Hmm

I'm getting really bad at blogging regularly. Bad Lindsey. I really have to work on that. I guess I just don't have much to blog about lately.

Here are the highlights of my past week.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II

Yes, I'm a big Harry Potter fan. I loved the books and the movies, and I finally saw the last movie with a friend Friday night. I loved the movie! I saw it in 3D (my first 3D movie!), and it was fantastic. Made me want to read the books all over again.

Catching Fire

Alright, you've probably figured out by now that I'm a fan of young adult fic, but sometimes a girl just needs something a little lighter to read and a bit of an escape. Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games series is definitely an escape from reality (if not quite light reading). I started the second book in the series, Catching Fire, today, and I can hardly put it down. I went ahead and ordered the third and final book, Mockingjay, this morning so I can read that too. If you're looking for an excellent series to read, I highly recommend picking this one up.

And that's about it. There was work, work, and more work. Hopefully this upcoming week goes a little more smoothly, but for now, I'm going back to reading and vegging on the couch.

Better

Friday was the first day at work that I felt in control of things and like I actually knew what I was doing. Yay! I know not every day will be like that and that I just have to give this transition time, but I finally feel like I'm moving in the right direction. I know there will be frustrating moments/events/people, but that's life, right?

This weekend I watched the movie Convicted starring Connie Nielsen, Aidan Quinn, Kelly Preston, and Tim Daly.

The movie is about Charlotte Cory (Nielsen), a convicted murderer/kidnapper on death row in Oklahoma. Frank (Quinn) is a disbarred, criminal defense attorney who has taken the habit of writing various death row inmates, befriending them, and selling their letters to newspapers upon their deaths. Frank and Charlotte have been writing one another (Frank posing as an old friend of her father's and not telling her the real reason behind his writing), and Frank ends up going to Oklahoma to visit Charlotte the week of her execution. While there, Frank (along with her defense attorney played by Preston) realizes things are not as they seem, and an innocent woman might have been convicted.

The movie is fantastic. It's not one of those death row-political agenda movies. It's just a simple 'did she or didn't she' kind of movie. The twists are extremely interesting and numerous, and the movie's never dull. I give it 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

I also finished reading Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton this weekend. I'd heard of the book but didn't know much about it (okay - I didn't know anything about it) when I picked up on a whim at the library last week.

This is one book I would LOVE to see made into a movie. The characters and storylines are just that good. The book is about a young woman (Willie) searching for herself in her hometown after a disastrous affair with her college professor. Willie arrives home at the same time that a 'monster' is found dead in the town's lake. While the scientific community tries to sort out what the 'monster' is, Willie searches through her own family's past to discover who her biological father is after her mother reveals that her real father is a current resident of the town. The book goes back and forth between the current day with Willie and chapters told from the perspective of Willie's ancestors, giving us insight into what research Willie actually finds. It's a very original book full of scandal and endearing characters. I suggest you pick it up for a weekend read.

My Not So Great Choices

Apparently this is my weekend for confusing things and crappy entertainment choices. Books, movies. Maybe someone was trying to tell me something.

First, I stayed up Friday night and watched Good with Viggo Mortensen. 

Good is about a German literature professor (Viggo) in Nazi Germany. The professor is a "good" man, hence the title of the movie. He writes a novel advocating compassionate euthanasia, and the Nazis use the book as a tool to push their own agenda. The professor gets swept up in the Nazi madness, leading to devastating events. The movie was alright but very confusing. The message the movie was trying to teach, that good people can get caught up in and by bad things, was interesting, but the movie was so abrupt and choppy that it was hard to follow. Unless you're a big Viggo fan, I'd skip this one. 

Second, Saturday I finished reading Brunonia Barry's The Lace Reader. The book started off well enough, but it turned into a confusing, frustrating, dull read that just irritated me and made me wish I hadn't wasted my time. Bad books drive me nuts. I have little enough time to read as it is so I hate wasting my time on crappy reads. This one just had a twist that was unforgivable and enough to turn me away from Barry's other books.

After finishing The Lace Reader, I decided it was time to watch another movie. I'm a sucker for horror movies, even the really bad ones. I decided to watch Dark House from the Fright Fest collection. 

Dark House is about a woman who witnessed the mass murder of foster children in a house as a child herself. The woman returns to the house as a college student to film a horror movie and face her fears as the house is reopened as a new horror attraction, but she's not alone as the ghost of the women who killed the kids also returns. 

And it's just as stupid as you'd expect. So much for my "great" entertainment choices this weekend. Maybe tomorrow I'll do better.

Almost There

Tomorrow's my last day of work! Crazy. I've gone back and forth between feeling sad, excited, nervous, anxious, thrilled, and so many more emotions all week. It's just hard to believe I'm really leaving. I'm really going to miss working there.

 

Monday is my official start date with the court, but I'll be spending Monday-Friday in Austin at a Professional Development conference learning about court administration things. I'm sure I'm going to learn a lot of great things, but I'm really looking forward to staying in a nice hotel all week and being away from a computer for an entire week. I've decided not to take my laptop with me (I'll have my iPhone though) so I'll be a little disconnected from the world. A little disconnection sounds VERY good right now.

 

I finished reading Lauren Weisberger's Last Night at Chateau Marmont and was kind of disappointed. I've always loved her books (The Devil Wears Prada, Everyone Worth Knowing, Chasing Harry Winston), but this one was weak. The main character Brooke was a complete pushover and just when you think she's finally going to do the right thing for herself, she goes right back to being a weak, silly girl. Usually Lauren's characters are refreshing and women you can identify with or want to be friends with but not this main character. All I wanted to do was slap her!

 

Next I'm reading Brunonia Barry's The Lace Reader, a book about a woman who is able to read the future by looking at patterns of lace. So far, so good, and very unique.