I got up around eight this morning. This is the first night that I have ever slept in my parents’ guest bedroom. That is a little weird. I got to see dad for almost an hour before he left to go to Sunday School down in Leicester.
I went through our mail this morning and then took Oreo outside for a walk around the farm and then did some exploring through our stuff in the barn. Boy is that ever going to be a challenge. I managed to find one box of books and decided to through out almost every single thing in the box! I wasn’t sure where to find other stuff that I need to go through so I am going to wait for dad to help with that so I did the SGL update for yesterday and began the process of uploading the Close Up 1993 pictures to Flickr. It took well more than an hour just to upload all of the pictures. No small project. I am glad to have them done so that I can give the originals and the CD of the digital copies back to Nate tonight if he makes it to the drive in.
It is weird going through the Close Up pictures so many years later and trying to remember who everyone was. It has been fourteen years since the trip. One of the best pictures though is this picture of the gang that includes Nathan Parker and myself, Gretchen Randall who I hung out with after Close Up a little (we went and saw The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Disney up in Canandaigua) and Colleen Moyer whom I dated for a few months in high school and was my date to my junior prom! Gretchen was from Naples, New York and Colleen was from Wayland and attended the newly integrated Wayland-Cohocton school that was located there. Seth Webster went to that same school but we wouldn’t know each other until we went to MCC together many years later.
I spent a while this afternoon going through the barn sorting through the stuff that Dominica and I have in storage. There is so much stuff that it is very difficult to know where to begin. I managed to eliminate one or two plastic bins worth of stuff and found some things that we had been looking for. And a lot of miscellaneous stuff is able to be thrown out now. That is a good start. Better than nothing.
A little after six this evening we drove down to Perry to go to the Silver Lake Drive-In with the Ralstons. The weather was a little rainy so even though this is the opening weekend (I believe) for Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End there wasn’t that big of a crowd. Art, Danielle and Michael got to the drive-in about twenty minutes after us. They were running late because they had run up to Penfield and had bought a new motorcycle this afternoon and just randomly ended up buying it from Ginamarie Romano’s boyfriend. Ginamarie went to York with us and is Steve “Cheese” Romano’s little sister. Ginamarie and I worked together at Tops in Avon for a while as well.
We had pizza for dinner and then some ice cream. Nate Parker came over to hang out for a little while while we were having our pizza. He had just gotten in from Boston a few hours before.
Pirates of the Caribbean III was nowhere near as good as the first two films. It was mildly enjoyable just because there was a lot of action and it had some good characters in it and it was interesting to see how they wrapped up the storyline from the second film. But the reality was that everything in this movie was very poor in comparison to the first two. The storyline was absolutely pathetic and it was clear that nothing had been planned even when they were working on the second movie and they were stuck with a very difficult plot ending to fix and had to slap the whole thing together. It felt like it was written by a high school class trying to learn how to do bland Hollywood script fixing. One of the most poorly written movies of the genre I have ever seen. Even with the cliff-hanger ending of Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest it is barely worth watching the third installment since it really is not tied to the second movie in any way. Just horrible. And the effects were not up to the standards of the first two films and the actors were definitely getting tired of the camp.
I was definitely bored watching the movie which did not happen with the first two. The first Pirates films is one of my all time favourite movies. But this is just crap and it shows how little Disney is able to keep any level of quality alive these days. Even with such a phenomenally successful and easy to work with franchise they couldn’t come up with anything decent at all. And they played so loose and wild with the “world” that they had to completely change the flavour of the characters and the world in general so it will be unreasonable to make another movie in the series. They introduced an entire pirate’s ethos and a bizarre and meaningless pirate political structure. It was as if they forgot that they were making a pirate movie altogether. In fact, it was very much like they had the script on hand for a bad mariner movie that got turned down because it was so stupid but when they didn’t have a third installment for Pirates they just grabbed some unrelated script off the shelf and stuck the Pirates characters into it (like Super Mario Bros. 2 – even the most casual gamer can just “feel” that it isn’t really a part of the series and it was just a cheap way out.) We were thoroughly disappointed.
To add insult to injury we then watched Wild Hogs. Pirates of the Caribbean 3 was boring and pathetic but the budget was so big and there was so much momentum behind it that we were able to enjoy it regardless. But Wild Hogs was horrible. Just horrible. Don’t rent this movie. Don’t even watch it if someone gives it to you. It isn’t worth the ninety minutes of your life. The acting was horrible. There was no plot at all. It isn’t funny. It isn’t anything. It would be a bad episode of a bland television show but they made it into a movie! Just sad that Hollywood is still able to make money making stuff like this. It is movies like this that completely make me want to stop going to the movies. And they have pretty much succeeded – this was the first trip to the movies this year and we only made one last year! We have almost completely phased out the movies from our lives. I don’t even think about them anymore.
It looks like this year is going to be the summer of horrible movies. Everyone has been saying that Spiderman III is a huge disappointment as well. It worries me because I have been hopeful about The Transformers but the trend isn’t looking good. And Harry Potter V is due out later this summer too.
Weight Lost So Far: Unknown – No Scale Until Tuesday