Bits of my life, and a fairly non-spoilery review

So I spent the evening yesterday hanging out with Anthea in Houston. She is in for a week for work. We had a fun time - we went to Galleria and messed around for several hours - we let a really over-enthusiastic Benefit saleslady in Macy's do our eyebrows (I have dark eyebrows to begin with so it never occurred to me to put any further color on them, but I have to admit that it really didn't look bad) and we oohed and aahed over the overpriced but really cute stuff in the Ed Hardy boutique, and we wandered around the various designer boutiques mostly window-shopping but occasionally wandering inside. (The results of this were usually jawdropping. The really cute embroidered leather Fendi purse I liked? $2700. A cute sort of peasant-style dress Anthea liked? $3500.) We also did a lot of talking, of course, and coffee-drinking, and later there was dinner, although both of us ended up eating breakfast food, at IHOP. Anthea had never had chicken-fried steak, and I had to attempt to explain it ("it's fried the same way chicken is fried" was the gist of it) and so she tried it, and somewhat to my surprise, liked it. We decided that we had both grown up on fairly similar red-meat-based diets in Queensland and Texas. And we are discussing trying to do something else on Saturday before she leaves.

In other news, I am taking a Medical Terminology class online, and will probably take a certification class on medical coding after that. (I'm hoping to be able to zoom through the terminology part pretty quickly.) The job market is really bad right now, as everybody knows, and I can't seem to work up any enthusiasm for going back to doing anything secretarial, anyway. Coding is supposed to be a really growing field and is something I can get into with just a few months of training, apparently, so it seems like a good alternative. And since I've already been working in a hospital, the experience I already have will help, somewhat.

Also, we went to see The Wrestler on Sunday, and as often tends to happen with movies that have hugely favorable reviews, I was just a bit disappointed. ("I expected more there there," was what I said to Rob.) It was good but somehow I felt like something was lacking. Practically every scene with Marisa Tomei was in the trailer - except for the ones where she was topless, and there weren't even really that much of those. It seemed to me that about half of the movie was in the trailer, although of course it wasn't, really. The part that wasn't was the wrestling part, mostly, and I actually liked a lot of that - we used to watch some wrestling back when we were first married, and in fact we went to a WWF thing in Houston once (a "Royal Rumble" along about 1988). I especially liked the backstage bits where they were working out what they were going to do, because of course that's something that you normally don't see. Like I said, it was good, and Mickey Rourke's performance was excellent, of course. I just think I was expecting something that didn't turn out to be there.