Sinfully Challenged

I was finally and inexorably drawn into the whole ALS ice bucket challenge yesterday.  I dodged two earlier attempts from Keene Friend 2 and my sister because I was just too busy so I made the donation to ALS and moved on.  Then, out of the blue, an ex-girlfriend whom I haven’t seen in over thirty years (do the math, anything less and I would be in trouble) sent me the challenge all the way from Belgium.

Since she was one of the only girlfriends that ever dumped me (and rightfully so) there was no way I was passing again.  I also felt I owed both Keene Friend 2 and my sister for their earlier efforts to douse me.  I therefore filled three five gallon pails of water and a couple bags of ice (no small bowls like some, who shall not be mentioned, sis).  My wife was having entirely too much fun videoing the event so when it came to my own challenge time she was named.  This had the unintended effect of ceasing the video just as the first bucket was raised.  She overcame her shock fast enough to catch the final two buckets.

Challenge Completed Thricely

This turned out to be a good thing because she missed the facial expressions when that first bucket of cold water hit my head but resulted in having to load two videos onto Facebook.  In a moment that will register shock waves with our children – my wife is the one who figured out how to download the videos to Facebook since I was clueless.  Buddy was capering around trying to figure out why the dumb humans would choose to get wet.  It will be interesting to see if my wife can overcome her potent fear that approaches allergic levels to cold water – more to follow.

Wife's Assistant Yesterday

She had a great day yesterday as she got her “grandmother fix” when the next door neighbors asked her to look after their impossibly cute daughter for a couple hours.  They spent the time gardening and doing their nails out on the front porch.  Since we’re seeing all of our “kids” this weekend I thought it was only fair to warn them.

Flower Girl in Wife's Garden

Split dates last night as my wife did not want to see Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill For (huh!?)and I wasn’t in any mood for her chick flick of choice.  We each went our separate ways and I had the entire theater to myself to luxuriate in the sequel to one of my favorite movies of all time.  This new movie had the same groundbreaking digital effects scenery of the first where most of the action is in black and white with just a few objects colorized.  My favorite character, the indestructible Marv, was back pulverizing anything in his way while Miho decapitated henchmen by the bushel.  I guess this was a prequel in some ways since when we last saw Marv he was riding an electric chair. Some of the other returning characters were dealing with events from the first movie. 

I really liked this second movie but it didn’t have the same dark edge of the original, it was a little too brightly lit.  There were some new characters introduced who more than held their own led by Joseph Gordon-Leavitt and Eva Green (or more correctly Eva’s breasts which are on full display for most of the movie).  Sin City is like film noir on some amazing performance enhancing drugs.  It doesn’t apologize for being violent or absurd but revels in it.  My wife would have hated it almost as much as I loved it.

MARV!!!!

I finished my frenzied run through the next Vince Flynn book in the Mitch Rapp series with Separation of Power.  This picks up the action a couple weeks after the events in the previous book with Mitch preparing to propose and leave his CIA assassin life behind.  Of course the bad guys (Washington politicians for the most part) have other ideas.  Rapp then has to power his way through the subterfuge and rescue a beautiful model/ex-girlfriend/fellow assassin which doesn't sit too well with his lady love.  On top of his romantic issues Mitch takes a moment to invade Iraq.

You can probably tell why i love this character so much after reading the last paragraph.  Flynn spends a little to much time creating the fiendish bad guys and the book slows to a crawl for those pages.  That's almost a good thing and a needed breather because when Flynn returns to Rapp the reader takes off at literally breathtaking speed.  I think you can probably guess that I kind of liked the book, especially the last 50 pages which I could not send down range fast enough.  I've already started reading the next in the series, it's what i do to myself.