a houseguest!

Today i am picking up my best friend from the airport!* She'll be staying a week, and we have a couple of super-exciting things planned (Cirque du Soleil, a visit to the Flower Fields), as well as some less-exciting things (heading up to see the seals, drinking way too many cups of coffee, riding bikes all over the place). Hopefully showing her around town will remind me of how sometimes i can actually like it here. Plus, now my house is stocked with exotic breakfast cereals and stuff like orange juice and frozen pizza– livin' the life luxurious, we are! Not to mention i finally had an excuse to dust the bookshelves and clean out the toaster oven. Crikey, that was a fright. And on the flip side, i am filled with remorse at my lack of awesome linens (unraveling bath towels, anyone?) or even a damned teakettle. But who doesn't love to boil water in a pot and eat from chipped ceramic bowls? No one, that's who.
*Note: by 'picking up' i mean taking the bus to, and subsequently from, the airport. Aren't you glad you're not my friend?

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In other news, we saw the new Alice in Wonderland last night. It reaffirmed my distaste for 3D movies (or at least, the new ones, with the huge polarized lenses as props), but it was also the first Tim Burton movie since Edward Scissorhands that i actually and truly enjoyed. It's just such a magnificently trippy story (although the plot here differed a bit from the books and/or the original animated version), and the computer graphics weren't overdone, which was refreshing. The girl playing Alice looked like a cross between Claire Danes and Sara Gilbert, Helena Bonham Carter was basically perfect as the Red Queen, Anne Hathaway still looks like an alien and can't act that well (sorry, but it's true), and Johnny Depp looked great but his performance was a bit all over the place. Someone in our group noticed that his accent kept changing, and his portrayal of the Mad Hatter was almost too... sensible.

At the risk of spoiling anything (don't think i will?), it also seemed like certain opportunities were missed in the story-telling: free will, morality, and personal identity definitely could have been explored a bit more. All of that aside, Tweedledee and Tweedledum were cute as buttons, and the Cheshire Cat may have been my favorite character. From the commercials i was convinced he'd be loathsome. Not so, thanks to Stephen Fry's voice and some amazingly ethereal animation. Hooray! Now, to see it once more, sans 3D.

A small gripe: where were my mome raths? Darling little things.