Slightly shiny and new

I don't know if anyone else will notice, but MB overhauled my template this weekend and I think it looks pretty sharp. I toyed with the idea of really having him change it up, but in the end I decided I still really love the original masthead he made for me back in the day. The stuff he did change I like, and he also fixed a lot of backdoor html stuff that was apparently all wrong and so five years ago. If anything doesn't work, please let me know...I've been test-clicking stuff, but I don't usually visit my own blog as a reader, so I might be missing things.

Multimedia, hooray!

I think I mentioned before that we got rid of our cable package when my job situation changed at the beginning of the year. We got an Apple TV and a Netflix account and it has really worked out well. After a long string of mediocre-to-terrible (not-so) scary movies, we have finally hit on a few winners. First we watched this weird little indie movie called Ink which turned out to be much better than expected. It starts out with barely any exposition at all and gets weird right away, but if you stick with it, it pays off. There's one scene I really loved, which you can watch here if you don't mind a slight spoiler:



Then the other night I finally watched Winter's Bone and oh my hell, you guys. Literally gut-wrenching. I am not usually too affected by movies, but about halfway through I started feeling like I might throw up if it didn't end well. (It did, but it got much worse first.) It's an amazing film, but there's really not a scrap of happiness in it. It was scarier to me than any of the horror movies we've watched, just because it was so real and so bleak. Brilliant but possibly scarring, consider yourself warned.

Oh, and if you just want something fluffy and like slightly cheesy dance movies, there's a movie on Netflix instant called B-Girl that's actually highly decent.

Clearance wins

I have been really, really good about avoiding extraneous shopping lately, but I found some things at Barnes & Noble today that I could not pass up. For $2.24 each (75% off plus additional 10% member's discount), I got two 24-piece Very Hungry Caterpillar puzzles (this one and this one) and a small stuffed Max from Where the Wild Things Are to put away for Nico in a year or so, and also a really cool Dover clip art set of 1920s fashion for my dear friend Kate. I wanted to buy the clip art set a few weeks ago but couldn't afford it at 50% off (original price was $24.95), but at 85% off, I could definitely justify it. I can't wait to send it to her. Today's steals made me feel better about walking away from the fifteen clearance racks of baby / toddler clothes at BRU yesterday. I also had a little bit of money to spend on Nico and blew his car-crazy mind with this book, in which he has pointed out every set of wheels at least twice already.

In a bit of reverse-shopping, I dropped off two big boxes of stuff at a very cool consignment shop and got $20 back for stuff they've already sold for me. I could get used to getting paid to declutter my house.

Mayday, mayday, mayday

I am impossibly buried under the weight of my google reader and I don't know what to do. Every time I go in with the intention of culling my subscriptions, I end up wringing my hands and fretting and not deleting any. This is colossally dumb since I'm pretty sure very few of the bloggers I read even know I exist due to the fact that I have less time to comment than I do to read blogs. But seriously, how do you guys figure out who to cut and who to keep? Do you just mark all as read and leave things as they are? I've tried that a few times and I always just end up buried again. First world problems, I have them!

Just because

Today is MB's and my 7th wedding anniversary and also the 11th anniversary of the day we met. I tried to find a non-identity-revealing photo from our wedding day to post, but couldn't find any I liked. I did, however, rediscover one of my all-time favorite photos of Nico, taken a year ago this past week:

He's much cuter than me anyway, even seven-years-ago me. (Good Lord do we look young in our wedding photos, though.)


Reading:  The Mermaid Garden by Santa Montefiore

Playing:  Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes