Altivo

Rain or drizzle and a high of 52F predicted for tomorrow. In January? Well, that should get rid of most of the snow and ice anyway.

Looking like the whole week will be short-handed again. One staffer out sick today, boss off the next two days. Hope the sick one is back or tomorrow is gonna be really difficult.

We watched the final installment of the Harry Potter films tonight. I'll say it was a ittle better than the preceding three, but only a little. Sure couldn't have made much sense to anyone who didn't already know the story, though.

Other than that, cut up some old jeans to make denim background for embroidered patches. And that's the whole of today's accomplishments. Well, no, I did do stuff at work, but I don't usually count that.

In which I actually seem to have done relatively little.

Notable: invited to make a list of silent film classics to be added to the library's DVD collection. This I will do, though it's not anything I would have expected. Came out of a conversation with the director, who discovered some extra funds and was going to order a Charlie Chaplin collection with it. I suggested that silent films would need some promotion in order to get anyone to pay attention to them, which turned to the question of what others I'd consider to be classics that we could use for promoting the idea.

I suggested several:

Nosferatu
Wings
Son of the Sheik
The General
Ben Hur
Orphans of the Storm
The Ten Commandments
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Thief of Bagdad
The Phantom of the Opera
The Gold Rush

I'd prefer pipe organ or orchestral accompaniments, but those may be hard to get. Piano will do if it's in the appropriate style.


She's willing to consider working up a film festival in which we'd show and discuss several of them, one a week this coming summer. Now the trick is to find DVD copies with appropriate music soundtracks...

Just saw this animated (CGI) feature and we loved it. It's silly, funny, sweet, and still real. And the art is great. Really enjoyable. Dennis Hopper and Danny Glover really gave life to the old alphas, too.

While I'm a serious fan of traditional hand drawn animation, I have to admit one thing that's great about CGI is that it has let a lot of smaller studios and newer people get their vision out there on the screen. Especially for the canines, but everyone should like this one.

I rate it four and a half apples.

I'm on "vacation" for the next nine days. I'll be working feverishly on a weaving project, though, rather than doing much relaxing.

Tonight we saw The Secret of Kells which I have to say is a beautifully drawn and orchestrated animation. However, unless you know some of the historic legends about the real Book of Kells and a bit of Irish mythology too, it probably wouldn't make a lot of sense. Still, the merger of illuminator's art and ornament with more or less traditional hand-drawn animation is quite remarkable. And there's the character Aisling, who is capable of changing shapes between girl and white wolf.

Snow here, another half inch or so during the afternoon, followed by cold. Glad I don't have to go out tonight, but I will have to in the morning.

...a well-digger's ankle? Well, actually, that's what my father used to say, but he was usually pretty decorous. My maternal grandmother would have said "It's colder than a witch's teat out there." And so it is.

Went to guild meeting in the morning, lunch and grocery shopping in the afternoon. In keeping with our usual little anomaly in gasoline prices, I found that in Marengo, gas was $2.78 and $2.77, while in all the surrounding towns it is $2.87 and up. This defies any economic logic or reason.

Replacement for the wrong disc from Netflix arrived in today's mail, as promised. Watched it tonight, it was the right one this time and no defects. So now I have finally see Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor. To tell the truth, I'm not much impressed, though I did find that the third episode, with Charles Dickens and the apparent haunting by "undead" in the funeral parlor, was particularly well-written.

Also filled half a bobbin with finely spun merino wool while watching, so it was at least somewhat productive.

It's late and so to bed.

Today was the Audubon Society Christmas Bird Count in our county. I joined two others in canvassing an assigned territory to count as many species and individuals as possible between dawn and dusk. We drove about sixty miles, walked another three in fairly heavy snow though not as cold as last year. A rough summation indicates that we spotted 25 species, which is more than last year and given the nature of our territory, not too bad. Our finds included a kestrel, a Cooper's hawk, two redtails, and three robins. (Yes, you can see robins in the midwest in winter if you look hard enough, but this was the first time I've seen them in the snow.)

We saw most of the common backyard birds, some like the junco in very large numbers. There were also plenty of starlings. We do not usually see large numbers of waterfowl, but this year we did. More than 600 geese in total, at a dozen locations and either flying overhead or on the ground. More interesting (we always do see some geese, but not that many) were the mallard ducks. We usually see some ducks in the spring count, but never in the winter. We saw quite possibly more than a thousand mallards, most of them gleaning corn in a single large field that had been harvested just earlier in this week. I've never seen so many ducks on the wing at once.

Other species counted included: red bellied woodpecker, downy woodpecker, bluejay, cardinal, house sparrow, white throated sparrow, tree sparrow, gold finch, house finch, horned lark, white breasted nuthatch, red breasted nuthatch, mourning dove, rock dove, black capped chickadee, and large numbers of crows. Though I manufactured a clever explanation for a trick by which some cowbirds who chose not to migrate stayed behind and disguised themselves as cows, I was not allowed to count any of the cows as birds. ;p

Weather was a thick overcast with occasional light snow, a temperature in the high 20s to low 30s, little wind, and five inches or so of old snow on the ground. Hurrying through dense woods tracking a mob of crows (at least 25 to 30 of them) that were picking on a predator eventually allowed us to identify the target as a redtail. I also found fox, coyote, deer, and probably raccoon tracks in the snow, as well as one live deer. People occasionally came out of their houses to see what we were doing, but no one objected to us standing on the road peering through binoculars once we explained that we were counting birds. Some told us of specific places to check, and a couple of those were pretty fruitful.

So, I'm very tired of driving (I was the designated driver this year) and tired of slogging through snow. But we had spaghetti and meatballs and greek salad for dinner, so life is good. Now to focus on finishing up the Christmas preparations.

Oh, and we enjoyed the 1925 silent version of Phantom of the Opera yesterday. It was closer, though not entirely true, to the original text of the novel, and of course Lon Chaney was unbeatable as the Phantom. The DVD had an orchestral score, and the black and white film had been tinted by hand in the style typical of the mid-1920s (not "colorized" but the whole screen changed hues depending on mood and setting, ranging from reds to blues, greens, and browns. The color changes coincided with scene changes, and were not at all distracting.

Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes, I really do appreciate being remembered so thoughtfully. (Especially since I tend to be very forgetful about such things myself.)

Gary and I had plans to go out for dinner to a place we like but they are on winter hours and not open on Monday, so that gets shelved for the weekend. Instead he made dinner, with several things I really like including broccoli with hollandaise and salmon patties. There's cake yet to come.

He also got me a really neat present. I've wanted one of these for ages, so long that I'd given up looking for it. They are quite expensive but he assures me he found a bargain. It's an artist's horse "manikin" (or should that be "ponikin"?) Made of polished wood with all the right adjustable joints, a flexible neck and graceful tail, it can be posed appropriately for practice drawing. I just think it's a really cool piece of art in itself. I also received a tiny plush horsie and a book on drawing horses with some art supplies and a sketchpad.

More than made up for the gray and drippy day today, and may even distract me from the predicted cold tomorrow and tomorrow night.

Then we watched Wallace & Gromit in "A Case of Loaf or Death" which we hadn't yet seen.

Well, the sky was blue anyway. The internet POP in Rockford came back online around 9 pm last night, so things were back to normal operation when I got into work this morning. We were short a staff member due to a vacation, and had yesterday's work to do in addition to today's. Needless to say, it was a heavy day.

On the bright side, our farrier friend John came to trim the horses' feet, and said they are all looking good. Tess has improved a great deal from where she was two years ago. She now has big, solid, heavy hooves on all four feet, and they are growing evenly. She's also acquired a much better disposition for the most part, I think, and has decided either that she really does like me or at least that it's a good idea to tolerate me affably.

In the midst of all the hubbub and distractions today, I found myself trying to explain, in twitter snippets, why I am so disapproving of Peter Jackson's version of Tolkien. In the end, I promised to e-mail an essay, since I can't successfully discuss major philosophical issues in chunks of 140 characters or less. That explanation is under the cut for anyone who really wants to read it. Feel free to skip if you aren't interested.

( Cultural integrity and the motion picture industry )

I never make polls, but answering a meme about films over on Facebook inspired me to ask these questions of LJ readers.

[Poll #1445665]

So the promise of a dry week to follow Friday's deluge and wind has already been broken. It's been raining on and off this afternoon, and the next few days are once again filled with "chance of thunderstorms." Water in the pastures is again deeper than the top of my rubber boots, and I think deeper than it was at its peak earlier this spring. I can't get to the vegetable garden without a boat, even though I can see the snow peas hanging there begging to be harvested. In the first nine years that we lived here, we saw flooding like this only once. On that occasion, we received four inches of rain in a 24 hour period, so anything was certainly possible.

Since the stupid developers busted up the tiling in the 250 acres of land uphill of us, we are seeing this every time there is an inch or more of rain in 24 hours. That's about six times in the last two years. Our ability to use our land has been damaged by this, significantly so. Our chance of getting anything done about it is, of course, non-existent. I take great pleasure in the fact that no one has actually chosen to build anything in that "development." I hope the developers go bankrupt.

We went to see the Star Trek film this afternoon because Gary wanted to. Even setting aside the fact that I now have a headache imposed by the earthquake inducing level of the sound in the theatre (which always irritates the hell out of me...I guess everyone else is already deaf from listening to stuff at those decibel levels, so they keep escalating) my reactions are mostly negative. There were some cute moments and an occasional clever concept, but c'mon, folks. Star Trek has used the time paradox thing far too much. It's no longer credible to me. I never liked Kirk and I like him even less after this film. Giving Spock a romantic interest, even at a young age, doesn't wash with me either, no matter how cleverly they could play it off against Kirk. The young Scotty, McCoy, Sulu, and Chekhov were interestingly portrayed, but they can't carry off a weak plot all by themselves. I won't even dignify it with any apples at all.

On the way home we stopped and used the "coupon" (plus $16) to get a digital conversion box. I don't anticipate it doing any good here, but we can always give it to someone else if it's completely useless.