Super busy weekend

This past weekend we went down to Clarksville again to paint my brother's old bedroom. It desperately needed it. My parents are turning it into a guestroom, so now they are one step closer to allowing people outside the immediate family to see it. I'm excited for when this project is complete because it will just look nicer and also because we'll have a place to sleep when we visit. It was fun to paint, though. I haven't done so in a long time and I kind of miss it. I also painted a bookcase that they had built into the corner of the living room this past week.

I was so busy, in fact, that I accidentally took three days in a row off from running. Oops! No long run! I don't think I'm going to worry much about it, and simply move on with the program. Except apparently I'm scheduled for 17 miles this weekend, which is a bona fide Very Long Run. I hope I'm ready. It's hard to believe I'm already back up into Very Long Runs. But yes, Pfitz is challenging. I need to decide whether or not to run it on the trail, where I can stash water, or to run it on a hillier course to prepare for Twin Cities and come up with a new hydration solution. Right now I'm leaning towards the flat, familiar route. But I do plan on doing at least a few of the Very Long Runs on a hillier course. I may just have to suck it up and drive the whole course beforehand to stash water. For this weekend though, I don't think I'll have to worry about adding to the challenge.

I watched a bunch of movies over the weekend. It's amazing how much easier it is to watch TV all the time when you have a kajillion channels available. Anyway, my parents somehow got a free trial of HBO on demand, so I watched Ice Age: The Meltdown. Pretty forgettable, but good for a few laughs and worth the time it took to watch it. A bit later, A Prairie Home Companion came on. That was a sweet movie with some good moments. It was basically like watching the show instead of listening to it. They even had the guy who does the sound effects. And then, Watch on the Rhine came on, which I had never seen. I usually have no interest in older movies, but something about it kept me watching, despite the scary, robotic/alien children. Then it got really interesting and I genuinely enjoyed it.

I also recently saw Pan's Labyrinth, the first movie we got as members of Netflix. Very layered movie, loaded with symbolism and meaning, and much more violent and creepy than I expected. We kept it an extra day so I could watch the commentary, and I was glad I did, because I definitely missed a lot of what was going on. It was a joy to watch, though. Visually, just beautiful.

I realize that our Alphabetical Movie Project has fallen by the wayside, and I don't think we'll revive it for quite some time. For now, it's all about Netflix. Next up, we have The Queen and Flags of our Fathers on the way. I feel like I have missed a lot of movies in recent years (college and the subsequent few years left little time and money for any but the movies I REALLY wanted to see), and now is the time to catch up. I'm also going to catch up on some television series. We borrowed the complete collection of Sports Night from our friend Sam, and I realized I'd forgotten how good it was. So hopefully I can use Netflix to try out some of these shows I never/rarely had the chance or opportunity to watch, like Lost, The Office, Six Feet Under, etc. As you can imagine, my Netflix queue is already obscenely long.

And in book news, um, there is none. It's quite sad. I just don't know why. I did come to the belated realization that even though the Harry Potter VII release date and the Red Eye Relay are on the same day, I can still do both because midnight happens the night BEFORE the day. DUH. Midnight release party, here I come. I will have to forcibly extricate myself from the book in order to get SOME sleep that night, but at least I can sleep in before the relay and the subsequent all-nighter. I'm not sure how I'm going to fit this all in, but I'm thinking I should probably reread the series so far in preparation. We'll see about that. Now I just have to decide which release party to go to. Besides the obligatory Barnes and Noble and Borders, Bloomington boasts a couple of very good indie bookstores. I will most likely be supporting one of them.