Update

What have I been up to lately?

Well I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road last week. Let's just say I devoured it in two days, in fact. I really enjoyed it more than I expected. Now Bill's reading it, and he's just as obsessed about getting to the end as I was.

I've been working a lot. There's been no time for blogging, scriptwriting, etc. Or I've been too lazy to make time. I can be lazy sometimes. But it has been seriously busy at work. I've been working a lot of extended hours.

Friday night Bill got free schmooze tickets at work to see a band we didn't really know, Widespread Panic, at the FedEx Forum. We weren't too interested in going, but we decided we'd like to see the opening act, Bobby Blue Bland, and the tickets were for a private suite box seating. Since I like R&B and Blues and I hate crowds, this seemed like a good plan. It meant free beer, too. We went with two of Bill's co-workers, Joe and Mohan.

We lasted for a while, but not really being fans of Widespread Panic, who, to their credit, seemed to be a very talented group of musicians, we left a bit early. We went to a new bar called Molly Fontaine's. We stayed there quite a while. It's in the building once occupied by Cielo, which is a Victorian era home that was re-conceptualized as a restaurant, and now has been re-conceptualized as a lounge. I must say I really liked Molly Fontaine's. Being there feels like being a laid-back party full of interesting people. It was friendly, funky, relaxing... a really nice vibe. I'd love to go back.

Here's a link to an article in the Flyer about it.

We came back to our house to watch movie trailers on the Mac Mini and listen to music for a while.

Went shopping Sunday for Halloween decor! That was fun. We've probably purchased about half of what we need to get. We also finally decided what "kind" of zombies we want to be for the party. I kept pushing for zombies that would reflect zombie-like professions: fast food worker, business person, postal employee, etc. Bill didn't find any of those suggestions very inspiring, though. I begged him for us to BOTH be lunch lady zombies, but we doubt we can find any white lunch lady shoes in size 12 for him.

Bill suggested instead that we be early 80s punk rock zombies. That sounds kind of fun to me. I'm glad to have something concrete to work with now, anyway.

What we didn't do over the weekend: Yard Work! The 100+ temps of August and early September were a great excuse to avoid weeding. After all, more than one (albeit elderly) person died in Memphis doing yard work during that heat wave. Now the weather is relatively mild and pleasant, but the weeds are thriving. I feel a bit intimidated by them, actually. I should try to tackle them before the party, at the very least.

We also didn't squeeze in any movies. A bit of a surprise because there are two that I'm very anxious to see: Eastern Promises by Cronenberg and Darjeeling Limited by Wes Anderson - two of my favorite directors. I'm sure I'll manage to see them this weekend.

Watched some great DVDs, however. I saw The Host. A Korean movie that was nearly perfect. It was a sort of humor-action-horror-comedy-family drama kind of movie. And it worked pretty well. There were some gorgeous shots.

I also watched Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven finally. I thought it was pretty good overall, but I still prefer Badlands. I just adore Badlands.

Can't remember the other DVD. Maybe it was a few episodes of The Wire. That's a really great show. HBO is solid, right? I had made a semi-conscious decision just to avoid watching The Wire. Luckily, Bill had it on his Netflix queue. I like the show a lot. Looking forward to getting the next disc.

La Sonnambula

For the ever-expanding Interesting Coincidence file:
Although far from an outright opera fan, I have been interested in hearing La Rusalka because it's referenced in Giraffe, and it's Dvorak. I turned Sirius online to the opera channel recently in hopes that they might play it. I know very little of opera, so for all I know they could play La Rusalka as often as the classic rock station plays Stairway to Heaven, right?

At the very moment I tuned to the opera channel, La Rusalka was not playing, BUT
La Sonnambula was playing! This was a surprise to me, because there are also several allusions to La Sonnambula and sleepwalking in Giraffe. Pretty strange, right?

[My Billy is a sleep-walker, but he rarely does it. The first night I slept over at his place, all those years ago, he got out of the bed and walked into the living room, where he began to repeatedly smack the dial of his tiny black and white television with the palm of his hand. At first I thought I had fallen for a total lunatic, but I realized soon enough that he was just sleepwalking.]

I finished Giraffe a few days after hearing a portion of La Sonnambula on Sirius. I cried and cried. It was so moving, particularly near the end.

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Here's a link to Maria Callas performing in La Sonnambula in 1955, not the same performance I heard last week:

One Eyed King

Here's a mock up of an image for the Elvis movie that Bill made. It makes me giggle.

Promising Events

1. The Johnny Cash Flower Pickin' Festival - November 2-4, 2007
2. The Goats Music and More Festival - October 12 - 13, 2007
3. Clanjamfry - September 21 - 23. 2007
4. My Zombie Halloween Party, duh!

Birthday Alert - October 12!

Less Than 30 Shopping Days until 34th Annual Catherine Day!

My Flippin' Wishlist

I am notoriously hard to shop for, but I'll be thrilled if you surprise me with any of the following:

Dock N Talk(so I won't keep missing your calls)
I need the Bluetooth module, too.

Tee Shirts:

Peewee Tee

Small Female Black

Haruki Murakami Tee
Any color. Size Small (Female)

Walkuski Postcards

Books/CDs:

My Amazon.com Wish List, which includes some of the following books:

• Sputnik Sweetheart - Murakami
• Stranger Things Happen - Link
• Self - Martel
• Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson
• Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God - Keret

Fortean Times Subscription

Work Clothes (zzzz)
But, hey, I always need them.

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Big Money, No Whammies:

iPhone
I don't really want the phone bill that comes with it (especially since I hate talking on the phone,anyway), but it's awfully pretty.

Panasonic AG-DVX100A

Any John Robinette Delta Series Painting

Please, please, please!!!

MacBook Pro


I also wouldn't mind a Nikon D80.

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I don't need any knick-knacks (chachkis) or soaps. I won't hate you if you give me any, though. I'll be damned grateful. I promise.


If I think of something else, I'll try to add it here.

Catherine. One Healthy Motherflipper.

We had free health screenings at work recently. My stats:

• Cholesterol - 154


• Blood Sugar - 73


• Blood Pressure - 92/60 (Took six tries to detect a pulse!)


• BMI - 23.9

They said I was the best screening that day (so far).

I'll be thirty-four in a month, so I gotta watch out for these things.

Catching Up (Supersized Post)

We saw two Memphis movies over the weekend: The Importance of Being Russell (@ Studio on the Square) and Black Snake Moan.

What can I say about them... they're both the best I've seen from each director, John Pickle and Craig Brewer. I'm sure their next movies will be even better, as well.

We watched The Importance of Being Russell mainly to see if Bill's name was in the credits, because he sculpted the "taint thumb" that was featured in the film. His name was omitted, but do you really want to be known as the "taint thumb guy" anyway? Bill doesn't mind, though. He says, "I know who sculpted the taint thumb, and that's all that matters."

We also saw Rob Zombie's Halloween. I'm glad that's over with. There's little nice to say about it. There was a shot I liked a lot, of a young Michael Myers in the back of a police cruiser. The camera was panning left to right and there were policemen, paramedics, and onlookers all frozen in time. The police lights were flashing red and blue. It looked sort of three-dimensional, like a life-sized diorama. Very effective. The best part of the movie, by far, and probably about five seconds long. They use a bit of it near the very beginning of the trailer. Rob Zombie's kinda got it made, though, he gets to spend his time making scary movies with his little wifey. Good for him, not always good for us, unfortunately. What's the point in remaking Halloween, anyway?

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Bill made a cool little "save the date" kind of thing for our Zombie Party.

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I've nearly finished Giraffe. The more I read, the more I just love it. It's seems more like poetry to me than a novel, and good poetry at that. There is a water motif, interestingly enough, that includes references to Slavic mythological figures rusalkas and vodniks.

Creepy water spirits... . I want to know more...

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What else is new... we've been shopping for cameras and working on an outline for the Elvis movie reshoot. That's coming along pretty well. We intend to have the camera before Halloween. We're looking at the Panasonic AG-DVX100A.

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A lot of our spare time is spent visiting my dad, who is surprising everyone lately. He started ECT about two weeks ago. He's getting around three treatments a week. I wasn't sure what to expect, honestly. I mean, I knew that the procedure has come a long way since Cuckoo's Nest. I had seen a documentary about ECT about maybe ten years ago that showed how much it had changed. Also I had heard last year Kitty Dukakis talking on NPR about how ECT made such a huge difference for her.

But did I expect it to work for my dad, the most stubborn person in the whole wide world? Let's just say I didn't have high hopes. So it's really remarkable to me that he seems to be doing so much better. He's not one hundred percent recovered, but for the first time in years, I'm seeing glimpses of his old "normal" personality, my *real* dad, who I honestly thought was gone forever.

I hope he continues to improve, otherwise I'm afraid I'll have to go through losing him all over again. In fact, after spending some time with him behaving more like his "old self", it was twice as painful to hear him suddenly matter-of-factly explain that he had sometimes "turned into air" recently. For this reason, I am trying to temper my optimism. He still has a few more weeks of treatments left. I am hoping for the best, but bracing myself for ... not the best. Besides, even if he makes a great recovery, it will still just be the beginning.

Well, I'm sure there's work to be done around here, so I'll click the Publish Post button and get to it.