call it friend-o

Check out our branch. It fell from a dead tree and landed smack in the middle of our parking area this morning at around 9:30am. Thankfully the Honda, tucked safely in the bottom right corner, was unharmed. We are under a wind advisory here in Western Michigan all day and when you're fortunate enough to live in what is essentially a treehouse you deal with things like 15 foot branches falling down.


Enough about the branch! Onto more important things like how amazingly good "No Country For Old Men" was.

The Coen brothers done growned up. I had fairly high expectations and though they weren't exceeded they were most definitely met. Watching this movie was like looking at music. The pacing was perfect. You could almost hear the metronome measuring out each shot, each frame, each beat. And yet there was no music. No background music. No hip soundtrack. Nothing. It was deliberate and perfect and I can't imagine the film any other way. It did lack tension for me but that was my own fault as I read the book first and therefore knew who was going to die and when. There was one scene I found unnecessary and one actress I thought they Coen brothered up, but other than that I got no complaints. It was way less violent than I expected given how terrified I was reading it and knowing just how well those boys do up the violence. It was still bloody just not gratuitous. The world was a character in and of itself--scrubby desert-y West Texas with old motels and hotels and trailer parks and cars from the 70s and western shirts and cowboy hats and boots and shell casings and guns and scary dogs and dust and and drugs and outlaw cats. Tommy Lee Jones deserves an Oscar nod for this as do the brothers. Cormac McCarthy wrote an excellent novel about a changing world, a man who makes a mistake, a psychopath on a rampage, and a sheriff who is just trying to decipher it all. And these boys were the only ones I could imagine bringing it to the big screen.

Tonight I'm off in search of a rug for the downstairs as tomorrow, weather permitting, I'd like to get that desk in. I'd also like to get every other little thing I've been putting off--the typewriter, the sewing machine, the fabric, the boxes of kitchen stuff I only use once a year when I actually make homemade pasta but refuse to give away--up the stairs. Enough is enough of this split living. I'm ready to nest.