Kill Bill Volume 2: Less Blood, More Plot

Upon seeing the “sequel,” I could really tell how the two halves were supposed to fit together as a whole. Watched in succession, the pacing of the two movies would be perfect. While Kill Bill Volume 1 focused on The Bride and her single-minded revenge, Volume 2 focuses more on the backstory and why her revenge is so necessary (and so flawlessly executed). The alteration of pacing would be a cleansing of the palette after two hours of jam-packed hack-and-slash gore—you’ve got it out of your system, so now let’s see more of why she’s on a murderous rampage. If you didn’t enjoy Volume 1 because of the over-the-top blood and guts, you may enjoy Volume 2 more for its drama and plot and character development. However, if you enjoyed Volume 1 solely for the gratuitous violence and much fast-paced kicking of asses, you may be mildly disappointed in the lack of equally massive gore in the second installation of the story (although it does still have its share). Remember, The Bride has fewer people to kill in this movie, anyway. 🙂

Apart from seeing Kill Bill, Amy and Aaron and I went to Subway for lunch, then the Low Carb Solutions store for the infamous pork rinds, then to Allied and Goodwill and Savers before we got our movie tickets. Fun weekend, great weather, and Amy’s visit most certainly saved us from doing yardwork all weekend.

Ah, well. There’s always next weekend.

…All’s Right With The World

Amy’s asleep in the living room, Aaron’s asleep in the bedroom, and I’m wide awake and hanging out in front of my computer in the basement.

Yesterday was fun: Amy arrived around 3:00pm, we hung out for a while and talked and gave her the Grand Tour of our new house, and then we opened presents. Aaron’s birthday present (from November), Christmas presents for all, and Amy’s birthday presents (from January, which ended up in amongst the Christmas presents). Then Amy and I went to BG to walk around and shop—we hit Finders, and R&B, spent lots of quality time in Grounds for Thought, ducked into Ben Franklin, browsed around 2 Play, wandered around Hatter, then realized that we needed to get home for dinner. We got some chicken and beverages at Kroger and headed back to Toledo. By the time we got home, it was 8:30pm and Aaron was starving. We barbecued the chicken on the grill and had dinner, then I opened my birthday presents (April 22nd, in case you were wondering). We all talked for a while, and finally went to bed around 2:00am, I think.

Overall, it’s been a fun visit so far. Today we’re going to go out to lunch, make Amy eat some Cinnamon & Butter Flavored Pork Rinds, and go see a matinee of Kill Bill Volume 2 at 3:15pm. Then she’s going to take off shortly after the movie, and Aaron and I will continue with our normal Sunday of food shopping and doing laundry. 🙂

Good times… I miss having Amy around. A lot.

Bye Bye, Blue…

Step one of the website overhaul is accomplished: I have changed the color palette for the entire damn site. It doesn’t have as much contrast as the last version, and I may have to do something about that. The dynamic contrast was what kept the site visually interesting for me, despite some sub-par header graphics from time to time, and I’ll miss that if I don’t re-implement it somehow.

My Mom always used to say to me, before I would go out with my friends, “Just remember who you are and where you come from.” At the time, it was a pleasantly sappy way for Mom to remind me to be good, and I took it as such. Remember, people know you’re a Mormon, and are watching you, so don’t mess up. That sort of thing. But recently, I find I’ve forgotten Mom’s advice (which, incidentally, was given to her as a youth by Memaw). I frequently forget who I am: web designer, amateur photographer, et cetera, and how I got to be where (and who) I am today. It’s not until I get into conversations with people who don’t know who I really am that I remind myself.

There’s a guy at work, name’s Mike, newest member of our department (about a month newer than me, though he’s worked for Sky longer). I think some people think him simplistic or goofy or whatnot, but I find him pleasant and honest and funny and forthright, which is refreshing in the corporate environment. He’s maybe a couple few years younger than me, I’d guess. Anyway, we always end up taking our morning break at the same time: around 9:45am, I’ll go into the break room to read whatever book I’ve brought with me that day—and shortly thereafter, Mike will come in to buy his can of Mountain Dew. We don’t plan it that way, and it doesn’t always coincide like that… but when it does, Mike’s quite the talker. 🙂

Today, through a series of random topic changes, we managed to start talking about my time at BGSU. I’d mentioned that I had supervisory experience, but that I was no good at disciplining employees (Sheryl… ahem). He asked about my job there, and I explained how I moved up through the ranks of RCC, from peon to supervisor, but had to leave when I graduated. Mike was surprized and amused that I knew more about computers than I’d let on. (When at Sky did I have the opportunity to flaunt my computer skills, I wonder?) He wanted to know why I never tried to get into the techie programming section of Sky, and I had to explain that I’m more of a designer than a programmer. I ticked off the media qualifications I got with my VCT degree: web design, photography, multimedia, video, print…

And I remembered who I was and where I came from. And I was ashamed that I had forgotten.

OMG Gibby…

Ahh… sitting at my computer—no, make that my computers—listening to mp3’s, with Outlook Express open, posting to my LJ. Cheerfully ignoring my external Mac CD burner giving me a tracking error; remaining happy nevertheless. Trying to decide what to work on next. Thrilling in the quick response of mouse and keyboard and a two-point-something GHz processor.

So, work has been so slow that I’ve been frequenting all the news sites: CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, Channel 13 out of Toledo. See, news sites are allowed, while blogging is not. A almost got canned when she tried it, but only because our supervisor saw and tattled on her. Not from any sort of monitoring, which makes me feel a little better.

Anyway, I found an article that you might find… intriguing. About binge drinking and its effect on brain functions. An excerpt reads:

Brain scans show clear damage, and tests of reading, balance and other function show people who drink more than 100 drinks a month have some problems, the researchers said.

Now, this might seem like a lot, but think about it in terms of college party-goers. One hundred drinks a month equals out to 25 drinks in a weekend. For the average college student (of the heavy partying variety), the “weekend” consists of Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. Heavy binge drinking would then be about 8 or 9 drinks in a night. That’s completely within the realm of possibility. That’s about how much I drank at my bachelorette party, although I can count on one hand how many times I’ve been that drunk. Some people really do get that trashed every weekend, though (and Amy and I used to live nextdoor to some of them in the dorms).

Doesn’t this explain some things?

“Oh my God, Gibby, we’re not brain damaged! Why won’t you wake up? You’re passed out in your own vomit!”

Ah, the memories…

Thank you, Sheryl!

Ye Olde Frankenstein PC is back up and running, thanks to a working power supply donated by Sheryl. I installed the new power supply with little to no difficulty, and was delighted to hear that lovely little “beep” when I hit the power button. Then I spent even longer hooking up the PC to my little network of crap (gotta make sure the Mac is all finished being connected before cramming the PC under the desk, which means hooking up the external CD burner and the monitor switchbox, gotta feed both PC and Mac keyboard cables through and figure out where they live when not in use, etc, etc). Then I got to pick up where I left off back in freakin’ January when my computer had its little blowout, which was figuring out why Norton LiveUpdate wouldn’t update my virus defs. Amongst all those things, I spent all evening with my computer and didn’t even get the stuff done that I wanted to do with it (time-sensitive alumni web page updates).

So, now that I’ve downloaded a nice LJ client for my PC, and updating my personal page is no longer a chore, the question arises: do I keep blogging on LJ, or do I return to manually updating the.details? I intend to do some updates to it, anyway: changing the header graphic and menu system, adding a few sections (like gardening… I’m a dork), maybe even changing the color palette (oh the horror!). Can I get some feedback from my loyal readership? Blog here, or blog there?

It’s way past my bedtime. Lemme know what y’all think.

P.S. – Amy’s coming to visit this weekend! Schnarf!
P.P.S. – How I’ve missed having a speedy computer. I like my Mac, but I also like not having to wait for shit to load.