Purgatorial Intro to Happiness

Today used to be the most dreaded event of the year for me – the day before Thanksgiving.  While I served in the military I always tried to make it home for Thanksgiving.  The decision was based on what I considered to be a day’s worth of driving range to New England.  My wife and I had starkly differing views of what constituted driving range.  My range extended as far south as Georgia and west to Northern Tennessee while she barely conceded Washington, D.C.

 She was the smarter of the two of us (something you already knew) but I was driven to return to home waters.  Driving anywhere on the day before Thanksgiving, when most of the US is heading somewhere for the holiday, has to be the closest we come to purgatory on earth.  The worst part of any driving trip is any fraction that passes through Connecticut and this Wednesday that state’s benighted highway system more closely resembles a parking lot.  It’s hard to get back to New England without passing through Connecticut, but not impossible.  I used to drive a hundred miles out of the way to avoid it.  It’s somehow ironic that I now live about five miles north of Connecticut.

A Typical Connecticut Driving Experience

I love that I no longer have to make those long drives and the annual opportunity to marvel at the capacity for human error.  I’ll sleep in tonight and drive up to New Hampshire tomorrow morning.  Of course I first have to go pick up my daughter and son in law who are joining us for the holiday.  You know where I have to go to get them, right?  Yep, a fun three hours driving through – CONNECTICUT!  It is truly testimony to how much I love those guys that I will do this willingly, excitedly, and without too much complaining (well except for here).  Just to make it a little more fun the Big Guy decided to bless us with some biblical level rain today – score!  Thank God for Google Traffic – He gives as well!

My daughter tried to coax me into waiting until this weekend to see the latest Hunger Games movie – Catching Fire.  After my last experience with weekend movie watching and the pack of rapid teeny boppers – I deferred.  My wife and I went to see this middle movie of the promised trilogy and were not disappointed. 

Jennifer Lawrence really is something special (news flash – huh).  I didn’t think there was any way a movie could capture the character of Katniss Everdeen because of the limits of the medium compared to a book but she pulls it off.  The middle movie is always the toughest because of the transitory nature of the plot – getting you set up for the climatic third but this movie stands on its own.  There’s action and a cool arc as we see the champions paraded around the country by the evil president while plotting their doom.  Donald Sutherland is perfect as the evil dude and the only miss in the cast is Josh Hutcherson who is clearly fighting above his talent level when paired with Lawrence.    

If there was a little too much hang wringing and angst about which of the male leads Katniss was going to choose I only had to look around the theater to understand.  I was one of very few males in the audience and the melodramatic elements had the double XXers in full swoon.  That being said – great flick that has something for us XYers as well.