A moving story

[Today’s run: 6 miles on the banks of the Big Thompson river]

I write this from Loveland, Colorado where we are visiting with our daughter and son-in-law and their nearly one year old baby. We are having a great time.

I had not run since last Saturday, but we got out and did a nice 6 miles today. Loveland has a lot of nice trails. I really like the inclination of small towns to use their flood prone areas for sports and recreation, particularly biking/running trails.

Anyway, I’ve had a busy week at work. The new guy started on Monday and I had three days of in-person before I zoomed out and he is expected to be able to lend a hand replacing me. We both worked at the office all three days. I think we gave him a pretty good foundation upon which to build using video calls, screen sharing and other remote tools.

In my free time I was boxing stuff up.

Tuesday the movers showed up and got a good amount on the truck. They finished Wednesday. We were “camping out” after they put all of the cooking equipment in the truck. Tuesday evening was somewhat sad since they had already packed the popcorn popper.

Wednesday I cut out a bit early (I had worked extra on Monday) and got home and finished emptying the house. We have a van-load of trinkets in the garage awaiting our return. About 5:30 we closed it up and jumped in the car and drove to Chicago to a hotel.

We caught the 2:30 am airport shuttle after a bit of sleep. It turned out that the check-in people didn’t arrive until 3:30! And we were unable to buy our usual snacks and water to take on the plane because none of the shops were operating before the 4:20 boarding. But we survived the 2 hour flight and ubered to a Village Inn on Tower Road near Denver International for breakfast. Then we ubered again to Loveland and here we are.

Most of our possessions are on a truck that may or may not be in Iowa City. The rest are in the garage, in the van (parked in front of the garage) or in our suitcases.

I almost talked the new guy at work into taking the MGB off my hands. But he saw it and decided to pass. I think he’s going to make a great employee… wise beyond his years.

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Movie Review — how James Bond is a better father than Trinity is a mother.

We watched the new James Bond movie and the new Matrix movie yesterday. I’m not sure how that was accomplished, technology wise. But we did.

Both movies are formulaic and touch-the-bases nostalgic.

No, I found it unbelievable that Bond was terribly in love with the daughter of Mr. White, then went underground so far that MI6 thought he was dead, then popped up for one last go. But Ok, the un-retirement theme seems to be a regular feature of late-model Bond movies. After much bad guy foiling, Mr. Bond is left with a hopeless situation: live without seeing his heartthrob and their daughter (shades of Forest Gump) neither of which he had seen for 5 years anyway, or just don’t. He took the sacrificial just don’t option.

In Matrix 4 I was having some trouble following the plot mostly because the faces were different and the movie was 99% earnest conversations between more-or-less total strangers and also because the volume was low. But somehow Neo had been taking daily blue pills and surviving inside the matrix, scraping along as a highly esteemed video game designer. I’m not sure what upset that applecart, but we find him going back to the “real” world and then trying to convince Trinity to take the same path. And in the end it seemed that she did. And I would be OK with that except for the scene where her husband and three children begged her to come home. Maybe they were fake inside-the-matrix-only constructions… like Morpheus? I’m not sure how that works. If any old person can turn out to be a fake AI or even just be hijacked by the Matrix, then it kinds of spoils things for me. So no, I was not impressed. I got a good chuckle from some lines about how people are so able to convince themselves of something that is not real… amazing stuff coming from a director who has convinced himself he’s a woman.

One theme of the Matrix movies, to me, is that people may not understand reality, but we don’t necessarily need complete understanding to make moral decisions in response to what we perceive. People can do right and wrong even when everything around them is a projection.

So James Bond was uncharacteristically selfless and the Matrix movie was uncharacteristically selfish and neither was consistent but both had rock-em-sock-em scenes with bad guys and stuff.