I don't watch a lot of network TV. Football when it is on the broadcast networks, Simpsons re-runs, and a steady diet of NickToons are the diet my eyes feast upon. Imagine my surprise then when I turned on the TV and caught Jason Lee's newest project "My Name is Earl" and I actually enjoyed it. No, seriously. I liked it.
It had semi-decent dialogue, a quirky premise, and yeah -- it had Jason Lee who played the best demon ever in Kevin Smith's Dogma. I like Jason Lee. He's got that peculiar nose and that lovable loser kind of presence on screen which make me think "hey, I could buy that guy a beer and hang out with him." In real life, I'm sure he'd refuse me buying him a beer... but the appearance of affable approachability is nice in a celebrity.
And because I enjoyed it no one else will and it will be canceled by the end of this season. Like Wonderfalls. Just put money on that.
Another recent finding that I liked is the Adam Carolla Project. I normally don't care for home improvement shows, but I like Adam's humor and he's got this band of merry screw-ups who are working on the house with him, and it is just funny. He has this gay personal assistant who the guys on the crew really seem to like, and he doesn't try hard to fit in with the butch construction guys, he's just himself and he's really sweet. Everyone gets along for the most part but they do argue and fight and then they eat Ozzie's super Barbecue and Adam cracks jokes. My kind of home improvement.
This will be a one-off because the goal of the show is for him to buy a fixer-upper (which he ends up buying from his dad) so he can refurbish it and sell it for a million dollars. So when the project is done, the show is over. Catch it on TLC if you like watching guys try to figure out how to get a huge air conditioning unit off the top of a house without caving in the roof.
I caught Breaking Bonaduce from the beginning the other day and it is one scary show. VH1 even refers to watching the show as a "train wreck" and it is indeed that. I'm not a big fan of a lot of reality shows at all, but this one sucked me right in because I am completely terrified for Gretchen and the kids at this point. Danny Bonaduce basically has an epic nervous breakdown, and the therapy that he and his wife enter into to try and fix where they are in their tenuously balanced marriage rips it to shreds. It can't end good.
On the kid TV front -- I've been watching Catscratch on Nicktoons, and it is really funny. It is about three cats who inherit their owner's fortune when she passes away. They get a butler who takes care of them, and the wackiness ensues. One of the voices is Wayne Knight (Newman from Seinfeld) and he's a riot. The dialog is fast and funny and we sit on the couch and roar.
This has been a rather busy week, and a rather rainy one. It started raining up this way about a week and a half ago. Last Saturday night when I was flipping around the dial, I went past the NH ABC affiliate (because we live so close it is one of our "local channels" in addition to the three Boston broadcast networks). They had a crawl going on the bottom of the screen telling people where they could go for evacuation, what roads were washed out, and all kinds of news and updates from NHEMA. So we watched their 10pm news, and were astonished to see the flood damage in Keene and Antrim and towns along the Connecticut River out in southwestern NH.
It was raining by us, but dude -- nothing like that.
And then it continued to rain all week here. Yesterday was kind of the culmination of some serious insane rain that threatened to have every river over its banks and up into yards and streets across the region. We went over to Haverhill to check out the scene.
The Buttonwoods Trail down along the river is completely underwater, normally the water is about 4 or 5 ft below the trail. I didn't go down there to look because everyone in Haverhill was there checking it out so we went into town.
I've seen the water level high, but never like this.
Yesterday my parents moved.
They packed up the moving truck on Friday in the pouring rain, and drove up yesterday morning. It rained and rained on us as we were unloading the truck. Linda and Ronnie drove up with the cat while my parents rode up in their car along with the moving truck. They all beat us there ... Doug, the kids and I got there around 2 and would have been there a lot sooner if we could have driven faster than 50 on the highway. Roads and highways were being closed all over the place and we totally thought we'd be sleeping on grandma's floor.
It all worked out fine, and of course the minute we finished unpacking the truck the rain stopped. Nice touch mother nature.
Linda made quiche and chicken salad, and we made it home as the sky cleared and we caught the end of the sunset.
Today was gorgeous so we set out to Geocache (of course!) and only got one down before we needed to come home for football. We made it harder than it had to be by not having the right coordinates, but eventually Doug figured out his mistake and we claimed the find. We wanted to hit three, but one had to be our limit. Football is a priority this time of year.
On Friday, my sister bought her BNL tickets for Mohegan Sun. The fan club pre-sale was sold out by the time it was her turn, so she had to go to ticketmaster. She scored some wicked great seats, right on the side of the stage about eight rows back. Not too shabby, considering her fan club seats would have probably been in New Haven. I knew for a fact my seats were in the 30th row, and that made me sad... so I was psyched for her.
And then I got an email from the fan club and the ticket purchase program saying that my seats had been upgraded to section 2 or 3 because the fan club was able to negotiate better seats with the arena. I could be sitting right near Linda, only on the floor, so we can thumbs up one another the whole night.
Nice!
I am so looking forward to these two shows in December. It cannot come soon enough!
Several weeks ago I asked for advice on how to teach a kid how to ride a bike. We worked on it forever with Geoff and it looked like he was not ever going to get it. I knew he needed a taller bike, and my boss' husband grabbed one at their local dump's "swap shed" and brought it in for us. It is only a fraction of an inch taller, but it is tall enough, and it seemed to do the trick. I spent a full afternoon with him out there talking about balance, brakes, and pedaling. I let him ride in the yard on the grass because it is a lot softer to fall on than the asphalt. Even though it is harder to ride on, it would give him the safe cushion that he needed for each and every inevitable wipe out.
He came home after school one day last week and in the spitting drizzle he spent four hours trying to ride... until I literally dragged him in the house and threw him in a warm shower.
I walked out this afternoon to take laundry down to the basement and he went whizzing past me, peddling like the devil. He got it. He figured it out. And when he saw me he wiped out.
"Do that again!" I yelled as I almost dropped the basket down the deck stairs in my euphoria.
And he did.
He rode around the dog pen and crashed into the swing set.
Okay. He'll spend some time learning about steering, control, brakes and safety. And yes, I went in the house and got his helmet. Now that he has speed, he'll need it.
He rode for another hour, and I'm pretty sure that he'll be able to ride elsewhere in about a week. Just in time for it to be too cold. We live on such a busy assed street that I don't want him riding up and down the road. I'm not sure where I can have him safely ride, unless my neighbor lets us allow him to ride on their trails.
So special thanks to Dave and Gretchen for the bike. It works. And it's fabulous. And you know what this means... Now I need one.
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