The View From Here

As with many other people, I have been greatly anticipating the next Pixar movie.  Well, I have seen it and it is great.  In fact WALL*E is one of my favorite Pixar movies.  As I make that statement I realize that I could say that about pretty much any Pixar movie.  It is quite amazing that one studio has made nine (if I am counting correctly) movies that I can honestly say are all great.  I would think that most people would agree.  If only other movie studios would take note and take the time to make the majority of their movies great.  Unfortunately, they tend to just throw junk out the door counting on the fact that the American public is used to the junk and will stomach it.  It is rare to see a movie that seems to stand up out of the rabble, refusing to be average, and truly be outstanding.  Pixar does this on a consistent basis and WALL*E is no exception.

To those of you who have heard that this movie preaches environmentalism I would ask you to read this interview with the writer/director.  I have read several interviews that he has given and in every on he says that he did not write this movie to preach.  In fact he came up with the idea in 1994 long before the green hype.  What I took from it is something I already agreed with: God has given this world to us and we need to take care of it.  Do yourself a favor and go see this movie whatever you may have heard.

One of the things that stands out in my mind about this movie is the lack of dialogue but the fantastic story telling through character interaction and visuals.  It is a marvel to behold.

Pixar taught me a lesson with Cars.  I remember seeing the trailers for it and wondering how it would be a good movie.  When I did see it it was wonderful just like the movies that had come before.  It is hard for me to doubt this animation studio.

(I suppose this is turning into as much of a review of Pixar as it is of WALL*E.  I feel that if they made the movie I will see it.)

Not to be forgotten is the animated short that comes before the movie.  Again, wonderful!  I highly recommend this movie to you.  Go see it!

Brian

The Supreme Court voted yesterday on whether or not Americans had the right to legally own guns.  Washington DC had a gun ban in effect that heavily restricts people from (legally) obtaining guns in the city (I guarantee you that there were still many ways to get them illegally).  This was challenged by a man named Dick Heller who was denied a gun permit in DC.  I won’t give you all the background on it as there are numerous source of information in the media on this.  Suffice to say that it ended up with the Supreme Court hearing the case.  I am very happy with the outcome of the vote.  The Constitution wins on this one for sure.

Justice Scalia wrote in the majority ruling that, “There seems to us no doubt on the basis of both text and history that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms.”

As happy as I am about the outcome of the vote, I am less than happy about the votes cast.  The decision was a 5-4 vote meaning that we were one vote away from having the second amendment slaughtered and our right to bear arms taken away by the very government that the founding fathers meant for those guns to protect us against. Despite the outcome that is pretty scary.

Brian

Here is the latest from our garden.  Everything is starting to grow very quickly now.  Our cantelope is making great strides.

On another note, some of you may know that I enjoy writing.  Weird, I know, an accountant that likes to write, but I do.  I have really enjoyed writing here on my website but I have always wanted, deep down inside, to write stories.  I have developed several ideas over the past few years but have never known how to get them into story form.  They have just sat as notes in a Word document to be updated every now and then.  I have been doing some research on how to write and one of the suggestions I heard was to just sit down and do it not worrying about exactly how it comes out.  You can always revise later.  Just sit and write, or as the person I heard it from said it, butt in chair, hands on keyboard (BICHOC).  This is so simple right?  Well their advice coupled with talking to one of my friends about his writing and I am about to finish the prologue to one of my stories.  I never thought I would actually have any of this story written. I figured that they would just stay in my head forever.  Well, that’s not going to happen now.  I don’t know how long it will take me to finish this or if it will even get published (that’s a laugh at this point) but I am on my way.  I have officially begun one of my long-term goals.  And with that I will take my bow and leave you to wonder what it is about.

Brian

Just a really quick funny blurb.  At work today Kevin, our CPO (that’s Chief People Officer), and I were discussing the merits of dieting.  Kevin had something very profound to say about it.  Basically, he said that he didn’t believe in dieting because he believes that our bodies are the temple of God.  He believes that our God is a big God and therefore deserves a big temple.  I hadn’t heard that argument for eating lots of delicious food before.  Pretty funny!

Brian

Here is something else new to us.  At the end of May we decided to plant a vegetable garden.  We had talked about this for a while and had just not gotten around to it up to this point.  Those of you who know anything about a garden know that we squeaked in just at the last moment to plant.  The reason we decided to do this on such short notice was that we came across a way that would be fairly quick and inexpensive other wise we probably would have put it off again.  We tried what is called “square-foot gardening”.  Here is what it looks like.

The next step was planting the plants as seen next.

So here we are with all of our nice and very little plants at the end of May.  The squares you see that have nothing in them are lying to you.  (The beans are hiding there)  Now our responsibility was to water.  And so we did.

As you can see above the bean plants are finally coming out!  This happened practically overnight.  We were getting worried that our bean plants might not even sprout but after about a week they came up all at once.  I came home for lunch and a few had started coming up.  I watered them and by the time I came home there were about double of them.  Amazing!  This last picture is the most recent one (as of a few days ago) and you can really see a difference.  The thing that has astonished us the most was the cantelope plant (it is at the top in the picture above). It had stayed about the same size up until about a week ago.  Look in the picture below (top right hand side on this one and you will see how big it has gotten in about a week.

As you can see we have gotten smarter as we go.  The soaker hose makes it much easier to water.  All the beans are growing up and we are expecting some real vegetables soon.  We have already harvested one jalapeno.  One of our bell peppers that was starting to grow got blown off in a storm we had a few nights ago.  Sad.

So there you have it.  Our first garden.  I will keep you updated on how it goes.

Brian