What I Did On My Summer Vacation..

Sorry it’s been a little while since the last entry. We’ve had our hands full in the last couple of weeks. It continues to be a isn’t-real-life-fun kinda year.

This weekend we saw Up in the theater. We haven’t gone out to the movies together much in the past; last time was Wall-E during our honeymoon last year, and the time before that was Bourne Ultimatum when Kristi visited me for the first time in Florida. The general range of crap that hits the big screen every year makes it easy not to go. But Pixar.. we had to go.

Up is a beautiful, charming, sweet, and hilarious film. It’s basically about an old man named Carl who faces an empty, purposeless existence when his wife and childhood friend Ellie dies. A balloon salesman at a zoo, Carl’s greatest regret is that he and Ellie never managed to pursue their big childhood dream: to venture into the untamed wilds of South America and build a house atop the majestic and legendary Paradise Falls. Life simply always got in the way. Now Carl’s alone in their house, facing a forced relocation to a retirement home while a large corporation prepares to bulldoze the house to build a commercial center.

Rather than be taken away, Carl decides to take the trip of his and Ellie’s dreams – by floating the house away to Paradise Falls under the canopy of thousands of balloons. There’s only one snag: when the house takes off, Carl’s got an accidental stowaway. Russell, an annoying 8-year-old Wilderness Explorer in search of his final merit badge (for “assisting the elderly”), gets caught on Carl’s front porch as it lifts for the heavens.

There’s a lot more to the story than that, including talking dogs, a famed but mysteriously lost explorer, blimps and a bird named Kevin. But again, Pixar nailed it out of the park. I think it’s Pixar’s funniest one so far; the comedic timing is nearly flawless. But Up is also an incredibly touching story. Remember that final moment in Monsters Inc. – Sully and the door? Nearly all of Up is like that (unsurprising, considering Up was directed by the same guy who did Monsters). Expect heartstrings, laughs and tears. The film’s brilliant, more than worth the cost and hassle of catching it in the theater.

General news update after the jump.

So.. Kristi’s now on third shift. Her last day at work was on June 5, and after a week of coughing her lungs out and generally feeling like crap, she started work at the Seneca plant last night. It’s a summer job, working in the personnel office at night; her dad set it up. Until September (or possibly earlier, depending on how our legal situation develops), she’ll be working 9pm to 5am – seven days a week – as the plant rolls through apricot season. As I write this, she’s sleeping in our newly tomb-inized bedroom and probably will be until mid-afternoon.

And seriously, it sucks. But we’re happy for the work. Between her remaining school paychecks, the money from Seneca and our business income (we’re doing surprisingly well so far this summer), we have a decent shot at paying off the credit cards by September. There’s still a lot of wedding-related expense sitting there; if we can get rid of that, it’ll seriously lighten our load this fall. So it’s a short term pain for a long term gain; it just means that we won’t be seeing a whole lot of each other this summer. (If all goes well and we can put the cash together, we’re going to take a real vacation in September/October. Preferably, London.)

The GOOD news: Kristi found out last night that there’s a production break in late June and early July, so she’ll be “laid off” for about ten days. Ten days that just so happen to wrap around our one-year anniversary. We get an anniversary!

The legal situation continues. We sent along our notes yesterday, and presumably the letter will go out this week. We’re cautiously optimistic.

I’ll update as I can. Maybe Kristi might put a post in here and there, but I probably wouldn’t expect her to show up here often while she’s on the Seneca Third. When she’s not working, she’s mostly sleeping.