Father's day
Dec. 30th, 2009 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mellicious(Middle of the night, last night) I need to go to bed, because I have to get up relatively early, but I can't quite make myself go to bed. We are having lunch with my dad tomorrow - I haven't seen him in nearly a year, I think. I talk to him on the phone occasionally but that's about it. So I'm simultaneously sort of looking forward to and dreading this lunch, all at once.
(Later) I got to bed and got a reasonable amount of sleep but I feel sort of crappy, still. But then I have felt sort of crappy for days on end. I think I have sort of a low-level sinus infection going, or something like that. I've had earaches and sore throats sort of sporadically - they come and they go. I've been through most of a monster Sam's-Club size bag of cough drops already. But I think it's gradually getting better.
It's almost noon and I'm waiting for Rob to get back from the gym so we can leave. It's raining outside, again - it's been raining or raining with sleet and snow mixed in (that was in Bryan on Christmas Eve) or something of the sort off and on for days. (The kids were excited about the snow even if it WAS mixed with rain - it was funny.)
(Even later) I did feel better this afternoon, and to balance out the karma, or something, my voice disappeared. Well, not completely, but everything came out as a croak all day. Still, it's better than feeling bad.
The afternoon didn't go too badly. We had Chinese food and watched a movie, which is much preferable to attempting to have a conversation with my dad. (The problem there being that my dad doesn't really have conversations, at least not for more than a couple of minutes at a time. After that, he gets excited about some subject or other and he stops hearing you, and just orates. It never fails.) The movie was 8 Below, which is about sled dogs; it's a Disney movie, but not one of those ones where the dogs talk. I had actually heard halfway decent things about it, so I was happy to watch it. (Spoilery thoughts about the movie below.) I don't know if Rob really wanted to stay and see a movie, but considering, as I said, that we hadn't seen my dad and his wife in a year, I felt obliged to stay a while. So we watched the movie and played with their dog - who, probably not coincidentally, is a husky - and whiled away the afternoon. It was well after dark before we left.
I didn't have a very good present for my stepmother, and I felt bad because she made us a really nice afghan in very pretty colors that I really like. (And it's not too heavy, which is the problem I have with many afghans.) I'm gonna have to attempt to make up for that at some point, although we have the excuse of my unemployment for bad gifts, this year. Come to think of it, I don't even know when her birthday is, and they've been married for years now. Which probably tells you a lot about my relationship with my dad, right there. I had a couple of books from Half-Price for my dad, which he seemed to like. I always buy my dad the same sort of books - stuff from the history section, about WWII or the Alamo, mostly, or sometimes about the space program. If he's tired of them he's very good at hiding it!
SPOILERS for 8 Below:
Y'know, if they ever explained what the title means, I missed it. (But I did miss some exposition at the beginning, because the lawn guys were outside running leaf-blowers and I couldn't hear a thing for a while.) That's not the spoiler. The spoiler is this: if I had a serious problem with this movie - which was a reasonably well-made, generally very watchable movie - it was that it had entirely too happy an ending. It's one of those "inspired by a true story" movies; personally I have come to internally translate that phrase as "Hi, we started out with a real story but don't expect us to stick with it." The second half of this story involves an emergency which causes the sled dogs to be left on their own, chained up and without food, for several months, while their handler desperately looks for ways to get back to them. (Don't let this talk you reflexively out of seeing it; this is one of those heart-warming movies, remember.) According to my dad, who seems to have looked into this, in the true story that did the inspiring, there was a team of 15 sled dogs, of which, miraculously, two survived. But that was deemed not inspiring enough, I guess, so in the movie there are only 8 dogs, of which, um, let's say a firm majority survive. (I don't really want to be THAT spoilery.) This seems to me to be sort of excessively inspiring. I wanted to believe it, but logic told me it was too good to be true.
(Later) I got to bed and got a reasonable amount of sleep but I feel sort of crappy, still. But then I have felt sort of crappy for days on end. I think I have sort of a low-level sinus infection going, or something like that. I've had earaches and sore throats sort of sporadically - they come and they go. I've been through most of a monster Sam's-Club size bag of cough drops already. But I think it's gradually getting better.
It's almost noon and I'm waiting for Rob to get back from the gym so we can leave. It's raining outside, again - it's been raining or raining with sleet and snow mixed in (that was in Bryan on Christmas Eve) or something of the sort off and on for days. (The kids were excited about the snow even if it WAS mixed with rain - it was funny.)
(Even later) I did feel better this afternoon, and to balance out the karma, or something, my voice disappeared. Well, not completely, but everything came out as a croak all day. Still, it's better than feeling bad.
The afternoon didn't go too badly. We had Chinese food and watched a movie, which is much preferable to attempting to have a conversation with my dad. (The problem there being that my dad doesn't really have conversations, at least not for more than a couple of minutes at a time. After that, he gets excited about some subject or other and he stops hearing you, and just orates. It never fails.) The movie was 8 Below, which is about sled dogs; it's a Disney movie, but not one of those ones where the dogs talk. I had actually heard halfway decent things about it, so I was happy to watch it. (Spoilery thoughts about the movie below.) I don't know if Rob really wanted to stay and see a movie, but considering, as I said, that we hadn't seen my dad and his wife in a year, I felt obliged to stay a while. So we watched the movie and played with their dog - who, probably not coincidentally, is a husky - and whiled away the afternoon. It was well after dark before we left.
I didn't have a very good present for my stepmother, and I felt bad because she made us a really nice afghan in very pretty colors that I really like. (And it's not too heavy, which is the problem I have with many afghans.) I'm gonna have to attempt to make up for that at some point, although we have the excuse of my unemployment for bad gifts, this year. Come to think of it, I don't even know when her birthday is, and they've been married for years now. Which probably tells you a lot about my relationship with my dad, right there. I had a couple of books from Half-Price for my dad, which he seemed to like. I always buy my dad the same sort of books - stuff from the history section, about WWII or the Alamo, mostly, or sometimes about the space program. If he's tired of them he's very good at hiding it!
SPOILERS for 8 Below:
Y'know, if they ever explained what the title means, I missed it. (But I did miss some exposition at the beginning, because the lawn guys were outside running leaf-blowers and I couldn't hear a thing for a while.) That's not the spoiler. The spoiler is this: if I had a serious problem with this movie - which was a reasonably well-made, generally very watchable movie - it was that it had entirely too happy an ending. It's one of those "inspired by a true story" movies; personally I have come to internally translate that phrase as "Hi, we started out with a real story but don't expect us to stick with it." The second half of this story involves an emergency which causes the sled dogs to be left on their own, chained up and without food, for several months, while their handler desperately looks for ways to get back to them. (Don't let this talk you reflexively out of seeing it; this is one of those heart-warming movies, remember.) According to my dad, who seems to have looked into this, in the true story that did the inspiring, there was a team of 15 sled dogs, of which, miraculously, two survived. But that was deemed not inspiring enough, I guess, so in the movie there are only 8 dogs, of which, um, let's say a firm majority survive. (I don't really want to be THAT spoilery.) This seems to me to be sort of excessively inspiring. I wanted to believe it, but logic told me it was too good to be true.
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