Vacation Well Spent!

I was off the entire week of Christmas, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. There was a lot going on in that time; cook, eat, clean, repeat. We ate all the original meals of course, the turkey & dressing and all the makings for Christmas, and the hog jowls, blackeye peas, and turnip greens for our New Year’s Day meal. We ate our jaws off folks. It felt like every time I turned around we were eating again.

And in the middle of both occasions, of course we were sick of holiday food, so we ate a bunch of other stuff. At some point I can remember saying I needed to eat some “real food” – so nothing would do but to grill a steak and bake a potato. I also made a huge pot of vegetable soup and some cornbread to go with it. Between holiday food and real food – we didn’t miss a lick at eating I can assure you of that!

We also somehow managed during all that table-grazing, to take down all the Christmas decorations and put our house back in order. As I’ve said before, I’m always excited to decorate for Christmas, but I’m also always ready for it all to come back down, four something weeks later.

But the thing we seemed to do the most was watch every single thing on television that we could possibly find to watch. All the college football bowl games, about 15 episodes each of Andy Griffith, Gunsmoke, and MASH. We also watched the Kennedy Center Honors – which among the honorees was Cher and Reba – both stars known nationwide by their first name.

But as is usual, we use time off like that to watch movies we’ve been wanting to see but never seem to have time. We watched several and while I won’t give complete reviews (mostly because no one probably cares) because I don’t want to dissuade anyone from watching the best movie they may have ever seen – I am going to tell you Dumplin was absolutely wonderful and Bird Box was horrendous.

Dumplin was full of Dolly Parton songs, Dolly Parton fan-girl’ing, and Dolly Parton’s ideas about love and life and how all that should work. It was heart-touching and necessary and it made me cry. I never really cry anymore.  “Find out who you are and do it on purpose. —Dolly Parton” If you hate feeling better about yourself – this is not the movie for you.

Bird Box is everything that I never watch – apocalypse-like activity, very graphic violence mixed with entirely too much spooky stuff. Voices in the background that didn’t belong to people or bodies and creatures in the woods threatening to snatch you and make you become one of them. I didn’t do my normal movie review prior to, so I take complete responsibility for scaring myself to death. Which also resulted in my having to watch 20 episodes of Friends until 2am in the morning to get past “the voices”. If you like terrifying, end-of-the-world movies, then this one is for you.

I know, I said I wouldn’t give my review. But some movies should come with warning labels; and I just gave them to you.