Movies

So my uncle came out of his surgery okay -- thanks to everyone who sent happy thoughts our way for him -- and my parents came home Friday night, full of anticipation for babysitting on Saturday.

It was a pretty happy Valentine's Day for everyone; Penny got toys and clothes and candy, and Alex got toys and clothes, and my parents got to spend time with the grandkids, and Matt and I got to go to the movies.

We went to see Coraline. Which was quite good, though Matt and I agreed that we're not sure adding Wybie to the story was really necessary. The reason I've heard they added him was to give Coraline someone to talk to, rather than thinking to herself the whole time -- but she still spent a lot of time in the movie thinking to herself, and they handled those bits just fine.

In fact, I think Wybie un-spooked the story a bit. At least, reading the book always gives me the cold shivers, and the movie was merely mildly creepy. He made her less of a loner, less of a parallel to the cat, and less alone -- her rejections of his friendship notwithstanding -- which shifted the story somewhat down the fear axis.

But we did enjoy it enormously anyway, and it was fantastic to have some time to ourselves for a few hours. We even had treats -- I'd budgeted my points to allow for popcorn, and much to Matt's delight, it looks like the AMC has finally clued in and begun to carry Junior Mints.

We got home to the happy news that Alex hadn't even been exceptionally fussy for my parents, which makes me think having them come to our house was a good idea. And hopefully now my mom will stop making noises about him rejecting her.

As usual, Matt completely blew me out of the water with my Valentine's Day present -- he got me a Flip Mino HD video recorder. It's a teeny tiny little video camera -- narrower than my iPhone but a skosh thicker -- that records up to 60 minutes (4 GB) of high-resolution (1280x720) video. It's got a USB plug built right into it, so there's no cables or chargers to keep track of, and the software that it came with allows for editing and capturing still images out of movies. All of which very handily answers my question of what I'll do for movies when I eventually get myself an SLR camera!

I took a bunch of movies over the weekend, of course, but I haven't uploaded any of them to flickr, yet. (The drawback to the movies being high resolution is that they're pretty large files. I'll need to remember to start my uploads before I go to bed or something.)

Matt and Penny have the day off today, for President's Day. I know Matt was looking forward to it as a chance to get to spend some time with Penny, one-on-one. She's a really good sport about Alex pushing his way to the center of the spotlight, but it feels good when we're able to give her our undivided attention.

Of course, the morning didn't get off to the best start, because we couldn't find Penny's library book. But the more I think about it, the more I think she may have not had a library book last week, and the one we're remembering was from the week before. In any case, I called home to say so and to recommend we postpone the book search until we can call the school and find out for sure. No sense ruining the day over it, at least, since they won't be going to the library this week anyway, right?

I'm stuck at work, but since I got her early, I have some vague hope I'll get to leave early as well. We'll see -- anything could happen!