Nine Great Years

Today is anniversary number nine for me and Cathy. Nine great years! Not every minute was great, but there were definitely enough great minutes to call it good.

Evidence that we're apparently doing a good job as a couple came to light last night as we were having an anniversary dinner at Charleston's. I use the word "light" in a metaphorical sense, of course; dinner at Charleston's is a candlelight thing, so don't drop anything black on the floor or you'll never see it again! Anyway... we had finished our meals and the waitress asked us if we were going to have dessert. Usually Cathy orders a dessert she wants and we share it, so she ordered her dessert, and there was a rather awkward silence... and then the waitress (rather awkwardly) asked Cathy if we were on the same ticket.

"Well, yes, we're married!" Cathy said.

The waitress apparently saw us enjoying being together, talking and visiting, and thought we were a not-married couple on a date! Now, what better commentary could you have on your marriage than to have a stranger assume that you were enjoying each other's company far too much to actually be married? It made Cathy and me feel pretty good to have that kind of thing happen to us after nine years of marriage. (To be fair, that particular waitress, though attentive and friendly, was a bit dingy. She forgot to bring dressing with my salad, brought Cathy the wrong dessert—which we kept anyway and enjoyed immensely—and then she actually gave us someone else's receipt and credit card. Good thing we're honest!)

As I was giving thanks for our meal before we started our salads, I also thanked God for nine great years. After I got done praying, Cathy remarked that she thought for a second that I was going to pray for God to give us "nine more!" hehe okay that's not QUITE as many as I had in mind!

Then we went to see Expelled, the new Ben Stein movie which is sort of documentary-ish, and we really liked it. We were still talking about it when we got to my mom's house to pick up Hannah. There wasn't too much in it that I haven't been at least vaguely aware of for some time (except the actual evidence that scientists and journalists that mention Intelligent Design as an alternative to the Theory of Evolution have been severely punished by the establishment) but I think Cathy learned a thing or two. And actually, although I was already aware of the issues, they were presented in such a way that I was able to kind of connect and ground some things that had been floating around free in my head for a while. Check my "Christian Life" blog tomorrow for some commentary inspired by the movie and the whole evolution vs. creation debate.

The reason we couldn't go out tonight, our actual anniversary and a Friday night, was that Cathy and Mikey are going on the Cub Scouts "Mom & Me" campout tomorrow. So Cathy needs all the rest she can get! I'll try to remember to send the camera with her and see if she can get some good pictures. So all day Saturday and then Sunday morning it's just me & Hannah! Yay! Daddy time!!!!

The Impostor

Check out this trailer for a movie that's in production right now. Do you recognize that long-haired guy? (He looked familiar to me, but I didn't really recognize him until I saw his name...)

"The Imposter deals with the lifestyle and
subsequent breakdown of a Christian Rock singer. As much as an inside
look into the Christian music industry, The Imposter is also a story of
redemption and self-discovery." www.theImposterMovie.com

Lost Trash Cans

This morning I sent the following email to Mayor Taylor's office:

I am currently without a trash can to put my garbage out on the curb. This is because over the period of a couple of months, the pickup guys apparently added my cans to the load. First I lost the lid to my big nice trash can, then I lost the trash can itself. Then last Friday they kept my little dinky can, the only one I had left, leaving me only the little dinky lid. So I guess I'm not totally without a trash can; I do have that lid. It's still sitting out by my mailbox, unless there's been an unscheduled trash pickup this weekend. I was too annoyed to bring it up to the house. Besides, what am I going to do with it?

I'm going to go pick up another can this week, and I'm going to spray-paint my address on it. I thought about getting a long rope and actually tying it to my mailbox, but then I might lose the mailbox too. Maybe someone could discuss with the trash guys the idea that trash cans are actually reusable and not disposable?

Michael Jones

UPDATE: This afternoon, to my surprise, I found the trash can (the little dinky one) on the side of our house! I have no idea how it got there.. I definitely left it by the curb, and the lid was definitely still by the curb when I got home that day. I'm going to have to email the mayor's office and tell them I found the can! (The first one... the big nice one... is still missing. That sucker's gone for good.)

Happy Caturday!

Recently I discovered ICanHasCheezburger.com, a site which features tons of LOLCat pictures. You can read the history of LOLCats and ICanHasCheezburger on Wikipedia if you like; the short version is that people add humorous captions to pictures of cats and other animals. Often they use a kind of broken English, as though the cat himself were speaking. Well, I thought I'd try implementing my very own Caturday tradition, using pictures that I've captioned myself. So, welcome to my first weekly Caturday picture!


moar funny pictures

By the way... click on the picture and click a cheezburger to vote for it. You can rate it between one and five cheezburgers.

(Note: there are some running LOLCat jokes... "you're doin it wrong" is one of them.)

(Also: I do realize that this caption is very similar to another one on the same photo... but I think mine is slightly funnier. Don't you?)

Movies & Kids

So... what's the deal with showing movies to my kid?

Mikey just turned eight years old. My wife and I try to keep some control over the media he sees. We carefully consider the movies we let him watch... for example, some friends of ours want to go see Iron Man this weekend with us, but we want to check our "family movie review sites" list (see below for the list) so we'll know what we're up against before we take him to see it. Although he had already seen all of the other Star Wars movies, we pre-screened and thought long and hard about Revenge of the Sith before we took him to see it because of Anakin, you know, bursting into flames and all. (We ultimately took him, and he loved it... and no nightmares afterward. he understood the good/evil aspects of it, I think.) I cringe every time a new Shrek movie comes out because of the slightly off-color jokes and homosexual double entendres. At home we have a special DVD player that we can use to seamlessly "clean up" things that we wouldn't approve of him watching without compromising the movie's story (think: automatic "network TV" version). He knows which shows on TV that he's not allowed to watch, and if one of them comes on he won't watch it (yep, he's a great kid!) Grandparents ask our permission to let him watch movies. And yet still he sees things that we wouldn't approve of. How is this possible?

This morning Mikey told me that he saw Horton Hears a Who! at school. I was incredulous... is that even out on DVD? I asked him if it was the computer-animated one like Ice Age or the cartoon one like the old How The Grinch Stole Christmas. He told me enough detail that I'm convinced that he actually did see the 2008 theatrical version... we haven't even seen it as a family, so I actually had to look it up and find some obscure details to ask him about (he knew them). I looked it up on Amazon.com... you can't buy it on DVD yet. Sometimes you can rent movies before you can buy them... he tells me the teacher said she rented it. His teacher is not the "illegally downloading movies off the Internet" type, so I have to believe she got it legitimately somehow. But how? (Maybe she had a wonderful, awful idea... oh wait. That's the wrong Dr. Seuss story...)

The first time I learned that Mikey was seeing movies at school was when he told me they had watched Transformers. That movie was one I actually specifically wanted to avoid letting him see because of some sexually-suggestive things in the movie. When the movie had just come out, my brother IMd me one day and told me he had seen the movie and it was great. (This was before I had read up on it.) "Cool! Someone else told me they liked it," I said. "Nothing bad for the kiddies, then?" His reply was: "woah...no, I didn't say take Mikey. I said it rocked." My brother is no prude, but even he cautioned me on that movie. And yet they apparently watched it at Mikey's Christian school, presumably with masturbation jokes and other and sexual humor intact. Something is weird here. (For the record, we probably would have watched it at home eventually with the Clearplay DVD player, but that's neither here nor there.)

They watch movies on special occasions at church, too. Once a month we have a special service on a Sunday night, and often they run long, so in the children's church they'll show a movie. A year or so ago when I first found out about this I asked our children's pastor if he could let the parents know what movie was coming up in case it was something we didn't approve of. He told me that he carefully pre-screens every movie and they're all OK. So no early notices of what movie is coming up have materialized. Now, it's my church, my "family", so in general I'm very comfortable with what is considered appropriate or not, but this is my kid here. Wouldn't it be courteous to let me know about something as potentially controversial as a movie showing?

(I won't even go into the fact that every DVD on the market has a incarceration-serious warning that it is illegal to show the DVD in public.)

Worse is the fact that the good folks at Mikey's church and at his school (and they are good folks) apparently have not considered the possibility that even if I do approve of the movie, maybe I would like to share that movie-viewing experience with my son instead of him seeing the movie for the first time with someone else. I suppose by the time something is out on DVD presumably people have gone to see it in movie theaters, but often we don't financially have the luxury of paying $20-25 to see something in a theater when we could wait three months and get it for $5 from Blockbuster, or sometimes free from the library.

So I appear to have more or less lost control of my child's movie-viewing experiences. I knew this would happen eventually, but I kind of hoped for it to be when his age had reached the double digits. Maybe I'm old-fashioned... the first time I saw an R-rated movie I was in college and went with friends, and if I had realized ahead of time that it was R-rated I probably wouldn't have watched it. But it seems like the people I trust with my little boy could have a little more respect for my discretion about something like that.

My list of family movie review sites:
Plugged In movies section - from Focus on the Family
Christian Spotlight on Entertainment movies section
Kids-In-Mind
Screen It! Movie Reviews - used to be more useful before they went to a subscriber model, but still some good info

By glancing through the information on these four sites, you can know basically anything that is going to happen in a movie that might surprise, embarrass, or otherwise upset you if your kids see it. You will also know almost everything about the movie's basic plot and you may run into spoilers, so if you prefer to be surprised, better just go pre-screen it yourself.

You might also want to look up some movies you've watched that you consider "okay" to get some perspective. You might find that some of these sites are less relaxed about content than you are. You also might be shocked to see how corrupt some of the stuff in kid movies looks when you consider it in the light of day instead of the dark of a theater!

Birthday Dinner Picture Captions Itself

After I posted this picture in yesterday's blog entry, I noticed that the word "OUTHOUSE" was floating directly over our heads. I'm not sure if my mom (who took the picture) was making some sort of subtle comment or something, but it's kind of humorous anyway.

Cathy's Birthday Dinner

Us with Mama on her birthday!

Cathy's birthday was 5 days past last Tuesday when we finally got out to Texas Roadhouse to celebrate. I was afraid the above picture wasn't going to happen... Cathy said she wasn't going to be photographed! I took a picture of her free ice cream instead (see it at right)... but then she let me take the picture and all was well. My mom and dad were there with us (picture at right). We almost made her sit on the saddle, but then we let her off the hook. (OK, she might have escaped soem other way... I don't exactly remember!)



Anyway... we had a great time. Mikey likes Texas Roadhouse because he gets to throw peanut shells on the floor, which is pretty much the only thing that can convince him it's OK to eat at a restaurant that doesn't give him a toy with his meal. Hannah found something to interest her, too... in fact, it was the first thing she noticed when we entered the room. Can you guess what it is? She's looking at it in the picture below. Click the picture to see what it was!

Click the picture to find out what she's looking at!