30 October 2005

It's clear what the big news of this week is: my parents are moving to the Twin Cities in 2006. We don't know when in 2006 yet, or where in the Cities, but they have time to figure these things out. My dad has been offered a promotion within his company that will allow him to keep solving cool problems without traveling so much, so up they come. My grands will be staying in Omaha for the time being, and we don't know what they'll do when there's a different time being. They don't have to decide that yet. So we'll still have ties to Omaha and still have reasons to visit, but the folks will be where we can have dinner together without having to drive for six hours first. I have been bringing up things like tea in St. Paul and the Eighth Floor Auditorium at Christmas, stuff we can just do without having to think too much about it, once they're here.

More than once, I've compared my parents to the British in India in the nineteenth century: aware of their expat status and yet comfortable in their new lives, happy to be where they are. I should poke around and read more stories about the ones who returned, see if there's anything that will entertain my mom with parallels.

In the meantime, though, I'm reading a book of Gould essays published before my birth, which is, perhaps I hardly need to tell you, weird. Koko the signing gorilla, for example, has always existed. Always. It was like the Flying Dutchman Gorilla or something like that. Intellectually I understood that Koko was not eternal, but coming upon an essay that touched on primates and sign language and didn't mention Koko was very, very strange, and that's when I checked the copyright date.

Mark and I watched "Batman Begins" this afternoon. This is not a good movie, folks. It has its good moments, and the heroine reminded me of Mark's cousin Anni, and since we were watching it at home, I could snark away aloud instead of saving it all up for the car. But still: plot holes you could drive a Bat-Hummer through. I liked Lucius and Jim Gordon and Alfred and Anni Rachel. I liked that they didn't actually definitively get rid of any of the villains. I liked sitting and watching it with Mark. It was just the actual, y'know, movie that was not so good.

I generally like living in a house in Minnesota rather than an apartment in California, but I remember it even more clearly the day before Halloween. Tomorrow we will have small twerpies dressed as dragons and baseball players and vampires driving the dog nuts. If we lived in our California apartment still, we would have neither twerpies nor dog. This is better, in case you were wondering.