorn. I Call It A Blunicorn.

Guess what, guys?

It’s officially the most depressing day of the year (in the Northern Hemisphere, at least… I’m not sure if the metrics apply to the sunny South).

So, to cheer you up, look at this sign outside of Owl’s favourite toy store, The Village Toy Shop in Port Moody.

Or, if you want to enjoy the day by wallowing and getting all your boo hoos out, Perfect Husband recommends this:

You Know You Live In Vancouver When…

…you’re scraping ice off of your car on a frosty subzero morning and you get the following helpful advice from a neighbour.

“Just pour a bottle of water onto the car, that’ll melt right away.”

…

…

I tried to explain why that might not be a good idea, but she just insisted, “no, it totally works!”

Anyone who assumes Canadians know how to handle cold weather has not been to Vancouver.

Hey, Single People, Here’s A Window To Married Life

Tags

dialogue, humor, life, marriage

Perfect Husband and I are in bed and settling down to sleep. For me “settling down to sleep” means reading for an hour in dim light until I develop the ability to go unconscious. For Perfect Husband, it means *snore snore snore snore*.

Perfect Husband: “I have a vital task for you.”

Me: “What?”

Perfect Husband: “Before you go to sleep, turn the dryer on to timed dry so it doesn’t run all night. Do this, and I will reward you with riches beyond your wildest dreams.”

Me: “And if if I don’t?”

Perfect Husband: “I will lick the inside of your nose.”

Me: “…I’ll remember.”

Meet Zippy

Tags

dieting, exercise, fitbit, food diary, gadgets, my fitness pal, new toys, pedometer, reviews

So a friend of mine who is always giving me embarrassingly awesome gifts gave me a Fit Bit Zip for Christmas!

I call him Zippy.

He counts my steps like a pedometer, calculates how many miles I have walked and how many calories I have burned, then syncs this info with My Fitness Pal and measures it against how much I have eaten that day.

How awesome is that?

Except for one thing – I have found out that Zippy is also a tattle tale.

You see, My Fitness Pal bases its calorie estimates on a certain assumed number of calories burned. So one night I went to bed and My Fitness Pal told me I was 20 calories under my goal! Yay!

I woke up in the morning and my diary for the day before had changed. Since I had gone to sleep instead of continuing to walk around, My Fitness Pal changed its mind. By midnight that night, it had switched me over to being 17 calories OVER my goal.

Thanks, Zippy, you little green rat.