The kids finished school on Wednesday, Steve finished work yesterday and here we are spending today (Friday) cleaning up and packing so that we can go away tomorrow morning. Evan is already complaining that we will be leaving too early, 9am is ridiculously early for a poor teenage boy in the first week of his summer break from school. Sarah is proving that she's practically an adult and leaving teenagerdom behind as she has been beating me out of bed lately. I do however have the excuse of waking repeatedly at night to tend to a wakeful baby, who's keen on a feed. I'm a convenient snack bar here. Harry is up at his normal time, with teenagerdom yet to dawn on him. Though I have detected some slimming in his frame, and he had grown a little in the last term, so that adolescent spurt may not be too far off.
Harry had been keen to celebrate the start of his holidays with a family movie night. I was in full support of his notion, as who doesn't love a snuggle on the couch with the kids and a jolly good excuse to sit down for a few hours. The only problem was coming up with a movie that suits the whole family (not including Ellie at this stage, but it wont be long until her needs will have to be taken into consideration too). I am the family keeper of the torrents and it is my job to weed through the potential security threats and scantily clad pictures of females offering to date me, to access suitable family movie entertainment. After much scratching of our heads trying to remember which were the memorable movies of 2013, we decided to give The Hobbit a go.
Downloading the Hobbit was problematical as some torrent providers have started to remove certain codex from their torrents causing you to have to download special programmes to be able to play them. Unfortunately these programmes are not always risk free, and they tend to want to come with a bunch of extra programmes and toolbars that insist on downloading themselves onto your computer, even when you have very clearly indicated that you don't want them. And no I don't want to use your stupid search engine as my default one thank you very much.
As the night got late on Wednesday it became apparent that the Hobbit was not a happening thing. Harry and I had already bought and popped the pop corn, had the file, tried to convert it, downloaded and then deleted a suspect program, looked for other Hobbit torrents and then basically gave up. Too hard! So with that family movie night a crumbling disaster we decided to take two for tomorrow night and get a bit more organised and download and test the file well ahead of time. I found a new and better torrent site and attempted the hobbit once more. It was a huge file and was going to take longer than we had to download, so we went to the reviewers, rotten tomatoes and others, to get their opinions of the best movies for 2013.
It kind of started to look like 2013 wasn't a particularly good year for quality movies. As most of the family had read Mortal Instruments the City of Bones, we decided, dreadful review not withstanding, that we would watch that one. At least we could have a good laugh and bag it out if it turned out to be as bad as predicted by it's review. And yes it turned out to be as bad as its review. I could go into detail about what was wrong with it, but the problem is my memory of the book is sketchy and Sarah, who is a massive fan of the series and knows it intimately, has written a most amazing critique of it on her blog here. I would have no chance of competing with her eloquence, so I suggest you go to her blog and read it for yourself.
Still, even though the movie was a disappointment, it was nice to have a family gathering. Both Ellie and Steve slept through the movie, but hey they were present, so that's the main thing. Harry enjoyed being popcorn chef and has taken a liking to microwave popcorn. Sarah ridiculed the movie the whole way through, to the point where I threatened to wire her braces together so I could hear what was happening on the screen, and Evan snuggled up with me and Ellie and seemed to tolerate the movie's destruction of the plot lines quite well.
I have spent a fair bit of today gathering some more movies for a later family movie night, perhaps while we are away. As for City of Bones, it is going to get relegated to the recycle bin, it's not worth hard drive space to keep. I need to get myself motivated to get into this packing and cleaning, but it's too hot. Ahhhh lazy summer days that just suit hanging around doing sweet bugger all.
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