Round two of movie/Frank Lloyd Wright weekend with my mother and Gail included this movie on the big screen on a Friday night. Whoo hoo! This was an ensemble drama that was pretty decently funny and moving. In general, I like the family carnage style movies that occur with a big life event at the home of the parents and all of the siblings and their spousal types. Three recent ones come to mind.
This was some lighter fare to kick off a weekend with my mother, who was in town for a bunch of Frank Lloyd Wright tours. We kicked back on a Thursday night and watched some Netflix, along with Gail. This was a Brit comedy starring Pierce Brosnan and Emma Thompson. You can’t really go wrong with that. It was funny and touching, with some action thrown in and with a few surprises. Not bad. Fit the bill well for the evening.
So by the end of August 2014, I had planned and urban hike for a group and done a GORUCK Challenge. I immediately followed things up in early September with a new hike for just my wife and I because I was consumed by this idea of urban hiking and still high from the GORUCK. Here it is:
It was a gray Labor Day morning and Gail and I started off early with an eye to getting done well before noon. I wanted to revisit some of the places I was on the GORUCK and get some training in for our big Xtreme Hike in late September. It’s here that we really began formulating the idea of being more organized with urban hiking.
What were we thinking? Well, we were in the throws of raising money for our CFF Xtreme Hike, so we saw it as a way to potentially raise funds and awareness for CF. Also, we’re doing these hikes anyhow, and having a website could make it easier to publicize it so more friends and family join and such. And with our own website, we wouldn’t have to clog up people’s Facebook timelines (I’m very sensitive to that, for some reason). And finally, in general, I really enjoy this tech and website stuff, so it’s somewhat of a creative outlet.
It was this very evening, I think, when I went on line and grabbed this URL.
My mom read this book a few years ago and loved it so it’s been on my list of books to read. I grabbed it at a half price sale at Open Books in June while searching for summer reading. It’s a fictional love story rooted in certain facts about an affair Frank Lloyd Wright had late in his career. The story is about the woman, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, mostly.
I volunteer occasionally for cystic fibrosis and I was in charge of a few training hikes for their annual Xtreme Hike every September. This was my first mapped-out urban hike and it was very well received by a pack of about six people who were signed up for the Xtreme Hike. I loved it and I’m excited to do more of this in 2015!
I mapped it in RunKeeper then used Skitch to annotate it. It has all sorts of issues.
I need to improve a bunch of things. First, I completely mislabeled “North Avenue Beach,” which is a breach in proofreading that I can’t tolerate. Second, I need to highlight restrooms because you kind of need those. And finally, this just needs to be a little more robust and fun, with miles and calories and more notes on tourist sites.
That’s just a start. We’ll get there.
It’s difficult to describe the sensation of this BBC TV crime thriller. In once sense it’s a current-day thriller and detective story, but it’s so implausible and gory that I found it helps to treat it like sci-fi/horror. If you do so, you aren’t constantly blowing holes in the plot and you’re prepared for the intense moments so you can keep your wife updated when she turns away (I know this from experience).
John Scalzi is a sci-fi writer I heard about years ago. You can get the whole story in my write-up of Old Man’s War from back in 2007 (this book blog is valuable). I don’t usually read one-off sci-fi or fantasy books, but there was a half-off sale at Open Books and I needed some summer reading. This worked nicely.
This movie was directed by Kenneth Branagh, which gave it some street cred in my book. The Jack Ryan franchise is pretty dead in my mind and doesn’t have much of a future, but this was passable. Plenty of action and decent thrills, good for a rainy night on iTunes with G.
The Brits have a monopoly on the creep factor. It amazes me that they create so man TV mini-movies with really, really creepy villains. This PBS Masterpiece Mystery thing is two episodes of about 90 minutes each starring David Tennant, the guy from Broadchurch, and his nemesis is one creepy dude.
Elmore Leonard, God rest his soul, wrote some great western novels. Yeah, I know he’s famous for the crime novel, and I love those, but I suggest you check out a little 3:10 to Yuma if you want to experience one of his Westerns. Or read this book, it kicked.