Andy and Darcy’s Blog

I had no idea foxes were so playful!

Thanks to Adam for showing me this, it is amazing.

Sorry, I have realized that this video doesn’t so much work in Safari. I know it works in firefox.

It doesn’t even work in internet explorer, but don’t get me started. It has become one of my goals to fix this video for all browsers. But seriously, use firefox. It’s just better.

We’ve had a lot of snow. We’ve had to shovel several times, and there was one day that the high was -2. Ugh! Now we’re really happy when it gets up to 20, and then we go outside without coats for short periods of time, just because it is so warm out!!

This is footage from our living room window on the day we had a blizzard warning. Andy and I went home from work early after the blizzard warning was announced, and we worked from home for the rest of the day, just in case the city didn’t have their snow plows out working hard. It was snowing, but the winds were high so that the snow was horizontal. We didn’t get a lot of snow accumulation just because the wind wouldn’t let it settle anywhere. But there were some big drifts in inconvenient places. This video isn’t that exciting and it doesn’t really do justice to the crappy weather, but there is a lot of wind and you can see the snow speeding by. And I wanted to edit a video and post it so here it is.

I have been held up by the untimely demise of my (former) harddrive, and there have been cooler things to blog about than books lately so I’m finally getting around to books. Over the past month there have been good ones and bad ones.

War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. Well, this one is no surprise, especially if you’ve seen the movie. Except that the story in the movie is completely different than the one in the book. But the main idea is the same. The Martians tried to take over the world (I mean Great Britain). And as we all know, they were defeated by the common cold. One thing that annoyed me was that the narrator is completely reckless with his life in this book, but I guess that makes it exciting. I think this one got no stars on my book rating scale. The movie was better, but I didn’t like that either.

Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones. I was just browsing through the library and picked this one up. It was spectacular! It is a book for probably…young adults? But it is a completely enjoyable story that is not too scary and has a pretty good plot. The plot is this: there is a boy named Cat who is an enchanter with nine lives. His has an evil sister, and there is a plot to unbalance the force of good. And one other thing: There is a magician who appears when they call him by name so they call him “You Know Who.” Sound familiar? I checked and this book was written in 1977. So its quite original. Five stars.

The Ill-Made Mute by Cecilia Dart-Thornton. This one was recommended to me by Ms. Kira Foken. And I must thank Ms. Kira Foken because I did indeed enjoy this book. The heroine’s face is poisoned (and extremely ugly), so this book follows her adventures, and they are pretty entertaining. It was a little scary, but most of it was “fantastical scary” which I would define as “couldn’t happen to me.” Someone else has the next book in this series checked out, but I’m so excited to read it when it comes in again. Five stars.

The Briar King and The Charnel Prince by Greg Keyes. These are the first two books in a series, and I have no idea how long that series is. I hope that it is a completed series! This book reminds me of George R. R. Martin, but without a lot of the morbidity. It is still morbid in some parts, but its not horrible. And I do want to find out how the battle between good and evil goes so I really want to read the next one. So the sad thing is that the library doesn’t own the next book in the series (this always happens to me). Five stars for both of these books.

The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones. I didn’t love this one immediately like I did Charmed Life, but in the end I really enjoyed it. Four stars.

Myst, The Book of Atrus by Rand Miller. I’ve read some very convincing reviews of this book, and it didn’t really live up to my expectations. It was kind of boring, which was possibly due to the lack of changing scenery. The plot is this: the main character and his father live in a city (whose inhabitants are dead) and they create worlds in the books those people left behind. People who played the video game seemed to understand what was going on, but it didn’t do much for me. Two stars.

Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier. Here’s the plot: The heroine discovers latent magical powers, and she was deceived by her parent. Nothing new there in the world of fantasy. The one unique thing was it was set in Austrailia and had a lot of Austrailian phrases which were interesting. But the story didn’t entertain me. Lots of other people like this book, or so I hear. No stars.

Smoky The Cow Horse by Will James. Forgive my generalizations, but I’m sure there is a 6 year old boy who loves cowboys and would love this book. I hated it. This book is written in the dialect of a cowboy (or that’s how it appeared to me). And the subject-verb disagreements in this book were an abomination. The book is about the life of Smoky the horse and a cowboy named Clint. Smoky goes from running free on the range, to becoming the best cow horse ever, then to becoming the best bucking bronco show pony ever, and then finally after many difficulties he goes home with Clint to spend his retirement on the range. Negative stars?

On Thanksgiving day several of us went to see Enchanted, the new Disney movie. It was a mix of animation and live action, so I was really skeptical (for about 20 minutes). But I loved it.

It has McDreamy, Susan Sarandon, and the guy who played Peter Pettigrew (I think) in it. There is singing, and it is quite humorous. And I left with warm fuzzy feelings, so that is always a good thing about a movie!

There is not much left for me to say other than this movie is worth your time.

I can hardly believe that it is Christmastime again. It was just summer it seems like. That means it’s also the time for Christmas movies. I know for me this means National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. There really is nothing better than the Griswold Family Christmas. However if National Lampoon’s isn’t your thing I have another suggestion. While it may be less of a Christmas movie and more of a romantic comedy-type film, I’ve got to say it’s good all around. That movie is love actually.

The premise of the movie is that it is about 5 different stories of people told starting at around 5 weeks to Christmas. It is based in London, but reaches out to other locations as well. They each are going through some life changing events. The cast is quite good, Hugh Grant (About a Boy), Keira Knightley (Pirates of the Caribbean, Pride & Prejudice), Alan Rickman (Harry Potter, Die Hard), Bill Nighy (Underworld, Pirates of the Caribbean), Liam Neeson (Star Wars), Emma Thompson (Harry Potter, Stranger Than Fiction) and many other lesser actors that you’ll probably recognize. I won’t give it away, but in the end the stories intertwine in a unique and interesting way.

The stories in the movie really center around one theme, that love actually is all around. Different kinds of love, old love, new love, friendly love. It is really very, very good. I watch it every year and it still affects me the same way. I highly, highly recommend it if you want a good heartwarming movie that is set around Christmastime.

Even if you’re thing isn’t romantic comedies, I would recommend this movie on the performance of Bill Nighy alone, one of his best I would have to say.

P.S. What are some of your favorite Christmas movies? I’d like to hear them.

This really looked like a movie that was made for PBS. Although I think, in fact, that it was made for A & E. This movie came out in 1995, and at that time I would have never watched it. This movie is incredibly true to the book. It is even paced like the book. If I had not been well versed with this story, I would never have known where this movie was going. But I think that any fan of Pride and Prejudice would really really like it. And I think there are a lot of Pride and Prejudice fans out there.

I saw the 2006 Pride and Prejudice first, so I have to make some comparisons. Colin Firth really portrays pride, much better than that guy in the the 2006 Pride and Prejudice. He is very moody and unlikeable. He’s really quite perfect. I think the Elizabeths are about the same. I think Keira Knightly was a little more haughty and offended, which is something I thought was fitting. The 1995 Elizabeth was more knowing, understanding, but still full of prejudice. And Mr. Bennet was really witty in this film (its so amusing I can’t leave it out!). Between the two movies, I can’t clearly pick a winner. I like both a lot.

I watched this miniseries twice and loved it both times.

The first movie we’ve got since we resumed netflix is Eragon, and we have just finished watching it. I haven’t read the book yet so I’m not doing a reader’s critique today.

Overall, I think that the movie went pretty quickly, and it had a lot of nice landscapes. I had to ask a lot of questions, and I think Andy had to rely on his book knowledge to answer my questions. Is this how people feel who watch the Harry Potter movies without seeing the book?

I am really quite pleased that I didn’t read the book, though. I’m not sure I would have dealt with the obvious omission of parts that well. The dragon rider thing was quite a neat idea that I haven’t come across in the fantasy world. Maybe I just don’t get out much (or I get out too much?).

Summary: It was a pretty movie that had a plot with some potential, and I’ll probably read the book, whenever I’m guaranteed that there is an ending to the saga.

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Dragons, swords, and Avril Lavigne. One of these things is not like the others.