Brody Brings the Ice

So, this weekend was the second time my friend, Brody, has visited me in Fort Worth. This is also the second time that Fort Worth has completely iced over, necessitating the use of sand trucks and ice scrapers for and among the populace. Coincidence? I think not.

We managed to have fun, anyway. We tried to trek across the metroplex to visit Ikea in Frisco on Saturday. However, just as we reached downtown Fort Worth on the freeway, we were halted by a wall of vehicles coming to the most rapid halts they could manage on the slick roads. There was a sand truck turned perpendicular to the flow of traffic and there were an array of flashy-wirly lights in the thick of things. Ordinarily, I'd be completely thrown by the combination of whirly and flashy things, but I managed to avert my eyes long enough to make an exit off the freeway before we were enmeshed in the traffic snarl. We had a minor adventure on our exit because it involved some unsanded bridges and some Texans who don't understand that the appropriate approach to such things is neither your accelerator nor your brake, and that a 2-second following distance is insufficient when the driving surface is ICE. Seriously, dudes, the Tundra in front of us was turned sideways relative to the direction of his movement and i think he might have bounced off the barrier wall more than once.

So, we ended up staying home, making stew and chili con queso, and watching movies. A great time! I must say that the movie Ray, while it is a terrific story and was very well made, is LOOOOOOONNNNNNGGGGGGGG. Longer than is comfortable to sit still for, really. We inadvertently watched the "Extended Version" which probably only added 10 minutes, at most, to the film. I was up and down several times while watching the film to stir the stew and let Molly out to potty (aside: if your dog can't hold it through the movie, the movie is DEFINITELY too long) and I still felt a little stir-crazy and chairbound when it ended.

The other film we watched was The Woodsman. It was intense. It deals with the struggle of a convicted pedophile (who apparently got off on smelling little girls' hair) to reintegrate into society. It's hard to find housing, hard to find a job, hard to find friends. In the end, the character finds redemption, but it's uncertain up until the very last moment whether he will or not. According to Brody, it's a very realistic portrayal of the sex offenders' struggle to be "normal". Some other areas of the film (like the love story and the family reconciliation story) suffer, just because the movie can't be long enough to treat everything with the same depth. All in all, intense, but worth watching.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, my fish survived me leaving them while I was in Austin last weekend. The weekend feeder tablet did the trick, apparently, because there were no floating fish skeletons waiting for me when I returned. We're into the third week of tank cycling now, and I'm researching other fish I can keep. I was really keen on one kind called the Black Molly, for the obvious and cheesy reason that it goes with my dog, Molly, a black lab. However, they have a water temperature incompatibility with the Zebra Danios I've got in the tank right now, so I think I'm going to look at keeping tetras. They come in a number of shiny color variations which I think would be fun, and they're supposedly not too hard to keep alive. This is good! The only thing I worry about is that if I get a bunch of them, I'll become mesmerized by their shiny flashiness every time I walk past the tank...