Yes, it has been a while. The holidays have been particularly busy, what with my new job. I ended up having to work a number of Sundays, which cut into my already small reading time. My spare time hasn't been helped by a new project I have going on also.
My wife and I volunteer at a local historic theater, and in particular I'm part of the movie committee, helping to decide what we will show, and to manage the costs and the volunteers and other minutiae. At the end of the last season, we found out that a local hotel owner was hoping that, once he got his hotel remodelled, we might want to work with him to run a special series that the hotel would sponsor. After batting around a number of ideas, I ended up volunteering to run a series of classic movies. I've spent quite a bit of time deciding the first year's worth of movies and learning what all goes on with getting the rights to show the movies.
Because of this new project, I've been watching quite a few older movies. Amazon had quite a number of box sets in which I was interested for more than half off, so those were impossible to resist, especially as they were movies I planned to show this year (Shadow of a Doubt and My Little Chickadee). And for Christmas we also bought ourselves a Bluray player, along with a bunch of movies (most of which we already own on DVD, we are such suckers).
So in the past few weeks, I've watched all the movies that the Marx Brothers did for Paramount (Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup), Gaslight, a couple of movies by W. C. Fields (The International House and The Bank Dick), and The Princess Bride and Amadeus on Bluray. I have another 8 movies by W. C. Fields, 10 Alfred Hitchcock movies for Universal, and 7 or so Blurays to go.
This all means I'm consistently about two weeks behind on my comics now, because of all these other hobbies I have. With the lull that most television shows are going through right now, I might actually be able to catch up, but this weekend I will putting myself even further behind, since the comic shop I go to down in Portland is having their semi-annual 50% off sale. I always end up buying about 200 books on these weekends.
On the plus side, Larry Marder recently released the newest work in his Tales of the Beanworld series. I intend to review it, but I've wanted my first reading of it to simmer a bit. This one book encompasses about half as much material as he had previously published in the regular series, so having that much new stuff makes reviewing it a bit overwhelming, especially without a second reading to pick up on things I might have missed on the first, excited, breakneck read-through. I hope to get to that in the next couple of days.
At any rate, I hope your holidays have been festive, and that the new year brings you everything you deserve, and thanks for reading!
