I am Jack's disjointed LJ entry.
My cousin Fabian is visiting us from Germany, and these last few days have been an exercise in linguistics and creative thinking as we 1) attempt to find interesting things to do around here and 2) attempt to find ways of communicating, period. He's my age and his English is really pretty good, especially compared to my horrible fragmented German, but we will occasionally run into translational roadblocks and have to run things thorough an online German-English dictionary to get our points across. Of course this devolved into teaching one another swear words and vulgar phrases the other day, which is without a doubt the most entertaining part of learning a language. :D
Also, what my neighborhood lacks in exciting activities, it more than make up for in wildlife. We've got a stand of woods in our backyard that serves as a habitat for all sorts of animals. Deer routinely wander into our yard and attempt to eat everything in sight (we've found hoofprints gouged into the bark of the apple tree in the side yard), a raccoon attempted to set up shop under our house, there were even reports of a coyote further up the ridge. However, I don't think I've ever seen anything as ridiculously amusing as the huge, fat woodchuck who was sprawled on our back deck this morning, sunning himself. We had to shoo him away, but he was cute for a rodent. If he comes back I will try to take a picture or two.
We've been watching a lot of movies over the last few days. Two of the more notable ones included Saw, which I had been way too wimpy to watch before, and Fight Club. Let me tell you, it took an embarassing amount of coaxing for me to actually agree to watch the former -- I am singularly the biggest coward you've ever met when it comes to gory movies. I can deal with blood just fine, but like disgusting dismemberment things? Brb, throwing up forever. I can't even watch violent war movies without feeling sick. So I screwed up a great deal of courage to watch Saw, and was surprised that it was not nearly as awful as I'd been expecting. Still nasty, terribly acted, and really not great, but more lulzy than horrifying, for sure. Michael Emerson probably helped (though he was the creepiest creeper to ever creep here, my god) as well as a surprise appearance from Miles Straume, haha.
Fight Club, on the other hand, was violent and twisted in its own ways, but was absolutely brilliant. It's definitely the best movie I've seen in a very, very long time and is one of my new favorites. It was nice to watch a movie that exceeded my expectations for once. Amusingly, I didn't realize how old the film was until I got a look at the computers -- the Apple logo was still rainbow-striped and you could hear dial-up tones while the characters were in an office. Anyway, great movie, even though I got spoiled for the plot twist years ago. I'm trying to resist the urge to quote it at random moments but it's not going very well so far. *gestures at entry title*