Last night I stood in line for the first time in my life to see a movie. We packed the kids in to see Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. It was worth the wait. They condensed it just a bit, but it was very true to the book and amazingly well done. The only complaint I have is that they condensed a bit too much on the kids' learning at Hogwarts. Harry Potter is a typical kids' book in that the kids solve dilemmas that the grown-ups apparently can't handle themselves, a common theme in children's lit. However, in the Harry Potter books, the author does a fairly nice job of building the characters up over the course of the novel so you can see how they learned the skills they use to solve the problems. They don't cover that aspect as well in the movie. Henson's Creature Shop does its' usual bang-up job on it's costuming and puppetry. Only gripe there is that the Goblins' hands were obviously gloves in that they could barely function, and were featured in rather close camera angles. It was a pleasant surprise to see ST:TNG's Rob Legato featured so prominently in the credits. Nice to know the crew is still working :). Anyway, highly recommended by me and my family. It does help to live in a town where you can take 4 kids and 3 adults to a movie for $24. And, wonder of wonders, our little bohunk theatre opened the movie, and will also be opening The Lord of the Rings. I am so pumped.

So that began our first family consumer night in a long time. I almost missed it. I was scheduled to work my last night at the hunting camp, but when I got there she said it was looking to be a very slow night, so I went home again and got to join my family at the movie. Anyway, the cinema is in the same congregate entertainment facility (ie: strip mall that houses less retail) as the bowling alley, so I wandered in to see if they had any lanes left for Rolling Thunder (bowling with disco lights and loudly thumping music), and, b'golly, they did for once, so we went right from Harry Potter to the Bowling Alley, and didn't get to bed 'til late. Thing 2 had a friend sleep over, and while she and the friend behaved fairly well, her sisters were obnoxious, and drew the wrath of the father on more than one occasion. I fear (?) we will have no sleepovers at our house for a while.

We used the nice weather today to move some of the Deadbeats' stuff out of the old house. I have come to the conclusion that these guys were just idiots. While packing today, hubby comes across a fannypack with Deadbeat #2's papers, bat pipe, scale, and stash holder, and his identification. *Blink* "Here, Officer, it'll be easier to book me for all this contraband if you just check my driver's license and fishing license there. The spelling's correct." I shake my head. No wonder he's divorced.

I am getting irritated without my email. We are in the process of moving our domain to the new ISP. Thought we could get by keeping our old mailboxes for a small fee, but the nice folks at the corporate office of our old ISP didn't agree with the prices set by the local dudes, who appreciate the business generated by Firestorm writing sites to be hosted on their servers, so we said "Thanks, no." and moved. However, Hubs had typed in some wrong numbers at the domain registration doohickey, and by the time he changed it, the old email was down, and therefore there was no valid email for the registry people to respond to, so they couldn't verify the change. Argh. So we had to FAX an internet company. Yikes. What's wrong with this picture? Anyway, email should be up again soon. *sigh*

Bruno has a friend here tonight from Finland, and they are having far too much fun with the new Karaoke CD-G machine (my early x-mas present--earns hubby back any points lost on that Harry Potter thing earlier) so I'd better go supervise...
G'nite!