David Cronenberg lays it on thick in A History of Violence. For most of the movie every move that every character makes, everything that every character says, is dripping with “notice what I’m doing!” I found this distracting, (also distracting: the music over the end scene) but what made this good movie was one moment with Viggo Mortensen.
Verdict: Good
Cost: free from library
Where watched: at home in preparation for Filmspotting’s March Madness 2019
My Aunt Pat sent me a postcard from what she says is her last trip to Hawaii. The Aunts stayed in a cottage that was built in the 1930s and is part of a former estate on the ocean. It sounds very nice.
And one more postcard from Iowa rolled in. I’m not sure where it was hanging out all this time. But here it is!
Another week with not enough hours in it.
Part of the problem was that I had something Monday, (Librarian Book Group) Tuesday, (Business Fundamentals I) and Thursday (Birthday dinner, REI shopping) nights, which precluded me getting any work done on those nights.
Business Fundamentals I is the class I am taking through Mercy Corps. The first class was last week and it was great! It was also three hours long, something I hadn’t quite realized until I sat down at 4 pm and realized 4-7 pm is three hours, not the two I was thinking. So there will be no blog work on Tuesday nights for five more weeks.
What did I accomplish this week? Ads finally showed up on the site! But they are only on the front page, not on any individual post pages. I poked around to try and figure out why they are not there, and eventually decided to wait a few days to see if they appear. That’s what happened with the front page.
I also wrote two posts, since I’ve pledged to myself to be officially “live” on December 1. That means getting up all the posts from October that haven’t been written since I’ve been working on the website.
I also decided I should figure out this SEO thing before I go any further with tagging posts. I starting reading an article et voila! my time had ended.
During my next session. I wrote two more posts, edited the previous posts I had written, and wrote drafts of three more posts. I’m still working on the flow of how to get things written and published.
I read more about SEO and feel like I have a handle on it. I also signed up to be an Amazon Associate, so I can have affiliate links on my site. I then went through and added affiliate links to my September top movies post. It took a long time.
One of the things that makes tagging old posts and linking to Amazon products a very slow process is that my current monitor is 17.5 inches. I can only have one window visible at a time, which means I have to toggle back and forth a lot. Since I have three monitors at work (one very, very large) I’ve gotten used to having at least three open windows at once. Deciding that this one-window madness could not continue, I bought a 24-inch monitor. It should be available to pick up at Best Buy next Saturday.
My mental state this week has not been very good. I was disappointed not to meet my seven hour goal this week, and disappointed to not meet that goal for two weeks in a row now. Plus, I had a small flame of hope that I could avoid working at the paid job next week, but unfortunately, the work rolled in, so I must go to my day job on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. This more or less crushes my hope of catching up, hours-wise.
I’m also very tired. I was hoping to become more rested over nine days of not going to work. Now that resting must happen over four days of not going to work. Which, since it’s four days and two of those days are a weekend just like any other weekend, and the other day is full of family obligations, it feels like I must do all my catching up, resting and other various chores (Decorating for Christmas! Making a baby blanket! Shopping for the fall wardrobe! Getting a haircut! Writing back to people who have written me! Etc!) on Friday.
So I head into next week feeling defeated. I’m making progress, but I feel like falling behind. John Green’s video then, was quite on point.
John Green says that acknowledging it helps (I’m not really feeling that). He also says that prioritizing the most important relationships in my life is important. Okay, then, it was good that I spent time with Matt, and sang karaoke when I could have been doing work on the websites. And I should not begrudge the loss of my Thursday to spending time with my family.
He further says I should remember what actually matters. Which I guess is that I’m making progress, even if it’s not all the progress I want to be making.
I don’t really feel that, John Green. But I appreciate you for mapping it out.
Still not sure when I’m going to get a haircut.
Never has the Male Gaze been so thoroughly applied to men (by a woman director*) as in Beau Travail. “This movie has not plot,” I whispered to my cat halfway through and while it does have a loose plot, most of the movie consists of languid observations of a small band of French Foreign Legion solders in Djibouti. To reach full mesmer, it’s probably best watched in a dark theater on a day with not much else to do.
Verdict: Good
Cost: free from library
Where watched: at home, in preparation for Filmspotting Best of the 2000s March Madness
*Young, fit military men are rather mesmerizing.
Chris Pine and his blue, blue eyes star in Outlaw King, a movie about Robert the Bruce which includes a lot of bloody treachery, especially concerning horses.* This is a solid story with attempts made to include women in the narrative.** The costumes are great in their raggedness and there are a ton of gorgeous landscape shots.
Verdict: Good
Cost: Netflix monthly fee ($7.99)
Where watched: at home
*I mean, I got what was going to happen to the horses when they outlined the technique in the training scene, so I didn’t need to watch it repeatedly during the battle scene. (The battle tactics were, admittedly, a genius move on Robert the Bruce’s part.)
**This is always appreciated, though I suspect if more women wrote and directed movies, we would see war movies where women are something besides helpers.
Having the first check number in your business checking account be the year of your birth.
This was the week where I got very tired. I had already gotten very tired last week, on Sunday when I collapsed around 4 pm. I used Monday to finish off the things I would have done Sunday night.
On Tuesday I downloaded my new 3SMR logo and put it on the site in all the places. I did not love it as much, once I got it up. The spacing is a little odd. But the whole thing cost me around $50 and it will do for now.
I also made a foray into getting social media sites set up. That crashed and burned due to Facebook stuff. So I turned to revising the display style of the movie pages. Because starting a website when you don’t know much about what you’re doing means redoing a lot of stuff.
On Wednesday I sat down to get work done and I just couldn’t. I ended up watching three episodes of Anne with an E and eating oyster crackers.
Oh! On Friday I had 30 minutes at work where there was suddenly nothing to do, so I spent that time looking at other financial bloggers websites to see how they were set up. I took notes on four of them before the work rolled back in. So I got some work done on Female Financial Independence! That was great.
On Saturday I spent a solid three hours and accomplished much. I now have a Twitter handle, a Facebook page and (possibly) an Instagram account for 3SMR. And they all have the same name! @3SMReviews. I also finished revising all the website page layouts. They now all display 30 posts, and then go to pagination. In that process, I discovered four pages I hadn’t yet set up.
I also now have a Mailchimp account for 3SMR. Yes, you can be on my mailing list. I also put a sign up form on the front page of 3SMR.
The last thing I did was poke around to see why the AdSense ads aren’t showing up on the site. The code is in the headers, but still: nothing. I’ll figure that out soon.
My hours this week totaled 5, which has me 1.5 short for the month so far. But I can probably make up that amount in the remaining days, provided I am not too tired.
Laurie and Burt are getting closer to finishing their second McMenamins Passport, so it was time to make the Washington run. We drove to Bothell to start at Anderson School, then did Seattle, Olympia, the Olympic Club in Centralia and then visited the new site, Kalama Harbor Lodge. Here’s a picture of us with our Olympic Club prize.
For comparison, here’s a picture of us from January 2016, when we first made the Washington run.
Kalama Harbor Lodge is the newest McMenamins property and is quite nice. It was stuffed full of people when we arrived and I’m not sure if that was a function of the three-day weekend or if the Kalama area is under-subscribed for lodging and restaurants.
Our visit did solve one mystery for me. When I take the train to Seattle, there’s always a stretch where there is a lovely park and I’d always wondered what park it was. It turns out it’s the Port of Kalama: Marine Park & Rasmussen Day Use Park and is right next door to the McMenamins. We got to walk through it, because one of the stamps needed for this site is at a small pub a half mile away. It was dark and kind of chilly, but was a nice walk.
The website for the hotel has also shed some light on why they would build a hotel in this particular location as it seems to be in the middle of nowhere. Aside from antiquing, the newly opened Ilani Casino is 15 minutes away.
This will probably be our last all-of-Washington-in-one-day journey. Once the Tacoma property opens it will take longer than 12 hours to get to all the properties, and that makes for a too-long day.
Laurie had the good idea to stay in one of the properties and do some on the way up and some on the way back. So it might be that you would hit Anderson School and Seattle and then stay in Tacoma. Then get Olympia, Centraila and Kalama on the way back down.
Because we live in Portland, the Vancouver properties are easy to pick up, so they don’t need to be a part of the journey.
In 100% Fresh, Adam Sandler skips from topic to topic, for an internet version of what some people say about the weather: if you don’t like it, just wait 30 seconds. This was a successful strategy. I watched this for the last two songs (one dedicated to his wife, and a beautiful tribute to Chris Farley) but I didn’t know there would be a song about his bat mitzvah, which was also delightful.
Cost: Netflix Monthly Subscription ($7.99)
Where watched: at home, with Matt
10 more postcard arrived from Iowa today. I particularly like various washi tape configurations, though I am also partial to the famous painting doctored with stickers.
