The holiday weekend is nearly upon us! Wha-hoo!

Not that I have any big plans. It's a traditional weekend for cookouts, but we just threw a cookout last weekend. My aunt and uncle are going to be in town, so we'll be having dinner with my parents and them one evening. Though Mom still hasn't called me back to let me know which night.

So much for my exciting long weekend. But I'm still looking forward to it. With luck, I'll be able to relax a little.

I got the card table out of the garage last night and set it up in our bedroom. The plan is to set up my scrapbooking stuff there, and aside from putting the sharp things and actual albums away (to avoid damge to or from little fingers), I'll leave everything set out, and that will take a lot of the hassle out of scrapbooking at home.

Of course, Penny could still do a lot of damage if I can't keep her out of my stuff, so we'll see how it works out, I guess. But I'm hoping it's a success. I signed up for the "summer challenge," which is to finish 50 pages by the end of August. The reward for meeting the goal is... free admission to another scrapbooking event. Heh.

But it's not like I don't have any projects to work on. The annual album waits, and my college album is ready for the second phase (grad school), and Karen's coming in July, so there'll be a couple of pages for her summer bash album to do, and I owe my folks some pages for their Cancun album, and it couldn't hurt to think about planning some gift albums for Christmas, and...

Plenty to work on.

Matt thought I'd start scrapping last night, actually, but before I got the card table idea, I'd already decided I was going to finally watch Bicentennial Man, which I've had sitting around the house for most of two months.

I can see why it didn't do well. It had some really major writing weaknesses, threads that were never resolved (why even mention the Three Laws of Robotics if you're going to violate all three of them?), and things happening at the end that came out of nowhere. Also, it had a really ass-ugly hat.

But it's really damning quality is that it was slow. That's probably another function of the bad writing. There are plenty of movies (admittedly, mostly chick-flicks) that are this slow -- but pleasantly slow, like sitting in a boat on a lazy current and watching the riverbank drift by. Nothing really amazing happens, but you're not really expecting anything amazing to happen. You're just along for the ride. This one kept promising some excitement, and then failing to deliver.

I have to give it some points for the CG, though. And Oliver Platt rarely disappoints.

It should be quiet in the office today. Several people are taking the day off to stretch the long weekend, and even more will be leaving after lunch.

I might even manage to get some work done.

--Liz