Once Upon A Time I Thought I Might Catch Up. Fat Chance.

As I wrote the title, I realized we never can catch up in life, but I was referring to little things like writing blog posts and paying the bills.  Today was my wife's birthday.  We went for a movie and dinner.   It seemed like a good day to spend the early afternoon in a movie, but the rain had stopped and there were even breaks in the clouds when we got there.

 And the snow was mostly gone from the Chugach.


I've already  written about my mixed feelings about going to see Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.   Now that I've seen it, if I hadn't, I wouldn't have missed anything important.

Even though I've eaten at Musso & Franks, went to movies at the Bruin theater when I was a student at UCLA, and even interviewed George Putnam (there was an ad for his newscast on a bus stop) for my junior high school newspaper.  Putnam arrived in a gold limo - a Rolls, I think - and he smoked through the interview even though his bio said he didn't smoke. (At least that's what my memory tells me.)

The movie began in a Pan Am 747, which set alarms off right way, since the date posted was 1969.  I'd read that the period details had been carefully done.  And yes, I know some odd details.  In this case because I first flew on one of the early Pan Am 747 flights - from Honolulu to Tokyo - in March 1970. (I was flying from a Peace Corps training program I worked at in Hilo to the second part of the training in Thailand.)  Pan Am 1 and 2 had just started flying. I think it was Pan Am 1 that flew around the world toward the west and Pan Am2 to the east.  Did it start earlier in 1969?  I've now had time to look it up and the first commercial flight was in January 1970.

It wasn't a bad movie - though I generally skip movies with lots of violence - but it felt artificial throughout.  Cardboard.  I assume that was intentional since it was about Hollywood and all the phoniness of that life, but as the birthday girl said over dinner at the Thai Kitchen, with all the really good stuff we're seeing on Netflix, it just didn't cut it.

So I'm reduced to writing filler pieces like this because I just haven't had time to finish my thoughts on the Joseph Maguire hearings and several other drafts that probably will never get beyond that stage.  

And tomorrow I start a slew of OLÉ classes.  (Continuing ed classes aimed at retired folks at UAA.  I think they pay for themselves so maybe they won't disappear next year.)   I have an actual project in one that I need to spend extra time on and I haven't figured out what I'm going to do.  It's a Pecha-Kucha class - you present 20 pictures in seven minutes with narration of the story they tell. Well, I've got plenty of pictures, but organizing a compelling story is the challenge.  As I see it now, though I'll probably discover that was the easy part once I get the story figured out.

Other classes I enrolled in include:

• An Overview of the Pebble Copper-Molybdenum-Gold Prospect 
• The Innocence Project
• State and Federal Courts and Current Legal Issues
• Homeless, Homelessness and Finding "Home"

And a one time short class that's a trip to an Escape Room.

I'm hoping the classes will provide plenty of fodder for the blog.