Well, dear readers, Christmas Day is, like the Do, done. I hope everyone had a wonderful and warm and fun Christmas Day and Evening. I, for example, had a lovelier than lovely visit with the Darling Daughter. Her BFF joined us about ninety minutes later and that was fun, too. I gave her her usual gift of some cash, which she likes, and she gave me her usual gift of various personally baked goods, homemade caramels, and one lottery scratcher card. I think that in all the years she’s given me the scratchers, I’ve won three times – once $2.00, once a ticket, and once $5.00. I’ll begin by saying we lost the top prize twice – $5 million and off by one number both times. However, we did win twice on this one card – they have one thing where you get 10 times whatever the amount is – in my case, the amount was $5.00, so that was a nifty fifty bucks right there. Then I also won $25. That was a pretty good deal. She’d purchased it at a nearby 7-11, so we just drove right over there and cashed it. That was FUN. We didn’t do our traditional drive because we were waiting for her BFF and they had two places to go after me. The Darling Daughter had spaghetti and tuna pasta salad, the BFF had tuna pasta salad, we gabbed a lot, and it was just the kind of Christmas Day I like. Oh, I showed her the first episode of Sami and I have to say she laughed from start to finish and loved it. She thought Sami looked and sounded great, and loved Kerry O’Malley and Karim Hazime, and really loved Cindy Williams. She’s not a pushover audience either. So, that was really nice.
Prior to her arrival, I had a terrible night. Normally, I have one helping of spaghetti and one helping of tuna pasta salad during the Do (maybe a sweet, too). Then when everyone’s gone, I have another helping of spaghetti and tuna pasta salad (maybe a sweet, too). So, I did that. Then, after I posted the notes, I was putting the remaining sauce in plastic containers, and I had another helping of spaghetti – that was one in the morning and what a mistake it was. First of all, all spaghetti sauces have tomatoes and they’re acidic. But my sauce has a real kick to it because I put a bit of cayenne pepper in it. And boy did it kick me. It simply would not digest, so I was up almost the entire night, falling asleep around six-thirty for five hours, with the alarm going off at ten-thirty.
I got up, answered a few e-mails, and then did a quick jaunt over to the local ATM machine, then came right back home. I showered, then waited for the arrival of the Darling Daughter.
After they were on their way to their other stuff, I ate – hadn’t eaten while they ate – tuna pasta salad and some of the cherry loaf that the Darling Daughter made, as well as a chocolate donut. That was it for food. Then I sat on my couch like so much fish.
I started to watch Matilda the Musical on the Flix of Net, but dozed off about thirty minutes in. I’ll watch the rest tonight, but I found it a bit relentless, and very cookie cutter in terms of its style, especially in the opening number, which looked exactly like every other musical number that Netflix has done. Perhaps as with the documentaries that all look the same, they have some kind of template. It’s over-edited and just weird because it’s so artificial (played to the camera), that it doesn’t draw you into the world of the story. I also found the songs I heard in that thirty minutes to be musically banal and lyrically sloppy with horrible off rhymes.
No, I needed a proper Christmas movie, so I chose the Blu-ray of Seven Days in May, a light and airy romp about a bad colonel trying to make a coup to overthrow the government. Hmmmm. Any movie that takes place in May is a good Christmas movie, don’t you think? Anyway, it’s a very good film – a little talky in the way that Rod Serling (who wrote the screenplay) could be talky, but with superb performances by the kinds of actors we simply don’t have anymore – Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner, Fredric March, Martin Balsam, Edmund O’Brien, Whit Bissell, Andrew Duggan, and more. The direction by John Frankenheimer is great (at a time when he really could do no wrong, but that would all change a few years later) and this kind of film sadly never dates. Frankenheimer hired David Amram to score the film (he’d done The Young Savages and The Manchurian Candidate for Frankenheimer) but it was tossed out and replaced by a Jerry Goldsmith score – not much of a score either – sixteen minutes long, and just percussion and pianos. It’s certainly effective in its way.
After that, I finished the last of the cleanup and then it was time to write these here notes.
Today, I’ll be up by eleven, I’ll do whatever needs doing, continue to hope for a major miracle, then I’ll mosey on over to Marshall Harvey’s abode to see the first cut of episode five, which I’m really looking forward to. After we do any finessing we feel necessary, then I’ll mosey on over to the mail place and see if anything’s there, then come home. I have enough tuna pasta salad left for a nice meal (plus a little sweet). I’ll then do the event page for the January Kritzerland show, and then I can watch, listen, and relax.
Tomorrow, she of the Evil Eye comes because she’s going out of the country for a couple of weeks. Then it’s just relaxing until the Annual New Year’s Rockin’ Eve Bash right here at haineshisway.com, the best partay anywhere and the safest. We’ll watch the balls drop and everything.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up by eleven, do whatever needs doing, see the first cut of episode five, do any finessing we deem necessary, hopefully pick up packages and/or mail, eat, and then watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: How much money have you won on scratcher cards? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy to have had a lovely Christmas Day with the Darling Daughter.