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11-jun-04 I Don't Like Mondays.Back to the grind. Oh joy. I'm actually not that sorry to be going back to the office (though I may rethink that comment tomorrow morning -- check with me). The Dreamweaver class wasn't as much fun as my CSS classes were. Everything started off on a bad note when I was called up to the main office and informed that no matter what the person on the phone had said the day before, I hadn't sent over the proper payment information after all. I don't do well in situations like this; I get intensely embarrassed and flustered, and I had to stay very focused on the fact that this foulup wasn't my fault. Not that it did much good with the snooty employee, whose attitude was pretty much "Tough tit if we told you the wrong thing -- maybe you can put this on your credit card." I eventually got my boss on the phone, and he got on the phone with someone else who didn't want to alienate a steady customer, and the upshot of it all was that I was able to stay in class. Which was okay, but it's intensely annoying when the instructor decides to deviate from the course syllabus to spend half a day teaching us her pet fascination. Databases, in this case. After a few minutes of setting up a database in Microsoft Access, I know beyond all doubt that I will never, ever be able to do that for a living. I'd go totally mad. It's hard for me to remember all the steps involved to begin with, and dealing with them through Dreamweaver, which has an infuriating habit of hanging on to cached information instead of doing what you tell it to do with your database, doesn't make it any easier. I ended the last day of the class with a blinding headache, although I did my best to kill it with a cup of coffee and a stroll in the beautiful gardens behind the Smithsonian Information Center. And there's a guy who works in the cafe in the lobby of the school who looks uncannily like Johnny Sack from "The Sopranos." It made me want to drop my croissant and run away screaming. Harry Potter and the Really Crowded Theater.Part of my weekend was taken up with Project Kitchen Aid Pasta Maker, but I don't think I have the energy to talk about that right now. I just finished picking the last of the dough out of the linguini attachment tonight, and we didn't even get any yummy homemade pasta out of the deal. Today I decided I couldn't go another day without seeing "Prisoner of Azkaban," so we braved the crowds and actually got tickets for a showing that wasn't several hours after our arrival at the theater. After the annoying pre-show reels (That new "Who Wants to Be An Action Hero?" show? Totally a ripoff of "WWE Tough Enough") and a series of previews that made me feel fairly certain we wouldn't be braving an actual theater again any time soon (I'm sorry, but is the world really crying out for a live action "Garfield"?), we finally got to see the bloody movie. It was worth the extended wait. This is the first Harry Potter movie that made me feel like I was watching fully-fleshed characters rather than some kids and adults who happened to look somewhat like the descriptions of J.K. Rowling's creations. The tone of the film was considerably darker, but that's okay; it ain't like the books get any cheerier from here. If I've got any quibbles at all, they're that 1. Anyone who went into the movie not knowing who Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs were might be lost by the end, and 2. I'm not sure I liked Movie Lupin -- something about the hair and the mustache and his overall appearance gave me that "Bad Touch!" feeling whenever he was alone with Harry. The casting in the movies has been almost uniformly dead on, so this was a little disappointing. But that's minor; on the whole I really enjoyed the movie and I'm sorry that Alfonso Cuaron isn't returning for another crack at the series.
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