June 17, 2009: Ramona Does a Final Visit

Getting out of bed was a little tough this morning, but I was still very happy that I had taken the time to play Oblivion for a while last night.  It will likely be quite a while before I get to play it again and sometimes you just have to have some nice, relaxing downtime or you just go crazy.

We did as much house cleaning as possible this morning before Ramona arrived.  She got up to our place about half past noon.  She had a long drive up from Pennsylvania.  This is her last time visiting us before she moves to China in a few weeks.  She is going to Shanghai for the summer and then moving far into the interior, near the Mongolian border, to teach English for the year.  She will have Internet access from there and a phone so we will hear from her regularly but it will be a year before she returns to the US.

As soon as Ramona arrived we packed up and headed out to Pastel’s for some lunch.  Liesl was a little unsure of whether or not she remembered Ramona as it has been quite a while since they have seen each other but they were best friends again in no time.

Lunch was nice and I was able to “work” via BlackBerry for a while so that we could hang out there and relax a little bit.

When we got back from lunch our new DVD collection of bikini beach movies, starring Frankie and Annette, had just arrived from Amazon.  We were all excited to watch them tonight after work.

I didn’t have to work too late tonight.  I was done around seven, I think.  Then we ordered in dinner from Forno’s and put in Beach Party, the first of the Frankie and Annette beach movies.  This one was from 1963.

It’s amazing how cheesy and ‘b’ movie movies from the sixties can be!  That was really something to watch.  It was funny in a total trainwreck sort of way.  A few beers are a definitely must-have when watching these movies.  It’s incredible to think that these were well known movies of the time.  Today they would definitely be direct to DVD movies that no one would even realize were released.

While watching the movie Dominica commented on how incredibly weird it is that that movie was made just fifteen years before she was born.  Watching it feels like looking into a distant, disconnected past.  But really it was only barely before we were born.  Only thirteen years before I was born.  The last movie that Frankie and Annette did together released when I was about twelve!

After that we watched Bikini Beach which was even worse than the original.  This one was from 1964.  They were turning these movies out at break-neck pace.  They did multiple movies in 1965.  They definitely did not take very long to film.  Talk about low budget.

Dominica went to bed around eleven thirty and Ramona  around midnight.  Dominica was still reading when I got to bed, though, at one thirty and I could hear Ramona was still on the phone in her room.  I had wanted to get some work completed before turning in.  Never enough time in the day.

Tomorrow Ramona is leaving us in the early afternoon, right after lunch, to drive up to Maine for the weekend to go camping in the never-ending rain.

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