Too many things on the list.

Often I find that I have way more things on my to-do list than I have hours in my day. Tonight is no exception. I wanted to come home, quickly do chores, go to the gym, cook dinner, eat dinner, hang up some of the art that we got at the Mystic Outdoor Art Festival, blog, do some brief work on the computer, work on my photos a bit, head upstairs to watch Coco Channel, and be sleeping by 11pm. Well, you can never tell me that I'm not ambitious! Needless to say, not everything's going to get done. No Coco for me tonight, which may be just as well, since it's long and I'm not the biggest fan of Shirley Maclaine. For me she's like tomatoes. Sometimes I like them, but often I don't.

Anyway, last weekend Doug, my mother, my brother, and I made our annual trip to the Mystic Outdoor Art Festival. Last year my sister joined us, but this year she's in Maine so she couldn't be there. We missed her, but she's probably having a blast in Maine and not thinking at all about art. We thought a lot about art, though, and made a few key acquisitions for our art wall. It's funny, but last year I don't remember seeing much art that I really connected with at all. We bought a small watercolor for the art wall, but that's it. And this year we connected with many, many things. And so did my mother, who bought several pieces of art for the rooms that she's redecorating. She bought a really nice piece of original art - a scene on Sconset in Nantucket - that was supposed to be for her bathroom, but it's really too nice for the bathroom so now she has to find another, more prominent place, to put it. It's nice to have these dilemmas.

At the art show we saw other kinds of neat things, like animals (and their butts) and nineteenth century whaling ships being restored and smiles from my brother! That might have been the loveliest part of the day.

And I can tell you what wasn't the loveliest part of the day. Seeing The Expendables. It's not that I didn't enjoy spending time with my mother and brother or being in the movie theater (I rather enjoy the movie theater, really the best way to see most movies), but I was very disappointed in the movie. I know, but really, what was I expecting? Certainly not good acting, a good plot, and understandable dialog from a movie staring and directed by Sly Stallone. But I was, actually. Turns out this might have been the best part of the whole show: Next time I think we'll have to listen to what my brother tells us The New Yorker says. We'll let it be our cultural guide.