this. that.

But first of all, thanks SO much for all the very kind notes about my aunt. The funeral is not until Friday, so we’re going up to Virginia very early Friday morning and spending the night. She’s being buried in Amherst, which is near Lynchburg. My brother is bringing Daddy, so we don’t have to backtrack to get him. I’ve never heard of such a long time between the passing away and the funeral, but she was living in Delaware and her kids are in Delaware and Baltimore, so everyone is traveling a fair distance to get there. There’s only a smattering of her husband’s relatives actually in Amherst still. And it’s good there was plenty of time to make arrangements. 

I love those pictures too. I love all our old photos madly, but since my mom passed away I haven’t really wanted to look at them. However, I am happy to report that I seem to be okay with them again. I have just spent forEVER putting together a Shutterfly book for my dad full of old photos. If you have never gotten a photo book through Shutterfly, you need to check them out.  I’d never done one until very recently, when I got a coupon for a free hardback photobook. FREE!! For doing a review of our Charleston Lodgings, i.e. the Mt. Pleasant Red Roof Inn, on TripAdvisor, bizarrely enough. I have no idea why one review warranted a free photobook, and didn’t realize I was getting rewarded when I did it. Of course being me, I waited till the day I had to redeem it to actually decide what to make and was very rushed. I ended up doing an England Trip book. And I was so very pleased with it that I did another one for Kim as a Christmas present. I had a better idea of what I was doing with hers so it’s a lot better than mine… and I think I’m going to order another copy of that one for me. Because right now they’re on sale! And every time I order something, I get another coupon, and apparently they don’t limit you to one promo offer per order. For Kim’s I got a discount plus free shipping, so the $30 book ended up being something like $20 total. Now they are on sale and I’ve got another coupon and if I order $50 worth I can get free shipping on everything! Wheeee!!!! I was not intending to order $50 worth but I started making one for my dad and decided my brother would love one too. Those plus a copy of the England one for me will earn me free shipping. And they are pretty quick. I think it just took four or five days for Kim’s, if that. 

Anyhow, my point was I have been putting together a book of old photos for Daddy and it is SO MUCH FUN. So was Kim’s, and so was the first one I did. 

Okay, apparently I can post it here, bizarrely enough. So I’m going to try posting the one I did for Kim:

Click here to view this photo book larger

Click here to create your own Shutterfly photo book.

We’ll see if that works. Oddly I can’t get my family one to load back up — I saved it and then it wouldn’t load. Neither would the other two, so I’m assuming it’s A) a Shutterfly issue and/or B) a sign that I need to not be doing that at work anyhow. But hey, I just did a practice save here, and it works!! Cool!! If it doesn’t show, reload the page. Then you can click on the link to view it larger, and there will be a "view book" button, and after you click THAT there’s a link at the top of the page to view it full page, so you can really see it. Hey, looks like you can even order one for yourself! I can’t imagine why you’d want to, but hey, whatever! That is very handy for family members. Actually very good to know for the one I’m making for Daddy. 

Hey, since that worked, I’ll post the one I did for myself too!

Click here to view this photo book larger

Shutterfly photo books offer a variety of layouts and cover options to choose from.

There’s some overlap but I put more pictures of people in Kim’s since she is all about pictures of her friends. I didn’t even think to put people in mine. DUH. Except one or two of Kim, and the one of me in the pub in Nottingham which I think is my favorite picture of me ever. I’ve used it as my Facebook profile for the last YEAR.

Anyhow, making these books is SO MUCH FUN. You can pretty much arrange the pictures however you want them, and pick all sorts of backgrounds and fun embellishments. I am afraid it’s going to be hard to STOP making books. And they are pretty reasonable. Well, $30 is a little steep, but it is a nice hardback book. I’m kind of thinking maybe a cheaper paper one now and then would be a wonderful thing to do since I seem to have quit putting photos into albums, oh, fifteen years ago. Since the advent of the Digital Photo Age, I rarely even print them.

So. That’s what I’ve been up to lately. Other than that, still watching the Tudors (verrrrry slowly- I’m only most of the way through Season 2 but since Baker B isn’t watching it with me it’s hard during the week to find the time) and waiting impatiently for Netflix to send me the last part of the Season Six Doctor Who. I am not amused by Netflix lately. The "long wait!" note disappeared last week and there was no wait at all, and I was SO excited…. then they sent something else anyhow. Three more something else’s. Then the Long Wait note reappeared just as I was dialing their number to complain, since you can’t just email them about something like that. Another thing that annoys me. I was ready to sign up with Blockbusters for a month just to get it, but Baker B prefers waiting till it is no longer clogged up in the queue to spending $20 to watch it sooner. And Blockbusters would take forever too, and probably send it out of order like they did last time anyhow. Since we’re oddly in-between TV Shows On DVD That We Are Watching Together, we’ve watched several movies. Well, we TRIED to watch Tree of Life.Which got amazing impressive wonderful glowing reviews and we’d seen a preview for it and it looked like something we’d love….

OMG. It’s two hours and twenty minutes long, and we sat through about 40 minutes of vagueness and a muttered word now and then and some very nice visuals and a very very VERY VERY long sequence of what I guess was scenes from The Beginning of Life and some more muttered basically meaningless words ("You have always been with me." "Brother. Mother. It was they that lead me to your door") and even more scenes that would have made more sense on the Discovery Channel where you’d actually be learning something as opposed to wondering what the hell all this had to do with the one kid who died in (I GUESS) Vietnam and how it affected his brothers and parents… ANYHOW, we then sped the DVD up thinking something HAD to happen SOMETIME, and finally at about an hour in said forget it. I still feel like we missed something, even more annoyingly. But OMG. And believe me, I am a big fan of many pointless meandering movies that don’t make sense (helllllo, David Lynch!!!). But this not only made no sense, it was also completely humorless and heavy handed and, I would go so far as to say, pretentious. 

If you saw this and loved it, please let me know why!! Like I said, I feel like we completely missed something. But it just could not hold our short attention spans for that amount of time, waiting as we were for something, anything, interesting to happen. And yeah, I know, the beginning of life should be quite interesting and inspiring….. but I just didn’t get it. Yes, I was bored out of my mind by the Beginning of Life!!!!

So we watched more old SCTV, which I have on ten year old videotapes. From when one of the networks was showing it after Conan. You can not go wrong with SCTV. We don’t have a whole lot of them, though, so Netflix really needs to get its act together. 

Oh, the other thing we watched and I really liked was Once Upon A Time in the Midlands. I’ve wanted to see it for years, and now I have no idea why I only just recently put it in the Netflix queue. I thought I had it in there ages ago, but I THINK it was either not available or there was a VERY LONG WAIT (i.e., they lost the disc — this movie is like ten years old). And then it vanished. And then the other day they recommended it to me, and I said, well where the hell did THAT come from, and why did I never see it?!? And put it at the top of the queue. 

Of course the fact that while we were watching it I remembered several scenes would lead you to believe that I actually DID watch it. And had forgotten. But I really don’t think that’s it. What I remembered was about fifteen minutes of the movie, and I remembered those scenes VERY clearly, whereas I had no memory whatsoever of any of the rest of it. So I am choosing to believe that I saw bits and pieces of it on IFC way back when we had a Dish and IFC showed odd movies and I’d see bits of the same one twenty times but never see the whole thing. 

Oh, great. I just had the brilliant idea of looking at my past rental history… and yeah. June 2007. Why do I remember NOTHING about it??? Well, other that a very few minutes that I remember vividly. Baker B didn’t remember it either, and he really liked it. That is bizarre. Maybe I started watching it but never finished for some reason?? It would not be the first movie I saw then totally forgot I’d seen and watched again, but considering it stars Robert Carlyle who I love and Shirley Henderson who I also love and was just the kind of odd sweet funny movie that I love…. you’d REALLY think I would at least have a vague memory of the rest of it. 

ANYHOW, after all that let’s just say that it was a very good movie, very reminiscent of The Full Monty. Although I liked The Full Monty quite a bit more. And Baker B STILL won’t watch The Full Monty. Even though he loved this one. 

Okay, that’s enough. What a disjointed rambling entry. Time to go.