don't fall in love with me yet, we only recently met

[walkingshadow]

meinnim tagged me for the movie meme:

1) Total number of films I own on DVD/video:

Personally? Almost none. I don't own a DVD player, so it doesn't really pay to start a collection quite yet. I own, of course, The Princess Bride and gjstruthseeker got me They Might Be Giants' music videos for a birthday one year. The West Wing DVDs are also technically mine, but I share custody with the house.

2) The last film I bought:

Field of Dreams for my parents' anniversary in a couple of weeks. I'm trying to coax them into converting their VHS collection to DVD, THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE, ensuring that new and better technology will promptly be released.

3) The last film I watched:

Empire Records yesterday with malelia_honu for the first time in like, five years. :-D

4) Five films that I watch a lot or that mean a lot to me:

Hrm. I haven't seen The Princess Bride in years, but I bet I can still quote the screenplay; I could watch Ocean's 11 until my eyes fall out— ditto for Groundhog Day; I've seen Much Ado About Nothing several dozen times ("Do not you love me?" "Why, no! No more than reason!"); and let's toss in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to round out a random five.

malelia_honu and I had a lovely day on Tuesday, thank you Palm Beach County. My dad warned us on the way out about THUNDERSTORMS PREDICTED IN THE AREA, we should be very, very careful and perhaps not linger in Palm Beach County, what with the major thunderstorms, but we managed to make it out the door, agreeing to keep our distance on the wet roads and, like, turn the windshield wipers on. We had blazing sun all day. But I'm getting ahead of the narrative.

It's not a very complicated narrative, but we had fun doing it. Mal picked me up a little after eleven, and our first stop was breakfast at Panera where we ate bread mmmm and mocked young businesspeople for their cellphone usage. From there we drove up to the Morikami, a museum and gardens left by one of a group of Japanese settlers who arrived in the area in the early part of the century. We walked the path around the lake, taking pictures of the flowers and the bamboo and the insects and each other, walking in the shade whenever we could and ducking under shelters when we found them. It was very hot. Our pictures attest to the perfect blueness of the sky but fail to convey the heat. We made it most of the way around the lake and to the Yamato-kan that housed the museum, padding around the stuffy rooms in our paper slippers and sweltering in the warm air the fans blew around. We lost the will to live then. There are no pictures of the rest of the walk back, and once we got into the air conditioning we sat ourselves down in the back of their auditorium and watched the sadly-outdated twelve-minute video of what the Morikami has to offer.

Once we'd gotten some energy back we toured the gallery exhibits. There was some folk art, but the best part was the origiami figures of endangered Florida species: butterflies, birds, a panther's face, an alligator, a snake made from a single sheet of paper, nine feet long. Other animals, all gorgeous. They think there are maybe fifty adult Florida panthers left in the wild.

It was time for ice cream then. Mal's boyfriend R. lives about twenty minutes up the road, and on the way to his house we stopped at Publix and picked up some Ben & Jerry's. Once there, we ate it over a viewing of Empire Records, finishing about when he came home from work. Empire Records! Oh, that movie. I think of it every time I say "orange" and I love Lucas even more than I remembered. "Who knows where thoughts come from? They just appear!"

For dinner they took me out for sushi, and what faaabulous sushi it was. R. was overjoyed Mal had brought along a non-vegetarian with whom he could explore the menu, and I was happy to experiment. We decided we could put away five rolls between the two of us, and we did, though they came after the salad with the yummy ginger dressing and before the green-tea ice cream, and I practically rolled myself out, stuffed and content. Back at the house we looked at our pictures from the day, comparing and culling, and then we all played a rousing game of Rummy-500. We are wild and crazy, it's so true. R. called it quits a few rounds in and went off to bed; Mal and I played a little more and polished off the Ben & Jerry's from earlier before I said goodnight and it was lovely to meet you and we headed back south.

We'd had grand plans of playing more cards and maybe watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail at my place, but it was 12:30 by the time we pulled up, and Mal had things to do in the morning. I stayed up for a while but was too tired to do much, even to post. I went to bed at three-thirty or so and slept until after one this afternoon.

And how do you follow up a day of camaraderie and activity but by doing nothing around the house all day? That's what I thought. There's a little more space on my floor, but I mostly just shuffled things around. My mom and I made dinner and we watched House afterward over ears of corn. I'd say spoilery things about it, but other people already have, and I'm probably just talking to myself anyway. I loved it though, I thought it was done incredibly well and revealed quite a lot, for both the canon and the characters. I'm looking forward to catching it in summer reruns. When I get tired of waiting around for those, I'll be scouring for episode guides at tvtome.com. Plus I'll be looking for the fic. It's not that I'm always in the market for new fandoms, but they follow me home and how can I turn them away?