Father Daughter Time II – A Giant Day

My Puzzle Partner

Yesterday was another day of unbridled yet unassuming fun.  My most excellent daughter and I spent the day watching movies – something we both kind of like (vast understatement).  She has a quiet grace that just makes it fun to hang around with her.  As I wrote yesterday I cannot remember a time when it was just the two of us and an agenda free weekend was just what the doctor ordered for both of us.

We spoke with my wife a couple of times and I could tell she really wanted to be back with us for the weekend, until I told her it was snowing again.  My wife was out dancing with her family and friends until three in the morning so she wasn’t her normal chipper self.  She confessed to actually wanting to leave but none of her friends would let her.  I told her now she knows how I feel when she refuses to leave a club when I run out of gas (she laughed nervously).

My daughter and I went to the movie theater to see Jack The Giant Slayer which was a lot better than I expected.  Stanley Tucci and Ewan MacGregor in supporting roles tells you how good the cast was.  CGI has reached the point that even thirty foot tall giants are completely believable.  Nicholas Hoult who we last saw as a zombie in Warm Bodies continues to impress as the lead – Jack.  My daughter, always a fountain of pop culture awareness, informed me that Hoult had recently broken up with Jennifer Lawrence – so things aren’t going completely his way.  He was very good and heroic in this movie though.  The action does not let up and the climactic battle was awesome.

We returned home for more movies and our recently discovered mutual fascination with puzzles.  I subjected my daughter to one of my “culinary Sundays” where I prepared two batches of Hamburger Helper and a huge vat of spaghetti for my upcoming lunches. She took it fairly well hiding her horror at the results.   

She had never seen the Untouchables which we quickly rectified and then watched a Japanese movie called Battle Royale on Netflix instant.  This is what I love about hanging with my daughter – I never would have thought to watch something like this but I completely enjoyed the camp fun and unintentional comedy of what was a pretty good flick.  It involved a class of high schoolers who are sent to an isolated island and forced to kill each other until only one remains. (I’m sure the hidden fantasy of many high school teachers) There was a high Hunger Games relativity at play.

We ended the night back at the puzzle table and finished the puzzle we started together on Saturday.  Frustratingly we found that one piece was missing.  A complete search of the house failed to turn it up.  Since it was a brand new puzzle I knew the piece had been there on Saturday.  If I had to guess I would say the missing piece is working its way through the digestive tract of a certain black lab who was decidedly opposed to the puzzle making.

I really enjoyed working on the puzzle together with my daughter.  It was kind of bittersweet as we finished because it also signaled the weekend was ending and I’ll shortly be returning her to her native habitat.

Puzzle of the Missing Piece

Good Flick