Another Fab Weekend

Wow there is a *lot* to blog about this morning. Where to start ...

On Friday night (after gym even, impressive!) I went to dinner and a movie with J9-double0blonde and her sister Squeak. We ate at Doppio Zero where I had a very nice Haloumi and Roasted Vegetable Salad and then watched Happy Go Lucky.

Sally Hawkins plays Poppy, a 30-something teacher who exhibits an eternally optimistic demeanour. She always has a smile on her face, and does her best to brighten the days of those around her by making small talk and cracking jokes.

For the past ten years, Poppy has lived with her best friend, Zoe (Alexis Zegerman), a fellow teacher whose wry outlook on life serves as the perfect counterbalance to Poppy's effervescent charm. One day, Poppy decides that it's time to take driving lessons and enrols in the Axle School of Motoring.

Almost instantly, Poppy and her stressed-out instructor, Scott (Eddie Marsan), clash. Still, it seems that there's more to this relationship than surface appearances would suggest. After accompanying her colleague Heather (Sylvestra le Trouzel) to a tango class taught by a particularly passionate instructor (Karina Fernandez), Poppy connects with kindly school social worker Tim (Samuel Roukin).

Of course, Tim can't help but fall for a woman of such boundless compassion, but how will Poppy's increasingly jealous driving instructor react to the news of her most recent romance?

Meh, I was expecting more ... but it was a pretty average inconsequential film. The best bit is the flamenco instructor - hysterical! And her best friend looks like Sybil Fawlty's daughter, maybe that's just me? Although I will say that the new seats at nouveau are pretty cool. Just a pity about all the chatty over 50s in our movie (seriously there were people actually pointing things out in the London scenery during the film !?). Oh and we had a pretty disastrous start to the movie. Dunno exactly what happened, but about 10 minutes in it was like the film got stretched or something. It was like watching aliens :) Eventually someone called the cinema people and got it sorted ... but they couldn't rewind the section we'd just watched. Which was annoying.

On Saturday we took Coal to the vet ... was getting a little worried about the urgency of getting him neutered. He's 3 & half months old now. Turns out he's not a he after all ... my Coaly-boy turned out to be a Coaly-girl. Well now that was a shock! But I gather it happens quite often with bunnies ... till they're around 3 months old and sexually mature it can be hard to tell. So Varen & I have spent the weekend correcting ourselves, because we keep referring to our "boy". Oops. Anyway, at least it saves us a surgery :)

After that, Varen & I headed off to Doodles of a Journo's house for the end-of-the-month bloggirls event ... which was her housewarming this month :) We had a fantastic afternoon with Doodles & TSC, Louisa, Laura & her 2 cute kiddies, Arkwife & Arkhubby, Ruby, Angel, Damien & Glugs and ExMi. Thanks again Doodles!

On Sunday we had a bit of a lazy day, aside from the week's shopping - yes, I'm back on my new-year-new-recipes challenge ... and have even made a list for Varen to buy next weekend while I'm down in Cape Town! Organised or what? I actually missed cooking something new last week. Weirdo :)

In the afternoon, we decided to go watch a movie, secretly I was hoping for a Benjamin Button-Changeling double feature :) But we accidentally ended up watching Inkheart. How does one accidentally watch something you might ask. Let me tell you, because it left me feeling supremely annoyed! So generally I love Ster Kinekor's self-booking machines. Who really wants to deal with a service-person where you can't even pick your own seats (far from the noisy crowd)? Not moi. But the machines at Cresta have been deteriorating for a while now ... they respond terribly to the touch-screen. Which is how I worked out what happened. You get a screen where you pick which day you are booking for. Today, today, today. It didn't seem to be registering my click so I kept tapping away at the screen. Then I got a list of movies and tapped Benjamin Button. All's good right. Proceed on my merry way, notice the movie time seems different than on the website when I checked earlier but continue tapping none the less. When it eventually printed our ticket and I looked up at the big schedule board I noticed that it said Benjamin Button was showing at the time I'd originally expected from the website. So I had a closer look at my ticket. We were booked for Inkheart. Inkheart which is no where near Benjamin Button on the movie listing screen ... but which is about where today appeared. Sigh. How annoying. I almost threw the ticket away and went to re-book our tickets ... till I got to the pricing screen and saw that a second set of tickets would cost me *more than double* the tickets I'd already bought and paid for (for the WRONG movie). With my Edgars discount, Ster Kinekor movies cost R44 for 2 people. You get one discount a day, so these 2nd tickets were going to cost R90 for 2 people. R45 a person?!? Seriously? Add popcorn and drinks onto that and movies must be costing an average (non-discounted) person just over R150 for a night out at the movies for 2. Now that just seems completely exorbitant to me! Seriously people, movies should not cost that much, hook yourselves up with an Edgars or Discovery discount or freaking go to Nu Metro!

Inkheart is a thrilling adventure that stars Brendan Fraser as Mo Folchart, a father who possesses a secret ability to bring characters from books to life when he reads them aloud. But when Mo accidentally brings a power-hungry villain from a rare children's fable to life, the villain kidnaps Mo's daughter and demands Mo bring other evil fictional characters to life. In an attempt to rescue his daughter, Mo assembles a disparate group of friends - both real and magic - and embarks on a journey to save her and set things right.

The movie wasn't terrible. It was quite fun in a lighthearted total-fluff sense. There were some huge gaping holes in the plot tho (as happens with most fantasy type stories that start with a cool idea but can't really be explained). But I was still annoyed by not watching either of the movies I'd intended to :(



In other news, 2009 South African Blog Awards nominations have opened (and close on 14th March). Here are my nominations for this year (sorry to all the other amazing personal blogs I read, but you're just competition ;) ):

South African Blog of the Year: Glad to be a Girl
Best Post on a South African Blog: Doodles of a Journo > People don't understand my job!
Best Photographic Blog: Jeanette Verster Photography
Best New Blog: Se7en
Best South African Podcast: The Digital Edge
Best Personal Blog: Glad to be a Girl

Go and nominate your favourites now :)

I have something else I need to blog about, a dilemma I'd like some advice on, but I need to get some work done now ... so maybe later.