Blues, Pet Stores, and Harry Potter

This picture pretty much sums up how I've been feeling the past couple of weeks:

 I think I've got a full blown case of the Winter Blues. I've had half a dozen blog post ideas floating around my head, but I have had the hardest time motivating myself to sit down and write them. Forget blog posts, I've had a hard time getting anything done around here. It feels like the days just slip away without anything really happening. I know Spring is just around the corner, but it is still cold and windy and I'm sick of being stuck in our apartment and stuck indoors. I'm tired of bundling the kids up to go out and having to squeeze them into their carseats in their big puffy coats. I'm ready to get out of this funk. At least we will have house guests next week. If nothing else, it will get me to clean my bathrooms...

We have gotten out a little bit. We went to the fabric store and I made Elsie a deal that if she was super good and listened and stayed with me while I was looking we would go to a pet store after I was done. She held up her end of the bargain, so I had to keep mine. The kids loved running around looking at all the animals and even petting a few of them. It was a small store with small animals, but they had fun anyway.

 Alan wanted to watch the Harry Potter movies since they where finally all finished and out on DVD. I had only seen the first couple and I really didn't like them. Alan hadn't seen any of them that had come out since we've been married, so he really wanted to finish the series. I finally made him a deal that we would watch the movies only after he read all the books. He started them last August and he finished some time in December. Since he was reading them, I of course reread them for the 40 billionth time.

 One night when Elsie was driving me crazy, I turned to Alan and asked if we could just turn on a movie and eat dinner. It became a family affair to eat pizza and watch Harry Potter together. We made it through all eight movies that way. Here we are getting ready to watch the first one....

And getting ready to watch the last one. Elsie loved them and it became an incentive for her to get to watch Harry Potter. There were a few scary parts where we covered her eyes, but she was okay most of the time. She would get worried when the "friends" (Harry, Ron, and Hermione) weren't together and kept asking "where her friends be?". As long as the three of them were together on screen, she was happy. All the way through the movies I kept promising Elsie that I would read the books to her when she was older.

After seeing them all the way through all eight movies, I stand by my earlier statement. I don't like them. I feel like they were poorly done and were made in too much of a hurry. It really irks me that they added parts to the movies that weren't in the books. I understand that they are longish books and that some condensing must be done, but if they were already cutting things out, why waste so much time on things that didn't actually happen? Even Alan said during one of the movies "did the screen writers even read the books?"

Anyway, that's my Harry Potter rant. Maybe I've read the books a few hundred times too many to really enjoy the movies. Maybe if I'm lucky they will do a remake of them in my lifetime and actually do the books justice.

Maybe next we will start introducing Elsie to Star Wars...