Partying like a rock star

 Writing this as I realized I was an old fart just a few minutes ago.

This is not the first time I've realized this, so I guess I re-realized that I'm an old fart.

This particular realization?  

Got excited that there was a Ken Burns documentary series on the American Revolution starting on PBS tonight.

I heard my DVR grunt under the strain.

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We had us a beautiful weekend here in my corner of East Tennessee, this middle of November.  We had a cold snap...a very cold snap at the beginning of the week.  Lows around 19, colder by about 15 degrees than any night since last winter.  Our fig and banana trees seemed to feel this snap the hardest.  The banana tree went from vibrant green to dull yellow overnight, it's leaves reaching as high as 13 feet last weekend, now wilting to just taller than my 6'4".  The fig tree, meanwhile, just decide to drop its leaves all at once.  I used the leaf blower later in the week to blow them around its base, in a makeshift mulching.

But the cold gave way to highs in the 70's again this weekend.  Shyam and I unloaded a load of firewood for her folks this morning, and we'd both worked up a light sweat by the end of it.

Colder weather is coming.  Tonight, in fact.  I think we're expected a low around 34 this evening.

Should be good sleeping weather.

(Another old fart milepost, I think...commenting on cooler weather as beneficial to slumber....)

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Saw a couple new movies last week.

The first, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, was a delight.  We caught it on Netflix, after wanting to try to make the pilgrimage to Sevierville to see it on the Big Screen.  Real life being what it is, lately, we couldn't make the time to do that.  So, we waited until its Netflix release.  Regardless of where we saw it, I'm just happy that it was exactly what I wanted it to be.  A big, glorious horror story.  It's a favorite novel.  And it does the book a lot of justice.  Jacob Elordi is amazing as the monster.  Oscar Isaac is reined in and performs well.  Christoph Waltz is amazing as always.

An honesty, though?  I don't care for Mia Goth in this.  It's like she's half a beat off.  It's not horrible, but she didn't seem to fit perfectly.

One more note about Frankenstein:  my blog pal Sheila O'Malley wrote the book on the production.  I'd like to pick that book up at some point.

Later in the week, my buddy Micah and I caught Predator: Badlands.

I liked it.  It was exactly the gruesome adventure I needed it to be.

I couldn't help but compare it to Fede Alvarez's Alien: Romulus, which appeared last year.  I enjoyed seeing that movie on the Big Screen, but don't know that I gave it more than a moment's thought after that.  Alvarez seemed to enjoy playing in that sandbox, but I can't recall seeing anything on the screen that wasn't a callback to some other facet of the Alien franchise, including one or more of the video games: references lost on me considering I haven't played a console regularly since I bought a PS2 off a stocker when PS3 came out.

Dan Trachtenberg, with Prey, Killer of Killers and now Badlands, has expanded the canon on screen in a fun way that doesn't betray the original flick, which is just a wonderful, wonderful thing.