7 years and "9 1/2 Weeks"

One observation I have gradually made over the last several years is that as I get older time seems to condense and speed up. What I mean to say is do you remember as a kid, the days seemed to continue for eternity! Days seemed to last forever. Now, I get up in the morning and before I know it, it’s lunchtime, time to head home from work, put the kids to bed, and then myself…only to start the whole maddening cycle over again the next morning and before you know it, it’s the weekend, the month end, and the entire year’s gone by as you’re working your butt off to pay those Christmas bills again.

Well, that just sucks.

So, enough about the complaining, I know enough that no one wants to listen or read about it anyhow.

What I did want to say was that today is Carrie’s and my 7 year anniversary. Hard to enough to believe. It has gone by too damn quick.

To celebrate, we sent the kids on “vacation” with her parents for the weekend and slept in until 8:30 am. Laugh now, but when you have kids, you’ll quickly learn that that is sleeping in.

We began our weekend going to a church sponsored Anniversary Dinner that was coincidentally scheduled for the same weekend. It was being held off of Lake Erie at a Christian Recreation Center in Euclid/Cleveland, Ohio. The kick in the pants was that we got there to find that they cancelled the dinner due to “expected” bad weather. Disappointed, we were able to still walk and enjoy the grounds, watch the sunset behind the encroaching storm clouds and listen to the waves lap against the northern Ohio shoreline. Very nice. Ever looking for a place to relax in Ohio and get away? This is definitely at the top of my list. It was simple, but in its simplicity it was wonderful.

After sundown we made our way to a strip mall in Beechwood, called Legacy Village. This mall is built like a small downtown area with a Las Vegas feel. When I say Vegas, if you’ve ever been through the malls inside the casinos, specifically the Venetian and Caesar’s transpose these malls to actually an outdoor setting and you have it. Another good comparison is the layout of the 11th Street mall in Denver, Colorado. Legacy Village was cool with many look and don’t touch stores. And some other stores that were just downright cool to visit. We ended up having dinner at the Cheesecake Factory that night (Carrie had never been there) and capped off the night with an evening stroll around the grounds. Next time we go, there is a restaurant called “The Melting Pot”. It is a fondue restaurant that sounds intriguing.

So, after the trip home, we slept in until 8:30 am. Amazing enough to leave in it’s own paragraph. AMAZING.

Saturday, was a trip, after doing a few chores and running around, we were just worthless. It was quite relaxing.

The most notable thing about Saturday was our rental experience. Carrie and I rented “9 ½ Weeks”. Carrie thought it would be a fun…anniversary type movie . It turned out that it was quite the opposite. While this was the 80s movie that birthed the notorious food/sex scene mockery’s such as in “Hot Shots” and other such films…it was actually fairly disturbing. The male lead was pathologically controlling and the female lead was…well…just stoopid. When they first meet up they go to a cottage on a lake/bay and then the guy starts making the bed and tells her that there’s no phone, no one nearby, no car, no way to contact the outside world and then starts making stalker overtures she obviously freaks and here ends the date. Good beginnings for a stalker movie right? Where’s the guy with the mask or the hook for a hand? Eh? Not this movie. No, she’s still interested in this wack-job and confirms to the audience how colossally STOOPID she is and continues to go out with him as though his “dark side” never appeared. They both deserved what they got in the end. I have no sympathy. And needless to say, the movie was a tremendous buzz kill for what could have been a great night.

SO, if anyone tells you “you gotta see 9 ½ Weeks.” Walk away. Walk away. It was fairly pointless and I wish I had those 2 hours or what seemed like 9 ½ weeks of my life back. Which is fairly circular to my problem I stated earlier. As you get older time flies unless you wasted it on a really bad movie. So if you want to live a long life and prolong the hours in the day, just rent some crap movie and make sure it has no point.

Now that I think of it, we should have watched “Robot Jox”, bad movie but hey can you really go wrong with two robots trying to destroy each other? Bad movie, good fun.