Yesterday was my first Fourth of July as a dual citizen. I got to celebrate both my countries’ birthdays in one week. We didn’t go out to see the fireworks, but we could hear them from the living room. If they were going to be as exciting as the ones in San Diego, I might have considered going out. Apparently something went wrong in San Diego and they all went off at once. Fifteen minutes’ worth in fifteen seconds. The video is quite impressive. The still looks like the backdrop from a Pink Floyd concert.
I spent most of the day yesterday configuring my new PC. Just as Windows 8 is about to launch, I’m finally joining the Windows 7 community. My old computer was getting sluggish and loud, and the USB ports were acting wonky, so I figured it was time to upgrade. Getting all the files transferred, and the emails and the music, as well as reinstalling all the software is busy work, but it has to be done so I bit the bullet and did as much of it as I could manage during the daytime. I still have a couple of things left to do (rebuilding my iTunes library, for one), but I’m mostly there.
We watched The Descendants last night. It stars George Clooney as the trustee of a 25,000 acre parcel of land on Kauai, passed down for generations, which now the clan of cousins wants to sell for development. That’s only the B story, though. The main story is about his wife, who is in a coma after hitting her head in a boating accident. He learns something shocking about her and has to figure out what to do about it while simultaneously switching from being the backup parent to the primary custodian of his 10-year-old and 17-year-old daughters, the latter of whom was a handful even before her mother’s accident. It’s an excellent character study, full of little moments. Clooney is terrific, as is the actress who plays his older daughter, who rallies behind him once he decides to go on a mission. Clooney’s father-in-law is a hardass who blames Clooney for his daughter’s accident (though he has to make a few logical leaps to get there). He has a funny scene with the elder daughter’s friend, a seemingly stupid surfer dude who says something terribly inappropriate and ends up with a knuckle sandwich. Judy Greer has some strong and surprising moments, too. An all-round fine movie.
I finished off Murder in Four Parts by Bill Crider (a fun crime novel with a sardonic protagonist not unlike Bill himself) and we went through the two disks of The Sopranos extra features, so now it’s time to move on to something else. Not sure what I’m going to read next. I’m leaning toward The Wire as the next TV program. I watched the latest Rizzoli and Isles this morning while on the elliptical trainer. I guess Sharon Lawrence is almost old enough to play Maura’s mother—in real life there’s a 12 year age difference and on the show it’s supposed to be 17 or 18 years.
