Yee Haw! It's The Weekly Round Up!
by Nicole Freire

Photo by SantaBarbaraPix.com

I'm still adjusting to this new Sunday perspective. My deadline has changed for one thing, so that means I meander through the week as usual and then, come Friday morning, I get all panicky and think to myself, "What will I write about? Did anything funny happen? Anything sad?" and then I open MS Word and stare at it. Usually I end up typing away and before I know it, BAM! It's done. But I do have to get angst-y about it first.

So, nothing extraordinary happened, nothing too sad, nothing sidesplitting funny, just an average week at Chez Freire.

But there are lots of little things floating around, so let's round 'em up, ok?

Two good movies, one bad.

Yes, we did take the kids to see the new Harry Potter movie. And it was great, right up to the end, when the youngest Freire freaked the freakin' out over some scary scene and started to cry quite loudly. Instantly I was rewarded with a few stares, some that said (silently), "Who brings a small child to a scary movie?" (She's small, but she's not that young) or "Please shut up so I can hear the movie". You know, the typical bad mother award.

Go see Moon while it's still playing. It takes place on another planet (yes, the MOON), and in a spaceship/space station, and there is a robot (voiced by Kevin Spacey and that is creepy), and it is set in the future and there are spacesuits, and everything is white and futuristic looking. Normally, that is all the criteria I need to see any sci-fi movie. Even a bad movie, taking place on other planets is a good movie to me. But Sam Rockwell is in it (why his career isn't totally huge confuses me, because he is a fantastic actor), and my husband and I were breathless the whole movie and man, just go see it - it's worth paying real money for.

If you have a crazy bad tension headache and are stuck in bed for half a day and take some Tylenol with codeine and a muscle relaxant and mellow out because the pain is gone and think to yourself, well, the laptop is right here, let me watch something on Netflix instant play - choose wisely. I did not choose wisely, which is why I watched Next with Nic Cage (who I will usually watch in any movie, just because he's in it) and Julianne Moore and man, it was awful. Stinky awful.

Not even Nic could save the movie. And I bet that when Julianne Moore saw the final cut, she sort of slunk away, hoping no one would notice her. She plays your typical woman cop/FBI/CIA type, the kind who wears pantsuits with really low cut white blouses and high heels. Midway between looking appropriately dressed to run around barking orders at her underlings and looking semi-ridiculous when running after the bad guys.

As far as I could tell, the entire movie was Nic Cage trying to see into the future, Julianne Moore yelling at everyone, and some lame nuclear bomb subplot. Do not bother seeing this, even if you love those two actors. Poor things, they just wandered onto the set and thought it might be good, and probably halfway through the shoot they met up in their trailers, and tried to console each other for signing up for such a crappy movie.

Onwards!

Robyn, the winner of the giant bag of OMG Granola! wrote to tell me that she loved it. Whew. I was afraid she would hate it or be stumped by the three page letter I wrote to accompany it. Once I had typed out the recipe, it occurred to me that I don't really follow the recipe that much and so had a dozen caveats to explain. Things like "I don't measure the nuts, I just throw handfuls in" and "Definitely buy honey and cinnamon at Costco because it's so cheap it's criminal" etc. etc.

But now I have to go to Costco because my granola making stash is low and I need some expensive cleaning fluid for my contacts (because, of course, it turned out that I was allergic to the generic brand and so have to shell out for the pricey brand) and there are only 2 rolls of toilet paper left in the house. So I must suck it up and head over to Costco and try and get through it without deciding that yes! I do need more socks!

What's Next?

Oh, this is good. Chez Freire is temporarily childless, as the younger Freire members are taking a train up north to see their cute cousins with their very brave grandmother, and they'll be gone almost ten days. TEN DAYS.

And naturally people asked me, "Oh, what are you going to do while they're gone?" This is what we do when they're gone. We go see movies IN THE THEATER, or we blitz Blockbuster for all the movies we couldn't go out to see earlier. Then we eat dinner very quietly (sometimes on the living room floor right in front of the television) and it's usually food that the kids would never eat in a gazillion years because it's not white pasta covered with powdered fake parmesan cheese or Top Ramen. We are crazy, I know. Whoo! Party time at our house. Also, we do yard work.

The house seems too quiet though, and I miss them already. I'm not ready to be an empty nester.

Another Cool Thing

I'm going to be in a super secret wedding soon and I can't wait. All I can tell you is that I'm making the bouquet, and the color purple is involved. I love little secret surprises like this and am mentally planning all sorts of other things I can work into it. Playing the wedding march on a kazoo? I think I'll be grinning like mad the whole time because it's exciting and super secret, and the couple in the super secret wedding are wonderful people.

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Nicole Freire is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara.