Michael & Liz are Bloggable

Whether people want to admit it or not, everyone judges a book by it's cover. If you disagree with me then tell me why first impressions are important? But chances are you are dead wrong which is why everyone also says not to do it. This movie has been out for over a year and we just watched it last night for that very reason. The title sucks: No Country for Old Men. I have a very crazy imagination so I couldn't help but laugh at the thought of a mass migration of old people. Haha, yep, still funny. After watching this movie, I can happily report that the title of the movie is appropriate, so off we go.

This movie was fantastic for a variety of reasons, many of which could possibly ruin the ending for you, so I will try to show restraint. First of all there are slow, boring movies and then there are slow, intense movies. This movie was the latter of the two. It wasn't slow, scary though, which is a HUGE plus. Halfway through I found myself leaning forward with hands clenched rather than leaning back and relaxing. The scene I was watching was a guy walking through a field. Riveting, I know. There were fast action scenes but the movie did a great job of keeping you engaged no matter what was happening.

I don't know what Javier Bardem was paid for this movie, but it was half of what he deserved. Bardem played Anton Chigurh, the villain of the movie. Chigurh is a psychotic outlaw on the pursuit of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). Every scene with Chigurh in it, I wanted him to stop talking and go away. This wasn't because he was a bad actor but because I was afraid of what he would do to the person he was talking to. He is emotionless and extremely unpredictable in what psychotic behavior he might pull next. He would kill a baby if it was laying in his path. Javier couldn't have done a better job scaring me half to death. That's what villains are for right?

Half my enjoyment of this movie was in the weapons they used to kill people. I know that sounds terrible, but if you've seen the movie, you know what I'm talking about. Moss walked around with a pistol and a sawed-off shotgun. That's nothin' compared to Chigurh. He walked around with a compressed air tank gun and a silenced shotgun. Both weapons I've never seen before but both of which are freaking sweet to see in action. They should have called the movie "Crazy Guy with Awesome Guns", doubled the number of gun scenes, and I would have seen it the day it came out. What can I say? I judge movies by their titles!

The only disappointing part of the movie was the end, but that's only because it was so unexpected. In fact it was so unexpected, that Liz and I rewound the last scene to see if we missed why the movie was over. It caused a bit of confusion and sparked conversation. Have you ever seen a movie where you didn't get it until after it was over and had thought about it a little? The movie went from awesome to stupid to awesome again in about 5 to 10 minutes. Luckily it landed at awesome, and I totally recommend seeing it.

Satisfaction Rating: Steamed Vegetables. You probably enjoy them while your eating but once you're done you feel unsatisfied because they weren't a basket of fries. You just have to wait 20 minutes for that signal to get to your brain that your stomach is full, and you're glad it's full on steamed vegetables.

I feel like today I have heard or read so many crazy quotes, that I had to share them. Also I have a few comments about each.

Some commercial on the radio this morning:
"I am a victim of predatory lending."
This was a woman who hadn't lost her job or had any trouble other than just making the payments on her house. What a convenient time to be a victim. Made me throw up my arms and say "gimme a break!" Can someone please take responsibility for being stupid?

A *HEADLINE* on Fox News while I was running:
"Are We on the Road to Communism?"
Are you freaking kidding me? Also... that doesn't sound like news.

A cnn.com news article link:
"Southwest warned pilots of Buffalo issues"
I don't mean to make light of the situation, but my imagination just ran wild.

Liz at dinner:
"You're only 27... wait... you are, aren't you?"
Love you too.

Liz on the way home from dinner:
"Oh man! I should have gotten a banana... wait... why did I say banana? I meant Root Beer."
Is there an "on" button I can push?

Our conversation on the way home from dinner:
Me: It just doesn't hit the spot.
Liz: Well it hits my spot.
Me: Nice.

Is anyone really all that excited to see this movie? It can't be anything more than mediocre when the ending is so set in stone. Spoiler Alert: The 1980 USA Hockey Team wins the gold medal. But I'm not one to care whether or not I know the ending based on my record of ruining movies for pretty much everyone I know, so I watched it anyway.

The problems I had with Miracle far out weight the redeeming qualities. There's really only one storyline to the movie and everything else was just fluff: a really mean and mysterious coach takes on a team of young underacheivers. Try and get anything else from the movie and you'll just get confused.

I watched a whole movie about a hockey team and I couldn't put one name to one face outside of the coach. The team was all just a bunch of forgettable white guys with long hair who liked to use words that ended in "oot". The climax of the movie was one of the USA players scoring a goal and I have no idea which one it was. Their nemesis, the Russian hockey team, might as well have all been from the Ivan Drago family (Rocky IV reference), they were tall, strong, and can't talk. A side plot was about how the big bad mean coach was defying the olympic officials with his coaching style, but it was extremely weak. It was just one guy saying "I'm backing you coach, you better know what you're doing".

Rudy, Cinderella Man, and Cool Runnings are all awesome. I'm a sucker for feel good sports movies, and this one certainly applies. The difference here though, was at the end, I didn't really care about the people involved.

Those are just a few of my beefs. I feel like (and I feel this way far too often after movies) they decided that the USA hockey team's triumph in 1980 would make a good movie, and then just filled in the beginning and middle with whatever would keep you interested. I guess they achieved their goal, I watched the whole thing.

Satisfaction Rating: Popcorn. You knew what you were getting into and it's always just OK.

I came home for lunch today and let Daisy out in the backyard. Gryffin is a girl so he stayed inside. After a half hour I look out and Daisy is going to town on a big huge hole in the middle of the yard. I call her in and this is the gloriousness that comes to the door:

What you don't see here is how her belly is caked in mud as well. Let's just say that I went back to work 10 minutes late and with a different shirt on.

Today I worked with Charlie for the whole afternoon in the lab. If you don't know Charlie, he is on my team and one of those people where if you start talking with him and you haven't laughed within the span of about 2 minutes, either hell has frozen over or Charlie is just not in a good mood. But it's rare, let me tell ya. So we had a lot of time to talk and that's always a good thing. We are similar people constantly aiming at similar goals so it's always nice bouncing ideas and thoughts off each other.

Charlie's dream job is to be an artist. I'm not even going to try and describe what kind of artist but in extremely stupid terms, he wants to be a digital artist where one picture tells a story. I guess that description didn't sound as stupid as I expected it to be. If you want to see what he's working on there's a link on the right or just click this one. He's talented to say the least and I definitely see his dream coming true at some point (although I have a hard time encouraging him since he's a valuable part of our team).

Today we got to talking about what I would do if my life was taken care of. Not if we were rich, but if we had no worries about paying our bills. I can't help but pinpoint my hobbies in that instance and try to piggyback a career off of them. My hobbies are running (sports), woodworking, and movies to only name a few. So I guess my potential career moves would be Personal Trainer, Woodworking Guy, Movie Reviewer.

I'm going to throw out Woodworking because I really don't think my back or muscles can take doing that 8 hours a day (but then again if I stop using a coffee table that might not be a problem). I'd LOVE to be a personal trainer. I have told Liz this before that if my job for 8 hours a day was to work out and help other people work out, that would be amazing. The problem really with that is that you need a ton of credentials to do it. Obviously if money weren't an issue I could get it eventually, but that's not really something I feel like spending time on at the moment. So Movie Reviewer it is! I watched 8 movies this past weekend and another one last night... it's just something I love to do and I don't think it'll ever get old.

As a promise to Charlie, I will start reviewing some movies that I watch. I think my problem with movie reviewers though is that none of them are right and none of them are wrong, their review is just an opinion. So why should I care to read an opinion from someone I don't know? Well you know me... so read it and care please.

Also going into this makes me very aware of my writing skills or lack there of. I stink at punctuating things, I use apostrophe's for no reason sometimes, I like starting sentences with "but" "also" and "and", and I really like using the word "and" 3 times in a row with it actually making sense, and I really enjoy run on sentences that sometimes lack punctuation or even have 5 subjects and verbs. My attempts at reviewing movies will not be focused on writing accuracy though, so please don't point out crappiness when it happens.

If you have any movies you want me to review, let me know and I'll get it on Netflix. When chick-flick nights start back up, it'll get pretty crazy some of the movies that go on here.

Today I didn't feel like running the 14 miles I was supposed to (I will do it tomorrow) so instead I worked in the garage on my next project, building a birdhouse. It took roughly 4 hours to complete and I have to say that it started out great but ended terribly. Now I realize the goal is to put together a little home for a bird and I definitely accomplished that, but there are so many problems with the house, that I feel ashamed to put it up and use it. One thing I have to note, the wood is from my old desk that I made, so I took it apart and am going to use it for various projects. It is plywood which is really hard to work with as far as projects go because it splinters when you cut it (you can see if you look closely) and it is just extremely low quality lumber. But as Gordon Ramsay says, bad chefs blame their ingredients so.... umm... "plywood is wonderful". Check out the craptastic work:


Check out the not-so-round hole in the front and the bump that is a screw trying to push through on the front of the house. The reason I couldn't get the hole round is because I put the house together before creating the hole, so that makes it extremely difficult to use any tools to make a good round hole. Lesson learned.


Believe it or not, the gap above the hole where the roof is, was put there on purpose. It allows for ventilation for the birds during the summer heat.


I put a little ladder there on the inside front of the house. I've read that a lot of birdhouses do a great job raising the baby birds but then when the babies need to get out they have no way of climbing because they can't fly. So I built a little ladder out of spare wood. If you're thinking the wood for the ladder looks a little hapharzard, it's because the rougher the wood the easier it is for the babies to grip, so the ladder is rough on purpose. There are holes in the floor for ventilation and also if for some reason it rains into the house, the water has somewhere to drain

I guess if I made the hole more rounded and didn't have that protruding screw on the front, it would be a pretty decent house but I'm still a little annoyed. But like I said, it will house a bird this year so it will accomplish it's goal.

What kind of birds can stay in the Fulton Bird Suite #1? Chickadee's, Titmouse's (or would that be Titmice?), Nuthatches, and Wrens. The house is only for small birds that can fit through 1.5" diameter holes. I feel uncomfortable making a bird house for bigger birds. If for some reason a smaller bird tried to use it, there's a good chance a bigger bird would come in and kill the babies and we definitely don't want that. It's pretty rare to provide a suite where it's OK to open the door and take pictures, so we will do our best to monitor whoever inhabits the Fulton Bird Suite #1.

By the way, Fulton Bird Suite #2 will be on the way shortly once I have enough time.

Well the new year's resolutions are not off to a great start. I have quit two of them already.

Here are the 4 and how I'm doing:

1. Sell something made of wood. I already have several people who have said they want to buy a wooden cross from me so I am confident that this resolution will be accomplished no problem. Because of the frigid temperatures, I have not been able to do any wood working in the garage yet so this resolution is somewhat on hold. But once it warms up, I will be out there working away on some projects.
   
   
2. Run 1000 miles. I ran 108 miles in January and am up to 131 miles as of today. The training will only get harder and harder along the way so the miles will add up quickly!! I'm excited about that. Also I have lost 9 pounds since the new year, so that is sweet as well.
   
   
3. Do not eat a combo meal. Sometimes you want fries and you want a drink and it makes no sense to not get both for a better deal.
   
   One day Liz was heading out to Captain D's to pick something up for dinner. Captain D's is basically Long John Silvers and it's delicious. We love the "Giant Fish Sandwich". It is two huge pieces of fish in a sandwich, it's so good. Well I told her "if you can get me fries and a drink that'd be great!" So Liz comes home and says "I told the guy 'a giant fish sandwich, medium fries and medium coke' and he said 'would you like the combo?' and I have never felt more stupid as to say 'no'." She said the guy asked her "you know it's cheaper right?" and Liz said "I know, but I don't want the combo."
   
   So that pretty much broke the camels back. I have gotten some combo meals but I am down 9 pounds so I don't care as much. :)
   
   
4. No TV Mondays. We found that the only thing to do when it got dark, outside of TV and Movies, is to read. You can only read so much. Then I started to realize that Liza would get furious this Summer if we turned off the TV once a week for a whole day. Resolutions are meant to cause a change not to make you miserable. I want to get better at wood working, I want to get better at running, but there's really no reason to just deprive myself of TV for no reason. It's not like next year I will be not watching TV on Mondays. Last years "no coke" resolution has genuinely changed my craving for soda. It's not as strong anymore. No TV Mondays would have stunk and really for very little reason.
   

...and I think we're the only ones. Anyone who has talked to us about finances, knows Liz and I get far too much taken out of our paychecks throughout the year and doing taxes means we get a biggity tax return in the spring. I think there are a few readers who have already said in their heads "that's really stupid". Well my response is "no, it's smart and you'll hear why in a second."

Over the course of the last year, I got an estimate taken on how much we thought we'd get back from the government and the estimate was 11k. I realize that is ridiculous and had we gotten 11k back, I wouldn't be sitting here blogging, I would be at Best Buy sizing up the dimensions of my new 70 inch LCD TV. Unfortunately the estimates were wrong. Last Saturday (January 31st) we did our taxes and it definitely wasn't that much. But it will almost single-handedly knock out the rest of the payments we have on my car and we should have the title sent to us in March or April. WOO HOO! We can't express how excited we are about that.

So why is this a bad plan? I can only think of two cons:

1. The goverment gets our money for 1 year (and the interest that comes along with it).
2. We are paying interest on our debt by not knocking it out earlier.
   

Before I list the pros to our plan let me eliminate the cons. The two cons above are under the assumption that when we get the extra money in our paychecks we are going to be smart with it. To be honest, I would probably just take the extra $500 a month and distribute it amongst our current budget. I think our food budget would be more relaxed and our "blow" money would have a little more in it for stupid purchases. Whatever we do with it, I highly doubt 100% of it would go toward the right things.

So why is this a good plan? Here are my pros:

1. Every penny of the money is given a name and place as to where it will be used.
   
2. It's not as likely that we blow any of it on something stupid like food.
   
3. For the whole year we are living BELOW our means.
   
4. It is a one year forced savings plan, and that's NEVER a bad thing.
5. It's like giving yourself a bonus every Spring.
   

So what are we doing with our return? We have 3 friends/family members who have awesome DSLR cameras and it has always been a hobby that Liz really wants to get involved in. We decided in the Fall that one thousand of it would be given to Liz to get her awesome camera and any accessories and the rest of it would go toward paying off my car. I'm all about paying off debt but I gotta give Liz props for being such an amazing wife when it comes to sticking to a budget. She deserves a sweet camera and a reinvigorated hobby.

I gotta admit, I'm already looking forward to next year!