Own a bit of Straya

R.I.P. Truly an American Icon.

CRwM and I went here

Saturday it was seventy god-fearing Farenheit degrees (21 heathen degrees) in January!

January!

So I did the Minuteman. The trail was very crowded, with lots of kids and their Christmas bikes. It rained earlier in the day, so there were a lot of puddles and sand and a very stiff wind. I was in full summer kit; no warmers, no nothing. Didn’t get started until late because my apartment was so much colder than it was outside, i didn’t realize just how warm it was until I took the dog for a walk at lunchtime.

35 miles for the first ride of the year.

Fantastic Four
[netflix] [IMDb]

I’m not quite sure why this got panned so badly by the reviewers. I thought it was quite good as a superhero flick. Every bit as good as the X-Men series, at least, and way better than Spider-Man II.

The four are given super powers as a result of an accident of sorts and the resulting exposure to cosmic rays. The same accident affected Dr. von Doom who sort of takes the dark side. The characters are reasonably well done and there were quite a few good jokes. Some of the effects didn’t quite carry it off, but that may have been due to the small screen. It might have been better in a theatre. Reed Richard’s (Ioan Gurffudd) stretchiness, in particular, didn’t work well. Chris Evans spends a respectable amount of time undressed, which is all to the good.

Fun and certainly worth watching. The DVD extras are pretty lame, but I did finally learn how to pronounce “Ioan”. Interesting fact: half of the Fantatsic Four are from Massachusetts (Chris Evans/Johnny Storm is from Sudbury; Michael Chiklis/Ben Grimm is from Lowell).

Carpenter came on Friday morning to check out my place. He'll be coming back in about a week with an electrician and plumber to get their opinions. I'll be upgrading my electrical service (yay!) to 100 amps (from 60) if I don't have to rewire the whole place. He said I shouldn't have to but I'll wait for the elecrician's opinion. I checked out the neighborhood and found a couple of building permits and it looks like permits are 1% of the construction cost. What a racket.

Other than that, I'm supposed to be looking at "things" to decide what sort of "things" I like. Ugh. One quick intarwab search shows me more than I could possible choose from, so I'm going to bring in help for that too. Just give me four things to choose from. That's all. Four. Not four thousand. I did find a place that sold copper bathtubs, but they start at $4000 so we're going to pass on that. Yeesh.