the list of now

Waste of talent. Waste of time. Terrible movie.

It might have been salvageable and decently fun, had the entire movie been about Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone’s characters. Maybe not. Maybe I could just watch Ryan Gosling do anything

The directing alternated between boring and weird. The writing was way too trite to take itself this seriously (or was it even more trite that it did take itself this seriously?)

Also, congrats on the barely having one likeable (Emma Stone) female character, who only has 3 scenes in the movie while the rest of them were portrayed as some combination of crazy, cheating, weak or stupid.

I love the show Revenge. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a dishy night-time (melo)drama that is actually incredibly well produced, directed, acted and written. I think the difference between Revenge and other soap-dramas that have come and go over the years is that this one knows itself and delivers the right balance of cleverness, camp and enjoyable characters. And Nolan.

I could watch clips of Gabriel Mann’s Nolanisms and the accompanying 800 different smirks and eyerolls all damn day.  Luckily, I’ve just discovered some other like-minded evil genius made an entire tumblr devoted to his expressions. It’s so wonderful.

I digress. What I’m here to talk about today is this beach house…

This is a cast with no shortage of attractive people. And I wasn’t able to grab any great sweeping screenshots of the rooms, but this set actually upstages some of the pretty characters. I see a small detail in the background on the lovely mix of comfy, rustic and vintage furniture, the built-in bookshelves, fireplace or porch swing and it tugs at me.

I just WANT it.

I am happy to say that I do have one small piece of something that lives in the Revenge beach house already. They use my favorite mug in the show!

I’m drinking tea out of that mug right now!

Oh hi, middle of January. It was time to do this 3 weeks ago. Alas, I had some priority issues over the past month – this blog being one of the things that had to go hang out on the back burner for a while.

So here’s my list of highlights from 2011:

Books

Music
Some of these are albums and tunes I revisited this year, some are ones I discovered this year.  Most were not new releases from 2011.  Click albums to launch on spotify, the individual songs I listened to are all playable in that handy widget guy.

Albums

Songs

(in totally random order)

Movies
I didn’t see as many movies as I would have liked to this year. And I didn’t keep track of the older ones I watched (there were a lot of dvds from the library, netflix and hulu streaming this year).  Here is a handful of movies from this year that I really enjoyed. I will do better keeping track in 2012.

loving right now:

-chai
- music by Ólafur Arnalds
- scavenging people’s “best of ” lists for 2011 for great music, movies, and books that I missed.
- the books The Wave by Susan Casey, Graceling by Kristin Cashore
- watching American Pickers with Darcy and scheming to go roadtripping/antiquing/flea market scrounging sometime
- the kindle fire (an unexpected holiday gift this year)
- brussel sprouts, soup, risotto and all citrus fruits
- David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Rooney Mara’s interpretation of Lisbeth.
- still having christmas lights up in our house
- new (paper) journal and sketchbooks.
- a positive resolution for our lemon car nightmare. it’s almost over.
- ginger spice, my ukulele.
- dying my hair nearly-black. I think I’m going to go with this for a while. I like it.

on the horizon:
- A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Marting. And maybe I’ll get around to watching the Game of Thrones tv series
- reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close before I can go see the movie
- still want to see The Artist, The Descendents, the new Muppet movie, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Shame, Pina and a bunch of arthouse stuff that takes a long time to get to Rhode Island.
- wondering if I have time to make Valentine’s Cards for the shop? am I too late?
- Skins 6 is starting soon
- finding a good (safe, reasonably cheap and in decent condition) used car so that our schedule can go back to normal instead of being a mess of ride-sharing and long car trips back a forth to get both of us to work.
- learning to knit socks before the winter is over.

These are the Holiday cards I drew, collaged and got printed this year:

Tonight, I’m going to put on a Christmas movie and sit down and actually write mine out to get in the mail tomorrow.

(Late start as usual. So what else is new?)

If you want to buy some, they are also up in the Etsy shop. You can order single cards or a set of six.