We're attempting to take a few days off,
which means I'm not going to leap out of bed to pour Elphine's wretched cat a saucer of milk. She, Frances, can just sit there and stare bullets at me. Both cats are looking at me as if they'd like to maul me to death. I do, generally, like cats, but Frances doesn't like me, and the other one is too needy this morning for me to be really fond of him. Thank heaven I'm not God because every person asking for something would have been smitten by now.
So yesterday I watched Cheaper by the Dozen with Elphine and Gladys (who promptly fell asleep). I must have read this at some point but I don't remember it at all. I was a little unimpressed with the simpering of the two oldest girls in the first scene (Elphine loves to tilt her head, put her hands under her chin and talk in a sickly fake and disgusting English Accent--DRIVES me crazy and I don't want to do a single thing to encourage it) but the plot moved along and there wasn't over much of that. Anyway, deeply enjoyed the slam against Planned Parenthood and the father going along to the school dance. But then, !!!!! there needs to be some kind of death warning on the label. Or I guess I could have just known better. But the father dying in the last three minutes of the film! Honestly. Elphine started out the day with a long speech about how she couldn't watch anything sad because we'd made her watch 1. the White Lion (full of death) and 2. Desperaux (full of suspense) and 3. half of Iron Man before she burst into tears. She kept saying she just "needed a break".
So much for "family" movie nights. I dislike watching movies anyway. Scanning endlessly the ever decreasing live stream options on Netflix, I increasingly feel a vague sense of despair, like we're all wasting our lives and we should be doing something more interesting. This "fun", "special", "family" activity is a real pain. Thankfully, we don't do it very often.
And now I am going to get up and throw something at Frances because she just hit the other cat for no reason. Its the circle of life, here on our week off. Life and death all circling together. (That's a reference to Lion King for those of you who missed it--another move I really hate.)
Have a lovely Thursday!
1 comment:
Poor Elphine! Ordinarily, I'd be right with her on her movie tastes (still ;) ) but I must have been about her age the first time I saw Cheaper By the Dozen, and it never made me react like that. But then, I was probably younger when I read Little Women, and that's probably the ultimate in sad books they hand to children to read. (Okay, Bridge to Terabithia too, but it was still a young book when I was the age to have it foisted on me, and never made it to any of my reading lists, and I never found it in the library until I was in college.) I read Anne of Green Gables at about that age, too. Be glad the book and movie left out the real part where the 3rd daughter died of Typhoid, IIRC, when she was still a child. The children who wrote the books (Ernestine and Frank Jr) left it out, because their father never could mention it when he was alive. Can you stream the sequel, Bells on Their Toes? It continues the story, and is all about everyone carrying on after the death, and the mother trying to get the Engineering world that they created to take her seriously and allow her to take Frank's place. No one dies, and they all live Happily Ever After. It might make her feel better to know the rest of the story.
I thought I might be the only person on the planet who hates The Lion King. :D
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