Houston, we have a contract!!

As of this morning we officially have a contract on our house!  I’m excited (because I know its pretty amazing to get a decent offer in this housing market), but also a little sad (because I really like my house and are somewhat not ready to leave).  Our little house now is so pretty and decorated and finished and I know that when we move all our upcoming weekends are going to somewhat be monopolized with painting, fixing, trips to Home Depot and living in a mess of a house for a while. 

BUT, its a great house, or at least has the potential to be a really great house, and hopefully our ‘forever’ house.  It’s just going to be a long process.  We knew that going in, and we figured now is the time to do it before any kids come along.

So here is a picture of the Dixon’s soon to be (as long as nothing falls through–fingers crossed) home:

 

No, we’re not planning on keeping it Smurf blue, but that’s way far down on the priority list.

I plan on blogging all about our house renovation projects on a separate blog: 82northcutt.wordpress.com there’s nothing there yet, but I plan to put a bunch of ‘before’ pictures up soon. 

Then you’ll see just how crazy we are.

It was a long Dark Knight…

Last Friday, Stephen and I and 4 of our friends made the drive up to the mall of Georgia to see the new Batman movie in IMAX.  Stephen and the guys had made sure to order tickets about three weeks ago, which was great since they sold out about two weeks ago.  I don’t think I’ve ever ordered tickets in advance for a movie, much less three weeks in advance!  I’ll admit though, I was really excited to see it.  I loved Batman Begins, which initially surprised me because I wasn’t really a fan of the older Batman movies.  I never saw the original one, I thought the second one was really weird and I only went to see the awful Batman & Robin because (like every other middle school girl) I thought Chris O’Donnell was really cute.  He was, but the movie was terrible.  In fact, I think that’s why he’s so angry in this picture, he knows it was terrible and his career really never took off afterwards.   (Well, I just looked at IMDB and it looks like he was/is in Grey’s Anatomy.  I didn’t know that since I’m one of the 3% of the population that has never seen Grey’s Anatomy.  I’m OK with that.)

Anyways, Batman Begins was different.  It was like the Batman movie for non-Batman people.  And it had Christian Bale in it, which is like chocolate in any dessert: it instantly makes it better.  

    =   

 

I’ve had a crush on Christian Bale ever since his singing and dancing days from the movies Newsies (which is on my list) and Swing Kids.  He doesn’t do much dancing as Bruce Wayne, but fighting crime with ninja-like moves is still pretty cool (which he first mastered as Jack Kelly with his ”remember Crutchy?” headbutt).

Because of how good Batman Begins was, I was really excited about seeing The Dark Knight.  I was also really interested in seeing the much talked about performance of Heath Ledgar as the Joker.  I’m not really into the whole celebrity gossip/worship thing, and I was a little skeptical about how good his performance would be.  I thought it was probably just hyped up because of his death.  I was wrong though, he was really amazing and played the character brilliantly.  (Wow, don’t I sound like a seasoned movie critic?)  It’s really sad he won’t be able to reprise his role (and its even more sad he won’t be around for his little girl) but I guess at least he went out on a great performance. 

Although the movie was fantastic, the process of getting in to the movie was probably the worst movie going experience I’ve ever had.  We had tickets for the 10:20pm IMAX show.  We started the evening a little after 7 with dinner at P.F. Changs.  Dinner was good, but what was even better was seeing the really drunk woman stumbling to the bathroom.  Who gets drunk at P.F. Changs at the mall of Georgia at 8pm?  Looking back I kind of wish I had, it would have made the next 4 hours a whole lot more enjoyable.

After dinner we headed to the theater.  Since we had ordered our tickets in advance we just need to print them off at the kiosk.  This was the first clue it was going to be a long night of waiting in line.  We stood in line to print tickets for about half an hour, and it was one of those situations where whatever line we were in was the only line not moving.  At least it was somewhat entertaining.  I saw a couple of middle school girls dressed up as Batman and this very impressive guy dressed as the Joker.  Adam got his picture with his way cool iPhone. 

After getting our tickets we migrated to the official line for the movie.  Remember, we had tickets for the 10:20 show and were probably in line right around 9pm.  The line was already pretty dang long.  While standing there we hear a rumor that the IMAX machine broke during the 7pm show and they were hoping they could get it fixed in time.  We didn’t think much of it since we still had like an hour and half before our showing.  So we wait, and we wait, and we wait.  Around 10pm we realize that since we haven’t moved at all there is probably something going on.  Someone said someone else heard (don’t you love movie line gossip?) that they were going to try to give the IMAX machine as long as possible to cool off and therefore might delay the start time.  We were all OK with that so we waited some more. 

At about 10:45pm (about half an hour past when our movie was supposed to start) they make the official announcement: the IMAX machine is a no-go.  People start groaning.  Never fear though, they will give us 2 free passes to come back and see any movie and they are re-routing us to another theater where they will be playing the Dark Knight.  We were a little disappointed about it not being in IMAX (especially since we had driven close to an hour for that very reason), but after waiting in like for close to 2 hours we were happy about just being able to see it. 

At least we weren’t the sad couple who had been diligently waiting in line ahead of us.  They turned out to not have tickets for 10:20 IMAX but for the 9:50 regular show.  The girlfriend had thought she bought IMAX tickets, saw people standing in line and just assumed it was for her show.  I felt really bad for her because a) her boyfriend was really really mad and he had to work the next morning so they couldn’t stay to see it and b) the theater for the 9:50 showing was no less than 10 feet from us.  Lesson learned: Always pay attention to your surroundings. And your ticket stubs.

So we get our free passes and make our way to yet another line on the other side of the theater.  Now, if I was the manager of a major theater, I think I would have made sure the theater was all ready to go before I told a slightly on-edge crowd that they were being moved to a non-IMAX theater.  We all thought we would be able to walk right in to the theater and start the show, but instead we had to wait for a least another half an hour.  Some people were getting pretty mad, some people were leaving, I was getting tired but after all of that I just wanted to watch something (I might have even settled for Space Chimps which is apparently a real movie playing at the mall of Georiga).  I was starting to think that no matter how good the movie was it would never live up to the anticipation that had been created for waiting in line for 2+ hours.

We FINALLY get in the theater a little before midnight, have to split up and take random seats.  Tiffanie and I ended up being way on the side, which wasn’t the best but at least it wasn’t front row.  After 15 minutes of previews (seriously, couldn’t they have just cut those out?) the lights dimmed and everyone started clapping and cheering.  You could almost hear the audience breath a collective sigh of relief that it was finally starting. 

It was a great movie, a little long, but really really good.  (In fact, Tiffanie and I were the only ones from our group that stayed awake the entire time.)  My only minor complaints about the movie is I still sometimes can’t take Christian Bale’s “Batman voice” seriously (had that problem in the first one too) and I think that Harvey Dent’s transition from good to bad was a little quick and the Two-Face makeup/graphics were a little much. 

All in all a great movie, but a loooong night.  We didn’t get home till about 3:30am.  Stephen mentioned he’d like to use our free passes to try to go see it in IMAX. 

As good as it was, I may have to pass on that.

The Amazing Maisie!

I mentioned before that I’m trying to get more into photography so I figured it’s time I posted some of the pictures I’ve taken recently.  The first week of June, Stephen and I went to Gulf Shores with some of our good friends.  One of the last days we were there we did a mini-photo shoot on the beach. 

Here on some of the pictures I took of our good friends Amy & Jason and their adorable daughter Maisie.  Amy is one of my best friends (I’ve known her since about 4th grade) and the first of my close friends to have a baby.  (I’ve told her I’ve observing her as my test run for the whole parenting thing.  So far it looks alright…) 

Cutie Maisie.  Doesn’t she look like the Gerber baby?

Maisie has the prettiest eyes.

 

 This is one of my favorites.

So is this one.

Again, look at those eyes!

Maisie was a really good model.  We only had one spit-up incident, but despite it she remained smiling.  I had so much fun taking these pictures!  Soon I’ll post some of the maternity pictures I took of Josh & Meredith from the same trip.

Inconceivable!

The mind is a strange thing.  My mind is even stranger.  I am often amazed and confused as what my mind chooses to remember and what it chooses to forget.  I’ve always prided myself on having an excellent memory, however, often times my stellar memory is not for important useful things (like important dates in history, Scripture or the periodic table of elements) but for completely random, pointless and worthless information.    My latest example of my propensity for insignificant ‘knowledge’ occurred this past weekend.

  

On Sunday while trying to figure out a grocery list for the week I was flipping channels and came across a great movie from my childhood on PBS: The Princess Bride.  (Why it was on PBS I have no clue–but it was great because there were no commercials thanks to support from viewers like you.)  Now, I watched this movie a lot growing up.  In fact I watched a lot of movies a lot growing up.  That may sound like a typo, but what I mean is I had a set group of movies that I liked and instead of introducing new ones into the mix I just watched the same ones over and over and over again.  I still do that.  I’d usually prefer to watch a movie I know and love over 97% of new movies.  This drives my husband crazy. 

 

Anyways, The Princess Bride was one of the movies on my A-list growing up.  However I have not watched any part of it in probably close to ten years.  Yet, almost instantly the large section of my brain that stores all this useless data kicked into gear and I started quoting every.single.word.  I’m not saying I knew the main lines or could say the gist of them.  I knew every syllable, pause, and every inflection spoken by Westley and Buttercup.  It was amazingly scary and my husband was quite impressed. 

 

I started to think about the other movies from my childhood hidden away in my brain that I can quote in their entirety.  They include:

 -The Parent Trap (The original, not the cheesy Lindsay Lohan remake)

 

-Rocky III & IV (I can even phonetically speak Russian in Rocky IV)

 

-The Karate Kid (only the first one, I don’t even think I saw the others)

 

-Home Alone (for me this wasn’t just a Christmas movie)

 

-The King and I (The only part I wasn’t good at was the whistling.  I’m still not good at whistling a happy tune.)

 

-Annie (My unofficial babysitter when I was little.  I’m told Annie kept me entertained for a few hours, and therefore I watched it every day.) 

 

-Pollyanna (I’m pretty sure my parents taped the Hayley Mills marathon on Disney channel in the early 80’s because one tape had this, Parent Trap and That Darn Cat on it)

 

-Disney animated classics (including Cinderella, Bambi, Peter Pan, 101 Dalmatians, Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, The Little Mermaid, The Rescuers Down Under, Aladdin, and Beauty and the Beast among others)

 

-Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (I think my love for this movie was part of the reason I was so disappointed in the 4th one.  That or the fact that it was about aliens.)

 

-The Back to the Future trilogy (I still like to watch these over and over again)

 

-The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe (The old school animated version.  I just got this on DVD!)

 

-Newsies (Perhaps the greatest movie in a young girl’s life.  Cute boys + singing + dancing = awesomeness)

 

-The Wizard of Oz (I had a friend in Kentucky when I was little and every time I spent the night (at least 8 times) her dad would rent this.  Every time.  I think they were in a bigger movie rut than me.)

 

-A Christmas Story (Another year round holiday favorite of mine.  At times my sisters accused me of being as whiny as Randy.)

-Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (For some reason I really liked this movie.  Maybe it was Baby Herman.) 

 

Looking back on this list I realize I watched a lot of movies.  A lot.  During the summers when I was little, my sister Jennifer and I’s routine consisted of waking up, putting our bathing suits on, swimming all day, coming in for dinner and then watching movies till we went to bed.  On rainy days we might start start our film screening a little early or mix it up with a little Mario 3 or Bubble Bobble playing on our old school Nintendo.  It’s these long, lazy, wonderful childhood summers that I can thank for my vast cannon of movies stored in my brain.  Those times where the biggest decisions of the day were which bathing suit to wear and which tape to put in the VCR.  No stress, no schedules, and no worries. They were perfect.

 

I think part of the reason I like watching these movies over and over is because it takes me back to that time and helps me relive my childhood.  It makes me happy and reminds me of those carefree days.  For this reason I’ll glady accept the pointless knowledge I have instead of wishing I could recall all members of the Continental Congress or the 6 steps of mitosis.  Who needs to know that anyway?             

 

 

 

If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter.

I know the title of this post doesn’t make all that much sense, but it was the only quote I could think of about writing and time.  I know I’ve wasted time not writing on this blog.  Is it for lack of time?  No not really.  Lack of ideas?  Maybe somewhat.  Lack of discipline?  Yes definitely.  

Interesting fact though, when I Googled to get the exact quote, about every site I saw it on had it attributed to a different author.  Among the possibilities: Mark Twain, T.S. Eliot, Blaise Pascal, Proust.  I even came across a couple of message board discussions about who actually said it and who didn’t.  (I’m telling you, sometimes it’s scary to think about all the stuff that people take time to discuss on the internet.)  

Although I have no idea if its correct, I’m going with Proust.  Only because I think I look really intelligent by quoting Proust on my blog.  However, if I’m incorrect then I look even less intelligent.  But considering that nobody reads my blog I think I’m ok with that. 

I plan to really step up my blogging and also add a whole lot more pictures.  I’ve recently been re-bitten by the photography bug and am re-learning Photoshop and want to share some of the pictures I’ve been taking. 

So stay tuned folks.  The best is (hopefully) yet to come.