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Well, for one thing, most weeknights Nancy is busy with school work, making lesson plans, correcting test and quiz papers, etc., which cuts into the amount of time we get to have together. I usually take a coffee break when she gets home from school, so we get to spend a bit of time together -- and then she usually has get busy with her paperwork and I have to get back to my work. (Okay, now that we are sharing the den for office purposes for both of us, we are in the same room, which is nice, but we are both working.) Then I make dinner and we get to be together while we eat dinner and we usually linger at the the table for a while, but then she heads off to plan more lessons and grade more papers, etc. There isn't enough time to watch a movie (although we usually end up relaxing and reading together for a while at the end of the evening). We used be able to watch an episode of Battlestar Galactica or 24 on a weeknight (less than fifty minutes without commercials) but it's been months since we exhausted the supply of those shows. (We've tried a few others -- such as Lost -- but simply don't find them interesting enough to bother watching.) Weekends are different. There is time to watch an entire movie. And, sometimes, there are plays or concerts or family get-togethers as well. Friday night I fixed an assortment of veggies and dip and Nancy and Jill and I enjoyed eating them and socializing while Jill and I cooked dinner (that is, Jill cooked herself a turkey burger -- she doesn't care for seafood -- while I made a rice pilaf and cooked some flounder fillets with sliced almonds. Jill was also baking four loaves of pumpkin bread. Mmmmm, delicious! After dinner Nancy and I watched A Walk on the Moon -- a 1999 film (that I had never heard of until I came across it scrolling through Netflix) about a housewife who falls for a salesman in the Catskills in the summer of 1969, the summer of the moon landing and of the Woodstock festival). It stars Diane Lane (who had a best actress Oscar nomination for Unfaithful) and Anna Paquin as her 14 year old daughter (Oscar winner for The Piano, plays Rogue in the X-Men movies). The salesman is Viggo Mortensen (Aragon in The Lord of the Rings trilogy). The husband is played by Liev Schreiber -- an actor I didn't know at all (although it turns out I had seen him in Sphere, a mediocre movie based on a mediocre Michael Chrichton novel of the same name) but then yesterday I was listening to the Rhode Island public radio station and they were interviewing Schreiber. They were discussing two movies he is in that will be coming out later this year -- a new X-Men movie where he plays a character called Sabretooth, and Taking Woodstock, a movie (based on a novel) about the Woodstock festival. (By the way, we liked A Walk on the Moon, although it did drag in a few places and, although they did a good job at recreating a Catskill bungalow colony in Montreal, it was quite obvious to me -- having lived there -- that it had not been filmed in Sullivan County, NY. The movie had the feeling of having been adopted from a novel, but as far as I can find, it appears to have been an original screenplay by Pamela Gray.) And we spent most of Saturday doing various chores around the house, trying to reduce some of the chaos and confusion. We set up a pair of bookcases in the living room and I spent a lot of time moving books from the basement to the living room, sorting them, putting books on shelves, taking some back down, bringing others up, moving some books from the office to the living room, moving others from the living room to the office. Nancy tells me that I must have had a good workout, carrying all of those books up and down stairs. Then we rewarded ourselves in the evening. I made pizza and we watched the first two episodes of season four of Battlestar Galactica. (Yes, I know, we should have saved them to watch on weeknights, but we just couldn't resist -- pizza and red wine and Battlestar Galactica.) Now, having lazed away Sunday monring with the Sunday newspaper and then surfed around the Web a bit and having written this, I need to post it and then head off to the supermarket to do some grocery shopping.
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