Two hundred and twenty-two days. I love stuff like that, as you know, if you know me at all. There's nothing worse than getting gas, and filling it up with $33.35.
Okay, there are worse things. But it might be an OCD thing--I like the numbers to match. And for twenty-five years, I've never been able to leave the television (or radio) volume on an odd number.
The snow is all melted (though chunks of it still slid off the roof early this morning, startling me), but it's not summer out there. My fire has burned out, but it served its purpose, and raised the temperature from the thirties outside to the sixties inside.
I finished BEN-HUR in the morning, and man, is it a wonderful movie. The whole reason I checked it out was that, once the library re-opened, I started grabbing DVDs again, to bring home or to the cabin, and one of them was the recent remake (2017 or so?). I quite enjoyed it, being impressed with certain moments of subtlety, and reinterpretations of scenes I vaguely remembered from the 1959 version (it was not the original, as there was a silent version by Cecil B. DeMile in the Twenties, and an even earlier version at the turn of the century that is lost). It made me curious about the Charlton Heston version, which I had seen so long ago, I couldn't remember where it was (my guess is, it was the fall of 1991, for a class).
I was very moved by it, and only found one or two bits to be dated, all of them forgotten by the time the magnificent chariot race occurs. I cried a lot with the leper scenes, and especially liked the performance of the Israeli woman who plays Esther (Haya Harareet). The religious aspects vexed me, because the film starts out with the Nativity, and it just seemed unnecessary (indeed, when the film was re-released, that scene was excised and it begins with Messala returning to Nazareth, which makes a lot of sense*), and I feared it would be too heavy-handed (the recent version did well with the Jesus stuff, I thought, though he does speak and you do see his face, unlike this one). But it totally works at the end, and I thought about whether I could write a movie like that or not.
It's not for nothing--it's a question I've asked myself over the years, along the same lines as the Hallmark Christmas movie I was casually offered and turned down. I didn't think I could write something like that, but have always wondered ever since.
I also listened to the commentary, in which an expert on the film is intercut with remembrances from Heston, occasionally sharing the same information, from different point-of-views. The critic said that, because MGM had spent so much money on the film (the highest budget for a film up to that time), they needed a finished product that would appeal to devout Christians, casual moviegoers, Jews, and people overseas. The religious scenes had to work whether you thought Jesus was divine, just a historical rabbi, or an invention of the first century church. And that, my friends, is quite a task. One I'm sure dozens of films have tried to do ever since.
"They tried and failed?"
"They tried and died."
I've written to try to please others before, and it's something I think I'd try, if the opportunity were before me. Of course, my efforts might not be welcome. After all, my story "Who Can It Be Now?" was rejected for a collection of monster stories set in the Rocky Mountains, and I'm intimately familiar with both of those things.
Sit-ups Today: 250
Sit-ups In September: 1512
Now it's time to go, and it's so dim and grey outside again. The sun came out around eleven, and I could've gone out on the deck and enjoyed it, but I didn't. Soon it was gone, like most of my life. Now it's cold again, and I've been wearing my jacket inside the whole time.
Push-ups Today: 34 (okay, I did this twice today)
Push-ups In September: 329
Once again, I was very hesitant to come home from the cabin, the cold notwithstanding.** It must be doing something right, huh?
I really like this picture, taken while podcasting and driving down the canyon. It sums up the feelings in my heart right now.
Of course, it also makes me wish I had cleaned my windshield beforehand.
I discovered on Sunday, after walking around on a foot that hurt, that the sole of my left shoe had worn through. When I got home, I checked my right shoe, and it was fine. I threw out the worn left shoe (but not the right, crazily enough) and grabbed my secondary pair of shoes off the rack . . . and discovered I had worn through that shoe in the exact same place, just not all the way through yet. That seemed strange, and when my foot hurt badly enough on Monday for me not to go on my nightly run, I worried that I had stepped on a sharp rock or something and that was the reason for my pain.
I spent most of the time at the cabin with my shoes off, but the one time I went upstairs to check for Shoggoths (there weren't any this time, thank H.P.), my foot really hurt coming down. So when I went out yesterday to the lake, I put on an old pair of shoes I keep at the cabin for muddy walks, and it was a lot more comfortable. Not sure why.
Anyhow, when I got home tonight, along with catching up on my blog and answering emails, I thought I'd go on my run, not having done so on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. I did a bunch of sit-ups as a warm-up, then took off down the road. It hurt a lot, almost from the beginning, but I thought that I could run through the pain, since it ALWAYS hurts, and I always feel better after the half-mile mark.
But it didn't. It started to make me worry there was something more serious going on, because it was cold outside, yet I was still sweating down my neck and forehead. So, I turned two blocks earlier than I usually do, and only managed a mile rather than a mile and a half (technically, 1.2 miles instead of 1.6). I started a bath and soaked my foot for a little while, but am still disappointed I couldn't just toughen up enough to go the whole way. Might do some more push-ups just to prove that I can.
Words Today: 1446
Words In September: 13,269
*I had tons of food I had brought with me and not eaten, and it occurred to me that, if I'm just going up again next Wednesday, why not leave the food and my suitcase there? I'd never considered doing that before.
**Actually, there was originally another opening scene for the movie, where the Three Wise Men encounter one another, and though they speak different languages, all are in search of the promised Messiah, who is revealed to them through the star we still see in the beginning.
