About A Stepdad

My top 5 trailers (based partially on the trailer itself and partially how AWESOME the movie should be.)  Plus one sleeper trailer.

The Dark Knight Rises.   

Batman. Bane.  Cat Woman.   Nolan.

The Hobbit

Gandalf.  Singing Dwarves.  Hobbits.  Peter Jackson.

The Avengers

Robert Downey Jr.  Scarlett Johansson in skin-tight leather outfit.  Joss Whedon.

The Bourne Legacy

Jeremy Renner.   Explosions.  Car chases.  I would bet a naked woman at some point.

Prometheus (Alien prequel)

Aliens.  3D.  Charlize Theron.  Ridley Scott

Plus a sleeper, a trailer that never fails to make me laugh…

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Bill Nyghy.  Maggie Smith.  Judi Dench.  No explosions.  No car chases.

I have a few friends who are on the web as well.  I thought I would post their links.

Claire…http://www.clairehatcher.ca/   Not only a blog but she created a pretty cool website.

Bruce and Lil  Not a blog, per se, but they’ve created an amazing website.  http://littlehouseintuscany.com/   It makes anyone want to go to Tuscany.

Gina… http://somethinginfinitelyinteresting.wordpress.com/  A lovely, sometimes sad, sometimes funny, blog about life.

Bev… http://bevnalabbeyscriptorium.wordpress.com/  Faith and writing.

An older one from me… http://travelswithjustjoe.blogspot.ca/  Makes me realize how long- winded I can be.

Sean Slater… http://seanslaterbooks.com/Sean_Slater_Books/Intro.html   No blog but for writers, take a look at the timeline in his publishing section.

Anyone else who has a blog, let me know, I’ll pass it along.

Would you give your facebook password to a potential employer?

I have to say I’m shocked this would even be asked.  Would I?  No.  I wouldn’t give it out to my friends, why would I give it out to an employer?  If they asked to be ‘friended’ so they could see my public face, I would be ok with that.  But asking for my password?  No.  Talk to my former employers, sure, talk to my references, absolutely but you can’t have my password.  That is, and always should be, private.   

Thoughts?

So, my blog has been up for a week, now.

Thanks so much to everyone who signed up to ‘follow’ me.  I feel the love, oh I surely do!

In that week, I wrote 13 blogs.  I have 14 comments (and even more sent to my personal email.)  That was awesome.  I love the feedback.

Things I have learned… I learned how to put pretty pictures into my blog.  I learned how to do links but looking at other people’s blogs, I still have a lot to learn.  I learned how to edit and add widgetie thingees and track stats and blog to twitter and FB.  No easy task for an old dog like me, let me tell you.

But hey, I did discover that old dogs can learn new tricks.

In my life…

I managed to get 100 pages out to my friend, Sean.  I love the changes that I have made and I think the book is reading so much better.   I managed to get a day with Mark and Alexander and Ana, and survive an encounter with the past.  I kept up with my friends via FB and email, always fun but sometimes time-consuming.

Lost 3lbs on my new diet (which I mostly just having 3 good meals a day instead of a glass of orange juice for breakfast, no lunch and a HUGE plate of ribs and mashed potatoes for supper.)  Now, for breakfast, it’s yogurt and fruit (yummy!), a salad (bleh) for lunch then a regular supper (including fish and chips on Thursday.)   So, it’s not like I’m depriving myself, just trying to make a few better choices.  Less pop.  More water.  Less chocolate bars, more carrots.

Next big step, exercising!

Don’t hold your breath.

Reading… The Affair by Lee Child.  Love the author, not sure this book works.  As always, reading with an eye to learning how to write better.  Even if it isn’t his best, Lee Child can still teach me a LOT.

Just got Game Of Thrones in the mail.  Can’t wait to watch that for the 5^th time.

Changed my background TV from news to home renovations.   That way, when I’m cooking supper or paying the bills or chatting on-line, I wouldn’t get so distressed at all the grief in the world.  Instead, Mike Holmes will make it all right.  Or that couple will find their perfect home in Belize.   That’s the world I want to live in.

This week, I want to continue the blog, do up a review or two, host a friend from Victoria, and find a way to have an adventure of some sort this weekend.  I will also want to make my official application for the Blogger position.

That’s assuming nothing interferes with my plans and, sadly, if there’s something I’ve learned in the last few years, the universe doesn’t give a damn about my plans.

While driving along the main street of Langley on Saturday, Alexander spotted a toy car shop.  Now cars are to boys his age like strippers will be when he’s 18 or a good snooze when he’s my age.  We had to promise to go back.

So, after breakfast/lunch at Dot’s Café, we crossed a street in a town where people still stop for you, and went inside C&R’s Hobbies and Collectables.  Alexander immediately found the packages of cars and began ogling them all while Mark checked out a HUGE radio controlled airplane, a WW2 Corsair.  I took Ana to the train area and we tried to spot all the doggies in a little display they had set up with collectable cars.

But there was so much more there.  So much from my past.  Testors paints that I used to use to paint my tanks and planes and little soldiers.  There was a Romulan Warbird plastic kit from my childhood, a few of the Airfix planes I’d put together, a couple of the tank and ship models and even a few boxes of toy soldiers I would save my paper route money for.

It was like I had been transported back in time.  So many good memories of times spent gluing models, painting them up, making little dioramas with them.  Some of my dioramas were even put in store window of my favourite hobby shop in Victoria.  As a kid, that was like winning an Oscar or gold medal (as least for a geeky kid like me.)

We didn’t buy anything but both Mark and I left talking about all the old models we’d built (and for some reason I can’t explain, I later set on fire.)

We were about to head to the Langley Airplane museum when Alexander heard fire truck sirens so off we charged to find the fire, or at least the trucks.

We never did find the truck but I we did find a classic deli, a tattoo parlor and RPG Vintage Toys and Games.

In we went and, just like C&R Hobbies, I was taken back into my childhood.  My teens to be specific.

There were old Nintendo games, Intellivision games, shelves full of all sorts of board games, even one with plastic tanks that my brother and I used to play.  There were transformers boxes and Star Wars figures and even Bionic Man and Woman dolls (which I lamely tried to explain to Ana who just looked confused.)

But there was also something from a truly magical time in my life.  A time when I met my wife.  Way back in high school.  An unpainted box set of D&D miniatures.  Like the ones I bought when I first started to play the game.  A wizard and elf and dwarf and Halfling and a good half dozen others.  I’d painted mine up but there they were, all silvery and shiny and pure.

If I had to say a best time in my life, that was it, when I was young and silly and found a girl who actually liked to play D&D, a girl who actually liked me, a girl I knew I would spend the rest of my life with, but ultimately that girl, my Margot was taken from me far, far, far too soon.

I left C&R all excited about my memories of being a kid. I left RPG Vintage Toys and Games just about as sad as I have been in a while.

The past, at least for me, is a double-edged sword.  There is happiness there, to be sure.  But also so much sadness and loss.   Somehow I managed to find both those things in two little stores in Langley.

Gearing up for the season finale of The Walking Dead.

Will Rick’s hearing return?

Will Carl decide to wander around while the zombie horde attacks?

Will any of them find a copy of  How to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse? http://www.amazon.com/Zompoc-How-Survive-Zombie-Apocalypse/dp/1906512337

Will any of them survive?

I hadn’t planned on going back in time when I woke up on Saturday morning but that’s precisely what I did.

No, I didn’t finally invent a time machine, though my draft schematics should produce a working prototype if someone could only send me $325 million for all the parts.

Instead, I had a visit from my brother-in-law, Mark and his two children, Alexander, age 6 and Ana, age 4.  The plan was to have breakfast/lunch then head to the airplane museum in Langley.  Yes, we have an airplane museum in Langley.   Mark, as a pilot, never lost his love of planes and for me, hanging with him and the kiddlings is always fun.

So off we went into the sometimes sunny, sometimes rainy weather.  To make it a bit more interesting, we decided to eat at a classic diner in Langley City.  Dot’s café.  Located on the revitalized mainstreet with diagonal parking , it’s a timeless place surrounded by a host of nifty little niche market stores. It’s not a place you go for linen table cloths, ornate silverware and delicate entrees served on shiny black plates.

No, it’s an old-fashioned family run restaurant with great tasting and inexpensive food.   It’s the type of place looks like nothing special from the outside but which always seems to be full.   The type of place that’s a secret to everyone but the locals.  The type of place I remember from when I was a kid, way back in time, back before we had cellphones, a 24hr news cycle and microwave pizza.

I had the artery-hardening eggs benedict with a buttery, creamy hollandaise sauce and perfectly crispy-but-not-too crispy hashbrowns and oh-so-bad-for me, coffee.   But it was all so very good even if it was also so very far from my diet.  Mark had the same as me and the kids ordered from the kid’s menu.  The highlight for Ana was being able to load up her toast with lots and lots of jam.  The highlight for Alexander was eating his own plate of food, half my hashbrowns,  one of Marks’ Eggs Benny and most of Ana’s fried egg.  My plan is to be super nice to him because when he’s 6’8” and 250lbs of muscle, I want to be on his good side.

The napkins we pulled from a metallic dispenser on the table.  The sugar I put in my coffee was poured from a glass sugar dispenser with a metal top.   Beside us, behind us, regular people hunched over their plates or talking with each other or reading a paper.

Everyone simply enjoying being there.

It was perfect.

So, for $36 dollars, I not only had a great meal but a fantastic experience.

What I didn’t know was that this was just the beginning of our adventures back in time.

Saw no reason to see it unless you were dating someone or had forgotten your wife’s birthday.  As far as I could tell, there wasn’t going to be any car chases,  explosions, or gratuitous shots of naked women in strip bars.  So why see it?  At best it would be ‘artistic’.  Blah!  At worst, it would ‘a unique movie experience’.  Barf.

I mean, come-on, it’s a movie in BLACK AND WHITE with no frigging sound!

It didn’t matter that most of my female friends had seen it and LOVED it.  I pointed out that their husbands/boyfriends had not gone with them, all being suspiciously sick that day, working or ‘caught in a hurricane’.   In fact, the more they said how great it was, the more I was convinced I would rather shoot heroin into my eyeball.

But I owed my friend, Helen.  She had endured Thor with me.  So, with nothing else to see but a truly nightmarish movie about teenagers having super powers and realizing they could rule the world, or some lame movie about a commune or  some absurd movie about an epic party, dude, a really, like totally epic party, I decided to give it a shot.

Sure enough, the movie theater was filled with young teenage couples.

NOT!

No, it was filled with a lot of women and a few couples, all of whom had likely received the senior’s discount.  Now, seeing a movie at 4 in the afternoon, that demographic is not, perhaps, odd but it certainly didn’t bode well in my mind for a good bit of rousing cinema.

But, you know what?  It wasn’t a totally, completely, utterly terrible movie.

Not at all.

In fact, it was pretty g..

Gahh.

Gooooe

Good.

That’s right, I said it.  Good.  Really good.

Excellent, even.

Yes, really.

The movie was clever and funny and had perhaps the most beautiful woman I had even seen on screen but it also had heart.  Somehow, they made a silent movie, complete with all the melodrama and excesses of the genre into something magical.

They started out brilliantly by having the hero shouting silently at the audience, the caption reading, “I will not talk!”   Captured by dark-hearted villains, he refuses to speak, to tell them anything, not now, not ever.

That set up the whole movie.  That made me think, ok, sure it’s in black and white and has no sound but these guys know their sh*t.

But for me the movie succeeded precisely why silent movies failed in the end.  The characters on screen even tell you this.  In the silent movies, they had to overact, to react to things with a ZOMG-WTF-ZOINKS look of astonishment.  It actually carried well into the talkies but with modern cinema, the close-up is king.  Great actors, great scenes, great moments have all been created by saying nothing (or very little) and letting the actor’s face show everything.

This movie did this more than any other.  It kinda had to.

So, guys, if you’ve done something wrong and need to atone, this movie will do it.  Say, “Hey, honey, why don’t we watch that movie you wanted to see?”  It’s a small price to pay.  You may even enjoy it.  I did.  Just don’t ever admit it.

And women, let them do it.   You’ll have company for a movie you’d otherwise never get him to see.

It’s the ultimate win-win.

10:06am:  Wake up dog-tired.  Literally.  Freya was sick all night and kept me up.  Poor thing.  Neck all sore from sleeping next to her with my arm over her.  Damn you old age!

10:09am:  Think about what I have to get done today.  40 pages.  A blog.  Catch up on emails and buy more grocs and damn, I need car insurance and bills have to get paid and

10:10am: Crawl back into bed.

10:11am: Assume fetal position.

11:15am: Guilt overcomes fetal position.  Get out of bed.  Feed doggies, worry about Freya, eat breakfast of yogurt and fruit and convince myself this is healthy.

11:40am: Decide to see if anyone read the blog.  Read comments.  Worry that I’m being too boring.  Need to have more excitement in life to write about.  Need to attract more readers. Begin thinking on next topic.  John Carter movie.

12:05pm:  Try to write.  Decide to read emails instead.  Respond to everyone.  Great long boring emails.

12:54pm:  Go out for coffee, bring laptop, load up novel.  Look at it.  Begin to swear.

1:01pm: Stop swearing.  All of the 60 pages that I’ve written have been reformatted so that no paragraphs are indented.  WTF?  How did I do that?  Now I have a choice, manually fix them all or find out why this happened.  Each could take a good hour.

1:06pm: Buy cookie to help with the decision-making process.

1:07pm: Decide not to worry about the reformatting and forge ahead.  Add more tension to a chapter that desperately needs it (after all, it was titled Lou Goes for a Walk so you KNOW something’s missing there.)  Fix some inconsistencies.  Add a few new chapters to improve pacing.  Delete about 10 pages for the same reason.  Pound away until I have another 20 pages fixed and finished.

3:22pm: Decide to take dogs for a walk but it’s pissing rain and windy and I have not brought a good coat.  So they get to run in the park instead while I squint at them without glasses and think about how I’m going to change around an important sequence of events in my book.

4:12pm: Realize I didn’t really eat a healthy lunch (a cookie) and grab some salad at home.

4:32pm: Need to write the blog.  But wait, there is a hair growing out of my forehead.  WTF?  I ponder how this could happen.  “Oi, we got a new build order boss.”  “Lemme see that.  Says here we are to, what, grow a hair on his forehead?  Are they mad?”  “Could be a mistake, boss.  You know, a typo.  Something like ‘hair for head’ not ‘fore head hair.”  “Damn bureaucrats!  Well we better get to it.”  “What, a hair for his forehead?”  “Yup, ours is not to question why.”

4:37pm: Pluck hair from forehead.

4:38pm: Blog dammit, must write that blog but wait, a friend has logged onto FB.  Maybe I should say hi.

6:22pm: Saying hi took longer than I thought.  Damn my friends for being interesting.

6:32pm:  Start blog but freeze up.  It isn’t funny!  Frustrated.  Turn on TV.  For just a second.  Ohhh, hockey game.  Catch up on emails while watching hockey game and pretend I’m doing something constructive.

7:06pm: Another FB friend logs on but logs off quickly to get something to eat.  Now is my chance.  Blog dammit, blog.

7:07pm: End up searching internet for solution to writing problem earlier, you know, the stupid indenting problem.  Find solution.  Go through a re-reformat the whole thing.

7:33pm: Wonder if I have other hair that need to be plucked but no, have to be strong.  Begin writing blog.  Have to be quick.  FB friend logging back soon.

7:41pm: Think about writing a blog about procrastination instead of John Carter.  But decide to put that off to another day.

7:48pm: New blog started.  John Carter Review.

8:00pm: Friend relogs onto FB.  Chatting ensues.  Eat supper.   Feed doggies.

9:15pm: FB friend logs off.  I Panic.  Need to get 20 pages done and JC review finished or I won’t have a post for today and I won’t have what I promised my friend, Sean.

9:16pm: Roll up sleeves.

9:17pm: Brew coffee.  Pour into mug.

9:18pm: Begin to write like mad.

9:57pm: Finish John Carter Review and post.  Grab more coffee.  Eat chocolate bar.  Back to writing.

11:15pm: Finish last rewrite pages for Sean.  Thank god they weren’t a complete disaster.  Send off.

11:16pm: Collapse in front of TV.  Catch up on emails.  Make vow to be better organized tomorrow.