The last day of 2014. What a year this has been. Most of it was spent with me working at a new job, then a few months of stressful wondering what was going on with that job and my supposed new job, then two months of frantic job hunting with me finding a new job right at the last second before the year was done (not really significant other than it worked out well for a year end wrap up paragraph.) A very stressful year, for sure. Our life in 2015 is going to be, in no way whatsoever, anything like what we would have guessed that it would be at any point in 2014. Nor, for that matter, was 2014 anything like we had guessed that it was going to be when, at the end of 2013, we moved back up to the northeast thinking that we were taking an amazing job opportunity that was going to make us very happy. Boy were we wrong. You just can’t predict where life is going to take you.
I ran out to Bullrito’s to pick up lunch for us to eat while we watched the movie. I did some work before that in the morning. We were so happy with our burritos yesterday that we just had to get them again today.
Dominica and I started the day, after getting our food, by finishing watching the second Hobbit movie in Cinema Joe. We are loving having regular access to his theatre which is much nicer than even the one that we had in Geneseo ever was. We are very jealous. What is funny is that now, after all of these years, when we finally own a house of our own it is very likely to be Dominica and not me that demands that we have an all out, full scale theatre in it. We use it non-stop when we have access to it. And we are not even using it for video games which it would be amazing for.
It was early afternoon when we finally got the kids over to the Grices. Francesca agreed to watch Liesl and Luciana for a while so that Dominica and I could have a “date afternoon” to go out and see the third Hobbit movie. We left at 3:45 to go up to Fuqua to the AMC 30 up there for the 4:45 showing.
I will not be going to an AMC theatre again, that was a horrible theatre. They left the projector room lights on so it was much brighter in the theatre than even when we watch movies at home. And the screen quality wasn’t as good. So it wasn’t nearly as nice for viewing the movie. And instead of nice, big, comfortable seats like Cinema Joe has, these were the smallest little theatre seats that I have ever been in. There wasn’t enough room for Dominica and I to sit up straight next to each other. It was smaller than normal airplane seats! Completely ridiculous. There is no reason to ever pay to see a movie under those conditions these days. None at all.
Overall we were not impressed with the third Hobbit movie. The book was really messed with, no wonder Tokien’s family revoked the rights for Peter Jackson to make any more films, this was really bastardized and in a very poor way. The movie trilogy was generally just incredibly boring but the story wasn’t right either in really dramatic ways. What is crazy is that the theme of The Hobbit is about someone corrupted by wealth and that is, apparently, exactly what happened to Peter Jackson. He was brilliant when he made The Lord of the Rings and now he is very obviously completely out of his mind and doesn’t know how to make movies anymore. He’s like a little clone of George Lucas who was never able to make a decent movie after he got rich on his original Star Wars success.
After the movie we ended up meeting Bennie and Francesca at Chili’s for dinner. Just the four adults. Emily and Madeline stayed at the house to watch the kids. It is very rare that we get to do this.
We went back to the Grice’s house and hung out for New Year’s Eve but none of us was interested in really seeing midnight so we did not bother with that. We needed to get all of the little kids off to bed anyway. So we went back to Joe and Brittany’s house at eleven thirty to avoid the after-midnight drunk traffic.
On the way back to Joe’s we almost hit a small dog running down the road. We pulled over and I chased the dog as far as I could trying to catch up to it so that I could help it. It nearly got hit by several cars. Eventually it got off of the road and cut across a field that I could not see it is as it was so dark out so I had to give up. It seemed to know where it was going and was heading towards a well lit area with a lot of houses so we are very hopefully that the poor little lost dog found its way home. We were guessing that it was running scared because of all of the fireworks going off all over the place. There were constant reports for hours, it nearly sounded like a thunderstorm but there was no sign of rain.
Once back to Joe’s house we spent nearly half an hour trying to decide on a movie to watch and finally settled on the recent movie adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” which Emily had seen before but neither Dominica nor I had and Emily said that she liked it a lot and was happy to watch it again. Overall, not a bad movie but not great. Very predictable for me, which is unusual. But it caught Dominica off guard which is shocking as she can always predict the outcome of movies. I knew pretty much all of the plot twists within the first few minutes.
It was after two in the morning when we finally all headed off to bed.