Day: May 27, 2018

Three sentence movie reviews: Solo: A Star Wars Story

The suspicion I developed while catching up with Alden Ehrenreich’s oeuvre prior to the release of this film was confirmed: Erinrich is a little too stiff to properly carry off a young Han Solo. That unfortunate fact aside, I enjoyed the standard adventure plot of this movie. I think the interesting parts of this story–L3-37 and Qi-ra*–were unfortunately overlooked, which made for a movie that wasn’t quite as awesome as it could be.

Cost: $5.35
Where watched: Regal City Center Stadium 12 (after attempting to watch it at McMenamins St. Johns Theater, an attempt that was thwarted by a broken projector. The nice part about living in Portland, the land of the many movie theaters, is that we had our admission refunded and headed for another theater. We even stopped along the way to buy supplies for the yard rehab project.)

*When someone says, “I’ve done terrible things!” more than once, that is the plot I’m interested in. What terrible things has she done? Are they really that bad? Has she really done terrible things, or has she just moved on from this relationship? Does she plan on continuing doing terrible things in the future?  I would be interested in watching the reveal of all of these things.

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2018/solo_a_star_wars_story.html

Backyard progress: the end of grading

When we finished the side yard, I had the happy thought that we wouldn’t have to do all the dreadful digging when we renovated the backyard. That wasn’t entirely true. The four inches of dirt we excavated from the side yard ended up in a pile in the backyard, and so we did dig for the back yard project. In this case, it was digging to move dirt around, which is slightly less taxing than excavating.

Here’s what things looked like early on. You can see the dirt mound at the apex of the yard. That had to be smoothed out. In grading the yard, we ended up adding dirt to the part of the yard nearest the house and taking it away from the part farthest from the house. The added dirt came from the mound. Plus, there was the excavating of asparagus roots. That was full-on hard digging.

But look!  We have finished. Matt stands where the mound used to be!

From the other end of the yard. You can see how we had to pile up the dirt near the point of our triangle in order to excavate it to the proper depth. You can also see the piece of plywood that served as our tamper. Plywood and body weight does the trick.

You can also see that the asparagus crowns have taken hold.

Here is our “mothership” stake. That was the stake most likely to not be disturbed, so we measured from it to find our proper grade.

I’m happy to have gotten through this phase of the project.