Zoom!
The weekend whizzed by. It started early, sort of, because I had a fantastically frustrating conference call on some litigation on Friday. It was supposed to be the settlement call, but the litigants got greedy and I ended up storming out of the room, yelling “We’re done! The State of New York is done!” In retrospect, it was probably pretty funny, but it didn’t seem it at the time. Came back up to my office, got a couple more things out of the way, and then dramatically announced that I had to either leave or quit, so I was leaving. My exec dep very sweetly called me a few minutes later to make sure things were okay, which I appreciated. It’s pretty rare that I’m a drama queen; it was probably pretty alarming.
So, I got home before the kids and plopped myself down with Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4. I was never much of a button-masher, so doing required combinations is just beyond me at this point, but I finally unlocked a second level so I can pick up a few more skills and go back to the previous level and beat some things. Great game. Then the girls wanted to go to the school’s drama club talent show in the evening, which started at 6:30 and went until, say, midnight. At least it felt that way. It was all very sweet — most of the talents involved lipsynching or singing along to songs I really never needed to hear, the top hits of the day and a bunch of country tripe. It took a very long time. There was a very long intermission with popcorn and soda and all that stuff, and then back in for Act II as we’re approaching bedtime. Bekah was getting quite restless, and the guy sitting in front of us had a serious gastrointestinal issue going on. To put it mildly. Not something I’ve experienced in a public setting in a long time. I finally couldn’t take it anymore and we went on home to fight over getting ready for bed.
On Saturday, I had to take Hannah out to deal with the problem with her skis. We had a lovely lunch together at a little cafe in Glenville, just the two of us sitting and chatting and have a delightful time. She’s such a spectacular little creature, bright and lively and considerably smarter than I was at that age. It’s inconceivable that she’s going to be 10 years old in just a few weeks. Then we went to deal with the skis, which proved a frustration. The place we rented them from had nothing to offer us in return, and wasn’t helpful at all. The issue with them is fairly evident on snow, but not so much on carpet in the store. I know somebody who knows the owner, and I could get it taken care of that way, but it really bugs me to have to do that. In any event, they would have replaced them if they had something, but they didn’t, of course, so I had to decide what to do. I didn’t want her to lose the chance to improve her technique in a season that’s likely to be long, so I ended up going somewhere else and just buying her a simple ski package at a decent price that I believe will get her through next season as well. Frustrating, though. And by then it was snowing like crazy where we were, so I had to beg off meeting up with an old friend I had been looking forward to seeing, but I had spent half an hour driving through fairly blinding snow. It wasn’t accumulating at all, but you couldn’t see a thing. Of course, as soon as we crossed the river, there was nothing. Ah well, next time.
Yesterday, skiing at Bousquet. First time I’ve been cold — the wind was just howling. But everything is open this year, and they’ve got so much snow they set up a little tunnel for the kids to ski through on the way down Drifter, which is pretty cool. I hit some of the diamonds early and had a good time. Diamonds at Bousquet are primarily just steep, not extraordinarily tricky, which is fine with me. Anywhere else I’d stay off the blacks, but on my home hill I can handle them. Then we went to a birthday party that started at a skating rink. When all that was over, I was just done. Kids to bed, a little TV, then me to bed. Still more than a little tired.
Two movies this weekend. “The Good Girl,” which I honestly forgot that I had seen in a theater, but which was well worth a second viewing. Jennifer Aniston isn’t likely to turn into one of our great actresses, but she’s crafted herself a clever career in little movies doing characters that aren’t just extensions of her “Friends” character, and she was very good in this. Tim Blake Nelson gives off a scary kind of common, backwoods evil. John C. Reilly is the straightforward schlub he usually is. Best line is when Jennifer asks the brooding rebel-wanna-be “Holden” why his parents call him “Tom”: “That’s my slave name.” Also saw “13 Conversations About One Thing,” the first movie in ages in which Alan Arkin is given something to do. That alone would have been worth the rental. It’s quite good, a nice little interweaving of lives in a New York that doesn’t look quite like the New York that’s usually in films, which made it interesting. The neighborhoods weren’t so familiar, the street scenes not the ones we’ve seen in so many other films. The settings alone gave it a slight edge. There was a sudden shift in the timeframe for one of the stories that surprised me at the end, when it turned out that its timeline had played out well in advance of the rest of the stories. Maybe there were other hints at that and I had missed them, but it caught me off guard. But very nice little bit of filmmaking.
Music: Jill Sobule, “Pink Pearl.” Why has it been two years since I listened to this? Ditto for Southern Culture on the Skids, “Dirt Track Date.” I got all the Christmas discs put away. Now if I could just find the energy to deal with the tree itself…