Shoot zem. Shoot zem both.

24 October 2005 13:38 EDT Posted by Highlander

SuperGirlfriend and I had a pretty excellent weekend. Saturday the kids went back to SuperGirlfriend's ex, and he actually made an effort to be civil to me, too, and after shaking hands with me and exchanging apologies with me in the yard, he let the girls show him around the new apartment... something they've been longing to do, but that hadn't happened yet because until Saturday, he had resolutely refused to even allow himself to be within eye or earshot of me voluntarily. However, hopefully all that is behind us now. I don't expect him to like me, ever, and, well, to an extent, having the opportunity to be hypocritically civil to someone I don't much like myself isn't anything I'm personally overjoyed about, but SuperGirlfriend and the SuperKids will all be under a great deal less stress if the SuperKids' dad and I can be in the same room together without radiating hostility towards each other.

Sometimes, I guess, you just have to bite the bullet.

He got SuperGirlfriend all upset trying to reverse some extremely complicated arrangements she had made in re: SuperAdorable Toddler's pre and after school care, but to give him further credit, after mulling her objections over for a while, he called later that night and advised that since it was so important to her to keep it the way she'd arranged it, he'd go along.

These are major breakthroughs for him, and he's obviously making an effort to do the right thing for his kids, so, well, I have to be grateful.

After that was over, SuperGirlfriend and I were both a little despondent, as we always are when the girls leave for the two weeks they spend with their dad. So to cheer us up I suggested lunch and a movie somewhere. We wound up out in the sticks, as I wanted to check out a multiplex my bus used to take me by every morning when I was in training for my current job, eating at a Rafferty's across the road from the theater.

I highly recommend Rafferty's and so does SuperGirlfriend; the food we had was superb, and our service was excellent, too.

As to the movie, we decided to see Stay, which seemed mysterious and enigmatic and fascinating from its advertising campaign, but which is in reality a lot of bewildering plotless nonsense that comes off mostly as a very long commercial for some horribly sterile glass & chrome yuppie lifestyle no one in their right mind would ever want to find themselves immersed in. As an experienced author myself, I could pretty clearly see how the script came about; the writer was essentially just hammering away at his word processor, throwing one modern day movie cliche after another up onto his screen, until he had created this bizarre mishmosh of The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects and Fight Club and I don't know what the hell all else... and clearly neither did he, because when it came time to actually explain all the nonsense we'd watched to date, well, he didn't bother. Basically, it was all a dream. Yay. Don't you just love movies like that?

After the bad movie, we went shopping, and at a movie store called Coconuts we found Season 1 of Drawn Together, which SuperGirlfriend loves and wants me to watch (I've seen two eps so far; it's pretty funny and pretty sick simultaneously), as well as the Director's Cut of The Warriors (I had no idea the movie was supposed to be set in 'the future', nor that it had some kind of comic book origins, although the comic book connection certainly explains the bloodless way that Walter Hill staged all the violence) and a second hand copy of Johnny Handsome I was so delighted to find that I didn't check whether it was full or wide screen, and didn't notice it was (fehfehfeh) full screen until I got it home. However, it's still wonderful to have a copy of the movie again, and SuperGirlfriend enjoyed watching it with me, so it's pretty much all good.

We also hit a bookstore, and I spent too much money on Reflex, Stephen Gould's sequel to his excellent Jumper, and The Protector's War, the second in the new trilogy by S.M. Stirling, the first installment of which was superb. I'm looking forward to reading both, however, I still have a very high pile of books in my in-stack from the last time SuperGirlfriend and I went to a bookstore back in early summer, so it's going to be a while.

Sunday was a grey, drizzly, rainy, cold autumn day, and we mostly stayed in and put some finishing touches on the apartment, bringing some pieces of furniture up from storage downstairs so I could take over one corner of our large bedroom and turn it into a home office for me, swapping out a small file cabinet we had the printer on in the living room for a TV table I wasn't using to give us a little more room, getting hold of some office chairs for each computer... overall, a day where we got a lot of useful work done on the apartment, which kept us largely too busy to miss the SuperKids too much. Always a good thing.

Today of course is Monday, and a grey, drizzly, cold Monday at that. I'll get into reviews of the comics in the latest box from Steve Tice at some point in the near future... or I won't, and y'all will just have to live without another really long post about comic books that nobody will ready besides Mike Norton. I'm sure, somehow, you'll bear up.

Have a good Monday, everyone.