How shiny is this? Firefly is in space! An astronaut took a copy of the series DVDs with him to the international space station!

(Thanks to Noumenon for the link.)

"Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer" (2007) -- Initial Thoughts

I just got back from Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. I quite liked it, actually. It's not the most amazing movie I've ever seen, but neither was the first one. Although it's not something I was dying to see, I did want to see it on the big screen because I knew the effects would be much cooler than watching it on my little TV. And cool they were -- particularly the Silver Surfer, who was done by WETA Digital and therefore rocked, of course. I actually liked it better on a whole than Spider-man 3, as it didn't devolve into gooshy angst-ridden slop. It just stayed fun and rompy -- light-hearted without getting silly.

Besides, hello? Ioan Gruffudd!

Anyway, it got two Warheads. Hmm, seems to be a trend this summer.

I finished making my baby books last week, so now I've started crocheting a baby blanket for Gumdrop. But I thought I'd tell you a little about the baby books and show you some sample pages. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I decided to make four baby scrapbooks at once, since Cowboy and I would like to have up to four children. All four are basically the same, in that they have the same pages in the same order. But each individual page is unique, so that no two pages and no two baby books are identical. They might have slightly different wording or different scraps or stickers decorating them, or be on different kinds of background pages.

Some of the pages, like the Family Tree and the one about what the world is like when the baby is born, I can fill out before the actual birth. Others, like the Growth Chart and list of achievements, will obviously have to be filled out as the baby grows up (provided Mommy has time, hee hee).

Not all the pages have lots of writing on them or spaces to fill in, though. About half of them are designed for displaying photos, like for Christmas and birthdays, or just random photos. Since I'm a camera fiend, I figure I should manage to accrue enough cute pictures of all my kids to fill the pages up, even if it takes me until they're 18 to find time to put them all into the books. And there are blank pages at the back for whatever I want to add.

I've designed these books to take the child through the age of three, which is where I kind of think of babyhood as being officially over. I figure after that, maybe I'll start another scrapbook for each kid, one where they can make pages themselves. You know, fingerpaintings they've done, special art projects from elementary school like those turkey drawings where you trace around your hand, whatever. Or maybe that will end up being WAY too much work, and I'll just set up a photo album for each kid the way my parents did. They did a photo album for themselves and one for me and one for Johnnycake, so that they could have memories of our childhood and so could we. Which I think is pretty brilliant. Also a great way to use up extra photos, since my Dad is as much of a shutterbug as I am (maybe even more so!).

Anyway, you can click on each of these pictures to see a (much) bigger version of each page.

Tonight, I fulfulled a longtime ambition. I painted the walls of a room. Not a room in my own Crypt, but that's beside the point.

When I was in high school, my friend Jewels decided to paint her room green. And for some reason, maybe I was sick or on a family vacation or something, I didn't get to help her. Freestargirl did, but I didn't. And it seemed like the coolest thing ever to be able to paint your walls a color other than some variant of white.

Growing up in a pastor's family, I always lived in parsonages. And the walls of the parsonages were invariable white or off-white, because before a new pastor came to a church, the congregation would paint the walls of the parsonage. But who knows what colors the new pastor's furnishings will be, right? So paint the walls white, because white goes with everything. Makes total sense, but because the house didn't belong to us and had just been freshly painted anyway, my dad would never let us repaint any rooms. I could put up posters and hang pictures to my heart's content, but not paint the walls.

So when Jewels painted her room grass green, there was born in me the great desire to paint walls. It seemed like such a fulfilling activity, seeing the new color take over the blank blah-ness of the old white walls. The whole concept of the paint roller fascinated me. I used to walk through the paint aisles in home improvement stores or hardware stores and imagine opening a can, pouring it out into a pan, and rollering it onto the walls. But I never got to.

I almost had the chance to paint walls when my parents moved into a new parsonage the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college. They were staying at the same congregation but moving into a different house, and the whole thing needed to be repainted. Sure, my dad insisted it all be painted white or off-white so that the next pastor wouldn't be stuck with mauve walls or whatever, but it still would have been exciting. Except they managed to schedule every single painting session for the exact times and days that I was working at my summer job. Room after room got painted, and I had nothing to do with any of it.

So now, ED just bought a house and is in the process of repainting nearly every room. I went over there tonight and she and I primed and painted her guest bedroom. We painted it this greyish purple color (more purple than grey) called Phoenix. And it was awesome. It was every bit as fun as I'd imagined :-D

So, you're probably wondering why I haven't posted anything about Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End yet, since I'm such a pirate fiend and all. Well, I saw it on opening night, May 25, and liked it. Better than Dead Man's Chest, but not as good as Curse of the Black Pearl. It left me in a much different mood than did the other two, however. When I left the theater after seeing the first two, I was totally pumped. Ready to do a little buckling and swashing myself. After I saw At World's End, I was sort of quiet and contemplative. But I thought it might have been because I had to head straight to my icky job from the theater, and that was enough of a downer to kill my mood. So I wanted to wait to blog about it until I'd seen it again, and was planning to go see it the following Tuesday with ED. But that fell through.

So I went to see it tonight with Cowboy. And I agree with my first assessment, that it's funnier and better than the second, but not as good as the first. But I ended up in the exact same contemplative mood at the end, so I guess that's how this one leaves me.

Anyway, Johnny was much less silly this time around, back to being seriously funny. Loved Keith Richards' appearance, wish he had more scenes. And I think my hands-down favorite part is when Barbossa, Elizabeth, and Jack meet up with Will, Davy, and the evil East India Co. dude to have a parley. They land on opposite ends of this sand spit thingie and the music goes all Ennio Morricone (think A Fistful of Dollars), and they do the slow-mo swagger-toward-each-other thing. Love it.

And once again, Johnny Depp was the hottest, but Orlando Bloom got more studly even than the last one -- and I'm not really an Orli fan! But starting with the aforementioned parley showdown, he just got cool. Like he finally figured out how to walk in his boots or something. The little earring helped too.

Anyway, it got two Warheads because it got a little slow in the middle and I actually unwrapped a second piece of candy. So not magnificent, but not shabby either.

Waaah! It's been so humid lately that my Oreo cookies have gotten chewy! Yuck :-b