Showdown

As the kids play for a bit before breakfast, I hear the following:
Ethan: Barbie, your no match for giant Bowser (bringing Bill's old Godzilla perilously close to the doll house where Lainey is clutching two beautifully dressed Barbies. For the uninitiated, Bowser is the bad guy at the end of each level of Super Mario Brothers)
Lainey: Oh, yeah? You can't get us. We'll get you with our big knifes.
A battle ensues, complete with blips of theme music and high-pitched Barbie voices saying "hi-ya", "take that" and other un-Barbie-like things. Occasionally Ethan adds a comment in Mario's Italian accent to Bowser's thrashing and snarling sounds.
Outcome is still unsure, but I don't think anyone's taking Lainey's gals down.

Funnies

Here are some things that made me laugh this weekend:

Ethan giggling uncontrollably at the dog park saying "Mom, all the dog's are sniffing each other's butts"
Both kids yelling out "Mom, that dog looks like Sparky!", when they saw a bulldog (Sparky is the mascot of his namesake wonderful ice cream shop downtown)
Jordan (you may remember an earlier, related post) sampling Mom's baked goods and asking "so are these kolaches or polaches or pilates?"
Alaina flitting by on tip-toe dancing to her boombox wearing, for the maybe 40th day in a row, the purple ballet outfit her aunt Julie got her for Christmas.
Remembering high school fun with my friend Swen who I hadn't heard from since maybe 1991 and who popped up on Facebook this weekend.
College-brand humor when we went to Deja Vu comedy club for the first time in maybe 10 years with our friends Terri and Jamie.
Watching Bill and Andrew count how many times the pastor said "Super Bowl Sunday" during the sermon (that laugh was quietly and reverently inside me)
Watching Jordan and Kahlea sing and dance to some song on the ipod.
Sasha peering at me from her giant cone the vet gave her.
Realizing that Anna and I, at least vicariously, were NOT watching the Super Bowl together.

Motion Picture Joy

I've found my latest time-waster. We recently re-joined Netflix after several years off. The new features are so great! It is better than ever at recommending films based on your prior choices, much like Amazon, my other media fetish. Better yet, many films are available instantly via streaming video. Now Bill will tell you the streaming movies aren't the newest blockbusters, but more older stuff, indies and foreign flicks. Kinda made for me, in other words.
Now in addition to Ragtag, our cool local theatre that shows great smaller-budget and foreign stuff, and which I get to go to more often now because Jordan likes to go with me, there is an endless array of Lisa-films at our fingertips. This coincides with our finally replacing our old computer with a new Dell that includes a good-sized Samsung monitor and decent streaming capabiity.
So today, I called Mom down and we wrestled the loveseat into the computer room (dining room to you traditionalists) and enjoyed Arranged, a very fun movie about arranged marriages for two modern girls in New York. Of course, we could invest in a Tivo or similar device that would stream the movies over to our TV, but first i have to convince Bill there are more than Lisa-flicks to be seen. Until then, I will be computing from the loveseat, with Cody stretched out behind me providing excellent lumbar support.