I like you but I don't want to hear about your plumbing problems

It really felt like the beginning of spring today and now they say it'll snow Tuesday. I'd say Nature needs to stop jerking us around but I don't want to make Her angry.

Today could have been frustrating, they keep giving me the same post at work, but I managed to cheer myself up by talking to the young woman who works in the cafe. She's very talkative and friendly.

I finished reading an Eyewitness travel guide on Bali & Lombok. I enjoy that series, along with the Insight guides and the Culture Shock series. They give information on people and customs that allow you to get an idea of the inhabitants and not just the architecture. Also, there are lots of pictures.

I also finished reading Journey to the Centre of the Earth. While, when you think about it, not a lot of stuff happens on the trek, Verne still makes it interesting and exciting. The narrative manages to convey that claustrophobic feeling of being practically entombed within in the depths, with miles and miles of heavy rock sitting heavily over your body. The despair Axel feels when lost carries over from the prose, giving you a taste of the desolation of being utterly alone in the dark so far from everything you are familiar with. You feel the fury of the storm and the wonders of things you've only read about in books coming to life before you. All of the scenes leave the reader realizing how small and fragile the characters are, how helpless against the implacable planet (practically a character itself) and that makes their determination to survive and continue that much more awesome. It's a great adventure.

I tried to watch a supernatural horror movie called deadline the other day. I got about an hour in and had to stop. Stuff was finally happening but it was so boring. There were too many coincidences. The main character lost a baby when her insanely jealous boyfriend tried to drown her in a tub and then she goes to a house for quiet to write her book and it just happens that the same situation had played out there? And who would leave a mentally fragile woman alone in a strange house the day her murderous boyfriend gets out of jail? When will scriptwriters learn that just showing a person talking a few pills from a prescription bottle doesn't mean they don't have to show those psychiatric disorders as well? Taking a couple of pills doesn't automatically equal batshit. Why doesn't my spell-checker recognize the word batshit? It's a perfectly good synonym for crazy-as-fuck. Anyway. It was more a supernatural domestic drama than it was a horror flick. Maybe it got better in the last half hour but honestly I was bored. I couldn't even be bothered to read a book while finishing it. That's pretty bad. You want better horror films? Try Session 9, Below, Paranormal Activity (the night scenes anyway), Dead End, Death Row (stupid but fun), Legend of Hell House, The Ring, The Orphanage, Ju-on 2, or the Evil Dead series. The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is out on Netflix; that's next to watch. That was such a good series.