I thought that maybe I could make a post about something other than politics to go along with that first post of the year. The Christmas/New Year's holiday is always a time of the year where we are really busy. Some of that is because the office is very busy, and there is end-of-the-year accounting to do. And part is because we have two boys who keep us busy throughout the season. We tend to do things as a family at this time of year, like a lot of families do. We have the opportunity to spend a couple of days in the big city (Chicago in our case), and that made it even busier.

Over the holiday we got to see three movies, a live show, and I got to do some reading. All of which I love to do.

First, we went and saw The Hobbit. At 2 hours and 45 minutes, it covers about a third of that relatively thin book. I was commenting before seeing it that they covered the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy in three movies, but they're going to stretch out this one to three movies by itself. By that schedule, the first three movies could have been nine movies.

Was it any good? Well, it was...there was plenty of excitement, but it felt dragged out to me, with added material not found in the source material, and just overly long stretches spent on events that just didn't seem that major in the book. Granted, it's been a long time since I've read the book (I'm moving to change that) but I just don't remember a lot of that stuff as being that important.

Then we went to see Les Miserables. As any reader of my blog knows, I'm a huge fan of the musical stage production. Seen it about seven or eight times. The film was good. I enjoyed it. I was moved by it. The performances by the big actors were decent, even great at times, although Russell Crowe cannot sing. Shame, because he has the stage presence of Javert.

Finally we saw the Cirque Du Soleil: Worlds Away movie. It was really fun. Like seeing several of their signature shows, including Love, the Beatles show they do in Vegas. Not much of a story, this one is about the incredible, almost-not-human stunts and acts by the performers. I recommend it.

Then we also took in a performance of Chicago's edition of Blue Man Group. If you've not seen it, they combine percussive music with funny skits and hip humor. My kids were doubled over laughing. My wife and I really enjoyed it also.

Then I found a new author, Edward Robertson. His books Breakers and Meltdown covered the same ground as Stephen King's The Stand but with some twists, and some really decent writing. I got them both for Kindle and enjoyed the heck out of them. Enough that I've gotten a couple more by him as well. (A caveat: I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic novels so maybe I'm more positive about these than they deserve.)

So there are a few thoughts on more creative endeavors. Thanks for reading!

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