End Game

Or: game over. In any case, I am soooooo (no, wait, SOOOOOOOOOO) bored with Vampire Wars that I am categorically refusing to go back there any more. As long as the farming’s fun, you’ll find me in Farmville or looking for eggs to feed the Hatchlings, but this idiotic, pointless collecting of “powers” and beating of unsuspecting players has to end now.

For those who remain unconvinced that I actually do have an offline life, you may go visit Flickr for the latest travel pics.

Welcome to Monday.

Love and the other Disaster

Having recently discovered the convenience of renting movies online and watching them on the laptop, I now regularly look at the week’s top movie rentals. Yesterday I found “Love and other Disasters“, starring Brittany Murphy and a bunch of other people. I had wanted to watch it anyway, because I think Brittany is adorable, so I downloaded it.

Brittany’s character Jacks was born into an English-Spanish family, grew up in the United States and now works at a fashion magazine in London. She shares a flat with Peter (Matthew Rhys, still cute) who’s a gay screen writer looking for success in the movies and in his lovelife. Because of the obvious reason, as Peter points out to her later, that she’d do anything to avoid getting hurt in a relationship, she carries on an on-off relationship with James. Her best friend, over the top Tallulah, is currently shagging a hot Jamaican named Freedom. So far, so good. One day, Paolo – assistant to the magazine’s star photographer- shows up on a shoot and Jacks decides to hook him up with Peter, who’s fallen hopelessly in love with a man he hasn’t met yet. Naturally, chaos ensues, but all ends well.

Different: every once in a while, the scene is set up by typed instructions as from a script that appear on the screen. Funny: whenever Peter disappears into his fantasy while something completely different actually happens. Disastrous: Brittany as Jacks. Jacks’ favorite movie is “Breakfast at Tiffany’s“, which she expresses by modeling her style largely after Holly Golightly’s, but that doesn’t mean her acting should be so forced when nobody else in the film pretends to be stuck in a Sixties flick. Sorry, but I’m taking points off for that. All in all, though this is solidly fluffy evening entertainment, even if I will be glad to just once watch a movie like this in which I don’t have to see the main character’s gigantic preggo belly in the final scenes…

Bits and Pieces

Sometimes one must go back to go forward. I simply could not get on with lesson 20 last week, so over the weekend, I went back to 16 to do some review and get the grammar down better. Today, I’m finishing the review on 19. It’s going well. Very well. Hopefully, it’ll continue in this manner. After all, I’m thisclose to being finished with the course!

About The Edge of Love… I very much like Sienna Miller as Cat. In fact, I thought the casting was superb. As with all movies about little snippets out of a person’s life, it leaves you wanting more (ideally), so I’ve been reading up on Dylan Thomas a bit. Very interesting. He should, if he could, consider himself very lucky to be played by the incredibly sexy Matthew Rhys (my motto: one more good reason to say something in Welsh!!), because even with the extra slobby pounds packed on, Matthew looks better than the soft, pouty poet ever did. He also has a better voice, as proven by a recording I was able to listen to on BBC Wales the other day, read by DT himself.

Our Celtic dinner was wonderful, although about half the guests didn’t make it this time. And yet, there was plenty to eat and lots to laugh at. We exchanged recipes, tested our way through a variety of mets, ciders and Drambuie, and learned that Breton fairy tales are probably best appreciated after smoking a good doobie or two… because the ones we read aloud seemed to have been written after exactly that kind of activity.

On Sunday, I nonchalantly jetted down to GAP for the day to go hiking and to dinner with the hubby, and Monday, being a training holiday, I lazed around the house and got caught up on my magazines. In other words, it’s all good. Tonight, I’m hooking up with Daniel Craig and Sienna Miller in Layer Cake (rented after I saw that it was classified as a thriller), and I promise to upload the pics from the brew course pretty soon.

Up, up and away

Having reached my goal of getting to lesson 16 in the Welsh course, I can now look forward to my weekend trip to Hamburg. While I am blissfully offline, you may still leave me a note, if you wish…

See you next week.

Werewolves, Vampires and Uncle Sam

Three days off are a splendid thing! Friday was spent doing all those things I don’t normally have time for, like almost re-registering my husband’s Jeep and soaking in the sun while the dogs splash in the river. Saturday was glorious, so the pigs and I kept the doors and windows open all day and enjoyed the warm summer winds while I frivolously whiled away the hours on the laptop, fighting and killing my way through one of two incredibly boring levels of Vampire Wars. I want my missions back!! On the slightly more bright side, I found a new way of killing time with pointless pursuits. Hatchlings is the name of the game, and all you need to do is click around and find Easter eggs hidden in Facebook pages. I really don’t care about ranking so much, but I love all the special edition eggs!

Sunday was gloomy and wet, so I got caught up on my reading and spent relatively little time online. I discovered, however, that whilst collecting eggs, I’ve also earned shells, which in turn can be spent at the Warehouse to purchase retired special edition eggs. After incubating my 4th-of-July egg, I now call a tiny Uncle Sam my pet, and I have to feed him eggs to keep him happy…

I rented my first movie from iTunes. It was really easy and didn’t take nearly as long to download as I had feared, considering a 45-minute episode of 24 once took me nearly two hours. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans completed the trilogy for me, but I have to say, this could have been a straight to video release without losing anything, mostly because there’s nothing to lose. The story is so predictable, I could have written the script for this film. An underchallenged Bill Nighy is stylishly menacing, although his most memorable feature is that he wears those creepy contacts all through the flick. Michael Sheen, although reprising his role as Lucian, was woefully miscast as the Lycan leader. Not that he didn’t act well, he’s just had too much exposure in other stuff in the past few years, in my opinion. I’m not even going to talk about all those rapid changes from day- to nighttime; it certainly is convenient that Sonya (the incredibly sexy Rhona Mitra) and Lucian get caught at night, she gets executed in full sun a short while later, and only a few seeming minutes after that, Lucian gets to try his luck fighting Victor in the full moon.

Fortunately, it turns out that this is something like a prequel to the other two, so we don’t really have to fear any more sequels…

Early Weekend Morn

Actually, my early weekend starts tomorrow, but why haggle over a few hours? I would like to take this opportunity to say hello to my visitor from Wales. I have a sneaking suspicion who it could be, but don’t you live in North Wales? The network showed up as being located in Caerphilly… oh well.

Lest you, my dear readers, fear I’ll be bored tomorrow, ’tis not so. I’ll be up for the early dog walk, as usual, then on to vehicle reg and the giant trash receptacles, where I’ll begin the clearing of my household. And daggone it, I’m going to the hairdresser’s, finally! I am looking forward to two days of not going anywhere for the actual weekend, because my house needs to be put in order, and I believe I promised someone to look for that mp3 player…

I think I’ll have a mini champagne, as well, for finally cracking lesson 12, though as expected, now lesson 13 has me stumped a bit. What’s that I’m saying? I’m talking about my free Welsh language course, of course. If you’re wondering what the heck it actually is I’m doing there, visit Say Something In Welsh and join the fun.

Speaking of joining, if you like traveling to Great Britain or if you’re a Wales fan or a Welsh person lost in Germany, come visit Annette and me on wales.mixxt.de. I hear we might have a celeb writer interested in doing a piece for us. That would be very cool if it worked out!

That’s enough advertising for one morning, I think… I can’t help it, between Vampires and Taffies, there’s not much else but the guinea pigs, and they’ve gotten quite a bit of blogtime already…

Anyway, don’t expect to read from me until Monday, and have a great weekend!!

Kinotag: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

It’s come to this: I’m at the point where I’m enjoying the movies more than I did the books. I suppose that’s not necessarily a bad thing, although I’m still wondering why the drawn-out, partially quite dry and boring last novel warrants a two-parter.

Anyway, HP was a thorougly enjoyable, well-directed and well-acted (even by Daniel Radcliffe) film. Especially the ups and downs of teenage love were portrayed in a sensitive manner. Dumbledore’s demise was dramatic and sad. Really, the only critique I have is this: where the heck was the half-blood prince in this? He appears in name when Harry receives the potions book, but even after Draco is nearly killed by the mysterious spell (in a POTIONS book?), nobody makes any effort to unveil the prince’s true identity. Now, I’d be curious who this master student was who concocted such a deadly weapon, apparently while doodling in an unchallenging class. And even when the prince reveals himself to Harry, we get no backstory at all! So, this movie could have been called Harry Potter begins the Search for the Horcruxes or Harry, Hermione and Teenage Romance, and it would have been more on point.

Still: if you’re a Potter fan -or even if you aren’t, but like dark movies- go see this.

After the Fires

Were I to find only one word to describe the weekend, it would have to be… barbecue! Saturday afternoon took me to Stuttgart and the backyard of friends who were firing up the grill for some homemade cevapce and don’t ask me what those burger-thingies were called. As always, the food was plentiful, and a great time was had by all (although Max and Rufus had to go home early because Rufi decided he wasn’t getting enough grilled food).

On Sunday, I was invited to a surprise birthday party in Wiesloch: more great food, more good company, and the end result was one very tired Party Queen. Good thing I have a week to rest…

TGIF Once Again

Honestly, I don’t know if I will have any time to post at all this weekend. After all, life beckons. Tomorrow, I have to get ready for my sister’s visit, do some shopping and go to a barbecue (possibly featuring the visit of a friend I haven’t seen in a few months). On Sunday, I expect to spend the morning with my sister, visit another friend in the afternoon, and watch that video my colleague thinks I need to get scared by. And after that, it’ll be Monday.

But I have confidence that you all will survive for a couple of days without me. Just in case you miss me too much, you can help me review some music for our Celtic dinner in August. Tell me what you think of The Rough Guide to Celtic Music and the Chieftains’ Celtic Wedding.

Life’s not all Fun and Games, but it could be

If life were like this past weekend, it would be pretty close to grand. I still haven’t been to the hairdresser, we did not see “Harry Potter” and the hardware store remains unvisited. But the boys and I had a great Saturday morning breakfast walk with Anke and Daisy. We purposely walked a different way, intending to hook back up to our usual road a bit further down in the woods, but accidentally missed our turn and instead took a longer walk altogether. The dogs certainly didn’t mind.

Saturday morning I was treated to omeletts for breakfast, and yesterday we had French toast. The new grill got plenty of action, as well. Mark christened the new rotisserie spit by cooking up a whole chicken. Last night, it ended up clearing up just in time and just enough to enjoy dinner on the patio.

Between washing dishes, doing some laundry, cleaning the guinea pigs and doing some shopping, I had plenty of time to go nuts in Vampire Wars, too.

So no, life’s not all fun and games, but when it gets this close, it feels pretty damn near perfect.