03-12-2005

Today has not been a good day. I did my good deed for the day by helping my mom purchase and assemble an entertainment center. Our church helps out with this program that provides apartments for people that need medical care every day but don't need to be in a hospital, so they have these apartments where they can stay without having to pay for a hotel and a lot of the Sunday School classes volunteer to take care of one of the apartments and keep them clean and just do whatever needs doing. Theirs really needed an entertainment center because the TV was sitting on this ancient microwave cart that would have fallen apart if you looked at it wrong, so we went and got one at about 10 this morning and carried it down there and it turned into the biggest headache of ALL TIME. First, the instructions were incredibly vague and often times wrong. It had you putting the top and sides together first, which was okay, except the silly little brackets you were supposed to use weren't really strong and pulled loose the second you let go and so I wound up having to drill and put in wood screws to keep that together. Then it turned out that the instructions had me putting the side pieces on the wrong side so after all that I had to take them back off and switch sides and drill new holes. And the brackets for the fixed shelves? Created by Satan himself. Anyway, four hours later I finally got it all together and everything put up. The guy staying in their apartment right now is super nice though and he was thrilled to death about it and even cooked us a huge lunch so I didn't really mind, but I would have probably done better throwing the instructions out the window like I wanted to do in the first place. Then Bama blew it, AGAIN (shut up Steve and Donna) and my sinuses have been bugging me since yesterday so I haven't really felt like watching movies. Plus, we're cooking out tonight and that will be nice but that's just time away from the tube. Blah.

190) La Dolce Vita. After the first twenty minutes I was ready to put this off as another
"brilliant" depressing movie about depressing people, but I got sucked in and enjoyed it. Visually it was great to look at and I'm down with Fellini on that. Storywise, I really did find it ending up rather hopeful. The young girl from an earlier scene waving goodbye to the party as they leave, all fresh faced and innocent, was really a beautiful moment and seemed to symbolize (at least to me) Fellini's faith that the younger generation would turn from such decadence. And both Emma and Fanny were both such great characters and so achingly beautiful....I could go on and on, but the point is I really do think this is deserving of it's masterpiece title.

190 down, 810 to go.