odds & ends

I’ve got some major updating to do, non? Speaking of and in French, I’m going to Montreal the weekend of November 7 & 8th and will hopefully eat crepes and say bonjour to my cousin Julie. She lives in Montreal with her husband and new baby. Brynn and her fiance Brian will be joining Sean and me, and despite not being able to finagle rooms at Le Petit Prince B&B, we’re pumped. Photos to follow, of course.

And now, updates a la bullet point:

• Brother Josh and I started a photo blog. It’s called melvin. You should check it out, add it to your RSS reader, and comment often. If you’ve got any suggestions for photo themes, challenges, or assignments, drop us a line. We’re pretty excited about this collaboration.
• Brynn visited this past weekend and we dined at Juniper on Elmwood. It was my second time there and damn, it was delicious. Our meal was perfectly paced, maybe one of the only times I’ve split a bottle of wine and not felt like I was downing my last glass. I hadn’t seen Brynn since June (!) and the only thing that kept me from kidnapping her before she could leave was our upcoming trip to Montreal.
• One of the things Brynn did do before she left was tease me with the idea of watching the 2005 movie version of Pride and Prejudice, which I had not ever seen. We ran out of time though and she took the DVD home with her. I’ve never had much interest in seeing the movie anyway because I am a fierce and loyal Colin Firth devotee. Who else could play Mr. Darcy and why even try? And, uh, hello. The only reason the miniseries even works is because it’s five hours long and extremely true to the book. A movie version could never do it justice. But, um, what do we have here?
  
  Oh, a tweet from me on Monday. Yeah yeah, so I got the idea of finally watching it into my head and had no choice (no choice!) but to go out at 8:30PM on Sunday night and try to find a copy of the DVD. One Target and one Blockbuster store later, it was mine. And then I watched it, and died and was reborn a thousand times. The drama! The cinematography! The Matthew Macfadyen! It was all I could do to not go home and watch it immediately after work.
  
  Confession: I tried. I tried to set up a knitting and Pride and Prejudice date that very night with my friend Sara but couldn’t get our schedules to gel. So I made a date with her for Wednesday. When she got to my house we made tea, got our knitting out, and pressed play. It might have been the best two hours of my life, especially when we rewound the awesome parts and watched them again. Afterwards, I walked around my apartment sighing and tweeted thusly:
  Confession #2: I watched two scenes while Sean was showering on Thursday morning and then decided I was psychotic and needed to stop. And I have. I SWEAR.
• Between this and the Dirty Dancing post, I’m not surprised if you all leave me.
• LOUD CLEARING OF THROAT
• In other news, Al Franken is being all sorts of awesome. Buffalo Pundit has a video of Franken kicking butt over at his blog. I also recommend Truthout.org’s post on the Public Option, published today. They link to Florida Congressman Alan Grayson’s Names of the Dead project, which is pretty sobering. I plan on writing a few stories about my family members and friends, and encourage you to do so too. I’d like people to stop screaming about protecting a health care system that we know is a piece of crap.
• Ok, I’m going to save the update where I tell you that I’ve started counting my daily caloric intake over at CalorieKing.com for another time because you are probably already scared enough.

Oh, one more thing.

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OH WHAT?!