Thursday, December 30, 2010

It's Over! Part 2


Always So Much Fun 

Gram and Mom have been gone for years now, and Oldest decided a long time ago that she didn’t want to be part of the family anymore. So now, my family consists of only my Middle Sister and my girl, who has been away at college for the last two years. She’s not coming home for Christmas this year, so we’ve decided not to even do Christmas. Neither one of us can afford to do much, and without the family dynamics, it just isn’t much fun.

I did get to spend Christmas Eve with my best friend’s family, and got a really pretty flannel shirt and cat socks, that I’m wearing as I type. And I splurged, big time. Here I have all these tremendous debts to pay, four or five businesses to finance, a car to keep going and just lots of household stuff that could definitely stand to be replaced. But a friend gave me money and told me to spend it on something that would make me happy. So, after much consideration, I spent it on a hard-cover book that shows me how the Harry Potter movies were filmed. 

While the practical side of my brain is still scolding me for buying something that will not help me earn money, the artistic and intellectual and emotional sides are really happy with my decision. The fascination with the Harry films for me is not so much the magic; it’s the family and friendship dynamics, and being able to watch the kids grow up. Cute, sweet little Harry is now a full grown man, and by buying the movie book, I now have a permanent record of all that’s gone on for the last ten years, and can enjoy it whenever I want to. Oh, it’s fun to see how the props and locations were conceived and built, and how the cast and crew were picked, but it’s still the family I find fascinating, more than anything else.  

I took the movies “Out of Africa,” “Julie and Julia,” and Jane Austin’s biography, “Becoming Jane” out of the library before it closed down for Christmas week while it’s getting revamped.  My plan for this week had originally been to watch all those, the first five Harry Potter movies, and “The Lord of The Ring” trilogy. So far, I’ve only watched the Harry films; all of them at least twice, and today, a friend is letting me borrow the sixth one, “The Half Blood Prince.”

It’s now the day before New Years, and I seem to have gotten over my Christmas depression today. I did a lot of editing on what I’ve already written for this post, because if I had posted it two days ago, everybody reading it would be depressed right along with me, and I didn’t want that to happen.

It will soon be time to quit playing, or whatever you’d like to call this, and get back to work. There are a lot of things I want to accomplish this year, which I’ll talk about in the “Goals for 2011” series, coming relatively soon to a theatre near you, kinda, sorta.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for visiting my blog and leaving a comment. It sounds as though you had a good strategy to get you through a difficult time of year for you. To tell you the truth, my NYE post could have turned into a pretty depressing post but I managed to actually take some of the advice from one of the many self-help books I've read in my lifetime! lol Think I might be turning a corner at last. ;)

    Hope you are feeling better and blogging is part of that, or it is for me.

    I haven't seen the film about Jane Austin but would like to. I'll put it on my "To watch" list.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jan, I need to get back to reading the good blogs. I found over a thousand sites listed on Magpie Girl and am working my way through that. Fortunately, so far there is only a handful of blogs that hold my interest, and yours' was one of them.

    If you liked "Pride and Prejudice" with Kiera Knightly, you'll like this one too. I don't usually like Ann Hathaway movies because she tends to pick rather ordinary and silly roles, but this was very intelligently done.

    ReplyDelete