Spoilers below.

I'd use the title of Transformers: The Movie, but the cartoon version took that title, thus the movie is simply named Transformers. Some people call it Transformers: The Movie 2, which is silly. I'm shocked they didn't call it something stupid, like "Michael Bay's Transformers". Whew. Spielberg was a rather un-hyped executive producer.

Violet and I actually saw this a few weekends ago, but I've been a slacker and haven't posted about it until now. So here's my review: 7/10.

• Great acting by many (but certainly not all) of the "human" cast.
• Decent story, sorta.
• Really good sound track, even without Soundwave :( Seriously, that little radio dude could have totally been Soundwave. We were jilted. I guess they're saving SW for the sequel...
• Special effects were really good most of the time, but the camera was so close you couldn't really tell what was going on. I guess that's "war-like" though.

Transformers: I liked the vehicles, for the most part. I'm bummed VW didn't give them permission to use the new beetle, but cest le vie, what can ya do. The camero was OK. I didn't care for most of the Decepticons. The tank, Devastator, was a good name for a tank, even though Devastator is supposed to be the combination of the constructicons. Meh. I also really didn't like how the tank and skip loader could travel across the vast distances as fast as Star Scream, the Jet Fighter. I really didn't like how the cube only produced crazy destructive robots. Bleh.
Oh. And my MAIN issue? The robots look dumb. Can't see or tell anything that they do. I hated the CGI robots.

I liked how the humans dealt with the aliens, although I couldn't decide if the agent dude was there for comic relief (and failed) or was just annoying. The techie cast were kinda stupid, and the hot blonde chick seemed outta place and underused. I really liked the military guys. Next movie: G.I.Joe!

My main issue is that I didn't care for the retreat to the city while being chased by the bad guys. BAD idea. Lots of innocent people were hurt and killed, not to mention the massive amounts of destruction. Hey! We're being chased by Decepticons! Let's drive from Hover dam all the way to LA and THEN evac the human with the cube. Smart!! Couldn't the choppers just evac them from the middle of the desert, or just outside Hoover dam? And didn't they realize the choppers were a bad idea cuz Starscream would blow them up? Oh, Jazz's death was kinda gratuitous. I didn't care for it. Optimus Prime having lips really disturbs me. I was happy a lot of the original voices were used. Neat!

Lastly, Megan Fox needs a shrine or sumthin. I have two words for her. D and AMN.

I finished the nursery this morning. All the furniture is in and the shelves are up. Violet still has some stickers to put up, but my job is finished. I even added a shelf to the closet for more storage. I'm pretty happy with the results, though there are several imperfections that glare out at me, like scrap marks or extra holes in the wall or something. But oh well. I know it can't *BE* perfect.




The Cherry Wood Crib with the pooh themed crib set. It doesn't have the mattress protector or pad on it it, but those can't be seen anyway.






Violet's Glider chair. The footstool was too expensive, so we didn't get it.






A pic I got for 2 bucks at a yard sale, and the painted shelves from my previous blog post. On the left is the Cherry Wood changing table, ready for some poop-inspired diaper changing goodness.








The most expensive piece in the set, this Cherry Wood Armoire is where we will keep his Diaper shirts (The term Onesie is a TM of Gerber), diapers, wipes, current wearable fashions, blankets, and large stuft animals that don't fit on the shelves, such as Tigger there.

Well over a month ago, probably 2 months ago, I bought some shelves from a yard sale. They were cheap and looked pretty cool, and I thought they'd look good in the nursery. Unfortunately, Violet didn't agree. Their coloring scheme was green and natural wood brown, which doesn't match our nursery's color scheme.

Apparently Home Depot has specific Disney color swatches. So I bought a gallon of paint for each of the two colors we're using and a quart of white primer.




Disney Link to colors

I spent a few WEEKS prepping and painting these shelves. What a pain. Anyway, I didn't get around to taking pictures of the shelves before I painted them, unfortunately. Hey, there was a rogue beaver in my garage, gimme a break. Here are pics of the finished products though:

I was thinking of selling my transformers on Ebay to make some money, clear out my old crap, and help pay some bills. Nearly all of them are in poor to fair condition, and I probably wouldn't get much for them. (sigh). So instead I dusted them off (see previous blog post) and put them on a shelf. It would take a long time to list them all out, and several are not Transformers at all. Some are Go-Bots or Japanese imports. For the record, I've been wanting to do this well before the movie was announced. Now that its out though, they may fetch some mediocre prices, but I doubt it.

The ones I recall the names of from the top of my head are:
(top) Metroplex, Perceptor, Omega Surpreme.
(shelf 1) Optimus Prime, Ultra Magnus.
(shelf 2) Shockwave
(shelf 3) All the Predacons (They form Predaking), All the dinobots (Grimlock is a japanese import, not the real thing, but I think he looks cooler) [Grimlock, Slag, Sludge, Swoop], Blaster, Soundwave, all their cassettes
(shelf 4) The combaticons (They form Bruticus, I think), a pair of rock transformers, and some weird water transformers that I dont remember the names of. Turtle, shark, piranha, and a manta ray.

Contrary to popular belief, I am not immune to disease.
Last week I had a bit of a cold.

Now, I realize the cold that's been going around has made people sick for over a week, and that their symptoms are more sever that what I experienced. Maybe I didn't get that cold. I've been digging around my old transformers and setting them up on a display shelf. Since they've been caked on with dust and dirt and grime over the last 20 years, I'm not too shocked I got sick. I wiped them all down with one of those disinfecting wipes, and I washed my hands often. Apparently not often enough.

However, it's possible I contracted the disease while playing with our friend's kid in their apartment complex's kid play area. I knew that touching any of that playground stuff (slide, ladder, teeter totter, swings) spelled doom. I totally think it was the kid play area.

I had a bit of a sore throat last Saturday, and then some congestion on Sunday and most of Monday. Tuesday was more or less recovery with a few coughs.

Most of the time the Nightquil / Dayquil saw me through it. I also had some honey based cough drops. Cough drops are actually great for sore throats. Much to my chagrin however, I ended up taking Monday off of work. I made it up by working late Tuesday and Thursday though.

During my sick time I mostly took it easy and read A LOT.

In order to not get Violet sick, I found a free full sized mattress a few miles away via Craigslist, and so I used that to sleep on in the other room. The mattress is good, but a little too firm for my tastes. It'll come in handy when we have guests though.

Today, 07/07/07, marks the 7th anniversary of Violet and I's first date.

On our first date, I picked Violet up in my mom's Mercedes. We went to Claim Jumper and had a really nice meal. We then drove to a spot that overlooked the Flower fields of Carlsbad. On the way home we stopped at AM/PM (a mini-market+Gas Station). Very romantic, I know. When we got back to her place we didn't even shake hands. I'm an old fashioned kinda guy, and besides, I had a cold and didn't want to have her catch it. This was easily one of my favorite dates ever though.

We were going to get married on 7/7 for one of several reasons. First, her birthday is on a 7th (Not July). Second, having our wedding on the anniversary of our first date seemed appropriate. Third, and probably most important, having everything fall on the 7th would make it easy for me to remember. :)

We did end up getting married on the 7th, but not of July. Because of our honeymoon plans in Florida and the Bahamas, we decided it would probably be too hot around July 7th. Since we wanted it on a weekend, we choose April 7th instead, which although on a Sunday, was much better for us. So that's the date we set. Oh, and just for the record... no... we did not get married at AM/PM.

I suppose somehow on the cosmic scale, the 7th works for us. Violet is also on her 7th month of pregnancy. Time's have changed a lot these 7 years. They'll change even more in the next 7. I'm overjoyed and thankful at how much happiness my life contains.

In random order, I spent Independence day:

• Played Command & Conquer 3
• Watching a TiVo'd movie with Violet (You, me, And Dupree.. it was meh)
• Finished painting the nursery shelves (Pictures coming eventually)
• Cleaned the house and especially the Garage a lot
• Fixed the lawnmower. (I haven't testing it yet tho.. heh)
• Watched fireworks for a few mins from our backyard
• Went out to eat at a Mexican food place (We tried good 'ol American Dairy Queen, but they were closed).

Overall a fairly relaxing and productive day.

Plans for July 4th include napping, watching TiVo, cleaning the garage, and maybe watching fireworks on TV. You would think that being so close to the capitol of our country there'd be a lot of fireworks around here. Well, there are. There's more firework "Buy One Get One FREE!" vendors than there are Dunkin Donut stores.

My fried Derek created an artistic interpretation of my beaver hiding behind a dishwasher in my garage story. Since I thought it was neat, and with his permission, here it is.

In other news, I repaired the chewed through wires of the lawn mower this morning. Hopefully it won't blow up or set the lawn on fire.

I don't read that much. At least, I stopped reading novels and the like somewhere around high school. I guess reading textbooks substituted for reading books. Besides, reading makes me very sleepy. Over the last decade I've barely read a handful of novels. But the last year or three, thanks to Violet who reads a lot, I've gotten back into the reading habit, sorta. I read when I'm able to goto bed early and I'm not quite tired yet. As a result I've read, albeit slowly, a few books this past year or so. My most recently read, currently reading, and soon to read lists are now located on the right column. Start of Darkness counts, even though it's book full of comic strips. I love Order of the Stick :)

I've somehow managed to snag myself on some bad luck.

A few nights ago I heard a mouse and saw some rodent droppings in the garage. I bought a mousetrap and set it up with peanut butter. The next day the trap was sprung but only bits of fur, and the peanut butter, remained.

Since I've been painting in the garage this concerned me. (More on that later, when I actually finish the project) Also, some items had been knocked off the shelves and several cardboard boxes had been ripped up, nearly through to the containing artwork.

Last night I decided to further investigate and used a push broom to move a bunch of stuff outta the way when I heard rustling coming from behind some boxes. I see something large and furry crawling back behind more stuff. (My garage is quite full of stuff). It didn't look like a mouse. Or even a big rat. It was certainly bigger, and faster, than a rat. I kept moving stuff outta the way, keep at broom handle length, when suddenly out jumps a Beaver, easily the size of a small 15 or 20lb dog or cat. I wasn't startled or scared or anything... I just watched it crawl behind a dishwasher that I had in the garage (I told you it was full of stuff). At this point I ID'd it as a beaver and went back inside the house to hit the Internet. My local Humane Society was closed at 8pm at night, but the site said to call the local police, which I did. 5 minutes later 3 cop cars show up. They can't trap him, only scare him out of the garage. I considered keeping him in the garage until the next morning so the HS could trap him, but then I noticed, to my financial horror, that the little bastage had chewed through the power cable of my electric lawn mower. This did not make me a happy camper. The police offered to either scare it outta the garage so not wanting anything else to be destroyed, I accepted their offer. I really didn't want the sucker to get caught in someone else's garage, or run over by a car, but I couldn't afford any more damage. Heck, I can't afford the current damage done. As they scared him outta the garage he came straight at me. I calmly but quickly braced myself between the 2 cars I was standing between and lifted my legs to let the dude pass right under me. Wish I had taken a picture of him at some point. It woulda made a nice blog entry.

The other major suckage is that Violet's Xterra's AC is out. I bought some refrigerant and filled it just fine, but it only lasted a few days. Figuring I may have done it wrong (Getting pressure was difficult in 95 deg weather) I checked the Internet and found some Nissan forums. The compressor wasn't kicking in, and I read that after 400 bucks of hose replacement repairs and diagnosis by several people, the Thermal Control Amplifier is what ended up needing replaced. 40 bucks. SO I went and bought one and tried to replace it myself. The Thermal Amp, or AC Thermistor as some call it, is a temperature gauge that overrides the AC compressor switch to make it kick on. Something like that. Anyway, The part I got wasn't even close to the original so I took it to the dealer this morning and had them troubleshoot it. They're results were... unfortunate. The compressor and hose line both had a large leak in them and needed completely replaced. Parts were due in on Wed. This isn't something I could do myself since I don't have the tools and vacuum equipment required for this sort of repair. Total cost estimate at this time is about 850 bucks. Le Ouch. So much for that new mattress I promised to buy Violet. ;(