Some Cool Stuff I've Seen

I had a few days off of work before the Fourth, and aside from going to parties where I either knew no one or knew everyone but they were fundamentalists and I feared to open my mouth unless something horrifically pagan should just come flying out of it, I did do some cool stuff. Like take the boys to the beach. Although either the water level is really low this year or they moved the ropes in at Medicine Lake; even Oliver couldn't get in deeper than his hips, so I didn't bother trying to swim. I did bring a notebook with me and got a bit of writing done

(Mostly outlining. My original stab at MITWA ran aground. Someday I'll admit I'm not a pantser and stop trying to just plunge in and find my way. I carried that same notebook around all week, except to the parties. Because not even I am that socially retarded. Outlining has got me excited about the story again, which is good news. I hope to be at the point where I can start writing from word 0 again soon.)

We also took the boys to see the Star Wars exhibit at the Science Museum, which was cool. Now the previous museum exhibit I had seen for Star Wars was at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and focused on the folklore and mythological roots of Star Wars. Star Wars succeeds much better at being folklore than science fiction, and that prior exhibit was a better one, but that was when my firstborn was a wee babe and the second not yet a thought, so they never saw it (although I bought a stack of books at the MIA bookstore about Star Wars and myth, which they've paged through a million times).

This exhibit had props from all six movies plus little video segments with the special effects guys talking about how they designed the ships, etc. plus some more peripherally related segments about city design (tying in to Coruscant) or exploring the Arctic and Antarctic (Hoth, natch). Even cooler were the experiment stations where the boys got to try to build a mag-lev train and get it to work in increasingly more complex ways (loosely connected to Landspeeders), or to try to build robots that could stand on its own legs on flat ground or a slope, or build and program a more complex robot to navigate mazes. We spent a couple of hours there; it was very cool (although the more peripheral it was to Star Wars the more interesting I found it. Perhaps this is because at this point there is not much I don't already know about those movies).

Also Natalie Portman is teeny tiny. They had one of her costumes up on display and I'm quite certain I could fit her in my pocket. Samuel L. Jackson is pretty tall, though.

The other cool thing we did with the boys was take them to see the new Pixar movie WALL-E. Pixar doesn't make bad films (they are second only to Hayao Miyazaki in my book), so if this one wasn't as good as THE INCREDIBLES, it's still better than most other animated films. I particularly liked the robot EVE; she was a grumpy bitch blasting away at things which annoyed her and then quietly fuming. You don't get much of that in movie love interests, you know?

So anyway, June book and movie posts still to come, but this writing thing has me pleasantly distracted (so much nicer than being distracted by day job overtime, let me tell you).