Where the Wild Things Are

Today my husband and I went to a movie that was derived from a lovable children's book, Where the Wild Things Are. In fact, I grew up with it in my home and my brother even had a cute little Max in his wolf suit that went along with it. Kel and I have been looking forward to seeing this movie since we saw the previews, because it brought back childhood memories and it actually looked kinda cute. Today we got out a little late and barely missed the beginning of the 12:15 show, so we bought tickets for the 2:50 show and hung out up in White Marsh until then. One of our pass-the-time spots was a Barnes and Noble where we picked up the book and reread it for fun. While we were reading, I kind of wondered how they were going to make a full-length movie about a 30-ish word book. I had faith, though. It was in vain.

The movie started out kinda...crappy. The kid who played Max was cute, though. But Max was portrayed not as a young boy who was naughty one day, but a wild child who probably should have been sent to juvi. He trashed his sister's room, stood on the counter, yelled "FEED ME WOMAN!" at his mother, and then bit her. He wasn't sent to his room like in the book. He ran away, had an exhaustingly long sea voyage, and then found the island. There, he found the wild things. One was trashing the others' homes. He was pissed about something that was happening that was never quite clarified in the movie. Once Max arrived on the island, I kind of started thinking, "okay, now what?"

What happened was this: Max lied and told them he was magic and would explode their heads if they tried to eat him. (In the book he does a magic trick of staring into their yellow eyes without blinking then they make him king) the wild things were all terribly depressed, angry, and rude. They made Max their king and then they all whined about crap. Then stupid repetitive things happened like them running around, jumping, throwing dirt clods at each other and sleeping in a pile. They were all really ornery. As Kelly put it: "All it was was repetitive bickering." It wasn't exactly a feel-good cute children's movie. At all.

They build a fort and everyone was mad and monster-Carol loved monster-KW and KW hid Max inside her stomach (GROSS!) and Carol pulled off monster-Douglas' arm, which was then replaced with a stick. It was not funny. I think the movie can be summed up by the comments I heard in the theatre during the movie: "This is the dumbest movie I've ever seen." "Well, that sucked." "I've had enough of this." "What time is it!?" "Is this thing almost over?" (Okay, I said the last one.) A few futile claps came at the end, but I think it was in relief that we survived the movie. They died down fast. Quite frankly, I hope they put those reviews on the advertisements.

So really, it was a bad influence on children (hey kids, act horrible, bite your parents, run away, and lie a lot. In the end, you'll get cake! Seriously, in the end he was eating not only hot supper, but a huge slice of chocolate cake! You're REWARDING the kid for that?!) it was annoying and repetitive and depressing. I don't go to movies to listen to big stupid things whine and crazy-monster children terrorize their families. So if you want to see a movie based on a cute children's book that you love, Where the Wild Things Are is probably not your best option.

Despite the crappy movie, Kelly and I had a great time waiting for the 2:50 show. We went to Barnes and Noble, a place called Game Workshop that we weren't sure what was in there. It ended up being one of those one places that was full of those miniature game pieces (like Dungeons & Dragons-type-games) and people playing it and stuff. It was absolutely full of pasty guys who really need to see the sun. I think I was the only female they'd seen for quite sometime. Then we went to IKEA and got a garlic press! Woohoo!

Weekend Trip to Fredrick, Maryland

Last weekend, I picked Kelly up from work, we stopped by home for our stuff and the store for some Pepsi and we hit the road! We just went about 70 minutes west of Baltimore to Fredrick, MD. We stayed at a Best Western and ate delicious Indian food and just had a fun night walking around Fredrick. It is a cute town! It was nice to get away and not think of students or lesson planning or the vice-principal one single time!

Western Maryland is so pretty!

The next day we headed back to downtown Fredrick and went to a Civil War Medicine museum. (No photography allowed there, so no pictures yet.) Unfortunately, we got there a little too early, so the museum wasn't open yet. We walked up and down the main drag and enjoyed the window displays. Then we went to the museum. It was actually really interesting. I learned a lot, but the coolest thing is this: In history, Civil War doctors are always portrayed as butchers who just hacked off limbs no matter what. Well, there were a lot of amputations going on, but that really was the best thing they could do to save the soldiers' lives because the lead balls that they were shot with would penetrate deep and then smash against the bone, mangling the bone and flattening the minnie ball. Gangrene was almost sure to get you, too, so really, there was no saving the limb. So really, amputating is tough, but it ended up saving a lot of lives. I kind of knew all that stuff before, but I didn't know that amputation was the best thing to do. I just thought it was the quickest and easiest.

After the museum we went to Antietam. It was pretty cool. I'm not very good at my Civil War history, so I don't know much about it other than it was the bloodiest battle in the Civil War, so I didn't get much from all the signs saying this is where such-and-such happened. But we checked out all the memorials and read all the signs and I kind of liked just looking out on the hills and trying to imagine all those soldiers fighting and dying there. It was hard to imagine such a bloody thing happening at such a beautiful place.

(Random-Cool fact #1: I wear my hair curly now pretty much all the time. My straight hair probably won't make many reappearances until I'm back in Utah. :( I miss it....Utah and straight, shiny hair.)


We also checked out a cemetery, which was really beautiful and peaceful.
(Random-cool fact #2: I took this picture to show my Utah friends & family what Maryland "mountains" look like. They're HUGE!)


The real thing we went to Western Maryland for was to hike part of the Appalachian Trail. I think we ended up going about a week too early to see all the trees changing. Things were still pretty green, but there was some beautiful orange and yellow too. The drive up there was gorgeous. It was nice to hike, though. (It was kind of more of a walk without pavement, but that's okay. As you saw in the picture, the mountains here are kind of....lacking.) The day was beautiful and Kelly and I just talked the whole 6 or 7 miles. It was so fun to spend the whole day with him!
(Random-Cool face #3: I took a picture a lot like this one of my dad on top of Angel's Landing in Zion National Park around this time last year. Click to see it! If it's too big to see right, try right-clicking and going down to "view image" It worked for me, anyway.)

At the overlook that we made our turning back point




When we got back to the car, we ate some sandwiches and then headed back to Baltimore and lesson planning and students and Michael's and Mrs. Cooper, but we had such a wonderful weekend, we were okay with going back to work.


The sunset was so beautiful on our way home, I thought it was a very fitting end to our wonderful weekend trip.

Being Married to Kelly is the Best!

Hey all, I just thought I'd write a little bit about some of the fun things we've been up to lately. Mostly we take a lot of naps in the afternoons after exhausting days on our feet. Last week I came back from work found this at the door:

And this on the bed:

So we ate the M&Ms and took a nap.

Then we woke up with bedhead.

But we do really fun stuff too! Last Thursday (the 24th), I got out of school, drove home and got Kelly and we drove all the way to Philadelphia and went to a Regina Spektor concert! But first we went to a really nice Italian restaurant and ate out on the sidewalk. It was so much fun!! Regina Spektor is so awesome and Kelly and I had such a fun time. We were standing all night, and I am up all day when I teach (whenever movies show teachers sitting at their desks, they LIE! Teachers never sit down.) and my feet and legs haven't hurt that bad since our wedding day, but just like that day, SO WORTH IT! Of course we both forgot our cameras, but it's okay. It was awesome. She even messed up our favorite song "That Time". The whole thing is "Hey remember that time I...[insert crazy-random thing in here, like "tried to save a pigeon with a broken wing? A street cat got him by morning and I had to bury pieces of his body in our building's playground."] She was like "Hey remember that time I...what'd I do?" It was cute. We got back kind of late, but we both made it to work on time in the morning.

Last Saturday, Kelly and I went to a movie called Whip It. It's Drew Barrymore's debut as a director and stars Ellen Page, the actress from Juno. Whip It is about roller derby. It was actually a really fun movie and it was a special early showing, so Kelly and I got free T-shirts! Woohoo! Don't we look adorable?