Technicolor pachyderms are really too much for me.

November 23, 2003

I went over to my Dad’s house this weekend to help him with his computer that’s been causing him trouble for weeks and weeks now, and I think we finally got the problem to a point where we can’t go any further with the hardware he has. Time to replace the RAM. Good thing that he has a lifetime warranty on that RAM so he doesn’t have to spend any more money aside from shipping. That means we’ve gone through four different motherboards working on that computer to no avail when the problem might have been the RAM all along. I got on of the cast-off boards luckily for me, but now there are still two other identical boards that are probably perfect. One will likely be earmarked for a machine that’s been in the works for awhile for my sister, as for the other one…well, if it goes in the attic it’ll get obsolete before someone can use it. Guess I’ll have to wait and see. I know that *I* don’t really have any use for it. Maybe my Dad can build ANOTHER machine for himself. Not likely.

I went out on Saturday night and caught a showing of the movie Whale Rider at the Laurelhurst Theater. Not nearly as nice as the Baghdad Theater, but like a few others in Portland they allow you take your pizza and beer into the theater. They’re also showing the French film La Femme Nikita there at least for a limited run, so that might be worth going back for. That, quite obviously, is the film that spawned the television show that I love so much. The American remake Point of No Return with Bridget Fonda wasn’t quite as good, because I just couldn’t accept Gabriel Byrne’s badass character being named “Bob”. Too weird for me. But back to the subject at hand, Whale Rider was fantastic. I saw a trailer for it a couple of months ago and it piqued my interest, but the only person I know who wanted to see it, my Mom, had already gone. It took place in New Zealand and followed the story of a girl in a modern Maori village and her coming-to-terms with her “destiny”, if you will. Very well-made, exceptional music, and beautiful imagery. The pizza in the theater wasn’t all that great, but at least they had a good selection of beer on tap. Personally, I prefer Baghdad Ale from one of the McMenamins theaters, but hey, that’s just me.

I think when I reach the point of thinking that even locally bottled beer such as Widmer and Bridgeport are too “commercial” for me because I can find them in most places around here, I’ve been drinking too much from the tap. I did try a new beer on Saturday: Rogue Yellow Snow Ale from the Rogue River Brewing Company. Funny name, good beer.

My friend Meagan who was in my class at Beloit has a cousin who lives here in Portland, and she set up an opportunity to send my resume to him to pass along to the people in his firm. He works for Wagger Edstrom, which apparently is a PR firm with offices around the world. I don’t know a whole lot about what they do aside from being a PR firm, but I sent a copy of my resume to her cousin and now I’m waiting for him to call me. It’s not a “blind” wait like with the other job I’ve been waiting to hear back from since he said he wanted to talk to me before he passed my resume on, but I expected to hear from him sometime this weekend. He did say he was busy, but that’s OK. Short week coming up anyhow, so it’s not like I/we could get a whole lot accomplished. It’s nice to have someone on the inside, however. I hope that same goes for the OMSI job, that having a friend in relatively high places can help me stand out among the other applicants. The old expression is “it’s not what you know but WHO you know”, however, I’m fiding that it’s not always the case, and employers will still hire someone with the impossible qualifications they’re looking for rather than eager young college graduates.

This afternoon as I was sitting around my Dad’s house and he was channel surfing trying to find something good on TV, he came across Dumbo on the Disney Channel. Dumbo one of the rare movies I can honestly say I’ve seen more than many other films, probably more than 20 times. However, most of those times were when I was a youngster–maybe four or five at the oldest–and it was one of if not the very first movies that was purchased for our new Betamax VCR. Too bad the copy we bought at Video Circle was VHS and I had to watch it across the street until we got it straightened out, but even long after Beta had gone the way of the dinosaurs, I still had the Beta VCR in my room with a few movies, Dumbo included, and thus it’s always been one of my more cherished childhood films. I don’t know what it was about that movie, but I watched it over and over again when I was really little, and I don’t think I’ve seen it in somewhere between ten and fifteen years. Long enough that I couldn’t remember exactly what came next but that every piece of dialogue was familiar. It was VERY strange to look at it with a different sets of eyes, though. My Dad and I sat there chuckling over some of the things we were seeing (we switched it on right at the beginning of the “Pink Elephants” musical number that confused me as a child and frightens me as an adult, hence the quote from the song as the title for this entry), and when the crows made their entrance, my Dad questioned whether a movie like that could ever get made now. I obviously hadn’t realized it then, and even now it took me a second to realize that the crows were all black, and they acted and dressed stereotypically “black”, at least from the perspective of 1941 Disney animators. Wow. Didn’t see that as a kid. The mouse with a Brooklyn accent was an interesting touch, too. Kind of an odd movie, now that I think about it.

Thanksgiving this week should be an interesting event. As you may recall from last year, my Thanksgiving plan of having a nice dinner for myself and my friends who weren’t going anywhere began dissolving as my friends made plans of their own, and even when I extended the invitation to anyone on my floor who was staying without plans, I still flew solo. My Dad bought me a very nice carving knife and carving board in preparation of my turkey dinner among friends, but instead I ended up alone and made rock cornish game hen for myself. Well I still have the equipment he bought for me, unopened and in its original wrappings (er…which I guess is just plastic), and I’m determined to make Thanksgiving dinner this year. The core of it at least. My entire immediate family (consisting of myself, my sister, my mother, and my father and stepmother) are going to get together and have Thanksgiving dinner at my Dad’s this year. First Thanksgiving get-together with family in at least four years, but I don’t remember us doing it all together before I left for college, either. I guess I’d have to go back and check my old emails, which I can’t do on this computer. But thankfully, I’ve been put in charge of the turkey and stuffing, and so I’m going to give the recipes that I was planning on using last year a shot. Obviously I’ll have a support network of the more experienced turkey-meisters around me, but I want to accomplish my goals from last year. I’ve made a lot of food at once in the past, but never something so big. It’ll be an interesting experiment, at the very least.

And aside from that, my week’s wide open. I have some computer work that I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time, so I might make use of this holiday week to do that. Not like I needed a holiday to do so, but hey, I can at least pretend I’m part of the rest of the world. Can’t I? I think I can.

Yay! I’m going to get to do something I meant to do last year!

Posted in Beer, Beloit, Geekery, General