Movies!

I got upstairs last night just in time to miss the first couple of minutes of Mission Impossible: 2. The story was okay, for the genre, but the producers suffer from a bad case of "A-Team-itis," which is to say that "rate of fire" should not be one of the criteria upon which one makes a film.

This morning, I dodged through a landscape mined with telepreachers (I have been known to listen, from time to time, but the Spirit didn't move me in that direction, this morning), and arrived at the Turner Classics Movie channel, just in time to catch the last 15 minutes or so of Joan of Paris, a WW-II flick starring an unfamiliar actress in the lead role, with Paul Henreid as her love interest.

I caught the film at about the start of a nice sequence where Henreid is trying to evade surveillance by the Gestapo (he's apparently a shot-down Free French flyer, and the bad guys know he's trying to rendez-vous with other fliers, which is why they prefer to watch Henreid instead of pounce). The sequence is entirely without words; it just shows images of two men: one trying to escape, and the other doggedly maintaining his distance.

The next movie up was Bogart's In a Lonely Place, but unfortunately, I have a couple of translations that need to get finished ASAP, so I could not afford the luxury of lolling about in bed to watch it. Too bad.

Off to work!

Cheers...

(Almost) ready for tomorrow...

Both translations have been sent, and I was able to relax for an hour and watch this week's episode of The X Files. The story was certainly not the strongest in the world, but it wasn't bad. To tell the truth, though, I'm growing a little weary of glowing eyeballs. I'm not at all sure that they lent anything to the story at all.

Back downstairs, I relaxed some more by writing up the invoices for the past few days. That's always guaranteed to bring a smile to my lips. On the other hand, considering we're at about the halfway point in the month, I'm really happy to have done The Nuclear Papers earlier on, as without them, this would be turning into a pretty thin month, indeed, invoice-wise.

Then again, I'm not at all sure that such reasoning is healthy, since without any invoices at all, things would be wa-a-a-y thin. Given the facts as they currently stand, and given my self-imposed monthly "nut," I'm almost three quarters of the way towards making that "nut" for the month of January.

If all goes according to plan, Galina will be starting a week-long Continuing Education gig for her real-estate license renewal. She called today to ask how she could dial phones down in Houston without each call being a long-distance number. I reminded her that everyone down there has to dial ten digits to call anywhere locally, even across the street. (How soon they forget.) I wish all the questions I get asked are so easy.

Time to hit the hay. With any luck, I might make it to the store a little early tomorrow, though ultimately my arrival there will depend on my ability to get Drew up out of bed.

Cheers...

P.S. Sasha had a bad day.