Happy Diaryland Birthday to me! One year ago, in a last-ditch effort to keep my brain from turning to mush while temping, I stumbled across Mimi Smartypant's journal and enjoyed it so much that I thought maybe I'd do one too. So I did and you can read my first dorky entry here.

I think what's cool about reading my first entry is how last year's lowlights are now this year's highlights. I got a job and have managed to keep it for three whole months so far. We bought a house. WE BOUGHT A HOUSE. This is still such a huge thing that I can barely believe it. Maybe I'll make it official and do a 2003 highlights/lowlights list. Here we go:

Highlights:

- WE BOUGHT A HOUSE.
- Got a job.
- Took amazing vacation to New Mexico.
- Managed to write nearly a year's worth of diary entries while temping and didn't get busted.
- Have managed to continue with working out and maintaining my weight-loss.
- Have read a grand total of 40 books this year.

Lowlights:

- My car is dying. (But the horn still works! Sort of! HHHhhhouuunk.)
- Still in debt.
- Questioning the goodness of my new job.
- Have not managed to stick to my "no sugar during the week" rule.
- Failed miserably to read all the reader-recommended books I have listed in my reading challenge.

Not too bad for one year, I think.

So, what the hell else have I been doing for the last week since I'm clearly too busy/lazy/boring to write journal entries? Here's another list:

What I've Been Doing For The Last Week Instead of Writing Journal Entries:

- eating my fool head off
- working
- mountain biking
- Christmas and related
- pretending to shop (which involves going to clearance sales at stores like Banana Republic and touching the soft cashmere sweaters that are marked down from $158 to $49 and then realizing I can't afford a $49 sweater, so why am I even there? So then I go to Old Navy where the sweaters are not soft but are $10 and I try them on and they look like misshapen sacks on me. It's really not fair.)
-Scheming about my birthday which is January 16th. JANUARY 16TH. DON'T FORGET.
- finally watching the first Lord of the Rings movie which I quite liked. I liked it so much I actually picked up the book and started to read the series.
- Saw Cold Mountain, which I think needs its own section because you really care what I think about it, don't you?

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Cold Mountain, the movie, my thoughts of.

(this section WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS. If you haven't seen it but wish to, don't read this. If you read it anyway and then wish you hadn't, it's not my fault, sucker.)

The good news is: Anthony Minghella will be allowed to live. Cold Mountain is one of my favorite books and I was really worried that he was going to completely ruin it. I saw the movie on Sunday with Kate and was pleased by how much better it was than I expected.

The accents were off and they changed a little bit of the story (Like, why the whole first 45 minutes? A lot of the battle scene really wasn't needed. I think a few succinct flashbacks would've done it. And why was Teague courting Ada? Also, why did they cut out so much of the goat lady? And why didn't they show more of Ada's struggle? Kate pointed out that Ada seemed to be having quite the good time on the farm, which negates the parallel of her struggle with Inman's.)

But, on the most part it stayed fairly true to the book. I really thought Jude Law did a great job (hell, he could sit in a chair for three hours and I'd watch it) and Renee Zellweger was surprisingly un-sucky. Nicole Kidman wasn't really my vision of Ada (and I really think she's too old for the part) but she didn't suck either.

Visually, I thought the movie was stunning, even if it was a little stagey at parts. The book to me is very much about image and emotion more than words, and I think that came across in the film. Go see it, but only if you read the book too.

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So that's it for 2003. After work there will be some mild revelry and hopefully my old-ass self will manage to stay up until midnight. We'll see. We'll maybe also find out if anyone in our new neighborhood owns a semi-automatic weapon. In our old neighborhood, it was the grand new year's eve tradition to pull out your illegal weapon of choice at midnight and fire it heedlessly into the sky, with nary a thought to where those bullets go when they stop going up. Idiots.

Have a happy new year, my little monkeys!

18 chatty monkeys