Oddly, thankfully, and despite the credit/market/economic crisis, we’ve got new neighbors.  The house near ours that was for sale forever finally sold.  Additionally, the last house our builder started (and certainly didn’t finish) was finished and sold.  Today, though, I was pleasantly surprised to see they broke ground on two new houses on our street.  That’s outstanding.  I understand there are 4 homes that were to start construction, but this pair I’ll see daily.  Let’s see how long it takes.

We went to see Jungua over the weekend.  They’ve been advertising the show quite a bit over the last month and it certainly seemed enticing.  Mostly, the show was pretty good, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it outstanding.  There certainly was a display of amazing skills, agility, and flexibility, but simple elements like synchronization were pretty bad.  I’m not sure how the director would miss this, but they need to get a handle on it quick.  I don’t feel like I’ve wasted my money, but I wish it felt more like a full show than a rehearsal.

Today, we went to see our first movie in quite a while — Quantum of Solace.  I haven’t posted in quite a while, so while I was working on some back-end updates I decided to make a post about it.  Simply said, this didn’t feel like a Bond movie of old.  I’m not looking for something formulaic, but it felt like an early revision.  A number of scenes felt as if they were cut short.  It really really didn’t seem like a Bond flick.  That’s not to say that this was a bad film, just not a Bond film.  Otherwise, it just becomes an action flick.  That, it certainly was.  There was non-stop action start to end.  Worth seeing, yeah, but if I’d make the choice again, I’d just wait for it to come out on video.

Well, we’ve just barely scratched the surface of getting the new house furnished.  We did the “office” (these are really all just bedrooms) first (basically done), started the “gym”, and due to some family coming for an extended visit we’re starting on the living areas.  Last weekend we put in an order for a dining table and it was delivered Friday.  It’s beautiful — even better than the manufacturer’s pictures.  We ordered chairs and a couch this weekend.  Here are a couple of (phone) pics of the table.

Well, I never got around to finishing the job of cleaning up after the last major software update and yet another has come along. This looked pretty important so I did. I wonder how long it will take for me to figure out what else broke. Hopefully, it didn’t make it impossible for me to track it all down.

As anyone that works with software knows, upgrades don’t go as smoothly as you’d like.  Well, my latest here with the site has been the biggest bugger.  I don’t know how long it’ll take me to sort it out.  I don’t seem to have lost any data (yet), but I have missed a lot of organization that I’ll have to re-do.  That sucks.  So, things will be out of whack for a while…

We went to see Live Free or Die Hard today.  It’s good!  I can’t go and call it one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen, or anything like that, but this was a true summer block buster.  It was an all out action film in the best of ways.  It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a “real” action film.  Mostly Hollywood tries to put out an action film with some sort of twist, but this is out and out true to the genre.  One liners, witty quips, car chases, explosions, impossible situations, a hero character than is tougher than nails and rough around the edges, no love story, no strange mystery, no attempted plot twist, no super powers, no half-hearted special effects, and nothing wrong.  Seriously, it was great.  I’ll say it’s the best action film I’ve seen this year, in the last year, maybe even in the last 5 years.  Go see it if you haven’t.  I don’t want to spoil it.

We went to see Transformers today.  We went to the theater without seeing a schedule and letting fate decide.  It turns out we got there way too early for most films, and a little late for Transformers, so we went to see it hoping that we only missed the commercials.  The timing worked out pretty well.  I gather we missed maybe a minute of the opening.

This film has me a bit torn.  I was a die hard Transformers kid.  I loved it.  I knew everything about it.  I probably saw every episode of the original TV series, and a good chunk of the crap that came later.  It’s been so many years, though, and my memory of all those little details has faded.  So my wish was that Hollywood wouldn’t screw this one up.  Well, they didn’t.  Sure, they changed things around a bit.  Some for legal reasons, some just because it’s Hollywood.  I’m not so sure I like Michael Bay’s execution.  It certainly wasn’t the crap that was Pearl Harbor, but here he seemed to be trying too hard to make it fast paced, edgy, gritty, etc.  He made a common mistake of Hollywood directors trying to zoom in on the closest details of a fight such that you lose sight of the big picture.  That single detail is what really got to me.  It made it hard to follow everything, and maybe that’s by design, but just not quite right for me.  Stepping back from that, the story was good.  Naturally, it’s a big Hollywood summer blockbuster, so it’s got big noise, explosions, weapons, the latest military gadgets, the whole spectrum of cliched government characters from spooks to grunts.  The dialog was a little less than believable at times.  That could be just acting, but I think the dialog hurt it.  I love the throwbacks and comedy.  The comedy helps with the comic book feel.  The throwbacks grab us original fans.  Number one on the list is “the sound”.  That sound the Transformers made when transforming.  The other is Optimus Prime’s voice.  They went and dug up Peter Cullen.  Amazing that he’s still alive.  Oh, and that nice car purchasing scene where Bumblebee smacks the VW Bug.  That was cool.

In short, I recommend this, especially if you loved the Transformers as a kid.

We ordered our appliances today (well, technically it was yesterday).  It feels good to get that off the list, but it sure is hard to see the bank account drop so much in one foul swoop.  I could almost hear my debit card groan.  Hopefully, we made good choices that will last us a couple decades.  We decided to go ahead and order them today, because it’s the last day of the big 4th of July sales.  10% off really helped.  We’ve got another rebate form that will help another 5% too.  Top that off with free delivery and it just seemed like a good way to stretch our budget.  And even if this week’s closing doesn’t wind up happening, we’re scheduled for delivery in about a month.  That should be plenty of time to have the house ready for them and them be all setup before we do our move.

We went to Memphis’ big July 4th celebrations on Saturday (June 30). This year they combined the two big celebrations on each side of the city into one big one over the Mississippi. I say that like I have some authority. We didn’t go to either last year, so it’s all new to me. When we went to the Sunset Symphony I noticed a couple wheel boats go out on the river and come back to watch the fireworks. A little light went off in my head saying we should try that. So, when I heard about the fireworks over the river I knew I had to look into seeing if the boat company would be doing it again. They did. We went. We went with some friends from work. I thought it was nice. The fireworks turned out pretty well. They certainly spent a bunch on the show. I think they could have done a much better job of choreographing the way the fireworks went off, much of it seemed like they were just randomly hit “fire” buttons. They had a huge volume of them, though. It went on for 10 minutes or so. The important measure of what I thought is that I think we’ll go again some time.