I saw "Night at the Museum", and liked it despite the fact that the first half of the movie was just not very enjoyable for me. The Ben Stiller character is not sympathetic, and he came off almost too pathetic. But half way through the movie, it got better and I laughed. I saw the moview with about 30 kids and they didn't laugh during the first half of the movie either.

The movie has some great special effects, and it made me want to revisit the Natural History Museum in New York.

I also saw "Curse of the Golden Flower" directed by Zhang Yimou. I loved his movie "Raise the Red Lantern", and loved the spectacle of "Hero" with Jet Li.

The movie was beautiful and slow going, and ends with the typical cloying chinese song at the end. I couldn't help but think of Quentin Tarantino's movies "Kill Bill, Parts 1 and 2". Quentin Tarantino sure does know the kung fu movie genre. And yes there were lots of good fighting scenes. I saw chinese grandma types with their daughters there, which I thought was so cute. My grandma would have loved this movie, and I wish she was alive so I could take here to a theatre so we could watch the movie together.

I saw "Curse of the Golden Flower" at the Sony Metreon, which was a little strange because it's not like they show a lot of Hong Kong kung fu action flicks, but I liked that a very mainstream SF movie theatre was willing to have it there.

Who knew that if you see a movie before 12 noon at Sony Metreon theatres the cost of the ticket is $6. Talk about a bargain! After 12 noon, it goes up to $8.50 and after 6 pm, it's regular price.

Would love to see "Happy Feet", "Dream Girls" and "Children of Men", since I read the PD James book. A friend was raving about "The Departed" recently as well "The Queen".

So around 10:30 pm on my Christmas vacation, I am editing a newsletter that I have to email to my boss before the end of the year. I got way behind on my weekly industry updates and have been putting them off, but I can't put them off any longer.

What a life, huh?

I went to see the Titanic exhibit, but it wasn't cheap. The ticket cost $22 and $5 more if you wanted the audio. There were a lot of artifacts, and I did get to touch a piece of the hull of the Titanic but still. A friend recommended I go because she liked it, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it unless you're into the Titanic.

It was only fun because of the movie, and it would have been more interesting if they had included some of the movie props and the real stuff.

But oh well. I paid for a ticket and an audio, and I'm glad I got to see it.

It's day after Christmas and I know I should be at the mall checking out the discounts on xmas decs and seeing what else is on sale, but I hate crowds!

I really am very shopped out right now. I don't think I could buy one more thing unless it was totally cheap as dirt and I absolutely had to have it.

Besides it's supposed to rain and it's too cold to be out. I am out all week from work. This is the second year I've take the off the week between christmas and New Years. I kind of like it. This year we got Christmas and the day after christmas off, so it was a short week anyway.

It's probably the best time to be in the office because it would be so quiet, but I'd rather stay at home and be lazy. I am going to try to do some movie watching this week, and hopefully if the weather gets better check out Angel Island. I've been to Angel Island a few times for parties, but I've never seen the whole island. Angel Island was the west coast version of Ellis Island in New York.

But then again, it would be nice to just hang at home and go through my stuff so I can do some year-end charity donations.

Merry Christmas everyone! Wow, I finally got some useful presents this year, which is a first for me.

I needed a new wall calendar for my bedroom and I got a big calendar and a smaller calendar for work.

I have one of those home fragrance burner things from The Body Shop, which I've been wanting for awhile now.

A friend gave me an astrocartography reading with San Francisco, London and Bombay India as the chosen places to check out. I've lived everywhere where there is a line; interesting huh? I don't think I'm supposed to be living in San Francisco, which I've known for about two years now. Check this out - Las Vegas is supposed to be a good place for me to live. I can't imagine living there because I have to live near an ocean and I don't like to gamble.

And my cousin sent me Joel Osteen's newest books. I love that man's sermons.

Speaking of pastors, Rick Warren has been on TV a ton and I really, really like him. I love his book "The Purpose Driven Life".

We had christmas pudding for dessert. We doused it with brandy and lit the baby on fire. You gotta love food that burns. We also had french brioche in the shape of loaves, which was fattening and divine, for appetizers, and I made braised chard with garlic from a recipe that was in the San Francisco Chronicle. I love chard! The recipe is definitely a keeper.

Okay, one last post. It's freezing here! I wake up every morning and my car is covered with white stuff. It's not snow, but the dew is frozen and white on my car.

I just bought a new parka from LL Bean that is wind proof, and I am very grateful for it with this freezing weather. The parka is warm, maybe too warm, but that's fine with me. The parka also has thinsulate in the body which is nice.

I decided to get rid of books I'm reading on the left side bar. It's too hard to keep up with because I read a book a week. This year however has been a bad year for reading. I thought I would increase the number of books I read this year, but I didn't.

My movie watching has also been abysmal. I hardly went to the movies this year, and now that I use Netflix insetad of Blockbuster I don't rent as many movies either. With Blockbuster I was forced to watch my movies in a week. With Netflix, my movies sit around for months on end before I watch them. There is no urgency at all for me with Netflix.

I have to decide if I should go back to Blockbuster only because I did like the serendipity of going to the store and seeing what was available. I ended up discovering many good movies this way. Netflix is good for renting movies that are hard to find, especially the classic old movies. But that's about it.

I saw the movie "Apocalypto" at the new Century theatre in Union Square that is part of the new mall with Bloomingdales. The theatre has leather seats and they were big and roomy.

I really liked "Apocalypto" and am glad I saw it on the big screen. Some of the cinematography was so beautiful. I went to the Mayan exhibit that were here last year, and it was fascinating to see how the Mayans were depicted.

I didn't think the story was a bad as the reviewers said, and I loved the violence. However if you're not into violence then I wouldn't watch it. The amount of violence kind of reminded me of a porn movie. In a good porn movie, there's like a sex scene every five minutes or less. In "Apocalypto", there's a violent scene every five minutes which was fine with me. I mean, HELLO! It was a period piece and back then life and living was hard and violent. People killed animals and ate them. They didn't go to the butcher to buy meat.

I wasn't sure about the ending, only because I think I wasn't expecting it. But it makes sense. So I don't know what is the big deal about this movie. I loved that it depicted a non-white culture, and a culture there are so few movies about.

I had two work gift exchanges this year and there were completely different experiences.

The first gift exchange I went to was "funny" gift exchange. You had to buy a funny gift up to $15. Talk about a dumb idea. The gifts were so dumb, like a farting Santa, Homer Simpson slippers, etc. $15 is a lot of money to spend on a funny gift. And it wasn't fun at all because who wanted to steal stupid gifts. I rebelled and bought a $10 Walgreens card. It's kind of funny to me because you would normally expect to get a gift card from an expensive store. It would have been more funny I suppose, if I had a McDonalds gift card but I didn't think about it until I saw the commercials on TV.

The second gift exchange was much better and the limit was still $15. The gift were really great like a mini fondu maker, a 1 gig memory stick, expensive chocolates, etc. I was in the middel of the draw and picked a bottle of wine. My bottle of wine was immediately stolen, so I opened another present and got a mini fondu maker. I was so excited, but of course as is my karma, my boss steals my fondu maker, so I stole back my bottle of wine. It's so much more fun to steal gifts if the gifts are worth stealing.

The 1 gig memory stick was stolen three times. So was the fondu maker. But thank god I was able to hold on to my wine. At the first gift exchange, I ended up with a bunch of self-help books. I was a little upset, but the books are at least ones I wanted to read but didn't want to spend the money to buy.

But it is so not fun to steal a "stupid" gift. No one wants a farting Santa!

There's too much white space on my blog, so I am going to post the picture that was desktop background for a year.

Okay, I fixed the archiving problem and now they're back. Apparently I had code that was older than two years. Whatever!

I am all shopped out, except that I have to buy one more gift to buy because a friend of mine gave me more present than I was planning to give her. I was only planning to give her an ornament, but she gave me a calendar and an ornament.

I spent way too much money this year, more than I was planning to spend. I even took back a gift because a friend told me I was giving too much. That was hard but I did it. It was just a stocking stuffer anyway and not the real gift.

Somehow my archives disappeared and now I have to figure out how to get them back.

The woman, who made my current job miserable since the first month I started, was escorted out of our building yesterday. The HR person didn’t even give her time to pack up the pictures of her children that are in her office, and an hour later the lock to her office was changed.

Life changes quickly. At noon, we were all in a staff meeting and she came but left after an hour. At around 3 pm, we were all called into the director’s office and told that she had “resigned effective as of today and if we needed to contact her about work issues, we need to go through him.” A friend who has seen this kind of thing happen before said she was terminated, otherwise why would they have escorted her out of the building like that without even time to gather her personal things.

I never liked the woman, but I felt compassion for her. They wouldn’t even let her take her kids’ pictures with her. That is cruel. The woman totally deserved it, but still.

I guess I am sucker for rock music ballads because I love the new song "Lips of an Angel" by Hinder.

I bought the whole season of Heroes from iTunes and I just found out I can't copy them. What a bummer. And who knew downloaded tv shows would cost me 5 gigs of disk space! Yikes! That's what it says on iTunes on my laptop. I should buy a DVD recorder and record the shows I want to watch instead of buying them! What a drag!

I'm probably going to catch total flak for doing this, but I declined to participate in buying a gift for the director of our group. This is the first department I've worked in where the employees buy presents for the boss instead of the boss buying gifts for the employees. In the 2.5 years I've worked at this company, I have never received a gift from my immediate boss for christmas or for my birthday.

I see other bosses giving their employees gifts in other departments, but not ours. Oh no. We, the employees who are getting paid less than the director of the group, are shelling out money to buy a gift for the director who gets paid way more than us. That is so weird. I mean, I can understand buying a gift for your boss if they're getting married or having a child, but not Christmas. That is so odd!

I'm sure my fellow employees are going to talk about me, but I don't care. I really need to get another job. This place is so strange. It's calmed down for now, so I stopped looking for a job, but I know it's just going to get bad again. I don't fit here, I never will and I keep denying it to myself because every time I start looking for a job, something happens in my life that makes me want to stay.

But this christmas gift giving to the boss is I think the last straw for me. It's always the little things for me that decide a course of action for me, never the big things. I thought with this new director things would change, but obviously they haven't. It's a new person, but the weirdness in the department still exists.

I'm not a fan of Anne Coulter by any stretch of the imagination and hate almost everything she's ever written, but I kind of like this article. Ann Coulter: How can I make your flight more uncomfortable?

We had a photo contest in my department and I won first place in "Offsite Picture" and "Best Overall". There were only six people taking photos so it's not like there were dozens to choose from, but I was so surprised I won. I didn't even buy my digital camera. My cousin gave it to me in 2004, and I'm pretty sure she bought it at Walmart's or some store like that.

The photo was taken at Domaine Chandon, a champagne maker Napa. I think it won because on the right side of the photo somehow I captured a beam of light. Is that hard to do? It must be because it's never happened to me before. The mushrooms were just rocks piled up to look like mushrooms.

I won treats from Peet's coffee: a bag of chocolate toffee almonds for best offsite picture, and a one-pound bag of coffee called "Holiday Blend" for best overall.

I need to update my reading list. I have been getting into reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories.

I've read Prelude to Foundation, Fondation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation, and Foundation's Edge. They are amazing stories.

A friend got into reading Asimov's Robot stories and she's going to lend me her books.

I'd like to read all of Asimov's books; he is such a good author. When I really like a writer I read all of their books. So far I've read all of F. Scott Fitgerald, Elie Weisel, Oliva Butler. Can't remember any more right now.

The worst thing about having to sit around and wait to see "Heroes" is having to watch Howie Mandel on "Deal or No Deal". I just don't get him and that show, and even just five minutes of it is torture for me.

I'm getting over a cold and waiting for "Heroes" to come on. There was an article on SFGATE.com about the show, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2006/11/09/apop.DTL&hw=dna&sn=003&sc=242, and I had to watch it. I downloaded the episodes I missed on iTunes and got hooked. What can I say?

For Thanksgiving I drove up to Redding to see my aunt and uncle. There were their usual selves and I spent Thanksgiving at an indian casino gambling, just like the last time I saw them. My aunt made turkey dinner and I brought home a ton of leftovers. But it was rainy up there and I think I got too cold and on Friday I started sniffling. This is my second cold of the season. Normally I get a cold when I can't get enough sleep. I didn't know I could get a cold when my body temperature drops too low, so this is a new one for me.

The first one only lasted 4 days, although I was in recovery for a couple of weeks. I'm on day 3 now and feeling better, but I think it will take me all week to get over it.

I've seen three movies with all this time off. So here are my capsule reviews:

Marie Antoinette - I wanted to see this movie because The Cure contributed two songs, but there were instrumentals only. I was so bummed. The costumes were beautiful and I think Sofia Coppola was able to film at Versailles, which is rare. I read the review afterwards and loved The NY Times review. The movie needed I think some editing, and I think the type of storyline that worked in "Lost in Translation" doesn't quite work in this type of historical fiction movie. Jason Schwartzman was totally miscast only because he looks so much older than Kirsten Dunst. Marie Antionette was 15 years old when she become engaged to the Dauphin, who was only a year older than her. If the Louis character looked around 16, the storyline might have made more sense. If you're into late 80's post-punk music, then you'll like the soundtrack. I think it might have been better if I saw this movie in a theatre with a better sound system.

Casino Royale - Daniel Craig is beautiful and he looks like he could kill a man with his bare hands; how cool is that! The first James Bond actor who actually looks like he can kill people, and not some dressed up Brit pansy. I mean Pierce Brosnan is not a man I want to see sans clothes, but I'd love Daniel Craig to walk around in my apartment permanently in the nude or with those cute swimming shorts of his. I normally hate men in tiny swimming shorts, and Daniel Craig is an exception. He is so cute! And so rough and tough too with great biceps! He looks mean and nasty. There was not not quite enough violence in the movie to suit my taste. I think they toned that part down, but there was some good hand to hand combat scenes with 007 getting punched out and bleeding. Some guy in the theatre afterwards said that Daniel Craig looked like Joe Montana. Interesting. I'm not into blondie boy either, but Daniel Craig can definitely act and he's got killer blue eyes like my first love. I'm a sucker for boys with deep blue eyes.

For your consideration - not as outrightly funny as their other movies, but the laughs are there if you get the jokes. It helps if you know yiddish too. Catherine O'Hara was brilliant as usual, but even more so in this movie because she went through quite a transformation. I think you have to know quite a bit of how Hollywood works to get this movie fully. The characters aren't quite as self-explanatory as they are in the other movies. I'm not sure how many people will like it because it represents an evolution from their other movies. Instead of just presenting people as they are, they added some commentary probably because it's Hollywood and it's their business and they have a ton to say about it all works.