My Movie Heaven

I have had a serious case of blogger's block lately--I can't seem to find anything witty or wonderful or even close to thought provoking to say, so it looks like I will stick to easy subjects until my thoughts regroup.

Today's no-brainer: movies I can watch over and over again--AKA: Shan's Movie Heaven! (Thanks, Marci, for mentioning Dirty Dancing and Grease last night--it made me think of this.) I am a movie junkie, so this list is extensive (and I probably have left some out because my brain refuses to function)

In no particular order:

Moulin Rouge, Harry Potter, Star Wars (the original Trilogy--I don't like the new ones), Dirty Dancing, Grease, Reign Over Me, City of Angels, Secondhand Lions, Gone With the Wind, Pan's Labyrinth, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Finding Nemo, Toy Story (can you tell I like Disney), The Sixth Sense, The Village, The Green Mile, Strictly Ballroom, Steel Magnolias, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Beaches, Space Balls, Office Space, Happy Gilmore, The Rocky movies (except five--it was bad), Life is Beautiful, National Treasure, The Man in the Iron Mask, Psycho (the original--Hitchcock was a genius), Rear Window, Twister, With Honors, The Lion King, Rain Man, The Truman Show, The Wizard of Oz, Rope, The Sound of Music, Chicago, Jurassic Park, Mighty Joe Young, The Producers, West Side Story, Bring it On, Gladiator, Rudy, Life of Brian, My Cousin Vinny, Pirates of the Caribbean (I am dying to see the third, but have't yet), Ghostbusters, Pretty Woman, My Best Friend's Wedding, Legally Blonde, The Mummy, Troy, Knight's Tale, Dead Poets' Society...and many more (they will come to me later, you watch...)

So, what about you? What movies make up your movie heaven?

Just For Laughs

I am tired and on my way to bed this fine Friday, but I wanted to post something to make you chuckle. A friend of mine sent me a bunch of Maxine cartoons this morning and this was my favorite--

Hope you had a laugh, friends. Enjoy your Friday night.

I've Been Tagged!

Skittles over at Skittles' Place tagged me this morning with my choice of two memes to complete and tag others with...I choose the Birthday Meme. Here are the rules:

Go to Wikipedia and type in your birthday (month and day)...Then write down 3 events, 2 births, 1 holiday, and tag 5 friends (leave them a comment saying their tagged and refer them to your blog for the rules).

Here goes:

On November 2nd...

Three Events:
1868: Time zone: New Zealand officially adopts a standard time to be observed nationally
1960: Penguin Books is found not guilty of obscenity in the Lady Chatterley's Lover case
2000: The first crew arrives at the International Space Station.

Two Births:
1734: Daniel Boone, American frontiersman
1865: Warren Harding, 29th President of the USA

One Holiday:
Day of the Dead (Mexico and the United States)

I tag:
The Cranky Librarian
Joker...I Jacked a Plane
My Crazy Life...in Pictures
The Jo Diary
The Myriad Musings of Marci

If you want to do the other meme (The Mutation Meme), Here are the rules:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

If you want to see what this one looks like, check out Skittles' entry.

It's your choice! Have fun, and thanks, Skittles, for including me in the game :)

Guilty Pleasures

Admit it--we all have them. Those things that we could technically go without but we don't want to. In no particular order, here are (some of) mine:

Gevalia coffee, candles from Yankee Candle, wine (Pinot Grigio is my fave right now), reality TV (summer is great for that--so much trash on, so little time), sleeping in, Rocky Road ice cream, hot baths (but I hate hot tubs--must be the chlorine), sun, X-Box 360, Dove chocolate, 400 thread count pillowcases, flip-flops from Old Navy, movie channels, the Cookie Monster (not from Sesame Street--it is a dessert at Chedder's...amazing), and shoes (I hate to wear them but love to buy them).

So, fess up--what are yours?

People are Confusing Me...

In general, I have decided that people are just confusing..in short, I don't understand why some people make the decisions that they do. Here are some reasons why:

1. A year or so ago a man in Ohio shot and killed a kid who was walking across his lawn. Why? Because he was walking across his lawn. Uhhh...okay. Sure, the kid was labeled as a punk who was a smartass, and the guy had asked him a couple of times to not walk on his lawn, but the kids did it anyway. So, instead of calling to police, filing another complaint, etc., he went inside, got a gun and killed the kid. He then called the police to admit that he killed the kid. Crazy.
2. Roy Pearson is asking a judge to rethink and/or clarify her ruling that he shouldn't get 54 million dollars because a dry cleaner lost his pants--What made this guy think that he could get that much money just because the sign said "satisfaction guaranteed?" I'm sure other people have been less than pleased with service and have decided to go about their business, or maybe they asked to be reimbursed for what was lost or ruined--but no one asks for 54 MILLION dollars because someone lost pants. Unless they were worn by Elvis and adorned with diamonds and lots of gold lame, no pants are worth that much money.
3. Remember the woman who sued McDonald's because she burned herself on HOT coffee? Now McDonald's (and every other place that serves hot beverages) has to tell everyone "be careful, it's hot." Duh. And if it were cold, people would complain (and probably try to sue for 54 million dollars...or does that just apply to pants?)
4. In Cleveland a group of 20 somethings were setting off fireworks (since it was the Fourth of July). Their neighbor (a firefighter) asked them to hold it down and the kids refused. Now, nearly all types of fireworks are illegal in Ohio, so the guy should have called the police, waited for them to take care of it and gone off to bed. Simple, right? Wrong. Instead, the guy goes into his house, gets a gun and open fires on the kids. He killed three of them, went back into his house and sat at his table until the police got there. Logic? None. Craziness? Plenty.

There are plenty more, but I am having blogger's block or something. I'm sure I could come up with something witty about the fact Paris Hilton getting out of jail was hot news (why???) or that professional athletes make more than the President (???), or that more people recognized Sanjaya from American Idol than the presidential candidates.

So, people confuse me...I will never understand why some people do what they do or say what they say. Maybe it's better that way...

Fourth of July

Yesterday was exactly midway through 2007. That is hard to believe--it seems that the older I get the more quickly time goes. Funny, really. When you are younger you can't wait for time to fly so you can be older and when you are older you have moments when you wish time would stop. It's that idea of being younger that made me have to post about Fourth of July today.

Let me start by saying that I was very fortunate to have grown up next to my grandparents on about eight acres of land. We had (have, really, since my husband and I got and acre and we are living there, too: my mom and dad, my grandpa and TJ and I all have houses on this land--it is very cool.) It was great to grow up next to your grandparents and it was great to have all that space to run around--especially when it came to the Fourth of July.

When I was little, Fourth of July was a huge deal. We would invite my other grandparents (Dad's side), my uncles, my aunts, my cousins, some of Mom and Dad's friends, and sometimes our friends and we would have wiffle ball, go swimming, have a huge cookout (usually with tomatoes right out of the garden) and, when the sun when down, we would have a fireworks show that lasted sometimes into the wee hours of the morning. My dad would spend hours planning the order (one year he even had musical accompaniment) and we would all take our lawn chairs and watch the show. We "ooh's" and "ahh'd" and got eaten by mosquitoes, but that was okay, because it was Fourth of July and it was expected. One year our crazy German Shepherd, Baron, took a Roman Candle out of the ground and ran across the yard with it. He shot flaming balls at all of us while singing off his whiskers. (He was fine...we were scared to death, but he was fine.)

But all those things aren't the best memories I have of the Fourth. See, we didn't just throw parties-for a few years, they had a theme. The two that stand out most vividly are the Hawaiian Fourth of July (where we all had to wear crazy flowered shirts and leis) and our hillbilly Fourth of July (yep, you guessed it: cowboy hats, bandannas, the works--and that year we even did a hay ride). Eventually my brother got old enough to help dad and it became a "passing of the torch" moment when he ran the show and Dad watched. Everyone always had a good time and we talked about it for weeks afterward. We started thinking about next year's Fourth on the fifth. We couldn't help it.

As I got older, the parties got smaller. Less people came, we stopped getting as many fireworks, and the themes vanished quickly. Our fireworks displays went from 4 hours to less than 30 minutes. When Eric joined the Navy, the fireworks pretty much stopped. Ironic, I know...my brother defends our independence and we stop celebrating it. It just didn't seem right to do it without him, somehow.

When Eric returned, we started again. Not anything huge like we used to, but fireworks. And food. Last year Mom, Dad, and Eric provided the fireworks and TJ and I provided the food. We set up tables in our garage, ate, talked, played cornhole. and then, as it got dark, Eric and his friend Nathan began the fireworks. Some of TJ's family came over and we all sat in our lawn chairs watching the show. We're doing the same thing this year (add ping-pong to the mix, though). Sure, we have to do it on the third because everyone has to work on the fifth, but we're still doing it. And it is getting bigger.

It's almost like old times...without the leis, cowboy hats, crazy dogs and hay rides.

What's your favorite Fourth of July memory?