The last weekend was good, right from the outset, and one of those that because it's so good, goes by much faster than it should. Saturday night, unfortunately, I was all too aware that there was only one day separating me from the next five eight-hour days. Bittersweet.

For most of Saturday, Steffi and I worked on getting our back-porch vegetable garden ready to go. After dropping a friend off at the emergency room (he had taken a spill while skating in an empty skatepark "swimming pool") we went on to buy potting soil, river rock, and humus for the container garden which, like last year, should hopefully yield us a good crop of tomatoes, bell peppers, lettuce, and herbs. Once home, we spent a good couple of hours repotting the rosemary and German thyme which survived this winter and getting everything prepared for planting. We're still waiting, though, for the chill of January and February to leave March alone so we can put the plants we bought outside.

Later that evening we watched Firefly, a compelling sci-fi series whose light FOX lit and put out all in one year. A friend of mine from work got me -- and perhaps Steffi even moreso -- hooked on the show about 2 weeks ago when she showed us the pilot episode and then sent us from her home with two of the four box-set DVDs. The series, written by Joss Whedon, is probably the best thing he's done, has a brilliant cast of characters, and does an unbelievable job of interweaving space opera, human drama, and wild, wild west settings together. It's an absolute shame that the show got the axe after 14 episodes - not all of which even aired. Just tonight we finished off the entire series and the DVD's special features, so now there's a long wait for the feature film supposedly slated for a Summer 2005 release.

Yesterday we went to the Chelsea, Chapel Hill's arthouse cinema, to see Crimson Gold. The film, which takes place in Iran, was directed by Jahar Panahi and paints an overwhelmingly unfavorable portrait of the country. Panahi's film, a 90 minute flashback, follows a motorcycle-driving pizza delivery man along a route leading to criminality and suicide. (This is no spoiler -- the protagonist shoots himself in the first 3 minutes of the film, setting off the retrospective.) Like America, it seems, Iran has its share of the filthy rich and the dirt poor, and it is this disparity which drives Hussein (a real life pizza deliverer) to do what he eventually does. For the most part, I enjoyed the film, but it's certainly not one I'd want to see again (at least not right away) because tbe societal injustices shown are absolutely disgusting. Tne politics and criticisms of the film are, I'm sure, why the film was banned in Iran.

Maybe I shouldn't complain too much about my job -- it affords me things like backyard gardens, a DVD rental now and then, and two tickets to a Sunday matinee...