Here, on Route 66, we talk about Bruno-no-no-no.

Have you ever done the route 66 drive from Nevada through Arizona to get to the Grand Canyon, talk about a whole lot of nothing. I get where Radiator Springs got its art direction from, because in mid August it was all a ghost town. Oh and the asphalt melts and ruins your tires in the heat, so there’s that to look forward to. What a waste of time that was. I think we stopped for gas at one point and it felt like The Hills Have Eyes out there. One Yike! Awarded. Zero stars do not reccomend. Grand Canyon on the other hand, giant hole in the ground. Absolutely lovely. Managed to capture some incredible photos. Which isn’t hard because of the scale and the depth of field in your photos. No fog banks to ruin your visit. My wife went to Machu Pichu in Peru many, many years ago, and did that hill climb and the fog was so thick she couldn’t see anything. Had to go back the next day, climb it all over again to get a photo that had any depth to it.

So Encanto is making the rounds at our house these days, out performing Moana, Frozen and Frozen Two by an order of magnitude. I must just be getting old as I find the sound mixing on the dialogue to be dog shit. I have to turn on the closed captioning, because it’s all just a thick mumble to me. I am, to be honest, hard of hearing from childhood, so that plays a role, I’m sure. But come on! Why have the music blaring, if people talk in a growled mumble even in childrens movies. The people are animated, shouldn’t they talk animatedly (not cartoonish but excitedly and with Em-pha-sis) enunciate more for those of us in the back. Probably why theater folks don’t do movies, they talk to reach the back of the room, which was how I was taught. So the moody, growler gets lost in my ear.

I’m a big fan of Luisa and her song, it’s a real banger. They all have lovely songs. Didn’t realize Rosa Diaz from Brooklyn 99! Was Mirabel. It’s rather lovely, if hard to follow because I can’t hear Abuela talk at the beginning, and through other parts of the film. A good time had by all otherwise.

We just had another 9 or 10 inches of snow after yesterday’s rains. We lost power at 2:00am on Thursday morning and didn’t get it back until just before 5:00pm, so that was fun. School cancelled due to inclement weather, and a portion of our town, us included with no power for nearly 15 hrs. It was a day. Kids took it well considering. But the fireplace came to our rescue yet again, so glad we put that in when we renovated nearly a decade ago. Well worth the footprint it takes up in the room. So I have spent another seventy five minutes shoveling snow again today. Next year, my Christmas/birthday present to myself will be a new to me, used snowblower. I broke my favourite shovel this morning, so I’m without proper tools if we get even more this month or next. Gah! Sick of the snow by now. It was eight degrees above zero yesterday, and kinda nice (even if rainy) and now we are twenty degrees or more colder today, plus the bitter wind chill.

Need to rest my shoulder, and I hope to start a new chapter in my ongoing series today. Still dealing with the loss of my Expanse series.

I keep thinking I want to read the grapes of wrath, which I opted not to read in high school, because I read of mice and men, and the odyssey and the iliad instead. I think I might have missed out on something there. It’s not what I usually read (science fiction or fantasy) but I think it has something to say that I want to hear. One thing I did do when I was out of Artschool and went to university, was I went to the campus book store and found all the sci-fi that was part of a Lit course, bought and read those when I found my Business admin or Sociology texts too dry. Although the abnormal behaviour Sociology stuff was entertaining and enriching. I found De Bono’s six hats to be kind of a pseudo science take on common sense. But whatever. There was considerable overlap between the two subjects. Time studies on manufacturing factors heavily in both streams. So I could use texts for one stream as sources for papers in the other. Less reading for info, more sci-fi reading for fun! Go me!