Sunday at the movies

We went to see Hot Fuzz this afternoon, which happily for us (if somewhat inexplicably) showed up at our movie theater this weekend. (Almost everything else showing on the eleven screens was one of the Big 3: Spiderman, Shrek, & PotC, on several screens each.) We liked Hot Fuzz quite a lot , although we thought it was a tiny bit too long - it was about 2 hours even and would have been better for being 10 minutes or so shorter. The screenwriters (who did double duty as the director and the star) had obviously watched every cop movie of all time, in preparation for this, and they manage to send up a really large number of them at one time or another. We finally gave up on figuring out what bits had to do with which movie - although two that it called out in particular were Point Break (which I've seen - once, years ago) and Bad Boys II, which I've never seen at all. in between all of that, they manage to fit in a murder mystery that you do come to care about, and enough character development that you do come to like the characters, too.

That's as coherent as I can get right now, in my Ambien-induced haze. Before I pass out, I will say that we also watched the Disney Around the World in 80 Days, that came out a couple of years ago, and we liked it too. Putting Jackie Chan into it was something of a stroke of genius, really - it liivens things up quite a lot. I didn't much like what I've seen of the old David Niven version - it seemed very stuffy, and what I've read of the original book seems a bit stuffy too. So throwing in Jackie Chan doesn't espcially seem like all that blasphemous.

My dad and his many careers

My dad at work, circa 1980
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

My dad was a man of many professions, have I ever talked about this? (Not that I can remember, anyway.) His father was a rice farmer, and so he grew up thinking he would be one too, but then his dad had a massive heart attack and died when my dad was only a teenager, and so somewhere in there the idea of continuing in his dad's footsteps got lost. But my dad did go to college and major in agriculture - I really need to sit my dad down and get him to straighten all this out for me someday, because I'm not clear if he was still planning on farming someday, at that point. But anyway, he didn't. He got an office job of some sort working for Olin-Matheson. When I was little we lived in Alvin and he drove into Houston every day to work. Then when I was four they suddenly transferred him out to West Texas and made him a salesman. We lived for a year in Snyder, Texas, and another year in Lamesa.

He didn't like being a salesman at all, so here the second career pops up: being a teacher and a football coach. (My mother was always a teacher, so I imagine she had something to do with putting this in his mind.) I guess this really started percolating during the year at Lamesa, because he got hired for the next year (which would have been 1966, the same year I started first grade) to teach in Lamesa. Then my parents went down to Houston for a visit and started talking to a cousin of theirs who was a principal in Channelview, near Houston, and he went and got both of my parents jobs in Channelview - meaning at the very last minute they had to get released from their contracts in Lamesa, move the entire household and kids all the way across the state, convince a stunned first-grader that starting school in a completely strange place was not a major tragedy, find arrangements for their pre-schooler.... It was crazy. But they did it. We stayed for one year in Channelview and then movied back to Alvin, where we had lived before.

My dad actually had three "careers" during these years - he drove a school bus in the mornings, then taught, then coached football (and track and sometimes basketball, I think) after school. He was the head junior high coach for quite a few years. Let's see, if he started teaching in 1966 and quit in 1974, I think... that's still 8 years he spent at that. A fairly long time.

Career #3 started as a summer hobby and grew. We had a neighbor at our first house in Alvin that was a shrimper, and Daddy started going out with him in the boat. The neighbor just had a really small boat, as I recall, and Daddy's first one was just our ski boat with nets and things added on, I believe. But then it got more and more serious, and the boats got bigger and bigger. He was already not always agreeing with the administration at school on how he ought to be doing his job, and finally they transferred him to another school, which he didn't like, and at the end of the year he quit to start shrimping full-time. (My mother was not entirely in agreement with this decision, I should say. There were many words exchanged about it.)

Actually, he was pretty much of a success at it for a long time. Paula and I went to college on the proceeds. But there were problems with overfishing, as I understand it, and the profitability of commercial shrimping - in this area anyway - slowly declined. Finally a few years ago he sold his boat and "retired" - so guess what he's doing now? Teaching again. He substitute teaches in a local high school. I hear he's highly sought-after. I guess he can make the kids think he'll knock their heads together if they don't behave!

Terribly important stuff

1. We watched Shawn of the Dead tonight. And a commentary that I dont think we had listened to before.

2. I have an optometrist appointment in the morning. I also have to call the lawyer and find out about the tax ID business. And we have a candidate coming for lunch with the group, and I am normally included in those lunches. So I will be busy. I'm probably going to have to take a day or part of a day off to deal with the estate stuff, but I think tomorrow is too soon, anyway. Wednesday or Thursday would be better. I need to do it this week, though, because next week the big budget push is starting at work, and it'd be much harder to get the time off.