Books vs. Movies: My Expert Review

Ever since I got my fancy-schmancy Kindle Fire for my birthday (thanks Remy!), I've actually been reading books.

Amazing, I know.

In just the first month I think I read more books than I have in the last 5 years combined.

Sad, I know.

I've read a few books that were made into movies.  The first one I read was Water for Elephants.  I saw the movie first when it came out and I enjoyed it.  When I read the book I was actually shocked at how closely the movie seemed to follow it. 

(Of course I have a terrible memory when it comes to movies, so it was entirely likely I forgot the whole movie anyway by the time I read the book.)

I really couldn't think of anything major that I remember missing in the movie.  I was impressed.  So the other night I re-watched the movie and yeah, it was pretty dang close.

(Of course I have a terrible memory when it comes to books, so it was entirely likely I forgot the whole book anyway by the time I re-watched the movie.)

The book of course has more detail, and I much prefer the book over the movie, but still, I was impressed it was as close to the book as it was.

Then I read The Help.  Awesome book.  I really enjoyed it.

Then I watched The Help.  Not that awesome of a movie.  I didn't really enjoy it.

If you haven't read the book, you need to!  Seriously.  Every few chapters it rotates through the perspectives of different characters.  There's Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny -it's pretty neat.  And the movie just can't capture their perspectives like the book.

I was really disappointed in the movie.  It had it's entertaining parts, and it can be fun to see how they portray certain characters.  But the movie just didn't capture, in my opintion, how deep Hilly's control of the group was, and Celia...oh Celia is so much more involved in the book.  So much of her character was cut out.  Though the parts they did include were actually really good I thought.  The amount of effort it took Skeeter to get Aibileen to talk initially...and then Minny...and then the others...the movie just didn't get into that enough for me. 

Oh and don't even get me started on the Stuart thing.  Holy crap they should have just left him out of the whole movie if that's all he was going to be in it!  They cut out a HUGE part of his character and the love story between him and Skeeter.

Same with Celia Foote's husband.  He wasn't a huge part in the book, but they didn't do the part he did have any justice.

And Skeeter's mom?  She wasn't dying from the beginning of the book!

And the whole thing with Skeeter and Ms. Stein?  Oh geez!  They didn't explain anything that led up to that first time you see Skeeter on the phone with her.  And then they're acting like they're BFF's or something.  It was just weird to me.

To me the whole movie felt rushed.  I understand you can't put every part of a book in a movie, but still.  I've been trying to separate it from the book and think if I would feel any differently about it, but that's hard.  I think that even if I hadn't read the book some of the scenes would make me say "wait a minute, where did that come from?" or "why is that even in here?"  I don't even feel like it should be nominated for best picture.  The movie was fine, but people...it could have been SO much better!  I'm curious to see deleted scenes.  I wonder if any of them had any of the little details I felt like were missing.

Anyhow, that's just my take on the whole thing.  Sorry if you loved the movie.  And if you did love the movie I'm curious to know if you've read the book as well.

So I've read The Hunger Games trilogy and as excited as I am to see the movies, I'm scared they're going to turn out like The Help, or dare I say...Twilight.  I don't want the movies to ruin the whole thing! 

To be fair I know there are a lot of die hard Harry Potter fans out there who probably felt the same way about those movies vs. books.  However, due to my aforementioned memory retainment issues, I couldn't remember the details of the books that were left out.  Or major events for that matter (and throw the fact that it's a whole SERIES of books in there, you just nailed the last nail in the memory coffin).  My point being that those movies were still really good and you could follow them even if you had never read the books.  The Help left me confused.  And I don't want the Hunger Games to make me feel the same way.

Any other movies out there that are from books I should read?

Where's Malcom Wednesday

It's time for a Where's Malcom Wednesday.

Flashback version!

Malcom loves things that blow heat.  And he has since his little life began.   He loves sitting on the heater vents and also the fan on my laptop.  When he was just a little kitten he would cuddle up next to the fan when I would sit on the bed working (What?  Watching Grey's Anatomy IS work).

He was small.  He was not inhibiting my online viewing experience.   It was cute.

See Figure A:

 FIGURE A



Malcom still loves the hot air...but he's....well...

He is not small.  He prevents me from using the laptop altogether.

See Figure B:

FIGURE B

A New Arrival...

Today this will be delivered to my house:

And I'm SUPER excited! It's SOOOO comfortable and really deep.  As in if I sit all the way back, my ankles barely hit the end of the couch.  I feel really fancy that it's from Crate and Barrel.

Now here's the story.  Sometime in November Remy and I went to the mall to check out the new Crate and Barrel.  We found this couch.  We sat on this couch.  We loved this couch.  We slept on this couch.

Okay maybe not that last one.

But really, we LOVED it!  We'd been couch shopping off and on, always checking them out at stores, but hadn't ever found anything we loved enough to commit to.  Plus we didn't NEED one, ours just isn't that comfy.  Even though we wanted to take this one home with us, the price tag was NOT as loveable.

Then after Christmas we went back to the mall for some reason and I suggested we go sit on our couch and see if we really loved it as much as we remembered. 

We did.

We also noticed there was a sale on this couch!  Yay!  But it was still a bit more than we really wanted to spend.  We started discussing colors, etc.  The floor sample was in the color of the pic above, which is fine, but there were some others we both preferred.  Remy happened to ask me what I would think if we had to have the color of the store sample.  I said if the price was right I'd take it.

Well right then a sales person came over to see if we had any questions.  Remy asked about the color options, and she let us know that the sale was on this color only because they were discontinuing that specific fabric. 

Okay then, good to know.

We went back and forth debating on whether or not the price was right.  It HAD been marked down twice....but still, we just got back from vacation and weren't planning on dropping large amounts of money on a couch any time soon.

Remy then asked if we could have the floor model and if it would be discounted further.  She said we could only have it if it was the last one left.  She also said they'd been going really fast once they went on sale, so she checked to see how many were left.

Well I figure this couch was meant to be ours.  Because wouldn't you know it, the warehouse was clean out -meaning we could take the floor model.  She originally said it would be an additional 10% off, but then after confirming with the manager we could even take it, turned out it was another 20% off.  This brought the couch to nearly 50% off the original price!!!

That offer was just too good to turn down.  So we bought ourselves a couch!

The lame thing was they couldn't deliver until January 10th at the soonest because they weren't getting the new display couch until then and didn't want a big empty spot on their floor.  So that meant there were 10 extra days that random people could be sitting on my couch! 

Our living room is going to be pretty tan though...tan walls, tan carpet, and we even got these new tan curtains for Christmas (also from Crate and Barrel) not expecting to then buy a TAN couch!

Oh well, walls can be painted!  I just can't wait to snuggle up on this new couch tonight!

Projects Galore!

So for a while there I'd been working on quite a few projects.  The first is this one...

Wanna see my laundry room?  Well, it's more of a laundry closet actually.  I'd been seeing chevron walls all over the blogging world and wanted to try my hand at it. Surprisingly, Remy was all for it!  So I called up my mathematically inclined sister to come over and help me figure it all out.  After some trial and error, and sheer luck...

{cough}

I mean skill...we figured it out.  And it turned out awesome!  I'm seriously impressed.  I have a habit of just jumping into projects with only sort of  thinking all the details through and I did NOT want to do that this time around!  Luckily Heather (the mathematically inclined one) was able to slow it down and figure it all out.  It definitely took some time to work through it all and finally get the system down, but it was worth it!  Remy even jumped in and helped me out!

Wanna know a funny story?  When we went to the paint section I found the color I wanted and had the guy mix up a quart.  Well as it was mixing we were looking through the "mistake" paints that are discounted, and I found the EXACT color in a gallon size for like $2 more or something.  The paint guy was really nice and let me take the gallon.  I felt kinda bad for wasting that quart, but I got over it.  :)

So here it is:

We finally figured out the right technique for the taping!

Ta-da! 

Here it is all finished, but before I moved all the crap onto the shelves (obviously).  Sadly I didn't take a before picture, but esentially it was all white walls, with one tiny shelf that wasn't screwed in properly so if you put too much pressure on the right side of the shelf it would flip up and dump detergent everywhere...not like we know from experience or anything. {shifty eyes}  And everything was just piled on the shelf and it was just a mess!  Originally I had wanted an EXPEDIT shelf from IKEA to mount to the wall.  I wanted the one that had like 6 cubes, but after looking at them, we decided they wouldn't really work for our space.  So we started looking around and wound up in the kitchen cabinet section where we found the shelf you see.  It's not pictured here, but for the bottom shelf we actually purchased the microwave shelf which sticks out a good 6 inches or so farther than the regular shelves, just to have a little more workspace.  It's been REALLY nice.  If I get around to it (don't hold your breath), I'll take a pic of the space now with everything in it.  It's awesome!  I can't even fill up the shelves!

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

We had been wanting to replace the two chairs in our livingroom and had looked and looked and looked for a love seat or something that would work, but we just never found anything we liked.  The chairs are a dark brown vinyl that match the couch, but the freaking cats run all over them with their claws and little Grey, who is an angel in every other way, decided to make them her scratching post.  Which is weird because it's the only thing other than their scratching post that has ever been scratched. 

Whatever.

The point is they were looking bad.

So one day I had an epiphany and thought, "I can sew, why  not make some slip covers?!"

And that's what I did.

I did some searching for some fabric and after consulting with Remy, who again surprised me with his acceptance of the brown zebra print, put in the order for the fabric and got to work!  I made templates out of paper first because I'm REALLY bad at measuring directly onto the fabric.  Then I started piecing the first one together.  Most of it went really quickly, until I got to the top corners of teh seat part.  I had cut the pieces a little larger than I needed it took some finagaling.  THEN I realized I had completely forgot to cut out one of the pieces for the skirt part.  THEN I realized I cut all the skirt pieces too short because...I'm not sure why, it just happened okay? 

So all in all the first cover took me 20 minutes to put together 90% of it.  Then probably another week or so to finish the last 10% because of the order I did everything which caused me pain.  The second chair cover was probably done in like an hour since I had figured out everything I did wrong in the first one. 

I also made some covers for the pillows that we have that go on those chairs.  They aren't pictured here because I hadn't made them yet, but they're white and really cute.

Just trust me.

And last, but not least, I painted this night stand for my youngest sister Amy.  I found this at the DI for like 6 or 8 dollars and it was just white wood. I think it was homemade actually.  So I gave it a sanding, spray painted it with ValSpar Grass Green.  I made the mistake of only buying one can which wasn't enough.  And I had to go back to freaking Lowes about 50,000 times before they finally had more.  Every time I went, and I went to probably 3 or 4 different locations too, they were out.  One time I bought one that I thought was right (really knowing it wasn't, I was just hoping they changed the name or something :) )it was too light.  But it worked out because I ended up using it for the chevron on the top.  And it was glossy and the rest is satin so it gives it even more dimension.  Then we just picked out the knob from Hobby Lobby.

So there you have it...oh wait, I forgot...we also painted our vanity cabinets.  But we haven't finished with the hardware so we'll get to that another day!

Strangers

Everyday as I crawl down Foothill Dr. in a sea of fellow commuters, I pass bus stops.  Bus stops full of strangers.  Strangers who are probably laughing at all of us that make up this massive river of metal and exhaust, just trickling down the street.  Maybe these strangers want to do their part to save the environment.  Perhaps they want to save a little cash.  Or could it be that they just like other people driving them around?  Who knows.  One thing I do know is that while they're laughing at me, I'm laughing right back.

See, in case you don't know, bus stops are marked by these metal posts with signs on the top letting everyone know where the bus will stop.  Sometimes the bus pulls up a little past the sign, while other times it comes up a little short.  Now when I take public transportation I usually stand, you know, by the sign indicating where the bus will stop.  And if someone is already standing there, I join them.  You know, create a little line if you want to be polite or start a little cluster that others would join. We become a group of people all tied together by a common goal with the sign as the center, a beacon if you will, calling the bus to us.

Not these strangers.

These strangers seem to be afraid of each other.  Or maybe they all smell funny.  Or maybe each person is afraid THEY smell so they're trying to do everyone else a favor.  Whatever the case may be, these people stand as FAR                          AWAYfrom each other as possible.  So far away it just looks ridiculous.  Awkward.  Silly.  Superfluous.  (not really that last one, I just like that word).  Seriously, there are about 6 people waiting for the bus and they are spread out in a line that covers the whole block.

I wonder what the bus driver thinks when he pulls up. 
Because I think y'all look a little foolish.

Maybe the driver opens the door and coasts by and all the strangers jump on when he passes them.  I mean, he can't wait all day for them to finish walking the rest of the way to the bus just because all these strangers are afraid of each other.  And it's not just these strangers who do it.  Oh no.  Everyone up and down the street is doing the same thing.  I think they're all lucky the bus even stops.  No one is even standing by the sign.  If I were the driver, I'd probably just pass right on by (guess you're lucky I'm not a bus driver).

I know we all like our personal space.  But come one people!  When did personal space become a 15 foot bubble?  Get a little closer.

Unless you want me to keep laughing at you.