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A record 10 'Avatar' enthusiasts* and lasagna lovers watched 'Blue Crush' last night at our weekly dinner and a movie night and pretty much maxed out our theater (living room).  Even our overflow area (hallway) was full but thanks to Kim who always brings her own chair and the new 150 pound tree stump-end table, everyone had a place to sit


If our house was a meal we would be about half way through dessert. 
1. The main level concrete floor has 2 coats of clear finish on it and is a masterpiece that no one in the lasagna group noticed so maybe is doesn't look as incredible as I think it does.
2. Vin hung chains from the gutters.  His intent was to divert rainwater while looking chic (we saw it in a magazine).  So far they only work part of the time which is when it is not raining and they are just looking chic.

3. I love our sliding barn door-y bathroom door mounted on inline skate bearings and am hoping that someday I won't even hear Vince mumbling that he'd rather have an in-swing door every time he slides it shut.  The bedroom doors are in-swing and chic because of the strip magnet (like a shower door) that sucks and holds them shut.   The closet doors are still pretend.

My Kitchen.
9 feet 2 inches is a perfect sized kitchen for someone who doesn't want a microwave or coffee maker.

Visitors:
Tim (of MikWright fame) and Boyd (of having a 40th birthday party that lasted a whole week fame) showed up one day after school.  Flying first class from Charlotte, they found martinis and acupuncture in Nelson.  Hiking trails and Gilbert Grape in Metaline Falls. 

Our friend Eric came to visit. He's in the truck...the one with the cap.  We started following each other in Massachusetts.  Now he's in Bozeman, except for last week when he was in Metaline Falls.


* at the last minute we decided  that Avatar was too long.

Just A Quick Pop In

Almost everyday I promise myself that I'm going to post and entry in my blog so you can see that I'm not very good at keeping promises when they're to myself.

School and Canada.
Six hours of "After Effects" (a complicated (for me) software program) yesterday and now when I make a movie where I'll need to have a car fly through a glass window on the 50th floor of a skyscraper, I'll know how to do it. It's the very same class in which I created a skeleton that danced the Macarena.

I got an 'A!' on my last editing test. You may think I'm punctuating the 'A' in order to emphasize it but I'm not. This is not an 'A' or an 'A-' but an A exclamation point. Just another cute little Canadian quirk.

Every week I look forward to going up to Nelson and look just as forward to coming back down to Metaline Falls. All year Vin and I been whispering in the car while sitting in the customs queue without even realizing it. I guess we both felt like somehow the customs people could hear us in the car if we spoke at a normal volume. Going through customs I'm always a teeny bit nervous. I'm sure I look guilty. I know I always feel guilty.

One easy swipe of my BC Health card and the receptionist sat looking at all of my Canadian medical records. Then, when no one was checking in, she swept the floor until an examination room was free and she could set it up for me. As students we get BC Health for about 100 dollars a month. I wish I was sick so I could use it. Thursday I had a physical. I was 3 minutes late. Two minutes later, the doctor came out to get me and apologized for making me wait.

House and home.
Interior doors. We decided on what we wanted so the hard part is done. You'll think it's weird, but we had some sheets of corrugated metal left from the siding that we're going to transform into doors. How will that look? Beats me but I'll know in about a week.

We now have a cute little Asko washer and dryer, showers, bookcases, dining chairs and wooden steps. The washer and dryer are energy star, the bookshelves and steps are local wood from Steve Kiss..neighbor, logger and talent from Vin's first film. The chairs are from Sundance Catalog (sorry).

Our Saturday movie night ('Benny and Joon'...filmed in Spokane in 1993) had a record 7 movie loving lasagna eaters in attendance. Both the lasagna and the movie were delicious. Must sees: 'Benny and Joon', 'Bart Got A Room' and 'Gilbert Grape', my recent new favorites.

The elk are back. Back from where? They didn't fly south because I know I would have noticed since they travel in groups of 15 to 50. Guess it's their little secret and I'd know if they wanted me to know.

Notice, in the last photo, how the wood from the outside looks like it continues to the inside (where we need some coat hooks*). Very Chic.

Warning. If you think that after 25 years of sleeping in a king sized bed, you can go back to a queen...you'd be wrong.

*Max, Vin and I found 17 railroad spikes, soon to be coat hooks, on a walk from our house yesterday.

Is Plaster Faster?

I should be working on my movie treatment (sounds like a joke doesn't it??) but instead I feel like writing about today....a day in our simple retired life. We're in Metaline Falls. The morning was mostly clean up. A normal retired thing to do. Then, we picked up color boards from the plaster guy***. We met him half way, an hour drive and close by western standards as they say. Gary, the closest (only) plaster guy we could find, showed up with his little dog wearing a football jersey that said QUARTER BARK (the dog, not Gary) with a #! between the QUARTER and the BARK. We could tell that Max was jealous of Quarter Bark #1 because he could be carried around. We treated Max to a walk on the way home at some waterfall...he wasn't impressed...in-fact he vomited.

Back home, 31 degrees and feeling like it was about time for something semi-epic, we convinced ourselves there was enough daylight to ride up Hall Mountain (elev. 6400') We rode to the trailhead and hiked to the treeless peak through meadows with clumps of softwoods and rock outcroppings to a 360 degree view of Washington, Canada and Idaho. The late afternoon angle of the sun tinted everything a rich gold. So far so good albeit a little colder on the way down than the way up. Normally I would have looked forward to the all downhill bike ride but as I suspected my summer weight Yoko gloves weren't even close to warm enough. (UNDERSTATEMENT!) Four hours and a movie later, I can type and feed myself again but that's about as interesting as I can make frozen fingers.

Metaline Falls.
Movie. "Nine". It was neither about an aging Bo Derek nor a musical with Penelope Cruz (not sure where I got that idea) but it was animated...and pretty good. I'm glad we went because then there were six of us in the theater.

House. The tent came down and we moved into a corner of the master bedroom this weekend. The photos make us look cold and uncomfortable but our word for cold and uncomfortable is 'cozy'. Will waking up with a coating of sheet-rock dust in my mouth cause any long term damage?

Back to the movie treatment. I've been struggling with ways to decrease my school work-load and finally got up the nerve to request an audit for Film Studies. I picked up the hot pink 'switch to audit' form at the office one day when there was actually someone in there and filled it out. I started to hand the hot pink sheet to Ian, the professor. "Did you enjoy the assignment?" he asked, all excited. I ended up using the back of the audit form for notes on Nanook of the North.

***plaster.
Plaster is good.
1. We don't have to paint because the plaster is tinted with our colors
2. We don't have to tile because the shower will be waterproof plaster
3. We don't have to trim the windows because our window perimeters will be plaster

Plaster is bad.
1. We have to pick the colors we'll have FOREVER, NOW. Would that make you nervous? It makes me nervous.