My long vacation is nearly at an end. I’ve been off work since the Friday before Christmas, but I have to go back for a three-day week tomorrow.
Many of the daytime hours for the first week or so were taken up with reviewing the page proofs for The Dark Tower Companion. After reading and rereading the manuscript and paging through it to look for specific potential mistakes (missing periods in certain types of paragraphs was a biggie), I sent my report in on the 28th. It’s a good book, I think, but I don’t need to read it again for a while. I’ll probably have to pore over the bound galleys at some point, though. The book comes out on April 2, just three short months from now.
It wasn’t all work. We cooked up some great meals and watched some TV series and movies. I’m about 2/3 of the way through an 1100-piece jigsaw puzzle. When I started on it, I thought it was going to be really, really difficult, but it turned out to be only really difficult, especially for someone as color-challenged as I am.
We saw Trouble with the Curve, starring Clint Eastwood and Amy Adams. Clint’s characters get increasingly surly and gruff as time goes on. He positively growled at times in this one. Still, it was a good film, with strong performances and a highly pleasing ending. We were wondering how they were going to demonstrate whether the draft pick was a good selection or not without putting the pick through spring training or some other lengthy process, but they came up with a clever way of dealing with that. We also saw The Words, which I’d been wanting to see since I saw the first trailer for it. Jeremy Irons is really great in it, and the story is twisty and turny and captivating, but I’m not sure the whole thing stands up to close scrutiny. It’s a story within a story within a story, but it only matters if the middle story is true, and, if it’s true, that the Jeremy Irons part of it is true, too. If not, it’s just an experiment in navel gazing. It has Olivia Wilde, so that’s good, but it also features what must be the world record holder for a public book reading. It had an intermission. The central story is interesting, but we lose some investment in it because of the wrapper that dislodges it from real importance. I’m glad we saw it, but I didn’t like it as much as I wanted to based on the previews.
I had the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on the DVR since November, so I started watching it during an idle period. I quit about 20 minutes in. I was bored, mostly because I’d already seen the Swedish version and couldn’t see the point of watching something that was so similar. No offense to Rooney Mara, but after Noomi Rapace, she was a pale imitation of Salander.
My British friends sent me a copy of the Downton Abbey Christmas special, which was light and frivolous right up to the very end. It was good to see Thomas and Mrs. O’Brien in different lights, instead of always being the villains of the piece. The trip up to Scotland was a nice change, though the lady of the estate was a real shrew. Mrs. Patmore’s love interest plot was fun, too. And then the end happened, which was a bit of a shocker.
We aren’t real New Year’s Eve revelers, and there’ve been years when I had a hard time staying up to midnight. This year we had a couple of light meals, spread out, and then watched the first six episodes of the second season of Treme. A year has passed since Katrina, and violence is rampant in the city streets. I’m intrigued by the use of real characters (in addition to the musicians, there’s the guy everyone thinks will be the next mayor, a politician who spent time in jail for accepting bribes), and the diversity of the music. Annie is probably my favorite character. It’s fun watching her blossom from a street musician into someone touring with the subdudes and playing at the House of Blues with Shawn Colvin. I also like the chef who threw the drink in a reviewer’s face. And Davis is a trip, but his aunt is a trip and a half.
We also watched the Doctor Who Christmas special a couple of days after it aired. Quite good. I liked the idea of the Doctor drawing a companion from somewhere other than our present, and she is quite a charmer. The snowman story was a little bizarre, but it connected back to a classic Who entity, voiced here by Sir Ian McKellen. The alien sidekicks made for good comedy relief, especially Strax, the Sontaran commander, who was the butt of many jokes. The gag about the worm of forgetfulness was played just often enough to keep it from getting old, and his outbursts about using various violent weapons to solve problems were great fun, too. The ending was a real surprise, though. I joked to my wife: Shortest. Companion. Lifespan. Ever, all the while thinking he’d use some regenerative power to bring her back. Bodes well for the future. At least he’s not on his cloud any more.
Our main outing after Christmas was to purchase a new car. We had a list of five dealers we wanted to visit and one or two makes and models to scope out at each. They were all within a few miles of each other, two on the northbound side of the interstate and three on the southbound side. We took a Kia out for a test drive, but didn’t like it. Then we tried out a Honda Fit, but we didn’t even get that one off the lot. Third stop was at Hyundai, where we planned to test out an Accent and an Elantra. The Elantra GS was a huge step up from the previous two cars we’d looked at, and we got a decent deal on it. My wife wanted red, white, black or silver, but she ended up with the 2013 Atlantic Blue coupe pictured above. We never made it to Toyota or Mazda. Sorry dudes. Geography.
