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It's been a food filled weekend.

Scored a couple trays of leftover bbq pulled pork and now I'm trying to discover different ways to work that into dishes. I gave most of the food away since the two of us can't eat that much meat.

Saturday was a fun filled day. In the morning kali seminar focused on ground fighting. Of course, it turned out that I was one of the few people who could still really do the ground fighting with the rule of thumb being, "if you can still pick yourself up off the ground..." Alot of the guys in particular had already worn out their knees from the years of hard hitting karate and tae kwon do styles. Part of it looked more like movie stunts, like lying on your back and rolling away before a 3-sectional staff comes crashing onto the ground where you were. So yeah, you better move, I don't care how tired you are. We also practiced some throws on the grass and tumbling which I hadn't done in years and wasn't all that interested to tumble on the grass. All I can say is that gravity is exhausting.

Afterwards, spent the afternoon swimming with the nieces. They arrived around 3. We went to greet them at the mini-van where the parents were cleaning up both of the kiddie seats as the twins decided to puke in union. oh yeah. While we went swimming, the hubby did laundry of the car seat covers and accompanying clothing. That's not a whole lot of lounging either since the twins weren't all that happy sitting in their nice inflatable seats. And it took us forever to inflate those things! But I liked the water so much more than the ground. The nice part is that the kids aren't too grumpy when it's time to come out of the pool, since now they know that they can come back fairly often.

Since the sister-in-law is part of the Rosenblum Cellar wine club, we headed to Alameda and got there about 30 minutes before closing and tried out 5 of their wines. I ended up buying a bottle of their North Coast Zinfandel and the Santa Barbara Roussanne which is perfect for a nice summer day. The hubby stayed in the car with the kids. 2 out of 3 of them were fine with the whole thing.

Next stop was Hangar One, which is down the street from Rosenblum. A $10 fee gets you a glass and taste of all their spirits which was at least a dozen from their liqueurs to their whiskeys. We shared it between the three of us which was enough to just coat your tongue with a taste. You can get completely wasted if we had gotten one each. Then they wanted to try some absinthe which is a separate $10 tasting but again you get to keep the glass. They have one of the best absinthes on the market today. We waited for the ice to melt. Between the three of us we only managed to drink half of the glass, so I switched places with the hubby to watch the kids in the van.

Remember the 1 out of 3 kid? Well by the time I got there she was into full on tears, so I let the twins out of their car seats with the instructions that they remain in the mini-van, which was fine with one and only momentarily fine with the other because she was still concerned as to where mommy and daddy were. I took that one into my lap and ran through the gambit of songs she knew from "I have two hands", "Twinkle twinkle", and "itsy bitsy spider". And even though she kept crying a touch, the songs kept her from all out bawling.

The parentals and hubby returned. The hubby, with a bottle of their Qi White, which is a mixture of white tea and their spirits which I like so much better than Qi Black (though I have to say that their Qi Black is vastly improved from the initial batch I had tried over a year ago).

With the kids happy about swimming and the adults happy about the absinthe tasting we headed to our parentals house to give grandma and grandpa some enjoyment. E, the eldest, remembers the house and the people inside, so she loved being there. The twins, went into their shy mode for a few minutes before finally relaxing and running around. They still weren't sure about mom and dad, but they did like the bowl of fresh grapes they provided and couldn't get enough of eating those.

Sunday, went to class. I woke up with my sore and achy legs. Just because I can do the movement doesn't mean I don't pay for it the next day. The hubby had been interested in learning to braise food for quite some time but we didn't have the proper pot that went from stove to oven. Fortunately we had numerous gift certificates from Williams-Sonoma that were still unused (I love that California law that doesn't allow gift certificates to expire.) We ended up getting a 5.5 quart Le Creuset in flaming red, which felt like was half off since the gift certificates. We followed that up with watching Iron Man which was an awesome movie (again using some gift certificates), dinner at Fuddrucker's, then grocery shopping at Ranch for the oxtails and veggies to christen the Le Creuset.

Whew! The hubby finished cooking it at around midnight so we haven't tried it out yet. We'll find out tonight.

Grant it I need a weekend from my weekend, I am glad we have such a fun filled life.

And the next Sulu is...

Oh yeah they just finalized the cast of the next Star Trek, and they've signed John Cho as the next Sulu. How cool is that?

brokeback

It's been two years since Brokeback Mountain was the must see movie of the year and I finally watched it on video. And yes, I had read about the two leading men and their excellent performances, Heath Ledger with his particularly nuanced character was excellent. But what really makes the dramatic shift are the performances of their wives and women. Michelle Williams, as Ennis del Mar's wife who finds her marriage falling apart after discovering her husband's secret, really heightens the tension that the lead characters face in their regular lives while retaining this dream of an idyllic world on Brokeback.

Ang Lee has honed that unrequitted love, love story. In many of his movies setting his characters in a love that their duties and expectations from the world cannot allow. OK, not sure if that's true in the Hulk, but certainly in Crouching Tiger.

making a movie

I'm making a 25-30 minute video presentation for my great aunt and uncle's 50th wedding anniversary. We just completed doing interviews of their children and families. We've been having a great time interviewing them as Uncle has always been a jovial man, so his kids and even grandkids are too.

I still have to review the video from auntie & uncle's individual interviews. We have about 4-5 hours of video footage, not including the 300 some odd photos there are too. Next step is to finish reviewing the interviews, importing them to the harddrive, then sketch out a storyboard before we leave for Europe. Then when we get back I'll be set to jump into the editing.

It's almost like a mini-documentary. I'm actually putting the skills from an oral history class to work. At first their kids were nervous about doing it, but once we were into it, there were all sorts of stories they were telling. The hardest was for the grandkids, being teenagers and all, they don't stop much to think about their favorite memories or things they learned from their parents.

Priscilla Agent Smith, Queen of Rivendale

On Netflix this week was The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994). The hubby popped in the DVD. Netflix tend to sit on top of the TV til someone bothers to put it in. I've long forgotten what I put on my video list so now every week is a surprise. I just presume that they were all movies I would have liked to have watched at some point or another.

So we're watching, and I'm thinking that heavy brow looks really familiar and indeed it was Hugo Weaving, 15 years before he became Agent Smith or Elrond, playing Mitzi, a drag-queen who takes another two queens on a road trip to the Australian outback to become reacquainted with his son. He already has that very serious stare about him that gives middle earth its gravitas, which the way I'm used to seeing him, but also many light hearted scenes, he is in drag afterall and wears a dress made entirely out of tsinellas.

Bernadette the aging transgender on the trip is played by Terence Stamp aka General Zod from the Superman movies. Nope didn't recognize him one bit.

I remember in college, there was a bit of an uproar over a Asian woman roll in the movie. Cynthia, played by Julia Cortez, is Bob's wife, whom they meet because Bob is the only mechanic for miles and miles. Her back story is that he woke up one night in a generic Asian country and told him they were married. Apparently, he was some kind of sex fetish performer with the knack of launching not one but three ping-pongs, from, um, well, certainly not her mouth. She uses a me-no-english accent, but often curses him out in full on Tagalog. She feeds off of the men's attention to her special talent. I still don't quite understand how her character works in the movie, except to show that Bob is a supposedly straight nice guy with a soft heart for Queer folk. Bob does try to hide his wife from people because he's ashamed of her talents and locks her outfits and ping pongs in a cabinet. She breaks the cabinet to perform at the bar and the next day she packs her stuff and leaves him. The actress only other credit in imdb is a Power Rangers movie.

The whole movie is like most road movies, nothing like sticking people in an enclosed space for miles and miles to get a plot going, except with tons of sequins and feather boas. The movie ends on a happy note as they find acceptance and appreciation wherever they end up.