Well, this year I actually caught the finale of the fireworks show (Emma and I missed it last year), and I have to say it was pretty good.
We were even close enough to catch some of the falling ashes and fireworks debris; a fairly big chunk of paper floated down right in front of us and Christian snagged it. I also got some in my eye, and a piece of tape got stuck on Riley’s arm as well.
Well, I finally got around to building the wall that will turn the loft area in our new place into the fourth bedroom.
I actually built the frame on Saturday, and then put up the first half of the drywall panels (with some help from Randy) yesterday morning. I plan to hang the other large panels after work today, and then finish it up on or by this weekend.
I made a deal that it would be done before I go to San Francisco on the 21st, but since we’re going to New York this next weekend that means I pretty much have to have it wrapped up by this weekend.
I’m sure that I’ve sworn off doing this sort of thing myself many times on this blog, but this time I just couldn’t resist saving so much money.
I’ll post some before, half-way, and after photos shortly.
Thanks to a tip from Si Johnston, I just checked out a BBC recording of Foy Vance playing one of his songs, accompanied by an orchestra.
I’d describe him as kind of an Irish Bruce Springsteen with a deeper storytelling style. You may not be into it, but I liked it, so I thought I’d share it here.
I’ll keep this short… you may not want to read it if you want to see the movie.
Peter Cullen playing the voice of Optimus Prime, as he did in the original series, was the saving grace of this movie. Actually, I take that back. It was a huge highlight to be sure, but unfortunately it wasn’t enough (IMHO) to save it.
One pleasant surprise (at least for me) was the amount of screen time that the Transformers themselves got. From the previews I saw, I kind of feared that it would be bits and pieces of robot action interwoven with a large human-based story that would be largely uninteresting. I was happy to find that the robots actually are much more prominent than I expected, but I could have never expected the human part of the story to suck so badly. I don’t want to go off on this in too much detail, other than to say I honestly could not believe some of the scenes and lines they actually put in this flick, and they just kept coming, each time surprising me that someone would actually let that into a movie of this scope/budget/whatever.
I’m sorry that this sounds more than a tad negative, and I do realize that it might just sound like the classic old school fan nitpicking about the inconsistencies compared to what they’re used to, but that’s not really what I’m doing. I can appreciate when movie adaptations stray pretty far from the source material, as long as it’s done well overall.
One last point that I wanted to cover was the action scenes and CGI. While they were very fast paced and pretty rewarding (especially a lot of the robot battles), I really wish they would have stuck with the more classic “boxier” looks (yes, we know computers allow you to create a lot of detail - that doesn’t always mean you should), and not tried to make the fight scenes quite so “Batman Begins”-esque in their pace/speed/disorientation factor. Plus, no Soundwave. 
The bottom line is that I think classic Transformers fans should go see it (just don’t say I didn’t warn you), and new fans, well, I’m not entirely sure how many new fans this movie will be able to pull in.