Movies in the mail... what a novel idea.

I love being pleasantly surprised by movies. I'm pretty picky when it comes to flicks. I really love movies that have deeper meanings and develop rich characters and their relationships with others in the film. My least favorite(s) are bathroom humor types and gory-over-the-top-CGI-blow-'em-up-end-of-the-world-apocalypse-aliens-attack-no-one-survives-muwhahah types. That kinda limits a lot, especially with what movies have been coming out the last few years.

Yesterday I opened my mailbox to find a red Netflix envelope. Not surprising in and of itself since I'm a subscriber. Inside the red envelope was the movie Chloe. Netflix recommended it to me because I have a crush on like movies with Julianne Moore.

I didn't know anything about the movie except the general premise that Julianne suspects her husband, Liam Neeson, of cheating on her. Blasphemous! Anyway, I settled in to watch what I thought was going to be a typical man screws around, man is a jerk, woman leaves man and finds happiness type of movie. Except it wasn't. Julianne Moore is Catherine Stewart, a Toronto gynecologist whose practice is thriving but whose private life is not. Her teenage son seems to have slipped out of her control and her husband, David (Liam Neeson), a college professor who apparently flirts with his students and appears to have lost interest in her.

Indeed, she's convinced that he's cheating and apparently discovers proof on his cell phone. (When will people learn to stop leaving their phone lying around when they're misbehaving?)

Still, Catherine wants hard proof. She hires a callgirl named Chloe and gives her the assignment of seducing her husband and then reporting back to her. You can tell Catherine is just destroyed by this, but even as she's telling Chloe not to give her the details of her encounter with David, she's coaxing them out of her and getting aroused as she listens. Then it just gets crazier. I won't spoil it in case you want to see it. You can probably get the gist of where this all goes from from the trailer. Double click it so it's full screen.

And by chart, do you mean the generally greyish area on the wall?

Yesterday was my annual eye exam check up. I always feel self-conscious going to the eye doctor because one of the first things they do is take away your contacts and then leave you sitting in the chair completely unable to focus on the doctor while he's having a conversation with you. If you haven't had that experience, it's probably because you still have relatively good eyesight. It's like that episode of Arrested Development where Buster is coaxed to go to a party without his glasses and he falls in love with "the darkish area with points" that later turns out to be Lucille 2.

Anyway, so back to my appointment. Like I said, once I'm without medically developed vision aids (glasses, contacts, or computerized eyeballs), I can't see. So why then does the doctor ask me to recite the lowest line on the chart I can read? I don't even see a chart.

To everyone else, the chart looks like this:


To me, it looks like this:


Following the eye test, my doctor decided that my right eye is seeing less clearly than my left eye and decides to bump up my prescription to the next level. The issue is that once you get past -6.00 in contact land, they only go up by 0.50 diopters instead of 0.25. So, my right eye was deemed to be weak and in need of a boost. I popped in the new contact and headed out for the evening.

Bad idea. Apparently the prescription was far too strong for what my weak eye needed. I could not get past the feeling of having one bionic eye. Make that one enlarged, pulsing, watering, bloodshot bionic eye. All I could think about was Anthony DeMartino from the TV cartoon Daria. That was me! Needless to say, I'll be returning to my old prescription STAT.

I should have known when the subject said XXX

This morning was like a typical Monday morning. Get up, get dressed. Roll into work. Have a tasty breakfast at my desk as I peruse over any emails that may have come in. It was all going well, nothing out of the ordinary, until I saw THIS pop out at me from my inbox:

Yes, what you are seeing is a naked lady. I added the strategically placed paint blobs to make this post PG. And see how her crotch is cut off at the bottom? Well it's really all there. All of it. At first I didn't know what had happened! Did I accidentally click on some sort of porno link? Did I subscribe to a Playboy listserve? Is an arch enemy setting me up to be fired?

I scrolled down in the email and oh dear Lord it got worse! There were full on frontal photos of about 100 11 women. It was a lot of boobs! And other parts! This was the next photo:



It was sort of intriguing (from a practical sort of way) about how well, uh, manicured these women were, so I was sort scrolling slowly half in shock and half in intrigue. Just then our CAD tech knocks on my door and walks in. Now, I have no clue how much he saw. I minimized as quickly as I could, but for a split second, there was a totally naked woman on my computer screen and I was appearing to be studying it. AWK. WARD.

The CAD tech didn't say anything and those who know him know that he probably would've said something if he saw that. After he left, I went back to investigate just how I ended up with this craziness in my work email. It was sent to me by this old retired electrical engineer who I haven't seen, talked to, or otherwise thought of for oh, about four years. I didn't even talk to him outside of work issues when he was still working for us. He was a shy, quiet, peculiar Chinese man who apparently used to go to photo events where people would pay for the privilege to photograph nude models, or so I'm told. GROSS. Not the models, but the thought of that guy taking the photos.

Anyway, I should've noticed that the title of the email included the words "At the Beach XXX". It was a blind CC and so I have NO idea how these pictures ended up in MY email. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Especially should I be questioned by the work police. I would prefer that my termination papers say something sexy like "Caught participating in Russian espionage" not "Caught studying supposed gay porn by CAD tech." Just so you know.

I think my even toes are getting skinnier

A couple of months ago, I thought it would be fun to run in a 5K. Turns out I was really just envious of Anne's race medals, even though she runs into vans.

I don't think running is fun, but it really burns a lot of calories. I can hit 13 cal/min during a run. Enter the Couch to 5K program, or c25k for short. I downloaded the app onto my iPod and it runs (ha ha) in the background while you're playing music. It's a 9-week program that involves running and walking intervals to gradually get your butt off the couch and able to run 3.1 miles.

I've been taking it pretty slow, which is the beauty of the program because you can repeat weeks as needed. I don't want to sideline myself with an injury, so I don't focus on speed, but rather sticking out the run intervals even though my lungs are on fire. I started the program in May (I said I was taking it slow!) and can definitely see mucho improvement! The first week has 30 second runs and today's workout included 3 minutes. When I saw that pop up, I was like "oh Lord", but I did it! Twice! And, I could have held a conversation with someone if I hadn't been alone in the gym.

So where am I taking this you ask? Well initially I was planning to sign up for a local 5K. But then I thought, why stop there? Why not go for a full triathlon? No really. I'm going to do the Tinsel Triathlon in Hemet. It's on 12/12, so I think that gives me plenty of time to finish up the c25k (at my own slow pace) and not embarrass myself. I figure I'll post updates during my training and see how much I can improve! I did 3.1 miles on the treadmill in 53 minutes. Nothing to be proud of, but I finished.