Ok. Now that I can breathe a little, I can fill you in on the weekend! 🙂
As you know if you’ve been reading, Chantale and I got up early on Saturday morning and headed out to the Colisee in Kirkland for an advanced screening of Harry Potter. We were there by 8am but bleary-eyed and nursing our free coffees, we were happy 🙂 The movie itself was incredible! Yes, there were some scary scenes (the Spiders and Snakes in particular) wherein I’ll be covering Melyssa’s and James’ eyes when we see it with them next weekend, but overall I didn’t find it that bad. Chantale hid under her coat for the entire Spider scenes whereas I took it in with relish 🙂 It was just so increidbly well done visually that it would have been a shame to not look 🙂 (Then again, I’m a horror buff and she isn’t 🙂 )
After the movie, we headed over to Future Shop to do some DVD Player checking. As we purchased Harry Potter & The Philosopher’s Stone (yay! Original title!) widescreen on DVD last week, and picked up the Spider-Man widescreen collector’s edition box on Thursday, we knew the Player would be coming soon. At Future Shop, we just didn’t feel right. Everything is so in-your-face that the comfort level is way down. After gathering some info, we hopped back into the car and headed to Dumoulin. Much better. And the guy who served us was friendly and very helpful. We talked for about half an hour reviewing all our options and getting all the details. Finally, Chantale and I were left alone to look around and decided on a Panasonic R32 in silver. We decided it would be our shared (and early!) Xmas gift. We signed on for the extended warranty and the salesperson even threw in a bonus 35mm camera 🙂
Very happy with our purchase, we went to show it off to her mother and then went home to begin the massive clean out/ clear out of videocassettes. We went through our movie collection and divided them into 3 parts: the ones I could part with/give away (turned out to be 21), the ones I could store (LOTS!), and the ones we wanted up on our shelves. Then, I tackled all the tapes I kept with favorite shows recorded on from ever since I had my first VCR. There must have been over 60 of those. All the Star Trek tapes (about 12), all the Star Trek Next Generation tapes (about 20), all the Babylon 5 tapes (about 14), and so many others! These, of course, are just regular cassettes. I kept about 15-20 of them for daily recordings (of weekly shows like Crossing Jordan, CSI, Hidden Hills, Friends, Survivor, etc etc) and have a HUGE bag left to give away to whomever wants them. (If you want a series, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll give them away to people to record on!). With everything packed and stored, the place looks SO much cleaner! Our current plan is to only purchase DVDs of the movies we really loved and slowly, very slowly, replace some of the videos we want on DVD. Not all old movies will be replaced, though, which is fine. But the classics like Godfather, Star Wars, Scarface, Pulp Fiction, etc, definitely will 🙂 Always in widescreen, of course (whenever available).
After a wonderful supper of Alfredo Carbonnera with some exquisite homemade wine, we settled in for some Harry Potter viewing 🙂 In fact, that’s how we spent Sunday! We woke up early because our neighbors seemed intent on making a huge racket (sounded like they were building a bomb shelter). We stayed in bed and listend to the Trivia Show on the radio. I suggested something for brunch so we jumped out of bed and filled our tummies. After the very wonderful brunch, we watched the extras on the Potter DVD, took a short nap, had another light supper, took a relaxing hot bath, and then settled in for Spider-Man (with popcorn and Boomerangs! 🙂 ) Basically, we spent the entire Sunday in our pjs just lounging around enjoying the snow falling and the coziness of our apartment. Exactly what a wonderful, lazy, Sunday, should be!! 🙂
I guess the fact that the DVD Player was our Christmas gift made the huge snowstorm of this weekend and morning quite fitting 🙂