I lied

Sorry, I didn't do it yet (the blog move thing). Stuff piled up on me, like as usual this month. Today. I'll do it today.

My ol' electric Braun filter drip coffeemaker finally kicked the bucket, so I drug out a (also old) French press I'd for some reason been annoyed at. By gum, the coffee IS better. (I knew that, really I did.) But I don't much like having to mess around with yucky (and tending to fly around unexpectedly) coffee grounds. I like the neat package of coffee grounds held in a filter that I can transfer to the garbage, fingertips touching paper only. This year, I don't seem to mind the grounds as much. Then there is the issue of not staying quite hot enough. Oh, well.

Two films from the Scottsdale Film Festival stand out in my memory, so before I forget... "Mother and Child" was a film about adoption, which almost put me off, but Annette Bening and Samuel L. Jackson are too good to miss. Bening's character had given birth at 14 and never recovered from giving up the baby at her mother's insistence (neither had her mother), and the daughter, well, I won't give it away. Bening is just such a fine actress I can hardly bear for any movie she's in to be over. It's spooky how she grabs my psyche. And Jackson, well, it's more like fond affection. A black couple wanting to adopt is the third strand of the story. All three strands eventually interconnect... in unexpected ways. It's a good story.

The other favorite was "Lovely Still." The writer/director came out before and after, to introduce it and to answer questions. Omigod, he was barely out of diapers! The film starred Martin Landau and Ellen Burstyn. What miracle got these two stars into the hands of a baby? Talent, apparently. It's a story of aging and romance and family with an odd twist, heart-twisting and almost requires a second viewing to see how he did it.

Aerobics class last night was brutal, as usual -- half-hour of step, then some weights & ab work. What is this fetish with balls and half-balls? Oh, I know, they increase the effectiveness of ab/core work, which for somebody like me means they make it so intense I just can't do it. Or, well, I do it briefly then collapse in a lovely back-curve over the ball (or bosu, the half-ball) feeling like surely I will die. Sometimes this just makes me stubborn, determined. Other times it makes me feel like shit. But I keep coming back. I had been improving, but skipped a class last week for films, backslid. Next week will be better.