DISHWASHER!!!

I bought a dishwasher with my tax refund.
This was definitely needed, as Colin and I both HATE doing dishes, and they tend to stack up and get out of control.

Colin and his dad installed it. This was a pretty big project (although it was completed in 1 day with only 2 trips to Lowe's). Since we did not have an old dishwasher that we were removing and replacing, everything had to be installed... a power line, a water line, and a drain line. First of all, though, we had to remove the cabinet.



This ended up being the most difficult part. The cabinet is in pretty good shape though, so I'm planning to paint it, put some wood on the top, and then tile it and stick it between the bedroom and bathroom doors so that we don't lose that cabinet space.
I didn't have charged camera batteries while the installation was happening, so the only pictures of that are on Colin's phone. So here are the after pictures:




(Joy requested a picture of the inside!)


And above is the total end product after readjusting the alignment and putting on the bottom plate thing.

I washed a load last night (notice the lack of dirty dishes in the sink in the after pictures!) and it worked BEAUTIFULLY. It is very energy efficient, and the estimated yearly cost for running it is $30. LOVE IT.

reading about world-wide fatal plagues is fun!

So check out my review of Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood, at Reading Rachel, which is linked in the sidebar.

Have you played Little Big Planet? It's addicting, so I suggest you don't start. And this is coming from someone who hates video games.

Avatar

Colin and I went to see Avatar I think the first weekend it was open here (or maybe the 2nd, I'm not too sure. But it was definitely before Christmas). I will say that we did not see it on a 3-D screen, so I'm sure we missed out on the coolness of that. I did not love the movie. I give it a C.

I am of course not trying to argue that the visuals were not stunning. They were. Completely. There were moments when I actually got a lurch feeling in my stomach because my body thought I was really high up in the sky and my fear of heights kicked in. The plants, animals, and people of Pandora were beautiful, breath-taking, completely amazing. I thought Gollum was an impressive digital character, but he was nothing compared to basically everything in this movie. Sigourney Weaver's Avatar's face looked freakishly like Sigourney Weaver, especially the movement of her mouth when she was talking.

The problem for Avatar comes in when you consider that visuals alone do not make a movie. There has to be a good story. This is where I believe Jimmy Cameron failed.

*SPOILERS* I found the story to be quite unoriginal and predictable. I've seen this story before - Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, The Last Samurai. The white guy infiltrates the "other" culture, falls in love with a lady, rescues the people.

I mostly agree with others who have said that the movie comes across as kind of racist. The main Na'vi characters were all played by actors of color. I don't know what the reasoning was behind that decision, but it just seems a little problematic to have your alien race played mostly by black people in braids or dreadlocks, almost naked, being saved by a white man. I have also read arguments against this view, and I understand the truth in them - Zoe Saldana's character was totally kick-ass on her own (and was the one to kill the worst of the baddies), Sully didn't take over leadership after he tamed the pterodactyl, all the bad guys were white (as were basically 99.9 percent of the humans, which I found ridiculous) etc. etc. It just struck me as an odd choice - I feel like he could have gone a lot of different directions with the Na'vi - why choose to make them aesthetically similar to stereotypes of Native Americans and Africans? They were so naive, and to quote Colin, they came across as "too dumb to know that the humans with the machines were going to hurt them."

I believe that Cameron was genuinely trying to get across that the Na'vi are superior to us, with their circle of life, we're all connected stuff. I don't know. I just think he could have done it better, and been more creative, instead of falling back on painted faces and arrows. Why have the Sully character at all? While Sam Worthington is hot, I don't feel like he's that great of an actor, and was a poor choice as the character for the movie to revolve around. Why tell the story from a human perspective? A movie just about the Na'vi would have been cool, a movie about their resistance of the humans, from their perspective, would have been cool.

Not to mention that the editing at the beginning of the movie, the part where the basics of the plot were being set up, was really freaking weird. I kind of thought it was another trailer for the first 5 or so minutes (I had no idea what the movie was about beforehand).

Plus, the robot machine things that the people ride in previously appeared in Aliens in 1986. I just feel like for $330 million or however much he had to make this movie, he could have come up with something new.

Those are my thoughts on Avatar. I guess what it comes down to is that Jimmy should come up with a more original storyline... and get some help on the script next time.

Invisible

I have gathered more evidence in support of my long-standing theory that I am invisible. (Previous evidence includes the fact that people I have met multiple times often do not remember me.)

So there's some big goings-on happening in the meeting room at work today. Some woman from the group using the room came up and told one of my co-workers that they needed help with their computer. So I went down there and some woman was speaking to the group. I asked some guy if they needed help with something, and he said "Do you have internet here? It's not working." To which I responded, "Yes, we have wi-fi, let me go look at your laptop." So I walk in front of the entire roomful of people, and go over to the laptop. It turned out that they, in fact, had apparently not even tried actually clicking on their wireless and choosing a network, so I did that and connected them to the library's wi-fi, and then reloaded the webpage that they had up, which then loaded correctly. Keep in mind also that the laptop is hooked up to the projector, so what I'm doing can be seen on a giant screen on the wall, that everyone is facing. Nobody said anything to me or acknowledged me in any way, so I started to leave. Then someone asked if there were anymore chairs. So I opened the closet where we keep the extra chairs and got a few out for them. Then I came back upstairs.

Like 10 minutes later, the same woman who came up before came up to the reference desk and said, "We asked a while ago for someone to come down and help us with some technical difficulties, and no one ever came."

So apparently... I'm invisible, no one saw me come down there, and they sent someone back up to complain without looking at the giant projector screen and noticing that the webpage was up, and the guy that I talked to when I went down there didn't point out to anyone that someone had, in fact, fixed their problem.

Books

Hi,
My first book review of the New Year is up at Reading Rachel (link on the right).

I'm off tomorrow, so maybe I'll catch up with writing about some of the stuff I need to write about.

Dorks

Dorks
Originally uploaded by audioblitz13.

This is just funny, and so I felt like I HAD to post it.