1. Steam Boy
Rocked. I’m not going to spoiler this movie for anyone, I will just say that it was everything a family movie ought to be. Lots of adventure, excellent animation, cool fantastical inventions, lots of “wow-factor.” I actually felt myself burst into a big grin, and had to forceably restrain myself from applauding senselessly two different times. I caught myself leaning toward the screen trying to look up at something or beyond an obstacle several times. The animation really draws the eye in. The voice-acting made me very happy, indeed. They didn’t follow the stereotype of forceably dorky dub voice. In fact, they did a creditable Northern English accent. That in and of itself made me squeal silently with great glee. The Manchester train station looked suspiciously like York’s train station, but really, most large, Victorian train stations have a similar look. It may well be that Manchester’s train station (or looked, I don’t even know if it is still as original as York’s) had really looked like that.
Anyone who’s been through Manchester station care to enlighten me?
There were a few things I didn’t like. Scarlett was a fairly unnecessary character, I felt, and hideously annoying. Bulma/Bluma/Bloomers-caliber annoying (All you DBZ freaks out there will know what I mean) I really hate the convention of an irritating, tagalong sidekick. At times I felt the grandfather’s rants were unnecessarily preachy, but that might have been intentional, or it might have been the result of poor translation wording choices. So really, just those two things didn’t sit perfectly with me, but on the whole, I enjoyed the hell out of this movie.
Anyone who gets the chance to see Steam Boy in the theatre, go, go forth ASAP and see it. Verily it kicked ass.
2. Crowbar
It has a pleasing heft, and engenders in me a terribly destructive, cocky attitude. With crowbar in hand, I’m all like “I’ve got a motherfuckin’ crowbar; I can tear some shit up!” In fact, now that I have a crowbar, I know I am going to be wanting for opportunities to use it. I mean, the garage is a pretty finite project, and I don’t have anything else around here which needs demolishing, therefore, I may have to hire myself out upon occasion. , Are you still needing help with your back staircase? ‘Cause I’ve got me a motherfuckin’ crowbar and I can tear some shit up!
3. Speaking of tearing some shit up…
In my workroom, there were three layers of wallpaper, plus varying strata of paint. Here you see one wall (south side) stripped mostly down to bare plaster, plus the east side wall down to the bottom layer of wallpaper (probably dating back to the 1930s)
The wallpaper/paint melange above the door does not want to come along easily. And it is turning out to be incredibly awkward and difficult to scrape on the lowered soffit above the windows.
Wallpaper, moistened and not. Once upon a time it was a hash-marked baby blue sprigged with white flowers that had silver metallic embossing around the edges.
The plaster came quite clean, except for bizarre dark stains in places.
Very old-fashioned electrical outlet. Still live. This one usually runs my 1958 Singer 401A.
I wasn’t so lazy and actually took the faceplate off the light switch.
Because I still work in my workroom, I will be painting two walls at a time, therefore tomorrow I am going to prime the two walls I have clean (south and east) and paint them probably on Tuesday, then when the paint is dry, move all my stuff across to the other side of the room and scrape and clean the north and west walls. That should actually go easier, I hope, since the west wall is mostly windows, and the north wall has the other doorway in it.