kitchen remodel: phase 5 of 31

Scott and I both took a four-day weekend to paint the kitchen. We've watched too many one-day home improvement shows on HGTV and DIY Network because we completely underestimated how long it would take to paint the room. We spent Friday removing the wall cabinets, patching the walls, taping the room, and going to IKEA. We spent Saturday priming and Sunday painting the ceiling. We finally painted the walls today and met with the IKEA contractor and our plumber friend. Now we just need to paint the trim, order the new cabinets, build, install, have pluming and electrical work down, etc., etc., not to mention the flooring. So, we've merely started the kitchen remodel.

Lower Lewis River Falls & Yale Lake

Here are Scott's amazing photos from Sunday:

Lower Lewis Falls:

Lower Lewis River Falls, originally uploaded by sweber4507.

Yale Lake:

LewisRiverLakeReflectionWest, originally uploaded by sweber4507.

Afternoon at Lewis River Falls -or- Day We Almost Lost Mom

Yesterday, Scott, Sheena, Ma, and I took what we thought would be a short drive to the Lower Lewis Falls at Gifford Pinchot National Forest. However, we didn't realize 40 miles from I-5 would take hours on winding forest roads. We finally got to the falls about an hour before dusk. Scott scrambled to take pictures (which I hope to post).

At some point, Scott, Sheena and I took the stairs down to the falls. I thought mom saw us from the viewing area overlooking the falls, but apparently she thought we headed back to the car. Worse, mom took a different path to another parking area. When we came back up and didn't find mom at the car, we all became worried. We were basically in the middle of nowhere in a vacant park, out of cellphone range, looking for mom in a dark, densely wooded area with poorly marked trails. Of course, we then started to assume the worse like she fell down the canyon into the river or some horrible Blaire Witch scenario (the only soul we saw in the last miles into the forest was a suspicious-looking hunter). Fortunately, Sheena found mom after twenty minutes of worry. In hindsight, the area between the river and parking lot was relatively small, but still it was creepy not being able to find mom right away.

French drain AKA ditch

Before we could do a more visually satisfying home improvement project like paint the kitchen, Scott forced us to do the responsible thing and install a boring French drain before the fall rains. Its fancy European name is misleading as a French drain is basically a type of drainage ditch with pipe.

Flavel House

Scott's wonderful pictures:

, originally uploaded by sweber4507.
Flavel House - Eastern Exposure-Vertical, originally uploaded by sweber4507.	Flavel House Sitting Room, originally uploaded by sweber4507.
Flavel House Family Room, originally uploaded by sweber4507.
Flavel House Music Room 2, originally uploaded by sweber4507.
, originally uploaded by sweber4507.	, originally uploaded by sweber4507.

On Sunday, ma, Sheena, Scott and I took a day trip to Astoria. In addition to seeing The Goonies house and Lewis & Clark's Fort Clatsop (boring), we saw the Flavel House Museum. The 1885 house was very impressive - especially considering that it was completed merely 79 years after Lewis & Clark left Fort Clatsop. It was interesting to learn that the Victorian style house also maintained Victorian etiquette in what still had to have been a young pioneer town. As new homeowners, Scott and I learned that we really should set a day each week to accept callers and keep a silver platter out to collect calling cards.

Julie & Julia: B

Meryl Streep as Julia Child, originally uploaded by eatwellguide.

Scott, ma, and I saw Julie & Julia on Saturday at the Moreland Theatre in Sellwood. The Moreland is the first movie theater I remember going to. Mom took me there to see Bambi and Snow White. All I remember of the theater then was that it had red heart-shaped love seats at the back of the theater. The love seats are gone now, but the little theater still has the painted ceilings and fixtures.

Anyways, I finally got to see Meryl Streep as Julia Child. She was terrific! Stanley Tucci returns as Streep's sidekick and Jane Lynch continues her scene stealing (as Newsweek notes). The Julia Child portion of the movie was great, but the Amy Adams / Julie Powell portion of the movie was annoyingly long. Let's be honest, Streep as Child is the major draw of the movie and no one really wants to see a movie about blogging. That said, the Powell portion does make a point about its overly idealized portrayal of Julia Child that no person could live-up to (Joe.My.God. reminds us that Child has been accused of being very homophobic).

Overall, a good movie with great performances, but it was a little long and the less interesting Powell story should have been edited-down. Sheena, who refused to see the movie, summed it up well as a chick-flick about a woman who finds meaning in cooking.

BTW, for a movie about people who cook, I was surprised that the movie didn't make me hungry. The duck scene was the only appetizing scene (Scott actually "Oooooh"ed the cooked duck). The irrelevant way the movie handled food, the movie could have been about auto repair, woodworking, or knitting. It seems the movie missed an opportunity to use food to entice viewers and could have taken cinematography lessons from any Food Network cooking show.

fierce kitty Gordon

Scott's camera captured Gordon in action:

IMG_4869, originally uploaded by sweber4507.

IMG_4843, originally uploaded by sweber4507.

Until our recent move to the house, Gordon was an apartment-only kitty with few opportunities to go outside. With the house, we hoped she would enjoy going outside more. We tried to coax her out by leaving the doors open. I even carried her out to which she replied with a worried yowl and ran back inside. So, we figured she was just afraid of the outdoors.

Then last month, she suddenly found courage and went outside. We think she became jealous of the numerous neighborhood cats she would watch roam through our yard. Now Gordon is obsessed about going outside and has become an outside monster. Scott and I still have to supervise her outings because she doesn't have all of her vaccinations yet. We are also concerned that she doesn't realize that she is clawless as she seems to be fearless in approaching other cats and even dogs. Her only defense now is that she crouches on our front steps as if she blends in with the concrete.

(09/09/2009 revised.)

Inglourious Basterds: B

Inglourious-basterds-members, originally uploaded by ashleyashhh.

[WARNING: MINOR SPOILER BELOW]

Scott and I saw Inglourious Basterds last weekend. I can't claim to be the most devoted Quentin Tarantino fan because I still have not gotten around to seeing Death Proof/Grindhouse or Jackie Brown, but Pulp Fiction is one of my all-time favorites and I loved both Kill Bills.

Besides the over-the-top visual gimmicks and music references, Tarantino's signature filmmaking style are long, two-person conversation scenes. Basterds' first chapter is a long scene of a Nazi officer's conversation with a little-spoken French farmer. It's a great opening scene with so much suspense as to what direction Tarantino is going to take the scene.

Basterds is surprising linear in its storytelling with only a couple of flashbacks and fewer tricks to keep the audience off-guard. The movie is still Tarantino but more conventional and less suspenseful carnival ride than his other movies. Since the movie counts each chapter, I sighed a little at each new chapter as I wondered if the title card was a warning of another long scene.

Like his other movies, Basterds is about criminals and gangsters who operate with some type of moral character or philosophy -- just instead of gangsters or assassins, this movie has a band of Army/OSS insurgents and a holocaust survivor versus Nazi war criminals. [WARNING: MINOR SPOILER ALREADY DISCLOSED IN MANY OTHER REVIEWS.] Tarantino took some far-fetched liberties in his historical recreation and made a revenge fantasy. Although I prefer movies to be historically accurate, this movie does have a satisfying ending.

Overall, a good movie with fun performances, but probably not the best Tarantino movie. Brad Pitt's accent grew on me. Mike Myers' over-the-top cameo made what would have otherwise been a uninteresting scene watchable. But it's the relatively unknown actors (at least to US audiences) like Christoph Waltz and Mélanie Laurent that stood-out to me.

The Hurt Locker: A

The Hurt Locker (2009), originally uploaded by LAS AVENTURAS DE ANTOINE DOINEL.

Last night, I watched The Hurt Locker while Scott went to Jurassic Park.

The movie literally spells-out its point at the very beginning, "War Is A Drug". The movie follows a trio composing a US Army explosives unit as they count-down their final days of deployment. The three men each cope differently with the enormous stress of the highly dangerous task of disarming IEDs, car bombs, and suicide bombers in the midst of the Iraq war.

For a movie about a current, controversial war, the movie and its characters don't seem to express an opinion about the war itself. The story could have been set in nearly any war. There is no overt message about the senselessness of war -- other than the obvious cruelty of hidden bombs. It's just three guys who struggle to do their job and then struggle to live without the intensity of the job.

This seems like a nearly perfect war movie and not overly gory or intense as I expected. My only annoyance was that there were a few M*A*S*H stereotypes such as an overly-calm Sidney Freedman type of Army psychiatrist.

District 9: B

District 9, originally uploaded by MyCine.

Scott and I saw the much anticipated District 9 last weekend. Like many sci-fi premises, this story was a heavy-handed examination of humanity at its worse.

The movie dives-in with many what if scenarios:

• What if, instead of landing on the White House lawn, the UN, or a socially/economically stable continent, aliens landed in a troubled location like Johannesburg, South Africa?
• What if, after 20 years, humanity was not inspired by first contact, but merely viewed aliens as another complicated, messy, unwanted refugee problem?
• What if the governments of the world outsourced extraterrestrial diplomacy to a for-profit, exploitative, multinational corporation -- which, needless to say, is inherently without morals or ethics?
• What if technologically-advanced aliens lacked humans' conniving, lying ways?
• What if a spineless, uninspired, corporate middle manager was placed in charge of human-alien relations?
• And what if someone made a documentary about it with the usual talking head, expert commentators?

Obviously, this movie portrays us at our worst with, at best, stereotypically irrelevant "human rights" activists in the background and an anti hero who only finds courage and morals when it serves his self-interests. Is humanity really that bad? Sure, other sci-fi like Star Trek are unrealistic in their overly optimistic portrayal of humanity, but nihilistic fantasy is no more realistic. The filmmakers made so much effort to make this movie seem like reality, but only portrayed the worst of humanity's indifference. I will credit the movie for implying that black and white post-apartheid South Africans somehow united to reimpose apartheid against the stranded aliens.

Overall, good sci-fi movie with more of a story than the similarly styled Cloverfield. The graphic vomiting and continually shaky camera work did make me a little nauseous, so small screen viewing is probably preferable. And the movie did annoyingly set things up for a sequel, so we'll probably get to revisit the story - especially since it had a great weekend opening.