In no particular order, here are some of the things we did this weekend:
Saw a fantastic movie, ***Lost in Translation|http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0335266/***. Bill Murray stars as an American movie star who has traveled, away from his wife and kids, to Tokyo, Japan to shoot a $2 million dollar commerical for whiskey. He finds himself alienated by Japanese culture and language. While at his hotel, he meets a young newlywed, played by Scarlet Johansson. She is in Tokyo with her husband, who is doing some photography work. The two bond and form a close friendship. It’s a wonderful movie, with lots of great shots of Japan, accurate insights into the Japanese culture, and enough weirdness to keep you interested. Two thumbs up!
Took a trip on the ***Thomas E. Lannon Schooner|http://www.schooner.org/***. It was a free 1.5 hour trip, courtesy of the Essex National Heritage district’s “Trails & Sails” weekend. The weather was very foggy, so the views from the boat were not spectacular, but it was a lot of fun to be on board a sailing vessel. Becky got to help hoist the sails, and I took ***some pictures|http://gallery.prwdot.org/schooner_lannon***.
Went to the ***40th wedding anniversary party|http://gallery.prwdot.org/joan_errol*** for my aunt and uncle Joan and Errol Ethier. We got to see some relatives we haven’t seen since our wedding, and even one (***Scott|http://www.scottethier.com/default.shtml***) who Becky had never met. The party was great and it looked like everyone was having a great time.
Did a large-scale apartment rearranging. We switched around furniture from our living room and our bedroom, cleaned up lots of stuff, and generally made things much more cozy. Becky is a die-hard TLC junkie (Trading Spaces, While You Were Out, Clean Sweep, etc), and I’m not hard behind, so I think some of those shows were starting to rub off. If you happen to be in the Beverly area, feel free to drop by and check it out!
Got the computer back up to full operating status. Well, almost. One of the RAM chips I had ordered was bad, and so I sent it back to ***OWC|http://www.macsales.com/***. I should be receiving a replacement some time this week, but for now I only have 384 megs of RAM in the machine. Other than that, it’s running great. The new GeForce 4 MX video card is fantastic, especially since it enables ***Quartz Extreme|http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/quartzextreme.html***, Apple’s technology which sends 2-D graphics processing off to the graphics card, rather than the system’s main CPU.
That’s all the news that is fit to blog!