various good things

Some good things:

• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: we caught a matinee today and both thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a lush filmic love letter to George Lucas, Spielberg, and all the 30s & 40s serials that inspired them. But it's also just a lot of fun, too. It's not retro only for the sake of being retro, the way some of Spielberg's later stuff seems. It's kind of more campy than that, which I like.
• it was phone call weekend -- calls from three dear long distance friends! I wish they were local, but I'm awfully glad for the phone.
  
• The Time Traveller's Wife, which I finished a few days ago. Loved, loved, LOVED it. It's smart without being ponderous -- the author is an academic, actually, and one of the characters works in the Newberry Library -- the references to Rilke etc actually blend in pretty well. The premise involves time travel (which doesn't put me off, since I read SF/fantasy) but it's a novel anyone could enjoy. Time travel is just a device for exploring the complexities of human relationships - - how people change, how you can't forecast the future of a relationship. It's well written, moving, completely engrossing.
  
• being available to help a friend deal with her dead car battery (it wouldn't take a jump, so we had to go get a new one) -- it's great to be able to be concretely helpful for someone in a bind.
  
• the excellent t-shirt my friend sent me. (To underscore her comment on my blog.)
• a relaxing Sunday mostly free of the usual Sunday grumps
• play time with W and G. Dogs keep you really zen. They don't care about the future and they don't care about the past. Only the now.
  
• feeling grateful for my gf. Nothing like a night out at one of the bars to make you extra super glad you've got a good catch right here at home.
  

I'm feeling pretty mellow tonight, trying to get some things in order for the week ahead. I didn't get as much work done as I'd hoped this weekend -- our houseguest was such a pleasant distraction -- but I'm feeling good anyway. It's going to be a busy/unfun week -- lots of grading coming in, and meetings in my department. So I want to focus on some of the good things to keep my perspective...