Not a hell of a lot going on ’round these parts. Was a mostly rainy, quiet weekend, with the wife and one third of the kids out of town. I spent a good portion of the last 72 hours hauling the other two-thirds to various activities, usually involving their proper education in the arts. This also involved lots of last-minute tracking down of stuff that they probably should have known exactly where it was. That was fun.

In there, I found the time to watch a couple of movies. While the oldest was away at her dance/voice lessons, I took the youngest out to see Chimpanzee, which was beautifully shot, and quite a nice nature film, though I could have done without the Tim Allan narration (as could this reviewer), which didn’t add anything except for cheap jokes to entertain the rubes in our particular screening (this audience, during previews, were completely indifferent to the amazing-looking Pixar film Brave, but cheered and whooped for the trailer for Madagascar 3. I consider this evidence that our society is one in decline.). This sort of gorgeous and groundbreaking imagery deserves better than Tool Time grunts.

Otherwise, we hung around the house, did laundry, and watched a few DVDs. Some may find it noteworthy that I introduced the eldest to Top Gun, which happened to come up in the Netflix queue (added months ago when I was reminded she’d never seen it when she didn’t get a random “Danger Zone” reference). I hadn’t seen it in years, and kind of enjoyed it in a cheesey, nostalgic way. My kid, who knows Tom Cruise almost exclusively as the subject of a Jonathan Coulton song, mostly rolled her eyes at it – all the “iconic” lines seem trite when you’ve grown up seeing them jokingly referenced in other media. Mostly, though, she got angry at the fate of Goose.

When the others returned on Sunday afternoon, after getting damp on a camping trip, things didn’t change all that much beyond group dynamics. It remained a lazy Sunday, with occasional forays into picking ticks off of people, sometimes from rather uncomfortable, intimate places.

To take the taste of that last image out of our minds, there was also a trip to a local FroYo place, and a viewing of the latest episode of Tabletop, featuring one of our family’s favorite go-to board games, Settlers of Catan, which, if you like fun, you should go out and buy (although if you like fun, you probably already have it.).