Stellar Path

Archive for the ‘Horror Movies’ Category

A big thanks to Erin from Erin Takes Control (see my blogroll for the link!) for inviting me to participate. 

10 Things That Make Me Happy (in no particular order, and not including people or other loved ones)

1. Snow Days!

We recently had a few snow days here.  We are southern Kentucky, which is in the northern part of the south, but we’re still not that far north that we get decent snow.  We got about four inches last week, which is, I realize, not much for some places.  But for us, it was a nice snow, and I can’t help it, the little kid that still lives inside me LOVES Snow Days!  I work for a program that works with kids, so if school is out, it completely changes what we do at work, and it was actually fun and a nice flashback, sitting in front of the television and hoping desperately that the Polar Report was going to announce that the schools that would change my day’s work would call off.

Best yet, Tina and I went outside and had a snowball fight.  The snow was way too powdery to make snowballs with, so we more or less flung handfuls of snow at each other, but it was still fun.  I also made my first ever snow angel.  When I dropped down to do it, my shirt rode up and the exposed small of my back didn’t enjoy it as much as the rest of me did, but it was still fun.

2. Streaming Netflix

This one is a new obsession.  We got a BluRay player that allows us to stream Netflix’s Watch Instantly movies.  There are some really good movies in their queue, but my favorite part… the t.v. show Lost.  I didn’t get into the show when it started, for whatever reason, and I heard from everywhere that it was a show you had to watch from the beginning.  I figured I would wait until the show ended and get the shows on DVD.

Well, Lost is part of Netflix’s Watch Instantly, and I am finally, several years late, getting to watch the show from the beginning.  I’m already hooked.

3. TV Shows on DVD

I thought about doing each show separately, but I have too many things I want to do for my top ten, so I’m going to lump it together.  I love full series television shows that are on DVDs, nice and neatly packaged with cool extra features that I’ve never seen before.

My current top two favorites: Buffy & Alias.

There are some others that I wish would come out with legitimate DVD seasons, namely Power Rangers (don’t laugh – I want to point out that I have NEVER denied being a huge nerd/dork/geek) and Clarissa Explains it All.  (They released season one of Clarissa and then decided not to release the rest of the seasons.)

4. Truly Scary Horror Movies

I like the lame ones, too, but if it can really, truly scare me, then I’m very excited about it.  I don’t know what it is; maybe it’s just the release of adrenaline that gets me hopped up, but I like being scared.  One caveat – I do not care for torture porn.  Films like Hostel and Saw don’t do it for me.  I don’t just want to see people tortured.  I want to see people fighting back and trying to survive.  I’m okay with brutal violence, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want torture and pain just for torture and pain’s sake.

Current favorite horror movie of all time is A Nightmare on Elm Street.  And I have to admit, I really am looking forward to the remake.  I just hope the new Nancy is as good as the old Nancy.

5. Folklore

I stumbled across a class called Urban Folklore that fulfilled a fairly random General Education requirement during my first degree at Western Kentucky University.  I signed up for it, thinking it would be a cakewalk of a course, and I proceeded to not think too much more about it.  The class was taught by Dr. Cam Collins, and this was one of those classes that truly changed my life.  I was amazed at how many stories and beliefs there were, even in the standard American mainstream, and I completely fell in love with it.  I ended up selecting Folk Studies as my minor, and I would have majored (and gotten a Master’s in it) if I felt there were more job opportunities in it.  (Let’s be honest – as awesome as it is, and as truly useful as the experiences and knowledge I’ve gotten from it have been with EVERY job I’ve ever had, the degree itself does not exactly open doors.)  However, I loved it.

My favorite class in my minor was Supernatural Folklore, taught by Dr. Erica Brady.  To be honest, this is probably my most favorite class I have ever taken out of my entire collegiate career.  I’ve always said that if I become independently wealthy and don’t need to work for a living, I would definitely go back to school just to study folklore for my own pleasure.

6. Oranges and Pineapples

These are probably my two most favorite of all time foods.  I don’t have a lot I can really wax poetic about them, but there is nothing that tastes better to me than fresh cut pineapple or a really good orange.

7. I Can Has CheezBurger

This really makes me look like a dork, and it puts me in dangerous territory of looking like a weird cat man, but I think this is one of the funniest webpages ever.  Located at http://www.icanhascheezburger.com, this is a site where people post photos of cats doing weird things with funny captions.

One HUGE caveat – I HATE with an all-consuming passion the ones that are so horribly misspelled and awkwardly worded that it takes someone with a Ph.D. in exolinguistics to read it.  A misspelled word here or there can be tolerated, but I’ve found that the ones I find the funniest are the ones that are spelled and worded properly.  It’s the whole leet-speak thing.  I want to stab people who use leet-speak in the forehead with a pitchfork.  But that has a placement in a separate list.

I think the second picture is far funnier than the first, just because the notion that a cat is trying to do CPR by leaping full-bodied onto his patient is hysterically funny.

Maybe it’s just me.

8. Sleeping In & Naps

Sleeping in is awesome, plain and simple.  There is no greater pleasure in life than knowing that nothing pressing, like work or any deadlines, need to be done, and you can just stay curled up under the covers for as long as you want.

One of the only things that might be better than sleeping in is taking the nap.  I love to have a day where I can afford to take a nap (which will not be happening at all for the next ten weeks that I am in Train to Lose).  I get in my wonderful, soft bed, put something mindless on the t.v., such as The Simpsons on DVD, and just idly drift off to sleep.  Pure bliss.

9. Old School Video Games

After the Super NES, I kind of lost interest in gaming.  I have a Wii, (well, Tina has a Wii), but I’ve noticed that the only games I EVER play on it are Virtual Console games.  I’m currently hooked on StarTropics.  One of the best games for the Nintendo Entertainment System EVER.

I’m also slightly obsessive with Super Mario.  I’m not a big fan of all of the games.  I could care less about any Mario game after SNES (although I do enjoy Super Mario Brothers Wii, but that’s because it uses old school controls), but when I think of my childhood, Super Mario Brothers is one that comes to mind.

10. Traveling

I don’t get to do it nearly as often as I would like, but I like nothing more than going someplace I’ve never been before.  To be honest, I think I would probably even like a job where I had to travel every week.  It might get old, but it would be so fun going to new places all the time.  Better than that, of course, are luxury vacations.  If I had more money, I’d be gone all the time.  And the best job, in the world, would have to be one of those people who work for the Travel Channel who get paid to go to different resorts.

Okay, that’s my list of ten things about me.  I’m supposed to pick ten people to pass this on to, but the majority of the people on my blogroll have already done it.  If you haven’t, do it! 

Merry Christmas!

I don’t know if I’ll post again before Christmas, but in case I don’t, I want to wish anyone reading this a very Merry Christmas and general happy holidays.

On the weight loss front, I got a little sloppy with my point counting for a few days and my weight loss stagnated.  So today, I pulled my calendar back out and went to counting.  Hopefully, I’ll show a loss tomorrow.  Exercise is going great, though.  We’re not seeing our personal trainer until after the New Year, and we have been given permission to do nothing but cardio until then.  Don’t get me wrong; I love lifting weights, but lately, I have been in such a cardio mood, it’s all I want to do!  Tonight will be another hour on the elliptical.

Before I move on to Christmas talk, let me share this awesome image I came across today on the internet.  A lot of people are offended by it; I think this picture is genius, and I just wish I had thought of it.  I frankly wish my gym would post it on the walls.

On Christmas news, Tina and I had ours, just the two of us, on Saturday.  We woke up, had breakfast, and opened our presents.  We gave us a $50 budget that we HAD to stick to.  We did, and it was a little tough, but it’s good for us.  We both probably would have spent two hundred dollars or better, and with the wedding and other miscellaneous expenses on the horizon, we just can’t afford that.  She got me several awesome gifts.  I got a new filter for my digital camera, a Bob Ross “thing” for oil painting (hard to describe – I’ll post the painting I make from it after I do it), a puzzle (which I plan to mount and post in my office at work), and season 12 of The Simpsons.  I got her a Barbie puzzle, a Heidi Klum collector Barbie (can you gather that Tina likes to collect Barbie stuff?), season two of Flight of the Conchords (lamest show ever, but she likes it), and Yahtzee.  (We have a tradition of buying at least one board game every Christmas.  Next year is her turn to buy me a board game.)

On a similar note, Tina and I are trying to watch a few holiday movies before Christmas is over.  This holiday season has just flown by, and I really feel like we haven’t gotten to do as much Christmassy stuff as I would have liked.  With the self-imposed budget on how much we could spend on each other, the stress of my old job, the excitement of my new job, and all of the change going in between the two, Christmas has really slipped away from me this year more than I would like.  But that’s okay, because I’ve got four days left, and I intend to make them VERY Christmassy.

I had planned for us to watch Gremlins last night, which is one of my favorite Christmas movies.  (Really.  It’s set at Christmas.  Gizmo was a Christmas gift.)

Instead, I clicked the OnDemand button on our cable remote to see what was new.  I always go to FearNet.  I love horror movies; what can I say?  It had been a few weeks since I had checked out FearNet, and I saw that they had a new category called Happy HorrorDays.  I clicked it, expecting to see the expected Christmas Evil and Silent Night, Deadly Night.  They were both there.

But a surprise movie, one I didn’t even know about, was sitting there.

Santa’s Slay.  A horror comedy starring Bill Goldberg.

In this gem of a movie, (really, I loved this flick!), Santa Claus is actually the son of Satan, who lost a bet to an angel 1,000 years ago, that for the next millennium, he had to not only stop killing people and waging destruction on Christmas Day, but he actually had to be good and give presents to children.  For the last one thousand years, he’s had to do this.  But this year, the bet is over, and he can do as much murder and mayhem as he’d like.  And he does.  In goofy, violent fashion.  It’s not very gory, unfortunately.  All of the gore takes place off camera, for the most part, but it’s definitely violent, it’s definitely fun, and I really enjoyed watching it.  Emilie de Ravin (Tess from Roswell) is in it, and she has one of the greatest lines I believe I’ve heard EVER in any movie.

The crux of the immediate situation they are in is that Santa will lose his powers at 7:00 local time, because that is midnight at the pole, and at midnight, Christmas will be over.  Well, 7:00 comes, and they think he is powerless, but Santa explains, “You know, most people make the same mistake.  The correct time at the pole is completely discretionary, because the poles are where the time zones actually converge.”  In other words, as long as it is Christmas SOMEWHERE, he still has power.  And at that point, Emilie says, “He’s scary, yet educational!”

I hope to post again before Christmas, but in case I don’t, have a wonderful Christmas. 

I am not good at daily blogging.  It instantly made my blog not fun for me.

Not so sure I’ll ever be a world renowned blogger who can make his living doing this.  Oh well.  I want to have fun with it above all else.

I’m strictly on Weight Watchers right now.  I have realized that if I don’t have SOME level of accountability for how much I am eating, I will eat too much.  I guess if I had a handle on it, I wouldn’t have gotten fat in the first place.  That’s why Core WW didn’t work for me.

I’m currently doing eTools.  I weighed in this morning at 330.25.  I do like the idea of weighing in every day.  Not sure how often I’ll actually post my weight, but I’ll shoot for once a week, minimum.

I’ll post tomorrow (hopefully) about our awesome engagement/Halloween party we had last Saturday night.  I was Super Mario, Tina was Princess Peach.

From left to right, Whitney (80’s girl), Tina (Wilma Flintstone), my Tina (Princess Peach – and she totally made her dress herself – every single stitch), me (Super Mario), Patti (Gypsy Girl), and Annie (Lady Jaye).  This is our wedding party; my best men are actually my best women.  My best friends have always been female, and who else could I pick to have standing beside me when I get married?  Fortunately, Patti and Annie are more than willing to step up to the plate and do the honors.  (Their husbands, also close friends of mine, will be ushers in our wedding.) [And I still get a little chuckle out of the fact that one of Tina's best friends is also named Tina.]

On a related note, Whitney, Annie, Kevin (her husband, Flint), Tina, and I went to see Paranormal Activity at the midnight showing.  (And we went in our costumes.  Tina was the hit of the theater.)  My thoughts – I do not understand why people think this movie is so scary!  If you have seen the trailer, you have seen the majority of the scenes of the movie that are even remotely scary.  Not scary and not worth the $9 each to get in.  It was kind of fun seeing it in a theater where people were screaming (literally shrieking at points), although none of us got it.  Maybe we’re too jaded from seeing so many horror movies.

I’m a horror movie nerd.  Can’t deny it.

It’s October.  This is the season of horror movies.

Back in the day when I ran a real webpage and not a blog, I used to update all of my graphics for Halloween.  While I’m not quite that into it now (mostly because Wordpress is a bit more complex than just changing html), I definitely wanted to change my header graphic.  Hence the arrival of Mr. Krueger.

I’ll change it again as soon as Halloween is over, probably with a new astronomy graphic.  And I’ll definitely do a Christmas one, too.

Just an FYI – so when you see a different graphic up top, you’ll know why.