Seven Pounds

Friday was fun, beginning with b'fast with my Friday Friends, continuing with an early showing of Will Smith's new film, and culminating with a trip up the hill to turn in my semester grades and view the winter wonderland.

Friday Friends donated to a local rescue mission this year, instead of exchanging gifts. However, I gave one close friend a cookie platter and took a large platter to the office staff, as well as another smaller platter to a work friend. I love baking, and also enjoy making homemade gifts. I also had knit an arm protector for our Friday server as she complained about having to stack hot plates up her arm. She likes it as I used an all-cotton yarn, based on her complaint about one she bought commercially: it was nylon and made her arm sweat. We'll see how my efforts turn out for her.

Seven Pounds is in the style of Sixth Sense, so if you like that interweaving of past and present with a tantalizing resolution just out of reach, you'll enjoy the film. Will Smith does a good job, but I think he over-acts his part. His facial expressions become distracting as he tries so earnestly to convey depth of feeling. I also noticed at least a dozen continuity disparities, which I find distracting. And I knew what had happened, as well as what he was doing, not too far into the film, so it was simply a matter of riding it out to the end to have my hunches confirmed. I guess if you just watch it, you will be taken aback and/or surprised, but I knew Bruce Willis was dead when he sat across from the young boy the first time. It is my job, after all, to know how to read literature, and a movie is just another form of literature.

The one clue that most people won't get is the title: think Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice. If you need me to explain this clue, email me privately.

The trip up the hill was totally surreal as the desert is usually a blank beige canvas studded with small beige bushes. Yesterday, it was an endless white landscape, studded with snow-covered roofs and shrubbery. Most of the parking lots for businesses are still covered in snow, some of which is melting, so I know that holiday shopping has been impacted by the weather. The roads were not completely cleared between YV and the college, and the snow was melting, creating both riverlets and ponds across the four lanes that probably froze last night as temps have been in the 20s all week. Traffic was moving at quite a clip, so I stayed to the right and 10 mph under the posted limit. I imagine that there will be many accidents as the base lets off work and families speed off to either shopping down the hill or on two-week holiday leave time.

The campus was blanketed everywhere except the walkways and parking lots, an especially striking accessory to the garden of metal sculpture. The view from the parking lot back toward the west was stunning and really showed the extent of the snowfall from the Big Bear Mountains and well into the National Park. Although it's snowed before during my 40-year residence in the desert, this snowfall came quickly and left quite an impact on the high desert communities.

I'm off for the next two weeks, so plan to take in a half-dozen movies, as well as rent some videos that I missed in the theaters. There are a couple of preps for the next semester's classes, as well as some further progress on cleaning out the cupboards and closets, but mostly, I'll just hunker down and enjoy the quiet time.