Today is the first day of my 2 week Christmas break. Yay!

It should have been last Friday, but then I had to work the next day, and yesterday didn’t count because it was Sunday and the weather was crappy and anyway I spent most of it being my aging mother’s taxi driver and grocery-carrier.

Today I got to meet a friend for lunch (a luxury, since I work in a different city from my friends), eat Nepalese food (is fish really endemic in Nepal?), sit in the sun at an outdoor café and talk, and walk around just because I felt like it and not because I had to go somewhere. Makes me nostalgic for the days when I’d taken a year off work and spent my time either painting, visiting galleries or reading in the library.

Here’s what I thought of The Return of the King -
Bloody exciting fight scenes, several tear-inducing sad scenes (especially the bit where a confused Frodo thinks Sam wants to take the ring off him) and a happy ending. But the lat 20 minutes were…dull. If they had chopped the last 20 minutes of the film off, it would have been perfect.

That’s not to say that I wouldn’t recommend the film to everyone. Its still really, really good. Especially for me because I’ve never read the books and desperately wanted to know what happens to all the characters.
Plus I got to check out the new seating in the refurbished Embassy theatre. Very nice.