Today begins the two week countdown to Christmas. You know even with there having been so much snow on the ground all ready this year I am not particularly feeling like we are approaching Christmas time. I haven’t seen any Christmas specials yet and haven’t really heard any music playing except for quick excerps here and there. And they always starting playing the music and putting up the advertising so early that it loses all of its impact anyway. But, one way or another, we are rapidly approaching the Holidays. Dominica and I are planning on doing most of our shopping tomorrow. We tend to wait until pretty much the last minute. It wouldn’t be us if we didn’t.
Today Dominica and I drove down to Silver Springs to worship at the Letchworth New Life Fellowship church there in the middle of town. It is almost directly across the street from Mary and Jocelyn’s apartment. Church starts early down there which is always tough for us on Sunday mornings. It is hard enough making it to the north side of Perry for 10:55 at LaGrange but getting all of the way to Silver Springs for 10:30 is a little beyond us.
After church we stopped at the Silver Lake Country Market in Perry and grabbed subs for lunch. We have a busy day and didn’t want to spend too much time out on the road and we figured that that would be fast and easy. It is always entertaining to stop there because they are like a general store and sell just about everything in the world that no one could ever need in there. So much junk that it is hysterical.
We came home and spent the afternoon with our puppy just hanging out. Phil and Kate called and rescheduled out trip to see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe because they had to run over to sign the papers for their new house! They are very excited to be finally buying a house. They have been trying to get one for quite some time now. So we decided to wait until the 8:15 show tonight to see the movie. Originally we were going to see the movie and then go out for dinner. We switched the order and decided that we would meet them at Friendly’s on Spencerport Road and then go to see the movie after that. So we got more time to hang around at home with Oreo. He is going to go over to dad’s house while we are at the movie so that he doesn’t panic from us being gone for too long. He is getting better but we are going to be gone longer today that he is used to yet so we wanted to make sure that he was comfortable and dad enjoys having him from time to time.
We went up and met the Ayers at the Friendly’s on Spencerport Road next to Nick Tahou’s. We had a good time hanging out although I didn’t get to see them as much as Min did because my stomach was bothering me. They got a chance to show us pictures of their new house that they had just closed on. They are moving up to the north east side of the city on February 15th. The are really excited. It will take a while before owning a house really becomes a reality to them. I can vouch for the fact that even having lived in my own house for over two years that it really seems strange to own a house of your own.
After dinner we rushed over to the theatre to catch the movie. We, of course, went to Tinseltown to watch the movie in Rochester’s only DLP theatre. We figured that the place would be totally packed but, in fact, there were only about twenty people there. So we got totally choice seats. Even so we did get stuck with a family right behind us who had to explain every little detail to their child but at least they weren’t saying annoying stuff.
I know that everyone is waiting to hear what we thought of the movie. Well wait to now more… the bottom line is: This may be the single best book to moving picture conversion ever done. We were totally thrilled with the movie. It was amazing. The effects were great and the adaptation was simply perfect. I am so happy that they managed to make such a faithful compliment to one of the greatest works of literature ever written. For any of you who are fans of the Chronicles of Narnia you must go see this movie. And if you are not a fan, which of course means that you have never read the books, then you should probably not even worry about reading the books first as the movie is so incredibly faithful that you really won’t even miss anything. And believe me when I tell you that I am not one to go easy on movies for not following the original print faithfully.
I grew up with the Chronicles of Narnia. My mother read me the entire series (there are seven of them) when I was about four years old. She used to read me a chapter each night before going to bed. When she read them to me she would record them on a Radio Shack cassette tape recorder. One of those silly portable jobs that were popular around 1980. Boy were those silly tape recorders. They had a terrible little built in microphone but I think that she actually used a plug in microphone. The recording quality was autrocious but it was both my introduction to “adult” fiction as well as my first introduction to the genre of fantasy. It was a major turning point in my life. I have a lifelong appreciation for literature because of those books. Going through them “live” the first time was important but then I listened to the tapes of the entire series over and over again over the next several years. I must have listened to each book twenty times or more. For years I would listen to them almost daily. I developed the desire to listen to all of the books that I wanted to read from that experience. It took a long time before having audio recordings of a large number of books became practical but recently I have reverted to that paradigm and now I see how it happened. All those years ago the seed was planted. I loved those books. I knew each one of them by heart. I knew every character and their significance within the story. I knew how each character related to every other character. So it means a lot to me that Disney has pulled through and created such a wonderful screen adaptation of the books. It is almost as if they took a piece of my imagination and brought it to life for me. Just for me.