Winter. Movies. Knitting

My view from the couch when it's snowing.  The ski trail is in the middle of the picture.

Snow.
Here in Craftsbury, when people (me usually included) 'pray for snow', it's to make the skiing better.  Today I needed it to cover up the ashes and big hole along the driveway before Vince came home.  It's not that I would never tell him I went off the road but I wanted a chance blame it on the car before he sees the hole and assumes it was my fault.  Even if I would have had my right hand on the steering wheel instead of in the potato chip bag, my rented Ford Focus would have ended up in that snowbank.  

When Vince takes the car to school, I'm carless.  So, one sunny, clear roaded  (I'm sure that's not a word) day I rented a car for a month without thinking to ask about snow tires.  Today as I crutched (I'm sure that's not a word either ) up our 200 yard driveway with a backpack full of groceries to swap for a bucket of ashes and a snow shovel (it worked pretty well as a crutch actually), I knew I wouldn't forget to ask about the tires next time.

 All dug out and parked at if nothing had happened, I called the rental car people to see if I could get a car with snow tires, he said that no rental cars in Vermont had snow tires, 'it's the law' (now that sounds a little odd) and that the car was 'fine' since it had all-season tires.  I asked him if he wanted to come and drive the car out of the ditch.

Rental car with miraculous go-anywhere all season tires.

Customer service.
Our 'Six Feet Under'  Netflix addiction got to the point where the nights we didn't have one to watch were almost unbearable.  Pathetic, huh?  We finally decided the suffering was just too much and it was worth four dollars a month to upgrade our membership from one dvd at a time to two.  I clicked on 'my account' and noticed I'd been paying 15.99/month (one dvd + streaming) and not the 7.99/month (one dvd) for which I had signed up.  Of course we had never used the streaming because we didn't know we had it and wouldn't have anyway because we both like the anticipation of that red envelope in our mailbox and it being as close as we'll ever be again to the thrill of our photos being in at the drug store.  Evidently during the Netflix fiasco last summer, if you didn't say "don't add streaming," they added it, and since they had your credit card, they charged it.  They just didn't tell you.  So.  For 4 months I'd been paying 15.99 instead of the 7.99 I'd agreed to be paying.  I figured it would be as easy to get my money back as it was to upgrade my plan but she told me she could 'only credit me for three months and I was lucky because until recently they could only credit one month'.  I think that's stealing.  Shouldn't I be making up the rules in this case?


aforA.
I haven't knit since I finished a sweater for my girlfriend's baby that I never saw her wear but I'm finally over the knitting self-confidence issues enough to pick up my needles again.
"afghans for Afghans is a humanitarian and educational people-to-people project that sends hand-knit and crocheted blankets and sweaters, vests, hats, mittens, and socks to the beleaguered people of Afghanistan".  

I'm unreasonably proud of the hat I knit to contribute.

January 2012, World Service delivers our wool gifts to girls and boys in Kabul!

Little bits.
The emergency room doctor had conjunctivitis (pink eye) and kept dabbing his weeping eye with a piece of toilet paper.  Should he be in there?

I have a new favorite movie this week....'Rocket Science'.  About a stuttering boy who joins his high school debate team.

My friend Fred bought a bail jar of pennies at an antique store the other day and there were 1157 pennies in it.

Did you notice?  Nothing about my knee.

(Number Fourteen) GOOD LIFE

I had a bad feeling about ending the year with 13 posts.....


Just got back from a week of visiting my dad at "GOOD LIFE" a resort for active seniors...(seniors meaning 55+!) in Mesa, Arizona where the gum chewing drove Vince crazy.

Twelve hundred, 400 square foot trailers 5 feet apart and if there were neighbors that hated each other, I wasn't aware of it.

Dad pretending to understand everything Vince is telling him about his (Dad's) new tablet.

Dad (cane) and me (crutches).

Dad pedaling at level 10.

I met Harris, 90, from Balaton, Minnesota. He'd ridden his bike with a basket to the fitness center then ridden the stationary bike for 30 minutes before riding to the post office to mail his lavender enveloped Christmas cards.  I mentioned something to Dad about Harris's degree of activity and he said "Yah, but he only has the exercise bike at level-one." 

This sign, posted at the Good Life fitness center, must have been effective because I didn't see anyone wrestling the whole time I was there.

On the flight back the flight attendant acted like the plane couldn't take off until I put my Galaxy Bookshop bag, holding a sandwich, under the seat in front of me.  Meanwhile, the woman beside me had an un-anchored one year old in her lap.   That doesn't make sense to me.

The Visitor(s)

'The Visitor' was the feature at our Saturday night dinner and a movie blowout.  It's just about my favorite movie ever so I liked seeing it for the second time and Vince went along with it.  John and Kathy couldn't make it for Saturday so they came Sunday.  I told them how good the movie was and that we could watch it again when they were here but Vince didn't like it as much as me so we talked instead.

Speaking of visitors...
Twelve hours after I arrived in Spokane on a red-eye from Athens I was sitting at a hotel in downtown Spokane with Kathy and Gaynelle, both Mankato State college roommates.*  Helen was the only college roommate missing from our 1978 apartment down the hill from campus where even though we had two bedrooms, we all slept together in one (the other sat empty except for the turn table and 8-track player) because we couldn't decide how to divide us up.
Between the three of us we were able to dredge up the names of a lot of college friends that we knew we never forget but did.  We convinced each other that we all looked the same as we did in 1978 and maybe even better.
Nineteen hours later,  Janet**, an earlier college roommate and stepsister (long story) pulled in from Minnesota on a motorcycle with her husband.
You can't have too many close girlfriends.

Writing.
Thinking the meeting would give me the motivation to wrap-up (i.e. start) a little screenplay I been thinking about, I went to my first 'Metaline Falls writers group' last week but since all they talked about the whole time was how expensive things are nowadays, I may not go again.  There must be some reason I can't work on the writing project at home but I don't know what it is so I rode on my mountain bike on pavement with really new, really wide knobby tires and an unpadded, lopsided 20 pound pack that didn't conform to my back (miserable ride) to Nelson, British Columbia and stayed at the Dancing Bear youth hostel for few nights to see if that would inspire me.  It did, and now I have a screenplay about a girl that enters a cooking contest.  It should be better than it sounds and shouldn't be too complicated to do except for the scenes with all the animals.

The Dancing Bear inspired my 'girl enters a cooking contest' masterpiece.

There was no easy way for me to get into that top bunk.

A Big Week:
The movie theater re-opened on Friday with 'Super 8', the smell of new paint and popcorn and a near record crowd, many of whom had to park somewhere other than the main street because all the parking spots were taken.  Except for the sci-fi parts the movie was good. 

Next week.  Is anyone else tired of Harry Potter movies?

We won 2 local kayak races on Saturday.  One race had 4 boats, the other had 2 and the blue ribbon we came home with was the first of the summer.

We got some new red chairs.  This is just one of them but the other one looks just like it.

After a fifty-five year delay, last week during a paddle, I got up the nerve to execute my first rope swing launch.  Describing is as a 'launch' is pretty misleading but I can't think of a better word. 


*I told you about Greece and I told you about Kathy my best friend from college and now Sleepy Eye, Minnesota home of Buttered Corn Days in my last post.  Both Kathy and I majored in Parks and Recreation/Natural Resource management.  She was a Rec major because she was passionate about it.  I was a Rec major because it was easy.  I was one of her bridesmaids.

**I was one of her bridesmaids too.

***Trying to come up with a good way to make sure that the three-quarter can of refried black beans I couldn't eat wouldn't go to waste, I walked over to Justin, the Liverpool, England-ite that had been traveling for 4 years and working on a website about how to travel for a long time with no money.
Beans in hand, I asked "Do you wan......" and before I could finished my sentence, he'd grabbed the can and was writing his name on it with the group sharpie while holding the refrigerator door open.

Where Are We Today?

Two or three times a week, I get 'Your Daily Spanish Word' in my inbox.  Yesterday my word was avergonzado.  It means 'ashamed' and reminded of how ashamed I am at feeling sorry for myself after my recent little knee surgery.  Even though it's just for a week, having to 'lay low' (which mostly means 'don't ride your bike') is driving me crazy.  You'd think with all this extra time I could be doing things that I never have time for when I don't have to lay low but I can't because I'm fixated on what I can't do instead of what I can.  It's not like I ride my bike all day, it's more like an hour or two, but the thing is, it makes everything else I do during the day so much better.  Sort of like butter.  You know how fresh sweet corn or warm homemade bread is pretty good all by itself?  OK, now add a little butter.

More About The Knee.
During pre-op, half way into the description of needle insertions and injections into the lumbar area, I interrupted my spinal anesthesiologist with an 'I trust you' which he immediately correctly interpreted as 'shut up' and left it at "you won't be able to feel anything below the waist."  I would have to say that was an understatement.  In the recovery room out of the corner of my eye I could see a nurse holding something in the air above her head.  When I focused I saw it was my leg.  

This is what they took out of my knee (the white thing that looks like popcorn, not the nickel)  It's blurry, sorry.

Real Estate For Sale.

I'd always wanted a purple door.  (Plainfield, Massachusetts)

Stairs and wall by Vince, a self-taught stone mason.

3 years is a long time to have a house on the market but 6 months ago we had 2 houses on the market so it could be worse.  Every winter we take the house in Massachusetts off the market and close it up because we don't want a potential buyer seeing all that unmanaged snow then every spring we spend a week opening it back up.  We've been doing it so long now that we just do it without even thinking that the reason we do it is to sell it.  I think subconsciously I don't want to sell it because it's my favorite place to sleep (and shower and ride) making the week we spend there every spring more like a luxury vacation than the drudgery it should feel like.  In a way I hate the thought of selling the house and cutting our last tie to western Mass after twenty-five years of a really good life.

Can you see why this would be my favorite place to sleep?

Washington State May Seem Like A Long Way To Go To Get Away From Deer Flies.
Neither of us play an instrument so when I saw Vin carrying our guitars out to the trailer I knew we weren't taking just the bare necessities and it was going to be a while before we left.
By 7:30 (that's 7:30 pm) we were packed and ready to hit the road.  We made it to Rutland, Vermont, Vin figured about 105 miles.*  The first thing I did when we got to the motel was lock the key in the room. The sign on the motel office door said 'We're Closed. In case of emergency dial 123' but since I was locked out of the room I had nothing to dial 123 on so I found a room with the lights on and knocked.  The door opened momentarily blinding me with a thick gray wall of cigarette smoke.  The guy holding the growling pit bull didn't take his eyes off the TV and the guy at the door just looked waiting for me to speak.  He dialed 123 for me.  I saw his lips move into the receiver but all I could hear was the TV.  30 seconds later the manager was cheerfully opening our door.

The Room.
Across from 'Simply Meat' and between the 'Joy of Nails' and 'Adam and Eve Hair Design', sat our $44 room.  It smelled sort of funny at first but I got used to it.  When I sat on the side of the bed my feet were in the bathroom so I didn't have to touch the carpet with my bare feet and without much effort I could almost reach the decal on the shower door that promised  a Thermasol In-room Steam®' that wasn't really there.

So.  We've started our road trip.  It's good except that we have to have the AC on high continuously for Max even though I'm freezing all the time.


*at that rate it will take us about a month to get to Washington.

Meet Our Movie

Brian (lead male) is bringing his new girlfriend Kathy to meet his family for Christmas dinner in rural Minnesota. Brian's family (age range from 5 to 75) expects him to bring the old familiar girlfriend they love and consider part of the family. When Brian enters with someone new, they don't know how to react. The story resolves when Kathy saves the life of one of the Uncles in a quirky, comedic scene and is welcomed into the family.

Loosely based on a true story, "You're Not Cindy" is an autobiographical comedy/drama of a Christmas when my college boyfriend surprised his family with me and I received a used, non-working clock radio in a shoe box as an impromptu gift from his confused parents weakly faking that they had expected me.

Without boring you with specifics, certain things need to be done before our movie hit the big screen.
1. Write a screenplay.
2. Find professional actors that would act for free
3. Find a location that looked like a Minnesota farmhouse, seated 16 for a Christmas dinner, wouldn't mind 35 strangers making themselves at home and was easily accessible for actors and crew from Canada and the US.*
4. Prepare a couple turkey dinners for 16 including pickled herring and several Jellos with Cool-whip.
5. Choose and wrap Christmas gifts for a big bunch of people in February.
6. Find and inspect hotel rooms for cast and crew.
7. Coordinate catering.
8. Find Christmas outfits for everyone.
9. Find a dog the day before the shoot since that is when we found out that our Canadian dog didn't have a rabies shot.
yada yada yada
Real movies have a lot of other people do this stuff but as usual it was just the two of us.

A series of lucky coincidences led us to the Lovitt Restaurant in Colville, Washington with an exterior that looked exactly like a Minnesota farmhouse if you didn't really know what a Minnesota farmhouse looked like. The Lovitt Restaurant, as you might guess by the name IS a restaurant, so inside it looked like a restaurant which would be fine if we had written a screenplay about a family that was having dinner at a restaurant but they weren't....they we at Aunt Marge and Uncle Joe's farmhouse for Christmas. Spokane cousins, that I only talk to when I need something (mostly kidding), earned a healthy spot in our credits with a collection of Christmas decorations that sang, snowed, kicked, swiveled and blinked. Then, between local secondhand, rent-to-own and furniture stores we managed to find a couch, loveseat and comfy recliner around town. Coffee and end tables, refrigerator, stove, a couple afghans and a TV that we could have on in the background throughout the day (is anyone else familiar with this family gathering phenomenon?)

Stuff I'd never really thought about...
If you want to shoot 'actor A' close-up from the front saying her lines and then 'actor B's' face reacting to 'actor A' when she's talking...it's at least two different set ups/takes....lights, mics, camera...everything. Then if you want to get a shot of 'actor C' overhearing and reacting to 'actor A and B', it's also and other set up/take. And, if actors A, B and C don't do their lines and reactions exactly the same every time, the takes can't be edited together smoothly which means that not all takes are good and you have to keep shooting until you get something good. You get the idea. When i realized that all of the gifts in a gift opening scene have to be wrapped up over and over exactly the same for each take, it was too late to make reservations for Costa Rica and spend the winter on the beach. A dinner table scene is similar. Let's use jello as an example. It gets passed around. Everyone takes some and puts it on their plates. Cut. Now let shoot it the other side. Easy for you to say. Now we need another untouched jello and clean plates.
And this is why we ran out of time.

Film Festival.
The venue (OK...so it was the school cafeteria) was sold out (if you can consider a free event 'sold-out') for our world premier. The standing room only crowd of movie buffs and surprised students looking for dinner, enjoyed the evening of 9 student films and 50 cent cookies that cost me 75.*
The audience laughed everywhere they were supposed to and then some. We held a question and answer session after the films and someone asked if our Christmas dinner scene was a real family dinner and if everyone knew each other. I guess that could be interpreted as a compliment? The event was followed by a party at our Nelson house until 2:30 and included international guests from as far away as Metaline Falls, Washington.


*For the event I bought some sweet breads and then went back and picked out 10 cookies at the Kootenay Coop Bakery.
"Would you like two more cookies?" the cashier asked.
"No thanks, I'm good", I responded.
"OK. That's 7-50".
I handed her a crisp purple 10 dollar bill.
"Thank you. If you would have gotten 2 more it would have been a dozen for 4-75." she said handing me my change.

If you think this post has a lot going on...you should have been at the Lovitt during the shoot.

The first photo is of the Lovitt before we did our magic.

Where Is The Camera? (part 1)

The buzz was "Pizza and Nelson Brewing Company organic beer in cans at Kathy and Vince's Wednesday night". The whole class came. A film-maker party. Like Hollywood. At 1 am we said good-bye to everyone except Rob who never left. Whether the full house was because it was OUR party or because we had free pizza and beer...I'll never know.

The public screening is Friday. Paul, Clay and Rob did the posters. I don't feel all that represented by our poster with the naked woman (covered in lycra only after protest) draped in film, toting a camera made to look like a machine-gun and announcing the event with a heavy metal/horror film font, but what the heck.

Figuring it would be easy to hang a few posters around town on the way home from school, I grabbed a handful. Not easy. Everywhere a poster could be hung, a poster was already hung....all current. While standing in front of a coffeehouse bulletin board a foot thick, I was approached by a musician who told me the best thing to do was to come back at 1:30 am...that way I could take some of the posters down from the night before and hang mine....a suggestion I chose to ignore.

The last time I mentioned the film we were preparing to shoot the car scene.

Take 1.
We were about to be the first car scene shot in Ione, Washington. The car was secured on the flat bed which was about to be pulled by Leon, the fella that put in our septic system, and his huge diesel truck. Vin wore a harness that was secured to the bed of the truck so well that if he would have fallen off he would have been dragged for miles. The tripod and camera weren't going anywhere. Our actors had driven down from Canada. ACTION. Ever notice how much a huge diesel engine vibrates at 20 miles an hour??? You'd notice if you were trying to film two people having a conversation in the car it was pulling while standing on it's flatbed. Well. That didn't work. We did, however, manage to get the boom shots and luckily Vince forgot he'd ever mentioned the shots from the airplane.

Take 2.
One week later.
Vince built a camera platform. Called a 'hostess tray' in the industry, it mounts to either side of the car and shoots through the window. If you want to spend 1500 dollars you can buy one or if you're Vince, you can build one out of scraps for about 20. The actors were mic'd. Everyone had a walkie talkie so we're synced for 'ACTION'. I hung holiday-looking garlands throughout the town so the audience would know it's Christmas even though it wasn't and even though the garlands didn't show up in any of the shots. Vin mounted an inverter to the car engine so we could run lights (held by huge suction cups suctioned to the hood) off of the car battery. Joel, our lead male, drove and did his lines as if there were no bright lights shining in his face and he could see just fine. Cut. Good take.

Where Is The Camera? (part 2)

Are you tired of camera scene pictures yet?

House.
Life is so much easier with a place to hang our coats when we walk in. I think I mentioned that we needed a coat rack, that Max, Vince and I headed down the railroad tracks to find some spikes and that Max didn't find any but Vince and I came back with 17 between the two of us. Today at Ryan's machine shop, Vin sand-blasted and shortened the spikes at a 10 degree angle while Ryan welded them to the metal plate he'd just cut and drilled. My job was to hold off the guy with the broken cultivator emergency for 15 minutes until they were done.

With the front door open, the house is 966 square feet plus 58 acres.

Exciting News.
Energy Star credits for the washer/dryer and the refrigerator just showed up on our electric bill.

Live and Learn

No one told me that one of the most important steps in shooting documentary was transcribing. Or if someone did, it was when I wasn't listening. It may not sound like a big deal to you but I have to listen to and write down EVERY word with the time...to the nearest one-hundreth of a second...that it was spoken I have about 5 hours of shooting for my 5 minute documentary and my fingers look the times of a garden cultivator. Ironically, accidently forgetting to turn the sound on during a one hour shooting session was a disaster that ended up making my day.

I never paid much attention to Skype until our cell phone bill finally found us up here in Nelson. We knew it wasn't going to be pretty but were still surprised to see that the last two months were 690 dollars. Our favorite call was the 24 dollar casual chat the Vin and I had to each other from one classroom to another (in the same building). Who knew? (don't you hate that saying?)

Canada.
Benjamin Moore paint chip colors are in French. Rainforest dew is vert stuart. Pale avocado is avocat pale.
Yesterday it was pretty cold....1 degree in the Peace.
Remember I told you about the Cocoa-nut lounge? We showed up to another standing-room-only crowd...this time on a Tuesday....groovin' to an electric guitar artist yelling a combination of opera and rock.

Wednesday was classmate Alan's birthday. He turned 25 so the whole class (except Naomi who's only 17 and has a grandmother my age) went out to a karaoke bar where Vin and I belted out 'I've got you Babe' to a crowd that didn't know that Cher had ever been married.

House.
We've had electricity, plumbing and 4-6" (R30-R45) of high density closed cell foam insulation for ages but since they didn't lend themselves to compelling photography or storytelling I've had a hard time working them into my news.

The insulation people? Perfect.
The electric people? Perfect. Two brothers dba Brother's Electric. One of the brothers, Darin, went to college somewhere in Ohio because it had the strongest Ninja 'team' in the country.
The plumber? Apologized after hollering F*** You and hanging up on Vin because he asked when the boiler was going to be installed.

Max loves hiking on larch needles, a silent, western version of New England's fall leaves.

The Beam Team again

Movies.
Just finished writing a 1000 word Feminist interpretation of 'Silence Of The Lambs' and the part I enjoyed most about the process was emailing it off, finished, to the professor. For the most part I enjoy movies as entertainment and not for the layers of supposed hidden meanings that I can never find.

Yesterday we watched Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) and I'm proud to say that thanks to finally a movie with dialogue I stayed awake through MOST of it. Ian the professor said it was 'quite possibly the greatest movie ever made' which made me think that I definately missed something during the screening even though I stayed awake.
Please note that I've easily stayed wide awake for American Graffiti half dozen times.

I just finished shooting another film. it is a pretend interview of myself with my new pretend cookbook of recipe's using food that has gone bad. (not leftovers ....gone bad) I think it's really funny but it's too long. It ended up being 9 minutes and it was supposed to be 2. Just like the old days, was up until 5 am one morning working on it and it was actually good to have a reason to have to be up until then.

I was thinking that If I was making a movie that had the Vince character (see the dirty Vince photo to the left) in it I'd want Juaquin Phoenix to play him. Juaquin is retired (I can't believe I know that) but I doubt if it would've ever happened anyway only because Vince would never want anyone else playing him.

House.
Two cords of firewood (which won't be maple or cherry or ash)* are showing up tomorrow so I wanted to show you our deck before it got covered up. Vin and Brett built the deck (which included mixing the concrete for the piers and looked like a lot of work to me). Then Joe, one of my favorite friends (FF) of almost 30 years cut down one of our trees (like the ponytail, Joe cut it for FREE....maybe it has something to do with cutting) and we put it on the deck to look like it was propping up one of the corners of the roof. The deck is a rectangle and if you looked at it from an airplane it would look like you had this big rectangle and slid it under the house at an angle. It's pretty dramatic as far a decks go. I THINK I like it but then again maybe that angle-drama has something to do with the headaches I've been having lately.

* I think I'm a firewood snob.

Grades.
Some mid-term test grades are in.
Screen-writing____A-
Editing_____A
Cinematography........ Trick questions. I'm not counting it.

Nelson.
Cocoa-nut Lounge. Funky, late night coffeehouse open until midnight 6 nights a week. That gem of a discovery gets us closer to our perfect-place checklist. Our maiden visit (a Sunday night) had us joining a standing-room-only crowd to listen to local poetry that I didn't realize was poetry until the third reader stepped off the rug that functioned as a stage. I'm at an even lower level with poetry than I am with movies.

The Beam Team again (again) interesting if you like beams and decks

More decks and beams and summer.