Direct Quotes, straight from the horses mouth.

HA! I got my way.

HA!

HA!

HA!

I finally got my way!

We prolonged our vacation 18 hours. And alls I had to do was hypnotize my hub and my kids and my IL's with some homemade chocolate chip cookies and some homemade chicken vegetable soup (laced with Ambien).

(J/K, I never use Ambien to get what I want.)

Oh, and I had to turn on the waterworks a little bit too. hee hee

(J/K. I never cry to get what I want either.)

Alls I really had to do was promise my hub I would get up early and drive my kids home @ 6 a.m. so they could make it to school. Easy Peasy.

I was so excited to spend one more night doing nothing that I suddenly had the urge to catch up on my cooking and my reading and writing and my movie watching. So I started cramming.

After I swam and slept, I started reading and cooking and writing. And then I pulled out the movies I checked out from the public library and we turned off football and baseball and stretched out for a movie night. All eight of us.

We decided on Elizabethtown--where love is a trip.

"Set against the backdrop of an incredible Soundtrack, Elizabethtown is an amazing trip of love, and loss and laughter," I read aloud to the family from the back cover.

My three favorite topics, right?

"Ebert and Roeper gave it two thumbs up," I assured all the boys-to-men in the family when they protested that they weren't gonna watch no chick flick.

So you know how I was watching my FIL closely this weekend? Just in case? Well I thought I'd let you watch him closely too. Just in case. So I pulled out a notebook and wrote down all the things he said during the movie.

hee hee hee

I lost several lbs just from deep belly laughing because OH MY GOODNESS, it was funnier than that Christmas in Maui when we forced my IL's at gunpoint to watch The Office.

Okay, so picture my IL's sitting each in their own recliner rockers eating a bowl of ice cream when the movie begins with the main character, played by Orlando Bloom, losing his job. He goes home, kicks all of his earthly possessions to the curb and rigs a butcher knife to his stationary bike so he can reenact the shower scene from Psycho, without that creepy Norman Bates.

Just as he's about to start pedaling, his cell phone rings. It's his sister and she has bad news. His dad had a heart attack and died while visiting his brother in, you guessed it, Elizabethtown. Orlanda Bloom postpones his suicide to jump on a plane and retrieve his father's body.

My FIL, sincerely: Is this a commercial or is this the show?

(One thing I appreciate about my FIL is that he takes John Mayer's advice to say what you need to say very seriously.)

A few minutes later:

MY FIL: Did I miss something?

My MIL: That's just how I feel. Did I miss something?

Later, after Orlando Bloom meets Kirsten Dunts on a plane:

My FIL: This is dumb. I don't get anything.

My MIL: Oh honest to Pete! Neither do I! Can you hear what they're saying?

My FIL, his voice escalating: I haven't heard anything to hear!

After Kirsten Dunts makes a camera out of her hands and pretends to take a picture of Orlando Bloom as he walks away through the airport.

My MIL: What did she do that for? I don't get it.

My FIL, his voice escalating even more: I got it, it's a camera, but SO WHAT!

It was all down hill from there as Orlando deals with his dad's funeral arrangements while simultaneously falling for Kirsten during a string of cell phone conversations.

My FIL to my MIL: You ought to love this show. It's a cell phone adventure!

My MIL: What? I don't talk on the cell phone that much! And anyway this is as slow as your cowboy shows!

MY FIL: There would have been five killings by now in my cowboy shows.

I wrote three more pages of notes, mostly containing Oh my gads and Oh dears and This show makes my cowboy shows look hilarious,which culminated in my FIL's grand exit to go watch Glenn Beck.

But not before he uttered those famous last words, Has anyone ever seen a program as dumb as this one? Who picked this show anyway?

It kinda surprised me how fast my hub ratted me out. "Dummy did," he said as his pointer finger made it's way in my general direction lickety split like. (He always took the blame for my dumb stuff when we first got hitched.)

Luckily I have all these notes in case I am ever asked to speak at my FIL's funeral one day. Or in case I'm ever asked to write a movie review of Elizabethtown.

Okay, on a more current note . . . it's my daughter's 16th birthday today and I need to get this post posted in case she reads it in her computer class. Happy Birthday daughter! LY! See last years tribute if you want to know how much I LY. But first go pay attention to your class!

(BTW, she's already got her first date lined up, which she won in a lottery at a party. That's how we do things 'round these here parts.)

It's also my daughter's Hoity Toity Freshman English teacher's birthday (from Hawaii).

Happy Birthday Mariko! I take back everything I ever said about you behind your back.

And last, but not least, it's my ex-door neighbor Martha's twins birthday today. They are practically my twins too, since I could never tell them apart from my own twins. Happy Birthday, Jimmy and Nana.

(Nana, I wrote you a whole post in St. George for you to read for your SFA homework, but we could only get the internet on the farthest right couch cushion for five minutes a day so I never posted it. Maybe I'll post it tomorrow. If I feel like it.)