Well, we found out last week that we are just a few short steps away from the happy arrival of two twin boys in our home! We got word that we’d cleared the last major bureaucratic hurdle in the adoption process, and we’re hoping that we’ll be able to have Ben and Sam home by Christmas. This is, of course, enomously wonderful news and enomously frightening news at the same time–now we actually have to, you know, parent and stuff. We’ve got plenty of pictures, but I’m not putting any up until we’re actually home, safe and sound, just so’s not to jinx it or anything. (After all, we’re not done yet. Anything can still happen. Unlikely, but…)

We’re very excited, as you can imagine. We’re running around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to get things finished around the house. I’m sure it’s the last time the house will be in order for a very long time…

When the V for Vendetta movie popped up on the radar, I was cautiously optimistic, but then I just got some kind of negative vibe and never went to see the movie in the theater. Maybe it was Joel Silver, maybe it was the Wachowski brothers, who knows? Anyway, the movie finally made it to the top of my Netflix queue and so I, hoping against hope, spent a hard-earned evening checking it out.

Compared against other Moore adaptations, I’d say it wasn’t bad, but it was still extremely disappointing from the perspective of someone who’s familiar with the source material.

Overall, I liked the fact that they remained faithful to the graphic novel, and I knew that they were going to have to take some liberties with the plot to get it to fit into a reasonable running time (I can only imagine what they’re going to have to do to Watchmen if they ever make a movie of it). But three things in particular really, really, really bugged me:

• The “love story” between V and Evey. Besides the fact that it makes no sense in relation to the original plot, it wasn’t even convincing on the screen. Really, must every Hollywood movie with a man and a woman in it have a love subplot?
• The evisceration of Evey’s psychological transformation. Leaving aside the fact that they butched up Evey’s character to begin with (thus making the transformation less dramatic), they truncated the scene in the book and left out, I think, the heart of the interaction between her and V. Cutting out Finch’s similar psychological journey also was a crime…
• The loss of the mystery of who was behind the mask, and the related loss of Evey’s assumption of V’s mantle at the end. Part of what made the whole story interesting was speculating who was behind the mask. Not even on the movie’s radar. And what was the point of Evey being in the movie at all if V wasn’t preparing her to lead after his death?

Anyway, I think League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is somewhere near the top of my queue now. However, I know that’s unmitigated trash, so no impending disappointment there!

Well, I’m at the tail end of my East Coast summer vacation, which has included a trip to the beach (Oak Island, NC) and a trip to see the in-laws (Richmond, VA).

Highlights:

• Getting my 9 year old niece and 11 year old nephew hooked (nay, obsessed) with the board games Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride. I mean, I love those games, but man… I think they would play Settlers 24/7 if they could. Frightening.
• Taking one last ride on the Hurricane at the Myrtle Beach Pavilion. This was the fourth summer we’d taken the kids to the Pavilion, and we’re sad that it’ll be the last.
• Having lunch on our way back to VA at Parker’s Barbeque and Chicken in Wilson, NC. It’s always a good sign when the parking lot is full on a weekday for lunch. I don’t think the barbeque or Brunswick stew was as good as the ones at Bullocks in Durham, but since I’m going to be visiting there in another month, I wasn’t too broken up. It was, however, nice to be in a real down-home NC eatery. Felt like home.

Lowlights:

• Catching the tail-end of tropical-whatever Ernesto. Hopefully, my nephew’s laser tag birthday won’t be flooded out down in Shockoe Bottom.
• We ended up at Parker’s because the place we really wanted to try, the Beefmaster Inn, wasn’t open for lunch. I guess we’ll have to make the trek out one day when we’re visiting Durham…

Back at work soon…

One of the things I’ve been meaning to do for a long time now is put an official closer on my earlier Firefly entries. So let’s do it.

I saw Serenity a while back when it was still in the theaters, and I did really like it. However, when I walked out it was clear to me that it was over. I don’t exactly know why I felt that way, but I did. Maybe it was the character deaths in the movie, maybe it was the fact that the movie seemed to compress what should have been at least a season or more worth of episodes into two hours, maybe it was the fact that Firefly was really designed to be on the small screen and just didn’t translate well enough to the big screen. I don’t know. Either way, the movie didn’t seem to do well enough to really keep the whole thing going, which is a shame, but there you are — at least we did get an idea of where a bunch of the ongoing sub-plots were headed. Those of you who don’t want to give up hope, head on over to www.fireflyseason2.com.

Since it usually comes up when discussing Firefly, I’ll also mention that I finally gave up on Battlestar Galactica. Now, I know lots of people absolutely love BG. I’m not telling you you’re wrong. I’m just saying that for some reason for me, it just didn’t do it. That’s the way things go.

Next up is going to see V for Vendetta. The trailers look as if they kept a lot of the storyline from the graphic novel. Will this be the first Alan Moore adaptation not to suck? We’ll see…

It’s been a little quiet around here because for the last two weeks of January I was on vacation in sunny Puerto Vallarta. Andrea and I calculated that it had been many, many years since we had taken a vacation that didn’t involve: a) family, and b) lots of sightseeing, so we decided to take a nice long vacation somewhere sunny where we had nothing to do. The trip itself went great and we had a wonderful time — lots of time to lounge about by the pool or on the beach, enjoying the wonderful Mexican sun. (As a side note, if anyone’s looking to buy/rent condos down in Puerto Vallarta, I highly recommend the company we used, Bayside Properties. They were fantastic.) However, once the vacation was over, things didn’t go so well…

It all started on the way to the airport for our flight home. Andrea’s stomach had been bothering her all morning and about 5 minutes from the airport, she suddenly says “We’ve got to stop the cab, now!” So we pull over and she jumps out of the cab and throws up on the side of the road. She feels a little better, so we continue on to the airport (and tip the cabbie really well). As we get to the front of the ticket line, Andrea says again, “I’m not feeling so good,” so they wheel over a wheelchair and she sits down while I check in. Just as I’m getting the tickets handed to me (and this turns out to be fortuitous in a minute), she starts violently retching again. Thankfully, a very nice old lady in line with us has handed her a plastic bag, so we avoid a nasty scene. The airport people call in their doctor, who wheels her over to their temporary clinic (since the airport is apparently remodeling), where she throws up some more. The doctor gives her an anti-emitic injection and suggests that she be taken to the hospital. Really wanting to be sick in her own house rather than in a Puerto Vallarta hospital, she insists on getting on the plane, so back we go. The Alaska folks are wary about letting her on the plane, but since we’ve already got tickets in hand and checked luggage, they let us on.

The anti-emitic starts wearing off about two hours in to the five hour flight and Andrea starts feeling sick again. She makes it to about three hours before starting retching violently again. By the time we land, she’s a real mess and so we have medics meet us at the gate and Andrea gets taken directly off the plane and to a waiting ambulance. (Let me say, it’s the fastest that I’ve ever made it through customs and immigration… the homeland security guy came directly on the plane and let us through on our way to the ambulance!) Off we go to the emergency room and arrive at about 8pm. At about 3am, they’ve determined that she’s still too sick to go home and admit her overnight. I go home, feed the cats, grab some clothes, cancel a few appointmenst and head back. By the next afternoon, she’s feeling much better and is able to go home.

And, of course, the kicker is that somewhere in dealing with all the bodily fluids (not to put too fine a point on it), Andrea managed to transfer the bug to me. So just as she starts to return to some semblence of health, I get knocked out of commission with some serious trouble with the other end of the digestive tract. Assuming nothing new happens, we’re hoping that maybe by next week things will get back to normal. But I’m not holding my breath…